The Torches of Other Worlds
by JaneAus10
Summary: AU. Sequel to Siren's Kiss. The Colonials deal with the discovery of the Cylon homeworld and move toward another confrontation as relationships are tested and traditional ideas of who is the enemy are challenged. COMPLETE. Image credit: Messier 43 nebula courtesy of ESA/Hubble & NASA
1. Prisoners

Title: **The Torches of Other Worlds**

Rating: M

Genre: action/adventure/romance/angst

Warnings: mild language, sexual situations and/or brief violence in some chapters

Spoilers: None

Characters: Lee/Kara, BSG ensemble, others of author's invention

Disclaimers: Others own all BSG series characters both human and Cylon. I have just borrowed them. The author-created characters are mine.

Image Credit: Messier 43 Nebula courtesy of ESA/Hubble & NASA

Dedication: For sci-fi fans everywhere who like adventure and action mixed with a bit of romance.

Summary: **AU sequel to **_**Siren's Kiss**_. The Colonials deal with the discovery of the Cylon homeworld and move toward another confrontation as relationships are tested and traditional ideas of who is the enemy are challenged.

**Author's Note:** Because this is a sequel, much of the "character building" occurred in the previous story. Some things in this story will not make sense without knowledge of the events that happened previously. For those who have not read _Siren's Kiss_, I recommend reading at least the last 7 chapters (beginning with chapter 73) of _SK_ for the background needed to understand where this story begins. It picks up quite literally where _SK_ ended.

To reiterate, this story is AU. The time line and events are very different from the television series and the characters are younger than their series counterparts, especially Laura Roslin and Bill Adama. All are similar in personality to those we met on the show and yet some have notable differences. As with _SK_ this story deals with the conflict of humans and Cylons in a science fiction setting. It has action and adventure but at its core it is a love story on many levels, not only the love of man and woman, but the love of parent and child and the love between friends.

_Siren's Kiss _is told from the points of view of Kara, Lee and Laura. In this sequel I have picked up John Gallagher's point of view.

One additional fact: There are no "Final Five" in either _SK_ or this sequel. The characters are included but they are humans, not Cylons. The "creators" of the modern centurions and the humanoids are also human beginning with Amanda and Daniel Graystone as depicted in the series _Caprica_.

So, with that out of the way and without further ado…

.

Chapter 1

Prisoners

_The poet stands in the lecture hall and tells his tales in metered verse_  
_Like his ancient ancestor, the troubadour, who spun his stories_  
_Around the fires of a distant planet, nothing but a myth now._

_There was a time, the poet says, when mankind lived in harmony with the gods._  
_There was a time on Kobol before man turned his eyes to the sky and dreamed,_  
_A time of peace and unity before the tribes were sundered into twelve and one._

_Then the gods gave to man the gifts of fire and love and immortal souls,_  
_And man grew restless and looked to the stars and yearned for more._  
_The poet stands in the lecture hall and begins his story._

_Over the velvet black and deep, the torches burn of other worlds,_  
_And I tell to you a tale tonight of distant places and other times._

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

_._

The Cylon Raider floated at the outer edge of the Prolmar Sector like a crescent pewter charm laid on a piece of midnight velvet. Inside Kara Thrace waited for her heart to stop pounding and her breathing to slow.

She glanced at Noel Allison, her unintended passenger, but was unable to see his face clearly in the dim green glow of the ship's instrument screens. Her visual monitor was dark except for the solar system's distant yellow sun and the ten planets which orbited it. One of them was her destination, the fourth planet, Nereid, the Cylon homeworld, the only planet in the Prolmar Sector that supported human life.

She nudged Narcho. "You're too quiet. Are you okay?"

"Dizzy," he mumbled.

"My dad said that happens sometimes after an FTL jump, especially a long one. Give it a minute. Your head should clear."

Ten seconds ago they were climbing toward twenty thousand feet over Caprica's ocean. Now they were thirty light years away. But the distance she had just jumped across was far more than a hundred eighty trillion miles. She had stolen the ship, a captured Raider that the government of Caprica had invested a million cubits in modifying for a human pilot and loading with equipment for reconnaissance. She knew the ship well. She had brought it to Nereid twice before on recon missions and both times she had returned to Caprica to report her findings to Admiral Adama. This time she would face a court-martial and prison when she returned…if she returned.

But returning to Caprica tonight had never been part of her plan.

At one time they had thought this distant planet might be Kobol. Now they knew that it was not. They knew that it was the planet where the Thirteenth Tribe had stopped after the exodus from Kobol…stopped and lived for twenty-five hundred years before vanishing, leaving behind a temple and a city and a number of other settlements that had long since fallen into ruin. The other Twelve Tribes had continued their journey to the next solar system and had founded the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. Their history had been recorded from the beginning of the first settlements on Caprica and Gemenon. The fate of the Thirteenth Tribe, the only one that had worshipped one God, had passed first into legend and finally into myth. The stories that existed about them now were not history but rather cautionary tales about the consequences of turning away from the gods of their ancestors.

Sixty years earlier the second of two scientific expeditions to this distant sector of space had also vanished, their fate still a question mark in history. Kara now believed that they had made it to Nereid but that something had happened to their ship which had prevented them from returning to Libran. Kara also believed that descendants of the expedition's survivors were still on the planet, but she had no proof, nothing to support what Admiral Adama considered only a theory.

What they did have proof of, though, was that the planet's current occupants were Cylons, both centurions and humanoids, or _skinjobs_ as some liked to call them. They had come here twenty-five years earlier when they had withdrawn from the long war they had waged with the Colonies. An armistice had been declared and the Cylons had disappeared.

Only a few top military and civilian leaders on Caprica had been told what Lee's and Kara's missions had proven, that the Cylons had gone to the fourth planet in the Prolmar Sector and were creating a world of their own, constructing new buildings and manufacturing basestars. The planet of the lost Thirteenth Tribe had re-emerged as the Cylon homeworld. It was from this place that five years earlier the Cylons had launched their genocidal attack against the Twelve Colonies and had succeeded in destroying all but one.

Caprica alone had been spared and had spent the last five years under Cylon rule…until four months ago when an audacious and daring plan scripted in secret by Bill Adama had ended Cylon rule on Caprica.

Even though neither Kara nor Lee had been able to find positive proof of _any_ human inhabitants on Nereid, Lee's earlier mission had gotten a few photographs of campfire smoke in the vast forest a hundred miles west of the ruined city. He had also found some newly-constructed buildings on a high, treeless plateau far east of the city. One of the buildings was surrounded by a wall and a fence topped with razor-wire. Admiral Adama had surmised that the complex housed more than just a prison. He and Kara's father had decided that it probably contained labs for the Cylon's genetic research and other experiments. They believed the labs were located next to the prison because the Cylons had used humans in their experiments...humans taken during the genocide.

But three recon missions had failed to get them any real proof of human existence on the planet. The admiral seemed to have ignored the fact that from the three missions they had a total of less than four minutes of footage taken over the prison. Neither she nor Lee would linger over an area where there were so many Cylons centurions. Kara could easily understand how they could have missed any humans. That is if there were any humans still there. That is if the Cylons hadn't killed them all already in their experiments.

Several weeks earlier on her last recon mission Kara had found at least fifty Colonial ships under the snow near the planet's north pole. The one that she had managed to partially uncover with the Raider's propulsion wash had been identified as a cargo vessel that had disappeared during the fighting five years earlier. But there was no evidence of humans anywhere, not even any bodies. Kara thought that the Cylons had taken the humans and the cargo from all the ships and had then flown them to a place where no human would be able to reach them. But to the admiral, this idea was also only a theory.

Without proof of human existence on the planet, Bill Adama refused to risk his battlestars and the lives of his pilots and Marines to mount a rescue mission. Laura Roslin, Kara's stepmother and the newly-inaugurated President of the Colonies, had agreed with the admiral. Kara had not. Lee agreed with Kara up to a point, but he had also been able to see his father's point of view. He had enough of his grandfather Joseph Adama in him to be able to argue convincingly for either side. Kara had found that when it came to military decisions, though, Lee usually agreed with his father.

Bill believed the safety of the millions of humans on Caprica outweighed the risk of taking even a few of his seventeen remaining battlestars to Nereid and fighting a possibly prolonged and costly battle to rescue humans that Kara hadn't even been able to prove were there. During questioning Sharon Agathon had told Lee that there were a lot of humans on the planet, but the admiral refused to take her word for it. He believed that Sharon was trying to keep the Colonials from destroying her homeworld and had told them the one thing she thought would stop them.

There was another reason that Kara was there in a stolen ship, however, a reason more important to her personally than all the humans on the planet. She believed that her father was on Nereid. Everyone else believed that John had died four months earlier when he had flown a Raptor into the Cylon basestar over Caprica and set off a massive explosion that had resulted in its destruction. Kara had since come to believe that her father had set off the explosion by jumping the Raptor inside the basestar. She believed that the explosion had exaggerated the jump's end point and he had wound up far past a Raptor's normal jump capability.

She believed that he had made it all the way to Nereid. The brilliant astrophysicist who had worked on the Raider had confirmed that although extremely unlikely, it was at least possible. And the Oracle had given her hope. Yolanda Brenn's words, spoken on her deathbed, had given Kara hope that she would see her father again…alive, not just in the afterlife.

Kara believed that Lee would now do everything in his power to convince his father to mount a rescue mission. She believed that Lee loved her enough that he would do whatever it took. She had staked her life on her faith in Lee's ability to sway his father. Admiral Adama would either listen to his son or Kara would die in a rain of nukes along with everyone else on the planet, both human and Cylon.

Either way she was all right with the admiral's decision. She had followed her conscience and her beliefs, but in doing so, she had crossed a line and there was no turning back. She would accept the consequences no matter what. She just hated that she had inadvertently dragged a friend into it with her.

Because of Noel she was going to have to alter her plan. The Raider's four hours of oxygen was based on one occupant. What would have gotten her to dawn and enough light to see to put the Raider down on the planet near the forest was not enough for the two of them. They would never make it for four hours. She was going to have to set the Raider down somewhere soon, open the hatch, shut down the oxygen tanks and wait. That's the only way they'd make the three or more hours until dawn in the forest where she thought she would find the free humans. Finding them was her first step in finding her father. She had prayed every day that he was with them and was not a prisoner of the Cylons.

There was just one big problem. It was still night on Nereid's main continent, and she couldn't land the ship in the dark on unfamiliar terrain. She realized what a predicament she was in.

"Damn."

"What?" Narcho asked.

"We don't have enough oxygen for the two of us to make it until dawn. I've got to land somewhere so we can open the hatch for a couple of hours, and I can't do it in the dark."

"What about the other side of the planet where it's light now?"

"I don't have any jump coordinates for the other side of the planet and we'd use up all our oxygen getting there. According to the first _Hyperion_ mission it's nothing but scattered islands and a few volcanoes."

"So what are we going to do?"

The stress of what she had done that night finally reached her voice. "I'll think of something."

"Better think fast."

She switched her dradis over to the long-range scanners and looked at Nereid. Three basestars hung in orbit over the planet just like they had on her two recon missions. At least there was no surprise there. She pulled up her map on the navigation computer's monitor and looked at Nereid's one main continent and the two much smaller ones.

"Okay, everything on the main continent is still dark, but off the coast to the northeast there's an island where it's already light. There's nothing there. It's mostly ice, but it looks like that's where we've got to go."

"Have you ever put this ship down on ice before?"

"I've never put _any_ ship down on the ice before, but I don't have a choice. Everything else is still dark."

"I guess it's the ice, then."

Kara almost snickered. "I bet you wish you'd taken your chances with the MPs out at the boneyard."

"I'd be in handcuffs right now, probably on my way to the brig."

"That still might happen…only it won't be Colonial MPs or Colonial handcuffs."

An edge of disbelief crept into Narcho's voice. "You mean you went to the trouble to steal this ship and you don't have some kind of plan?"

"I've got a plan. Let me get the ship down and I'll explain it. I'll tell you everything. We're going to have to jump again, but it won't be as far. Are you still dizzy?"

"No, my head cleared just like you said."

Kevin Abinell, the young computer genius who had worked on the Raider for the last year and a half had given her dozens of jump coordinates over the main continent. All she had to do was key one of them into the nav computer and press a combination of keys. The Raider's sophisticated FTL drive would do the rest. She chose a set of coordinates as far to the east as she could find and keyed them in.

"We're jumping into the atmosphere over the prison. I just hope none of the skinjobs are looking at the sky and see the flash. That's one thing about an FTL jump. If you know what you're looking at, there's no mistaking it."

"Won't the Cylons pick up our Raider on their dradis anyway?"

"We're using a Cylon transponder. It got me and Lee through the other missions just fine. Hang on. Here we go."

They were instantly fifteen thousand feet in Nereid's atmosphere. Below them, somewhere in the dark, lay the edge of the high plateau where the Cylons had constructed their prison and lab. Kara wondered again if there were any human prisoners still there before she turned the Raider northeast and flew toward the dawn.

…

Lee Adama sat at his desk on the morning after Kara took the Raider. He was on his third cup of coffee and it wasn't quite 09:00. All he had done so far was power up his computer. At the moment he was staring at his screensaver, his mind on the events of the night before…starting with the midnight phone call from Kara and his frantic race to the boneyard to try to stop her. The MPs who were already there had detained him, and his father had arrived shortly afterward. Lee had borne the brunt of his father's fury. Bill Adama had a hard time believing that Lee had not known of Kara's plan, especially since she had been staying at his apartment more than she had been at Marble House with her stepmother.

After they had left the boneyard, he and his father had the heartbreaking task of telling Laura Roslin, the newly elected President of the Colonies, that her stepdaughter had stolen the recon Raider and had jumped to Nereid with no apparent plans to return. Bill had been kind and gentle with Laura. He hadn't even told her the worst part…Kara's irrational belief that her father was alive and on the planet, but Laura had still taken the news very hard. Nothing could change what Kara had done. Nothing could change the fact that Laura had lost her husband four months earlier and it now appeared that she might have lost her stepdaughter as well.

Afterward Lee had gone back to his apartment and for the next few hours, until time to take a shower and leave for work, he had lain awake in the dark, searching his memory for any clue that Kara was even thinking about stealing the Raider and taking it to Nereid.

He knew Kara disagreed with the admiral about his plan to destroy the planet in order to wipe out the Cylon homeworld. Kara had made no secret of her belief that the humans on the planet deserved to be rescued. She had argued openly with Adama on several occasions. But Kara's belief that her father was alive, much less that he was on Nereid, had come so totally out of left field that Lee was still trying to wrap his thoughts around it. During the fighting to rid Caprica of the Cylons, John had flown a Raptor into a Cylon basestar and set off a massive explosion that had destroyed the ship. Everyone had sadly accepted John's death as a consequence of his heroic act.

Lee knew Kara had a hard time accepting her father's death, but following the memorial service three weeks after the explosion of the basestar, she had seemed to reconcile herself to it. Now he knew she had never accepted it. Yolanda Brenn had told Kara something on her deathbed that had caused Kara to come to the conclusion that John had not only survived the massive explosion, but that he had also somehow jumped a Raptor thirty times the distance it was designed to jump and was now on the planet of Nereid.

Lee became aware that someone was standing in the doorway of his small office. He looked up and saw his commanding officer, Major Brandon Parker.

"Good morning, lieutenant."

"Good morning, sir," Lee said.

He knew his eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep and he had nicked his jaw while shaving that morning. He did not look like his usual polished and pulled together self. He didn't have to wait long to find out that Parker already knew what had happened.

"I hear you had a rough night."

"Yes, sir."

"Did you get any sleep?"

"No, sir."

"I gather that nobody saw _this_ coming."

"No, sir."

"Your father is here with Dr. Rafferty and Mr. Abinell. They're in the conference room down the hall. We've been asked to join them."

Lee groaned. He didn't think he could relive what he had gone through with his father the night before.

"I know this is going to be difficult for you, but they're waiting for us," Parker said.

"I swear to you, sir, I didn't know Kara was going to do what she did. I would have found a way to stop her if I'd known."

"I believe you, Lee."

"I'm not sure my father does. For the last four months Kara and I have been…she's been staying at my apartment a lot of the time. My father thinks I should have known what she was going to do, or worse, thinks I knew about it and didn't try to stop her."

Parker smiled. "I've been married for fourteen years and my wife still surprises me from time to time. I'll admit not quite on this scale, but it's impossible to completely know another human being. I don't care how close you are. Don't start this meeting by taking a lot of blame on yourself. Now…come on. It might not be as bad as you think it's going to be."

Lee stood. He started to leave his cup of coffee on his desk and then changed his mind. He and Parker walked down the hall to the small conference room just outside Parker's office. The mood was as somber as Lee had known it would be. Parker followed him in and closed the door.

Lee nodded at Rick Rafferty and Kevin Abinell before he sat down and glanced at his father. Bill's eyes were also tired and bloodshot from lack of sleep.

The admiral addressed his first comment to his son. "Last night you said you believed Kara had planned this carefully. You were right. Kevin, tell us what she asked you."

Kevin looked sick. "Before her last mission we were talking and Kara asked me a couple of questions about security out at the boneyard at night. I didn't think anything about it at the time. I told her about the alarm system and the MPs patrolling. We even joked about her stealing Sadie. I _never_ took her seriously." Lee could hear the anguish in Kevin's voice.

"It's okay, Kev," Rafferty said. "No one is blaming you for what happened. I let her watch me key in the door security and disarm the interior alarm. I never once thought she had an ulterior motive for her actions. I just thought she got there early like she said."

His words triggered a memory for Lee. "So that's why we had to be there at 05:00 the morning she flew her last mission…so she could watch you open up."

"It looks that way," Rafferty said. "But I think I played a bigger part in this plan of hers than unintentionally revealing the alarm codes to her. I'm probably more to blame than anyone."

"I'm not trying to place the blame on any of you," Bill said. "I'm the one who chose Kara to fly the missions to Nereid after Lee broke his leg. If anyone gets the blame, it's me. I just want to understand how she pulled this off and why."

Rafferty spoke again. "Kara asked me months ago about the possibility that Major Gallagher could have survived if he had jumped the Raptor inside of the basestar in order to set off the explosion. I did a few calculations, ran the scenario through some software I had written and told her that there was a slim chance."

His words were met by stunned silence.

"How slim?" Bill finally asked.

"Less than ten percent that the Raptor completed the jump. Less than five percent that it emerged in one piece. Even less chance that Major Gallagher survived. I'm not sure that I gave her the exact odds. I told her it was possible, but highly improbable. So much would have depended on the timing of the jump and the distance from the explosives. I told Kara several times that the Raptor probably disintegrated in the explosion. She seemed to accept my findings. She made it a point to say we were just talking theory. I had no idea she would put so much faith in something as highly unlikely as her father's Raptor making it to Nereid."

"But it _could_ have happened," Bill said. "We're not talking about something that is outside the laws of physics are we?"

Rafferty looked almost as sick as Kevin. "No. Given what we currently know, it's possible. If the Raptor was near the Raider we had filled with explosives, the jump would certainly have set them off. I'm sure Major Gallagher knew that. And a massive explosion like that would have caused the end point of the jump to be significantly altered. Like I said, timing and distance would have been the key to whether the major and his ship completed the jump or were destroyed in the explosion."

Lee said, "I don't think it was just what you told her, Dr. Rafferty. The night that Yolanda Brenn died, she told Kara something that led Kara to believe John is alive. I didn't get to the hospital in time to hear what Brenn said, but I think that's what prompted Kara to talk to you." Lee glanced at his father. "I didn't know any of this until last night when it was too late to stop her. She called me just minutes before she took off in the Raider."

"Who's Yolanda Brenn?" Kevin asked.

"She was an Oracle," Lee answered. "She used to be a priest in Delphi. In the bombing five years ago, she was injured and lost her eyesight. Kara said that's when she began to see visions of the future or something like that. Kara claimed that everything Brenn had ever told her turned out to be true."

"Kara isn't the only one to get taken in by that so-called prophet," Bill said. "Laura put a lot of stock in her words, too."

There was an uneasy silence. Lee took a sip of his coffee and wondered how the rest of them felt about Oracles. He knew exactly how his father felt.

Bill finally looked up and addressed his next question to Rafferty. "How long until you could have one of the other captured Raiders ready to go to the planet? I'm not talking about all the bells and whistles that are on Sadie. Just get it ready for a human pilot?"

"Two months if we work around the clock. Retrofitting Colonial equipment into a Cylon ship is tricky to say the least. We worked on Sadie for nearly a year."

"Get started," Bill said. "I'll be out to see you in a couple of days. We'll talk specifics."

Rafferty nodded. "Yes, sir. Unless you need us for anything else, we'll leave. We've got a lot of work ahead of us."

"One thing before you go. What happened last night stays under wraps. I'm going to ask Laura to have her staff defer all questions to me. I don't want anything leaking from anywhere else. Let me handle this one. Is that clear to everyone? "

They both nodded. "We understand," Rafferty said.

After Rafferty and Abinell were gone, Lee asked, "How do you plan to keep two missing Viper pilots quiet without a good explanation?"

"They're on a mission for me. That's what I've already told Lieutenant Allison's roommates." Bill smiled wryly. "I believe Lieutenant Thrace's roommate knows the truth, but I expect him to go along with our cover story. If you are asked by a member of the press or anyone else...and I expect you will be…I want you to say that you are not at liberty to discuss the mission."

"Dad, I'm sorry you've been put in this position," Lee said. "I'm really…"

"No," Bill rubbed his forehead, "Don't apologize, son. I was upset last night. I came down hard on you. I'm the one who picked Kara to fly those recon missions. She's such a damned good pilot that it's easy to forget how young she is."

"Still I should have seen…"

"No. Kara knew what she was doing. She obviously planned this carefully. And if she did that, then she would have kept her plans to herself. No one else saw it either."

Lee kept his head down staring at his coffee cup as his father continued.

"I knew a long time ago that she's something of a non-conformist. I knew well over a year ago that she thinks outside the box. She spent a couple of years surviving in a refugee camp. And the way she dealt with Cavil…using a slingshot and a big marble to knock him out. She's resourceful as well as young and idealistic. Add to that what she went through getting separated from John five years ago and what finally brought them together again. You were the one who told me what a hard time she was having dealing with losing her father, how she wouldn't even talk about it. _I _should have seen the warning signs. She wouldn't let this thing about the humans on Nereid go, either. She kept bringing it up…even at the inaugural dance when I asked her if she wanted to say something to me about her father. I thought she wanted to get it off her chest about me letting John take that Raptor up to the basestar. Instead she said something about Nereid, about feeling the same way he did about Nereid."

Major Parker said diplomatically, "I'm sure if all of us look back, we can see many points where we should have seen the warning signs of something and missed them."

"Or ignored them," Bill said wearily.

Lee said, "Maybe sometimes we see something and don't want to think…"

He didn't finish the sentence. He was remembering the way Kara had hugged and kissed her little brother two afternoons previously when they had left Marble House, how Braedon had seemed to sense something and had clung to her, crying when Maya took him. Kara had even hugged Maya, something Lee had never seen her do before. And she had insisted they go visit Dreilide Thrace even though it had been a long day and they were both tired. Now he realized that she was saying her goodbyes. Remembering the letter Kara had left him, Lee realized that she knew she might never see them again. She was prepared to die on Nereid with the other humans if that's how Admiral Adama dealt with the planet.

Parker spoke again. "Well, it's done. We have to accept it and move forward. Admiral Adama, is there anything we can do for you, sir?"

"About Nereid, no. I have a meeting with the President later today. I'm probably going to have a mission for Lee after that meeting."

"What kind of mission?" Lee asked.

"Ever since Tom Zarek found those survivors on Tauron near the tylium mines, the refugees from the other ten Colonies have wanted to know if there could have been anyone on their planets who survived. The Cylons, of course, refused to let us send a ship to check it out. Over two months ago Laura and Adar approved a mission to visit the other Colonies. Everything is almost ready. I'd like for you to be a part of that mission."

"You don't seriously think we'll find any survivors, do you?" Lee asked incredulously. "The Cylons nuked all of those planets. Even if people had managed to survive the initial bombings and the centurions, the radiation would have killed them by now. It's been over five years."

"That's the prevailing scientific opinion. It has been since day one, but the President wants to make it official. She wants to give those refugees from Picon and Arielon and Libran and all the other planets some closure. Laura understands their feelings. That's the humanitarian in her. She's going to make the announcement to the press later today."

Parker said, "I guess there's nothing worse than wondering if a loved one is still alive even when we know that hope is not logical."

Lee and his father shared a brief look and then Bill glanced away. Lee knew that he and his father were both thinking the same thing. They were both thinking of Kara and her illogical belief about John.

"Are you going to tell Laura that Kara believes John is alive and on Nereid?" Lee asked. "I know you didn't do it last night, but now that you've talked to Dr. Rafferty…"

"No!" Bill said decisively. "You heard Rick. The chances are less than ten percent that John's ship even made it out of the basestar. The area of space between here and the Prolmar Sector is vast and empty. If he did get thrown somewhere into it, I don't want Laura to suffer thinking he died slowly and alone. She's got enough on her as it is."

"John has survived against incredible odds before. He's a good pilot. He would have understood how to execute that jump."

"That doesn't mean he made it all the way to the planet. Do you not think I haven't thought about what happened to him? I think about it _every day_!" Bill said passionately. "John was my friend, too."

"I know," Lee said quietly.

Bill's voice changed and took on a gentler quality. "Do _you_ think he's alive?"

Lee faltered. "No. As much as I want to believe…I don't see how…no. Still, shouldn't Laura be told there's a chance, however small?"

"I've made a decision on this, Lee. I don't have to make it an order, do I?"

Lee dropped his eyes. "No, sir."

Bill stood and Parker and Lee both stood. Bill said, "I've got to get back to my office and get my thoughts together for my meeting with Laura this afternoon. Then I guess I'd better go back to square one with my plan for Nereid."

After Bill was gone, Lee said to Parker, "Last night Laura told my father that she wanted him to plan a rescue mission of the humans on the planet. She said that she wouldn't look at her son one day and tell him that she could have done something to save his sister and did nothing."

"How do you feel about that?" Parker asked.

"It will cost us. A lot of us will die on that planet…or over it, but it's the right thing to do. Kara told me that she was putting her faith in me to change my father's mind. As it turns out, Laura made the decision. So I guess you could say that Kara's crazy plan worked."

"It hasn't worked yet," Parker said.

Lee swallowed hard. "Kara may never know if it does. If she gets caught by the Cylons…"

"I'd be more concerned about any free humans on the planet. If she lands near the forest in that Raider, they might shoot first and ask questions later."

"I hadn't thought about that."

"If a Raider landed here on Caprica and a _human_ got out, my first thought would be that it was a new skinjob."

"I agree, sir," Lee said.

"Remember what happened on Kara's first recon mission. If she hadn't jumped away when she did…well, we both saw the footage. Something _was_ down there."

"You're right. I just hope she has enough sense not to go back to those same coordinates."

"Kara's smart. I'm sure she has a plan. She managed to steal the Raider, didn't she? That took some planning."

"She started studying the information on John's laptop months ago. She'd sit at the kitchen table for hours sometimes. We.." Lee took a deep breath. "We fought over it at first. I thought she'd gotten obsessed. Then I decided it was just part of her grief process…her way of dealing with her father's death. Now I know she had started planning this insane mission of hers."

"It's always so much easier to recognize the signs when we're looking back."

Lee and Parker began walking down the hall toward the offices.

Lee said, "I really don't want to go on a mission to the other colonies. I know what we're going to find."

"I think the mission is a good idea. The admiral is right. The refugees from those planets need closure."

"He doesn't need me on that mission. He probably just wants to get me off Caprica for a while to try to get my mind off…what Kara did. Like that's going to make a difference."

"It's not such a bad idea, Lee. It will take Dr. Rafferty and his assistant two months to get another Raider ready to do recon. Longer than that before we go to the planet with any force. And things are slow for us right now. A mission off planet might be the best thing for you."

"I don't think it will take Dad too long to rethink his plan for Nereid. Maybe three or four months. We know where most of the Cylons are. We know where the basestar shipyard is. We know where their landing fields are. We could take those out with conventional missiles. If we jump in and destroy the three basestars first before they can launch their Raiders, then maybe we could do it without much loss. But I'm probably being too optimistic. We'd still have to take the prison complex. It's heavily guarded by centurions."

"You've got to have faith, Lee," Parker said. "Sometimes that's all that keeps us going."

"Kara is the one who has all the faith. She's the one who believes in the gods and the words of an Oracle. Sometimes I envy her that faith," Lee said softly.

"Then try to have faith in our human ability to survive and overcome adversity. If there's one thing that impresses me about Kara, it's that she's strong and resourceful and a survivor. She's a good soldier."

"She's like her father," Lee said.

…

The prisoner was more dead than alive now, and he knew that the next time the Cylons took him into that little gray room and tied him to that chair, the next time they beat him or almost drowned him in ice water or used the electrodes on him or any one of the other ways they'd found to cause him pain, or the next time they filled his veins with drugs would be the last.

He had made his peace with death a long time ago. He would welcome it now. His only regret was that he wouldn't be sitting in the cockpit of a Viper like he had been during the First War, guns blazing, taking as many of them with him as he could.

He should have died in the Raptor when he'd jumped it inside the basestar in a last-ditch attempt to set off the explosives packed into the Raider, or he should have died at the other end of the jump when he had reached his destination. But he hadn't. When his head had cleared, he'd expected to see Thyone, the larger of Caprica's two moons, the end point of the coordinates already programmed into the Raptor. Instead he was far out in space in what looked like the Prolmar Sector. Only it couldn't have been. A Raptor's jump capability was limited. It could barely jump one light year. A Raptor could _not_ make thirty light years in one jump.

And yet it had. But it had not emerged at the other end of the jump undamaged.

His ship had no power and his cabin pressure had quickly vented through several gaping cracks in the ship's hull. The only thing that had kept him alive was his flight suit and helmet and an auxiliary oxygen tank. He had four hours of oxygen, but he knew he'd be dead before then from the cold. His suit would protect him for a while, but without power to heat the Raptor's cabin, the cold of space would eventually get to him and he would freeze to death...if he didn't run out of oxygen first. Freezing wasn't a terrible way to die. There were a lot of worse ways, but it wasn't near the top of his preferred list, either.

Now he wished that's the way it had happened, freezing to death inside the Raptor. Now he wished that the Cylon Heavy Raider had never come along, attached a magnetic tow and pulled his ship aboard a basestar. From there several centurions had dragged him from the damaged Raptor, shoved him into a Heavy Raider and taken him to the surface of the planet. He had been shackled before they'd landed and they had hustled him out of the ship and into the back of a windowless transport, but he'd seen enough to know that they were taking him to the prison in one of the sand-colored buildings on the arid high plateau.

He'd been there in a small, windowless cell ever since…except when they had taken him to the little gray room.

He didn't know how much time had passed. The light in his cell was never turned off. He had no way to judge day or night. He knew it had been several months. His hair had grown, but he had come out of a drugged stupor once to discover that someone had shaved his head and beard. They hadn't kept him shaved, though. He now had a good half-inch or more of stubble on his jaw and scalp.

He clutched the scratchy wool blanket around his naked body as a coughing spell racked him.

On the first day three big humans working for the Cylons had taken everything from him, his flight suit and undergarments, his dog tags and watch. They'd even taken his wedding ring, the ring that had not been off his finger since his wife had put it there on their wedding day two years earlier. It was the only thing he'd tried to stop them from taking. That had earned him the first beating. His refusal to give the Cylons anything more than his name and serial number had earned him the second.

He should have known a lot worse was coming. He was no stranger to pain, but the cocktail of drugs, administered by Number Four, the copy known on Caprica as Simon, had finally been too much and he had talked, not talked so much as babbled. He had rambled about his childhood on Virgon and flying a Viper off the _Solaria _as a young lieutenant_. _He had talked about destroying Raiders. He had talked about losing his parents and the foster home and running away and going to work on a fishing trawler when he was sixteen.

But he couldn't answer the question they kept asking him over and over. He couldn't tell them how he had gotten to the Prolmar Sector in a nearly-destroyed Raptor because he didn't know. He didn't think he had told them anything about Bill Adama's plan, but he wasn't sure. He wasn't sure of anything anymore.

For days after they drugged him, he lost touch with what was real and what wasn't. He no longer trusted his memory. He didn't know what he had said in that little gray room or what he had just imagined. They must not have gotten what they wanted from him, though, because they'd continued to question and torture him.

For most of his lucid moments he thought about his wife and his daughter and his son and how much he loved them. He thought often of his beautiful daughter Kara and prayed that she had survived the battle. He thought of his bright and happy son. He tried to imagine Braedon growing up, developing into a youth and then a handsome teenager. His son would have all the breaks that he had never gotten in life. His son would get an education at the best schools. His son would become a great explorer and would fulfill an Oracle's prophecy. One day his son would map the stars on the way to Earth.

He knew that eventually Kara and Lee would marry. He tried to imagine their children, his grandchildren. They were little blonds, like Kara had been as a child. He saw them playing on the sandy beach of the island. He saw his brown-haired son with them, a boy of nine or ten, watching over them as they all ran squealing with delight, the waves breaking around their feet.

He lived in his head most of the time now. His reality was more than he could endure.

He knew that everyone on Caprica had written him off as dead a long time ago. He didn't blame them. He was sure they all thought he had died in the explosion of the basestar. How could they think otherwise? He wondered how long his wife would mourn him. He wondered how long it would take Bill Adama to make a move on her. How long would Laura resist her first love, the man who had never stopped loving her?

He knew that the longer he survived, the greater the chances were that Bill would bring some of his battlestars to Nereid and destroy the planet. He thought of the irony of dying in the white heat of a nuclear explosion, maybe put into the heart of the prison by his daughter or his best friend. He was all right with that. They would have no way of knowing he was there, and he would welcome a quick death right now no matter how hot. The small cell was cold, but not cold enough to freeze him.

The Cylons had left him alone for several days now. If they didn't come soon, he knew that he might not make it until they came for him again. He was fairly certain that he had pneumonia. It was getting harder to breathe and for the last day or two, he had been sweating even though he had been shivering with the cold.

He'd stopped eating anything on the tray that was pushed through a slot at the bottom of the door twice a day. He was ready to die and go on to whatever reward or punishment was awaiting him in the afterlife.

He coughed up something vile-tasting and rolled over and spat on the concrete floor. He wished now that he'd frozen to death in space. Slowly suffocating as the pneumonia infiltrated his lungs was a hell of a lot worse.

The cell door opened, a woman this time, the one he'd known on Caprica as the reporter D'Anna Biers. The Cylons were nothing but numbers to him now, all of them, faces that came and went as they'd questioned and tortured him. She was Number Three. He didn't know if they were the same copies each time or different ones. It didn't really matter to him now.

She stepped over to the bunk and pulled the blanket off of him. Her eyes moved over his bruised and battered body. For just a moment he thought he saw a flicker of shame or pity in her eyes. He wanted neither from her, from any of them.

"I know you like looking at me," he rasped hoarsely through chattering teeth, "but you've got me at a disadvantage. It's really cold in here."

She threw the blanket back over him and looked at him blankly. "I don't understand what you mean, Major."

He coughed and spat on the floor near her feet. "Have one of your thugs explain it to you. They both got it."

She turned and said something to the two big humans behind her. Four hands roughly pulled him off the bunk. He didn't resist like he usually did_._ He no longer had the strength. It would be over soon and he would be dead.

But instead of dragging him down the hall to the little gray room, they put him on a stretcher. The Three covered him with a softer blanket. He saw the lights in the ceiling as they moved down the hall and into an elevator. He could tell they were going up. Then there was another long hall and they moved out into the sunlight. He winced at the brightness and shut his eyes. The glaring overhead light in his cell was never turned off, but it wasn't nearly as bright as Nereid's sun.

The warmth on his face felt good. He thought of the island again, and of holding both of his son's hands as he toddled on the sand. He saw Braedon looking up at him, saw his smile, heard him laugh as the water touched his feet.

The men carried the stretcher into another building, a warmer place that smelled of antiseptic, like a hospital or a lab. The images of the beach vanished. He remembered what Bill had told him about the ice planet and the horrors that had been visited on those helpless humans. He had an almost primal reaction. The Cylons were going to cut him up in one of their experiments. Alive. He tried to get up and managed to roll partway off the stretcher before the Three's hands pulled him back and held him down.

He struggled ineffectively, surprised at her strength, and gasped. "Gods damn it! Just kill me! Get it over with!"

Her blue eyes studied him. "For someone who has endured so much and struggled so hard to stay alive, why do you now want to die? I don't understand."

"I'd rather be dead before you chop me up like sushi."

"I thought you would be pleased to get out of your prison cell."

She motioned to the two men.

Their rough hands lifted him onto a bed. He was covered with a crisp, clean sheet. Another man leaned over him, human not Cylon, and gently put a stethoscope against his bruised chest. He was wearing a white jacket and moved the stethoscope around, listening for a long time.

"Kill me before you cut me up," he rasped to the man in the white jacket. "Please kill…" his words ended in a rattling, choking cough.

The man turned to the Three. "You expect me to _save him_? You should have brought him to me days ago. I'm a doctor. I treat the sick. I don't raise the dead."

Her throaty voice said. "God won't let him die. He's part of the prophecy. God will give him the strength to live and give you the wisdom to heal him."

The doctor leaned over him again and smiled faintly. He had kind eyes and a kind voice.

"Is she right? Are you going to live and make a liar out of me?"

"I used to tell a friend that I had more lives than a cat," he managed to say before another spasm of coughing shook him.

The doctor paused for John Gallagher to finish coughing. "Then perhaps you won't mind becoming her house pet."

TBC…


	2. Stars Gone Blue

Chapter 2

Stars Gone Blue

_I followed behind, the man not seen.__  
__I hoped for her smile, a word, a glance.__  
__My love for her burned its way through my heart,__  
__The prayer on my lips to give me a chance._

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, Whisper the Rainbow_

_._

Laura Roslin knew she had slept for a few hours, but when she awoke to her alarm clock at 6:30 in the morning, she didn't feel like it. It had been after two a.m. when Bill and Lee had left and Laura felt once again like her world had crashed around her.

Hearing that Kara had taken the recon Raider to Nereid with no plans to return had sent Laura reeling into an emotional state that she hadn't experienced since losing her husband. Against her better judgment she had taken a sleeping pill prescribed by her physician during those first terrible weeks after they had won their freedom and John had paid the ultimate price.

Now she sat on the edge of her bed and fought the fog in her brain. She didn't think she could handle another loss right now. Kara wasn't dead, but she had undertaken a self-appointed mission that would likely result in her death. Laura held no illusions about what awaited Kara on the distant planet that had become the Cylon homeworld. She had no illusions whatsoever. Lee could say all the comforting things to her that he wanted about how Kara had survived after the first Cylon attack. Laura knew better than Lee what Kara had lived through. Laura had visited those refugee camps numerous times. She knew that Kara was tough and strong. But Kara hadn't been on a planet where the only proven occupants were Cylons, either.

Wearily Laura forced herself to go to the shower. Her breakfast would be brought to the small private dining area on the residential floor of Marble House at 7:00. Maya and her son would join her as they did every morning. She turned the water to a cooler temperature than normal and stepped into the spray.

Twenty-five minutes later she was dressed and in her son's room. Braedon sat in his crib playing with several of his toys. That meant that Maya had already gotten up and changed his diaper.

Laura walked over to the crib. "Hello, my little man."

Her son looked up and smiled at her before he pulled himself up on the side and reached for her.

She lifted him into her arms, and as she kissed him, she found that she was unable to stop tears from filling her eyes and spilling over. Braedon looked so much like John and thinking of John reminded her once again of Kara. When she turned, Maya was standing in the doorway pulling her hair back into a ponytail.

"Good morning." She walked over to them and saw Laura's tears immediately. "What's wrong?"

Braedon touched Laura's wet cheek. "Mamma cry."

Laura wiped under her eyes with one of her hands. "I got some disturbing news last night. I'll tell you while we eat."

Maya reached for Braedon and he went to her. "Let's get some breakfast, big boy."

While Maya carried Braedon into the small dining room, Laura took a tissue from the box on the dresser and dried her eyes. She had to pull herself together. She had a full day today, starting with a staff meeting followed by a meeting with Romo Lampkin. After lunch she met with Bill Adama. They were going to discuss the mission that would visit each of the other colonies to see if any humans had managed to survive.

Laura had read the reports by several scientific groups giving the scenarios they were most likely to find. Those planets had suffered the full force of the Cylon nuclear attack followed by a large centurion invasion. There was little chance anyone had survived. All of the scientists believed that Tauron was an anomaly, that the Cylons had bombed only the four major cities very likely with conventional weapons and left the northern area untouched because they wanted the tylium ore located there.

Tauron's hardy natives had so far refused the offer of refuge on Caprica. They had preferred to stay in the harsh northern region of their planet and live as they had for centuries, at least according to Tom Zarek and his men who now oversaw the tylium mining operation.

Laura walked into the dining room. Maya already had Braedon in his highchair and was stirring his cereal. Laura sat and absently dropped a lump of sugar into her cup of tea. Bill had asked her to keep the extent of what Kara had done a secret, but Laura also knew that she had to tell Maya something.

"Bill came to see me last night. Kara has…volunteered for a mission off Caprica. She left last night. Bill and Lee waited until she was gone before they told me."

Maya looked over from putting a spoonful of cereal into Braedon's mouth. "I just saw her day before yesterday. She didn't say anything about going anywhere. Not a word."

Braedon slapped his hands on the highchair tray and Maya got another spoonful of cereal into his mouth.

"It's a highly classified mission."

"Too high to let the President know about it beforehand?" Maya asked incredulously.

"Kara knew I would have tried to stop her. I think Bill knew it, too. At least she's not alone. There's another pilot with her."

"Lee?"

"No, not Lee."

Maya's eyes widened. "How did Lee let that happen?"

"She didn't tell him that she was going either. Kara called him just before she left."

"You can't tell me where she's gone, can you?"

Laura shook her head.

"But it's dangerous?"

Laura's face crumpled again and she grabbed the tissue from her lap. She took a few deep breaths and managed to get herself under control once more.

"I need to get to my office."

"You need to eat something first."

"I'm not hungry. I'll get something later."

"In a way this doesn't surprise me," Maya said. "Kara hasn't been the same since the fighting."

"You mean since she lost her father. At least I've accepted what happened to John. I was doing better…until last night."

Laura kissed her son before she left the room.

Behind her she heard Braedon slap the tray once more and say, "Kawa. Vipa."

Laura couldn't help but smile. Her son now associated Kara with his toy Vipers, but he was still having trouble pronouncing his Rs.

"Kara will be all right. I know she will," Maya called after her.

Maya's hopeful statement struck Laura as naïve and yet it was comforting to hear someone say it aloud besides Lee. She had a feeling that in some ways Maya knew Kara better than she did. Maya was also a survivor of one of the refugee camps. Maya and Kara had talked about some of their experiences. They shared the same bond that Kara shared with her friend Karl Agathon and with Hugh Connelly, now an instructor at the Academy.

A month ago Kara had told her that Hugh and his wife were expecting their second child. That was one thing the Cylons had not been able to achieve until Sharon Valaerii had gotten pregnant with Karl's baby. As she walked down the hall toward the elevator, Laura wondered about the Cylons on the planet of Nereid. Had they ever been able to create a new life like that? Were they using human prisoners to try to achieve that goal? She thought once again of Kara and prayed that she wouldn't be captured by the Cylons. She prayed that Kara would return to Caprica, to the ones who loved her.

Laura descended to the ground floor office wing of Marble House. She knew that she had not done a very good job of maintaining a relationship with Kara during the last four months. She twisted her wedding ring on her finger and thought of her husband's soul.

"Wherever you are, John" she whispered, "please, watch over our daughter for me."

…

"There's the island," Kara said and moved her head so Narcho could get a better look at the monitor.

"So where is that image coming from?"

"There's a lens built-in just below the Raider's eye slot. The other images come from cameras built into the gun wells underneath the ship. It took a while to get used to flying looking at screens."

"Is it hard to fly?"

"It's different. I think it helped that I'd spent so much time playing video games when I was a kid."

"Who tricked out this ship anyway? They thought of everything...except a way to make it bigger inside."

"Some very brilliant guys. Every system has a backup built in. If one of them goes down, the backup comes on line."

"Are any of these guys pilots?"

Kara laughed. "Not a pilot in the bunch. Some neuroscientists, an astrophysicist and engineer and a computer genius. Now I've got to find a place to put this ship down. Her name's Sadie, by the way."

"Sadie the Cylon. That's cute. Who named her that?"

"Kevin, the computer genius. He's keeps little blue and green streaks in his hair because he's such a big Buccaneers fan. He's the one who told me about security at the boneyard. I probably got him in big trouble."

Narcho snorted. "I think there's enough blame on this to go around."

Kara flew several low passes over the island. It was small, maybe thirty miles wide by fifty miles long. The entire surface was covered with snow and ice. The southern end was dotted with hundreds of creatures that looked like large seals or sea lions. She knew she didn't want to tangle with them. She headed north and finally picked a spot that looked fairly flat. She started an approach but at the last minute changed her mind and lifted off before she touched down.

"What's wrong?" Narcho asked.

She shook her head. "I'm not sure this is the best spot. I'm going to check one more time."

The truth was that she had lost her nerve, something that had never happened to her. She chalked it up to not having landed on ice before. She circled once more and finally brought the Raider down. Even with the vertical thrusters slowing her forward momentum, the ship started sliding and went sideways the minute they touched the snow. Kara realized that she had underestimated the incline of the slope. She held her breath. Sadie finally stopped moving when one wingtip plowed into a snow bank and they spun in a circle before coming to a hard stop. In the early morning light she could see that snow had covered the camera lens.

Narcho had been holding his breath, too. He let it out. "I hope you brought a shovel. We might have to dig our way out."

"Shoveling snow is your job. Why do you think I brought you along? Can you get the hatch open?"

"Let me see if I can reach the handle." He rolled into her as he maneuvered. "Sorry."

"It's okay," Kara said. "I know this wasn't meant for two people."

She heard him spinning the handle and then the pressure seal disengaging. She shut down the oxygen as Narcho pushed the hatch open about a foot.

"I'm shutting everything down. I don't want to take a chance that the Cylons will catch our signal and wonder what a Raider is doing out here on an island that's nothing but snow and ice. It would be bad if a couple of their Raiders showed up. The red eye on this ship looks real, but it's just for show. And we're not armed with anything but cameras."

"Nothing?"

"Nope. One of the first things the engineers did was disable the kinetic energy weapons. They needed the space inside here for other stuff. This ship wasn't meant to get into a dogfight with other Raiders. Our only defense is to avoid contact. But we do have our sidearms."

"That would be like shooting at them with a BB gun."

"I got my slingshot in the backpack," Kara joked trying to lighten the mood.

Narcho wasn't amused. "It's going to get cold in here with the hatch open."

"Can you reach my pack?"

"I think so."

"Unzip it. There's a thermal blanket on top, the thin silver kind. We'll share. I think we should try to get a few hours of sleep."

Narcho managed to get the blanket out of her pack. "You thought of everything. So how do you want to do this?"

Kara snickered. "Do I have to explain to you how to cuddle up with a girl in a blanket? You're a hot Viper pilot. I know you shared a bunk sometimes with a lieutenant on the _Galactica_. What was her name…Braswell? Marcie Braswell? She worked in the comm center if I remember correctly."

"Who told you? Seelix or Flat Top?"

"I don't remember. You should know there aren't any secrets on a battlestar."

"This isn't going to be quite like sharing a bunk."

Kara sighed. "Look, when Karl and I were living at a little cottage together and we lost the electricity, we slept in the same bed to keep warm. We did the same thing when we were in the refugee camp and he got the flu and we didn't have any fuel for the heater. We slept on the same cot. So…we can do this. Just think of me as your sister."

Narcho struggled in the tight quarters and finally got the blanket unfolded. Tentatively he reached for her and she spooned herself closer to him. It was already getting cold inside the Raider. He grabbed a handful of the blanket and pulled it around both of them.

"I don't know if I can think of you as my sister, but I can think of you as Lee's girlfriend. I mean I _do_ think of you as Lee's girlfriend. Can I put my arm across your waist. Otherwise it'll go to sleep."

"Sure, Narch." Kara realized how much she missed Lee. Noel Allison was a nice guy and she trusted him with her life, but he wasn't the man she loved.

After a minute Narcho said, "Tell me about your plan."

"In a couple of hours we'll go to the forest and land in a place I've picked out near where the humans on the planet shot at me."

"Somebody _shot at you_? And that's where we're going?"

"Not exactly there, but close. And they shot at _this ship_, at a Raider. They couldn't know I was inside."

"So tell me why we want to go _there_."

"It's a big forest. I don't want to have to search the whole thing. I've got to find those humans."

"I know I sound like a broken recording disk, but why?"

"Because I hope my father is with them."

"Kara…"

"I know. You don't believe there's any way he can be alive in spite of what the Oracle told me."

"What are you going to do if he's _not_ with them?"

"If he's not with them, it means he's a prisoner of the Cylons. Yolanda Brenn told me that he had survived. That's the only other place he could be."

When she didn't continue, Narcho asked, "And if he's a prisoner, then what?"

"I'll need information to figure out how to rescue him. I hope the free humans will help me get it."

"So that's it? That's your _big plan_?"

"That's it _so far_. You don't go into combat knowing every single move you're going to make ahead of time. Some of it you work out as you go."

"I still thought you'd have more of a plan than that…trying to find some humans who shot at you and…and winging it afterward," he said angrily.

"Look, I can jump back to Caprica to a little place called Heliops Island and let you off at a deserted airfield. It'll take you about four hours to walk to the nearest sheep farm. You can probably get somebody to take you to the only town on the island and get the local constable to call the military. You can tell them I forced you to go with me."

"Meanwhile you jump back here?"

"That's right."

"No. We're in this together."

"Then you let me worry about the plan." They lay for several minutes without speaking. Finally Kara said softly, "Are you sure you don't want to go back. There's a good chance we might die on this planet."

"There's also a good chance that us being here will stop Admiral Adama from nuking it and killing the humans. Right?"

"Right."

"There's a good chance I might get to take out a few Cylons face to face…skinjobs, not just Raiders. Right?

"Right."

"That's good enough for me."

"Before we get excited about killing them, we've got to find out if there's a resurrection facility on the planet. Otherwise they'll just download and come back."

She heard excitement in Narcho's voice. "You think we might get a chance to take out a res facility here on the planet?"

"I doubt it. My backpack isn't loaded with explosives."

"Maybe the humans on the planet have some. If they shot at you then they must have a way of making something that goes bang."

"Maybe. If they have explosives then I wonder why they haven't already taken out their res facilities or their shipyard."

"Maybe they don't know where they are."

"Let's get some sleep, Narch. Maybe we'll get a chance to ask them in the morning."

She was almost asleep when he said, "I hope that doesn't mean the humans are working _with_ the Cylons."

"If that's the case, we're totally frakked. Now let me go to sleep or you won't have to worry about the Cylons."

"What? Here I am wrapped in a blanket with you. I'm not even trying to take advantage of it, and you're threatening to take out your favorite wingman." The tone of his voice had finally lightened.

"Who says you're my favorite?"

"Who'd you ask to give you a ride to the boneyard last night and help you steal this ship?"

She poked him in the ribs with her elbow. "The only guy I thought was crazy enough to do it. Now shut up and let me go to sleep."

…

Lee was sitting at his desk after lunch trying to stay awake when Major Parker walked by his door.

"Why don't you take the rest of the day off, Lee?"

"You don't mind, sir?"

"I think under the circumstances it's advisable." Parker smiled. "You just got over a broken leg. I don't want you to face plant into your keyboard and break your nose. Go home. Get some sleep."

"Thank you, sir."

Lee shut down his computer and left the base. Instead of driving to his apartment, though, he drove to the little temple where Elosha was the priest.

He thought of the small abandoned temple on the island where he had given Kara the promise ring as an Academy graduation gift. This temple was at least that old, maybe older. When the cornerstone had been placed, it had stood alone. Now it was surrounded by taller and larger and more modern buildings. Caprica City had grown up around it and overshadowed it in a physical sense, yet it was still there. Lee found that oddly comforting.

He did not worship at any temple. In that way he was like his father. Neither one of them believed in the gods. The last time he had been in this temple was for John's memorial service over three months earlier. He remembered the touching and surprisingly eloquent eulogy that Buzz Jessups had given for a man who had been a fellow Viper pilot on the _Solaria_.

Until the previous night Lee had thought that Jessups' words had finally helped Kara find some peace with her loss. She had changed so completely after the memorial service that Lee had considered it just short of a miracle. But apparently what he had witnessed was not Kara gaining a measure of peace and acceptance of John's death, but the beginning of a secret plan that had culminated in her theft of the Raider. And Lee had just learned this morning that there was a chance, albeit a very slim one, that John had made it to Nereid and was still alive. Kara had staked her career and even her life of that miniscule chance.

He walked to the front of the temple and sat down on the first row near where he had sat during John's service. Laura and John had married there in front of the altar. They had all been so happy that night.

Just thinking about how Kara had looked made Lee's heart ache. She had literally taken his breath as she had slowly preceded Laura down the aisle to the strains of a flute and a lyre. Her dress had been the color of red wine and her hair was curled and down instead of pulled back in the usual ponytail. Lee loved Kara's natural beauty, but the way she looked the night of Laura and John's wedding had seared itself into his brain. He closed his eyes and saw her smile at him. He would find her. He didn't care if he had to cross half the galaxy. He would find her. One day they would stand here and say their own vows. One day he and Kara would become husband and wife just like John and Laura had done.

"Lee Adama," a woman's voice said softly. "This is a surprise. I didn't expect to see you in my temple today."

He opened his eyes. Elosha stood beside the pew.

"I came to ask you to say a prayer for Kara."

"I can do that. But so can you…just as easily as I can."

Lee smiled faintly. "I'm sure your prayers carry more weight than mine."

"All prayers spoken from the heart are equal in the eyes of the gods. Is there a particular blessing you wish me to ask for her?"

"Kara's undertaken a very dangerous mission. Just pray for her safety. Please."

Elosha's dark eyes searched his. "Up there among the stars?"

"She's not on Caprica right now. That's all I can say."

"Does Laura know about this?"

"She does now."

"Ah, Kara kept it from her. That is so like her." Elosha's eyes held his again. "She kept it from you, as well. That is _not_ like her."

"I would have stopped her."

"Kara has her own journey right now. So do you. You will be together again when the time is right."

"Spoken like an Oracle."

"I am no Oracle. Yolanda Brenn told Kara long ago that she would journey to another world, but she also told Kara that you and she would be together. Kara even asked me to perform the marriage ceremony for the two of you one day."

"I gave her a ring."

"She showed it to me. A promise given and accepted. She will return to you. You must have faith."

"Thank you," Lee said.

"I will pray for Kara…for her safety…and for you to be together again when she has completed her mission."

…

Laura sat in a small conference room near her office with Romo Lampkin and Billy Keikeya. She had hardly touched her lunch. Instead she was trying to read over the day's press releases that Billy had prepared but found that her mind was wandering.

Her personal secretary came to the door. Laura looked up and took off her reading glasses.

"Dr. Gaius Baltar is insisting that he see you," her secretary said apologetically. "I told him you were eating lunch. He said he only wanted a few minutes of your time. I think he plans to wait as long as he has to. Should I get Edgar to escort him out?"

Laura glanced at her watch. They had two hours until they met with the Quorum. "No. I'll see him. Send him in."

Billy pushed back his chair. "We'll leave."

"No, stay and finish your lunch. Both of you. There's nothing I'll discuss with Gaius that you can't hear."

Lampkin said, "I wonder if he wants to ask for his old job back."

"Quitting was his choice after we brought Dr. Attis in and put him in charge of the project. Baltar's ego wouldn't let him assume the position of _assistant_ director of the lab, but he left me no choice. He had made almost no progress during the last year on the anti-viral research. He was too busy adding names to his list of conquests."

"Did you know that he's taken up his girlfriend's calling?"

"Which one? He has so many…girlfriends that is."

"The Cylon. He's preaching sermons at the old warehouse every Wednesday evening. Keeping her congregation together."

Billy's eyes widened. "Dr. Baltar has become a monotheist preacher?"

"Forgive my cynicism," Laura said, "but I'm sure it's just a way for him to meet women since he no longer has a ready supply of research assistants. He's an atheist. The idea that he would fancy himself a preacher is almost laughable."

Laura's secretary escorted Baltar to the door.

"Madame President." Baltar sounded like the words choked him, but he quickly added in a contrite tone of voice. "I apologize for interrupting your lunch."

Laura was not used to obsequiousness from him. She found that she actually preferred his arrogance. It suited him much better.

"Gaius, how nice to see you again," Laura said politely but coolly. "You remember Billy. And this is Romo Lampkin, my Attorney General."

Gaius nodded at the two men.

Lampkin said, "You don't look like your picture, Dr. Baltar."

"It's definitely a new look for you, Gaius," Laura commented, but kept her other thoughts to herself.

She detested his greasy, unkempt hair and scruffy beard and wondered if his congregation found the look as off-putting as she did. But then Lampkin had once told her that many who had come to Natasi's warehouse sermons were street people.

"Ah," Lampkin said. "It's the look of our prophets of old. Is it an attempt to raise your credibility with your congregants? Does it increase your take in the offering bowl?"

Always the polite one, Billy asked. "Could I get you a cup of coffee, Dr. Baltar?"

Baltar sat at the table across from Laura. "No coffee…thank you."

"What can I do for you today?" Laura asked.

Baltar fidgeted. "I've come to ask about Natasi."

"She's being treated well," Laura said, "far better than she deserves."

"She did nothing. She doesn't deserve to be imprisoned like the rest of them. You could release her. She won't cause any harm. I'll see to that. She wasn't doing anything except spreading the word of God's love. Caprica has always been a religiously tolerant colony. It's one of the things we pride ourselves in."

Before Laura could reply, Lampkin shot back, "This isn't a question of religious freedom, Dr. Baltar. Your woman is a Cylon. She participated in the _genocide_ of billions of humans, a holocaust unprecedented in all of history."

"That wasn't her. She told me. That was another copy of her model. Natasi came to negotiate a peace treaty to spare the rest of us. She deserves some consideration for that."

"She stood by while the Cylons created a vaccine to make humans sterile and used it on schoolchildren," Lampkin said. "Unless a cure can be found, there's a whole generation of little girls on Caprica who will never bear children thanks to her and her kind."

Anger had robbed Baltar of his contrite tone. "She had _nothing_ to do with that, either. It was the other copy. The one you photographed at CapGen Labs. That copy went back to the basestar and is now permanently dead. Do you treat all your clients as guilty from the start?"

"She's not my client, Dr. Baltar nor will she ever be. If she goes on trial for her crimes against humanity, I'll be prosecuting her, proving her guilt, just like I'll do for the rest of them."

Laura glanced at him, her look asking for his silence. She knew Lampkin was entitled to voice his opinion. But she wasn't in the mood to hear Baltar and her Attorney General go at each other.

"Mr. Lampkin is right, Gaius. I'm sure the Cylons have a cure for their virus. When Natasi had the chance, she refused to help you. She deserves prison for that if for nothing else."

"She had _no access_ to their research. She _couldn't_ help me!"

"Couldn't…or wouldn't? You're incredibly naïve if you think she's innocent of what her brothers and sisters did to humanity. Cavil often bragged about their democratic way of making decisions. She cast her vote along with the rest of them. When Leoben questioned the genocide, Cavil had his centurions shoot him. Your girlfriend suffered no such fate. And I think she could have gotten that anti-viral if she had tried."

Baltar's tone edged toward a whine. "Her congregation misses her. The spiritual message she carries is important. Don't you see that she's teaching us we can live together in peace? She's teaching us that God is love."

Laura had enough. "You're wasting your breath, Gaius. You'll get no sympathy from any of us in this room or from most of the people on Caprica. You'll just have to continue spreading her monotheistic ideology…alone."

"You're lucky you aren't sitting in a cell with them," Lampkin said. "You openly consorted with the enemy. You took her to your bed."

Baltar fidgeted again. The contrite tone was back. "Yes…well. I only did what most of the men on the planet would have done. She's a beautiful woman."

"I don't think you'll get any argument from us on that," Laura said.

"Could I see her?"

"No. We're not allowing them any visitors."

"That's a violation of their civil rights…" he began.

"They're machines," Lampkin said. "They have no rights, civil or otherwise."

"Natasi says they have souls just like humans."

"Naturally she would say that. She's programmed to believe it," Lampkin shot back. "And since when do you believe in souls for any of us? You're an atheist."

"Are you going to put them on trial?" Baltar asked and evaded the topic of his religious beliefs or lack of them.

"We haven't decided yet," Laura answered.

"Most Capricans want a trial followed by a public execution," Lampkin said.

"I disagree," Laura said. "I think most Capricans would dispense with the trial altogether and go straight to the execution."

"That's barbaric," Baltar gasped.

"They executed everyone on eleven of our colonies…without a trial," Lampkin retorted. "Billions of humans…gone in a nuclear holocaust or mowed down by centurion bullets. Some died quickly. Others, I'm sure, died slowly and suffered greatly. Certainly a scientist of your caliber understands how painfully radiation kills its victims. It doesn't get any more _barbaric_ than that. The Cylons should count themselves lucky if they get a quick death in front of a firing squad."

"Gentlemen, please" Laura said. "Gaius, I've told you that she's being treated well. You'll have to take my word for it. Now we've got some things to discuss before we meet with the Quorum this afternoon. My secretary will show you out."

Baltar stood. "Will you tell Natasi that I asked about her?"

"I'm afraid I don't see her."

"Could I…send her a letter?"

Laura glanced at Lampkin.

"I've no problem with a letter," he said, "as long as Dr. Baltar understands it will be opened and read by us first."

"Write your letter, then, Gaius and bring it to Mr. Lampkin's office. He will be the one to take it to her."

After Baltar left, Lampkin turned to Laura and said, "I think the poor fool might actually have feelings for her. The fact that Baltar groveled before you says something to me about the depth of his feelings."

Billy, who had remained silent throughout Baltar's visit, said to Laura, "You once told me that you thought the Cylon had feelings for him."

"I said the Cylon programming was very good in her case. It was convincing enough that during their very public breakup outside a restaurant two years ago, she produced some very convincing tears."

"But they got back together, didn't they?" Billy asked.

"Yes. Mr. Lampkin discovered last year that Baltar had begun attending her sermons, apparently in an effort to win her back. She was at his apartment on the night that we had all the Cylons arrested. We let Baltar cool his heels in a cell beside them for two days. He didn't want to see her quite so badly then. I seem to recall him screaming at the top of his lungs to be set free."

Lampkin said."That was over four months ago. Perhaps she's missing him as much as he's missing her. Do you think we could use her feelings for him or her programming or whatever motivates her to our advantage?"

"How?"

"She hasn't talked yet, has she?"

"None of them have except Sharon Agathon and Leoben Conoy. They told us everything they know. That's one of the reasons they're free today…that and the fact that they helped us before the battle, before it was to their advantage to do so. But the problem with Leoben is that his memories were wiped by a One before he was placed here on Caprica. He remembers almost nothing of the homeworld. Sharon was activated on their basestar to take the place of another Eight. She would have been given the basic memories of the Eights, but she wouldn't have had personal memories of the homeworld."

"When Dr. Baltar brings his letter…_if _he brings it…let me question Natasi," Lampkin said.

"You plan to use his letter to bribe her into talking?"

Lampkin smiled. "I learned a great deal of my technique from Joseph Adama. He was the best I've ever seen at pulling information out of someone. He would have jumped at the chance to question her. What do you want to know?"

"Anything she can tell us about their homeworld and any humans who are there. It would be especially good to know where they are on the planet and how many there are. Bill is going to need every scrap of information we can get before he goes there. Sharon told Lee that there were _a lot_ of humans on the planet. She finally admitted that she had gotten her information from their datastream on the basestar, but she didn't know which one of them had added it to the stream which is why we question the authenticity of the information but not Sharon's sincerity."

"Then you don't trust her information at all?" Lampkin asked.

"According to both her and Leoben, Cylons can't lie in the datastream. Of course we have only their word for that, too. The others in custody won't even admit to having a datastream."

"If I question Natasi, could I have a bit more leeway in bargaining with her? Could I perhaps promise a visit from Dr. Baltar if she cooperates?"

Laura thought about his suggestion. "First let's see what kind of information you get from her with Baltar's letter."

…

When Lee left the temple, he had one more stop to make before he went back to his apartment. He drove toward the waterfront. Dreilide Thrace lived in a small apartment on Fifty-First Street.

Lee pulled up outside the apartment building and parked. He took out his mobile phone and started to call to ask Dreilide if it was all right to come up and then changed his mind about calling first. He got out of the car and locked it. Dreilide lived on the third floor. He had emphysema and the building had no elevator. Lee wondered how much longer Dreilide would be able to live there and climb the stairs.

As Lee started down the hall from the stairwell, he heard piano music. Outside the door he stood and listened for a minute before he knocked. The music stopped. The door opened.

Dreilide stepped back and Lee entered the apartment. Dreilide looked into the hall.

"Where's Kara?"

"She's not with me."

Dreilide immediately closed the door. His voice held fear. "Has something happened to her? A Viper crash? Is that what you're here to tell me? Is she dead?"

"No. She didn't crash. But she volunteered for a mission off Caprica. We don't know how long it will take. She won't be able to contact you for a while. I…know you'll worry about her if you don't hear from her, especially if a certain rumor hits the press."

Dreilide walked over to the piano and poured whiskey into a glass from a bottle that sat on top. "Drink?"

Lee shook his head. "No, thanks."

"I would ask where she's gone, but I'm sure you'll tell me it's classified."

"You're right."

"Why aren't you with her?"

"She has another pilot with her."

Dreilide didn't say anything, just turned up the glass and drained it. He poured another drink.

"Did she ever talk to you about losing her…losing John?" Lee asked.

"You mean since the memorial service?"

"Yeah."

Dreilide shook his head. "I'm working on a song for him. Kara asked me to write something, but I guess you know that."

"No. She didn't mention it. Kara stopped talking to me about John after the service. I think she stopped talking to everybody about him."

"She asked me to write something on the day of the memorial service. She didn't want to hear it until I was through with it. I'm calling it _Stars Gone Blue_."

He sat down at the piano and played several dozen bars of the song Lee had heard while he stood outside the door.

"That's good. John would have liked it."

Dreilide turned around. "I guess it's a dangerous mission."

"There are a lot of unknowns."

"How long will she be gone?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe months."

"What are you not telling me?"

"I can't say any more than I already have. My father would blow his stack if he even knew I was here, but I thought you deserved to know."

"Is there a chance she'll die on this mission?"

"There's a chance any of us could die anytime we take a Viper up."

Dreilide took another drink. "I knew as soon as Socrata told me when the baby was due that it wasn't mine. Kara asked me last year how long I'd known John was her father. I told her the truth. Did she ever tell you that?"

"No. I guess she thought that was between you and her."

"I love Kara anyway. I always have. I'm not going to lose her, am I?"

Lee stood. "Not if I can help it. I'm probably going to leave soon on a mission of my own off planet. I'll be gone for a while, too, but you'll probably hear about that on the news."

"I hope I live long enough to see her marry you."

Lee forced himself to smile. "What do you mean _live long enough_? You're going to dance at our wedding."

Dreilide forced a smile as well. "I don't know about dance, but I might be persuaded to play the piano. Maybe when I finish John's song, I'll write one for you and Kara…for your wedding."

"That would be nice."

"I'll have to do something. With you and Kara both gone, I won't have any visits to look forward to."

As Lee left, Dreilide said, "I'll ask my friend Paulla to say a prayer for Kara. I know she's a monotheist and prays to one God, but I don't think it can hurt."

"Thanks." Lee thought of his request to Elosha. "It never hurts to cover all the bases."

…

John Gallagher was walking across the sand dunes of a desert in a place where it was either eternal sunrise or sunset. He thought he was dead, but this strange place wasn't anything like his idea of the underworld. To enter the underworld he had to cross a river and he hadn't come to a river yet so maybe he wasn't quite dead.

He wasn't sure what waited for him on the other side. It would be either Elysium or Tartarus. The former was good, the latter not so good. Tartarus was the abode of sinners, a place of murky gloom and deep despair. Elysium was a bright, sunny meadow of trees and flowers and perpetual happiness. He had no idea how the gods would judge his life. He hadn't been a choirboy, not by a long shot, but he hoped that his life for the last few years had redeemed some of his past sins.

He was wearing his favorite casual outfit, khaki cargo pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up several times. He was barefoot and the sand under his feet was warm but not hot. He wasn't hungry or thirsty, but the desert air was thin and he had to stop frequently to catch his breath.

Several times he sat down on the top of one of the dunes and looked out over the rolling sea of sand that stretched to the horizon in all directions. He wasn't fond of the desert. He loved the water. He'd grown up in Port Ithaca, a small town on the northeast coast of Virgon. His father had owned and operated a fishing trawler. He'd spent his youth in a little house six blocks from the main pier. He'd played along the waterfront and the seaside cliffs with his friends. He couldn't remember a time when he hadn't known how to swim.

He felt like he had walked for days when the dunes became flatter. They finally leveled out and he saw the river. He looked for the boatman who was supposed to take him across, but there was no one there. As he got closer, though, he saw that the river was shallow and not very wide. He wasn't even going to have to swim. He could wade across.

He stood at the edge of the water and looked at the other side. His parents were there. His father had his arm around his mother like he had seen them so many times in life. His four brothers were there, too, jostling each other and cutting up the way they had always done. Behind them were many of his friends and fellow pilots from the _Solaria _and others from Picon where he had lived for nearly fifteen years. And standing off by herself was Socrata, Kara's mother, the only woman besides Laura that he had ever loved.

He never called her Socrata. He called her Sassy because the day he met her in the rehab hospital she had gotten in his face. It hadn't mattered to her that he was an officer and she was enlisted. She'd gotten in his face and chewed him out like a drill sergeant because he was acting like a jerk to the little guy who was trying to help him learn to walk again with crutches and a prosthetic leg.

He'd probably fallen in love with her that day, but it had taken him a while to realize it, weeks during which she had gotten in his face a number of times, weeks during which he hadn't wanted to live because he'd never fly a Viper again. He hadn't realized it until the night before she was discharged from the hospital, the night he had decided he was going to kill himself. It was also the night she'd come into his room and they had made love for the first time. She'd left the next day without even telling him goodbye, but she'd given him a reason to want to live. And later she'd given him a gift more precious to him than life. She'd given him a daughter. She'd given him Kara. Kara, who wasn't there waiting for him. That was good. It meant she had survived the fight over Caprica.

Sassy was wearing her fatigues. She looked just the way she had looked five years earlier when she'd stayed behind on Picon to fight the Cylons. She raised her hand and smiled at him. He stepped into the water. A few more steps and he would be there.

"Dad, wait a minute."

John turned. Kara stood on the bank of the river holding Braedon. She was wearing her flight suit just as she had been when he'd last seen her. He walked back to the bank. His daughter smiled at him and put his son into his arms.

"He shouldn't grow up without a father," she said.

Braedon nestled sleepily against John's neck as he had done so many times before and said, "Dada."

"I'm a long way from Caprica now, a long way from you and Braedon."

"When did a little something like thirty light years stop me? The Raider will do it in half a second."

"You haven't done something crazy have you?"

His daughter gave him her best smug look. "What? You mean like coming to get you and take you home?"

"That's exactly what I mean."

"I'm probably thinking about it."

"Kara…no. N-O!"

"You want Admiral Adama to raise your son? Because if you give up now, that's what's going to happen. You know what kind of father he was to Lee and Zak."

"You still have that smart mouth, don't you?"

"I just said what you're thinking. You hang in there, Dad. I love you. Brae loves you, too. You better be waiting for me when I get to Nereid because if you aren't, I'll come down to the underworld and get you...just like Prince Olliver did in the story."

"I love you, baby. I love you and Brae more than anything in the world."

"Then prove it. Wait for me."

He glanced back. He could barely see the river. Holding his sleeping son and with his daughter by his side, John began the long journey back across the desert.

The sun should have been at his back but it was in front of him again.

He put his arm around his daughter's shoulders. "What's your opinion of the sun? Is it rising or setting?"

Kara grinned at him. "That's a real no-brainer, Dad. It's rising. It's the one behind us that's setting."

John glanced around. She was right. He could no longer see the river and knew that his journey in this life wasn't yet complete. He had a son who needed him and a wife who loved him and a daughter who was going to do something crazy and he had to be there to help her.

...

Kara awoke to the realization that the air she was breathing was very cold. Narcho was no longer sleeping behind her although the thermal blanket was tucked tightly around her. It wasn't possible to sit up completely in the Raider, but she propped up on her elbow and looked at the chronometer in the cuff of her flight suit. She had slept nearly three hours. It should soon be light enough in the forest to see to make a landing.

She folded the blanket as best she could and stowed it in her pack before she pushed the hatch open and lowered herself onto the crusty snow. She looked around. Narcho had climbed onto one wing and was kicking snow off the top of the Raider. He had it about half cleared.

"I guess you couldn't find a shovel, huh?" She said to him.

"You put it into this snow bank hard. I hope Sadie has a reverse gear."

She shaded her eyes against the sunlight and looked up. "I didn't _put it_ into anything. We slid into that snow bank. How long have you been awake?"

"Twenty minutes. Nature called."

"I hear the call myself right now."

"Go to the back of the ship. I won't look."

Muttering to herself, Kara crunched across the snow and around behind the ship. What probably took him fifteen seconds or less took her several long, cold minutes. She already missed indoor plumbing, but she'd better get used to the outdoor kind.

Narcho was still kicking and pushing snow off the wings when she got back to the side of the ship.

"I've worked up an appetite. What's for breakfast?" He called down to her.

"Bacon, eggs, toast, coffee."

He grinned. "Right."

"I've got a couple of RtEMs in my pack," she said, using the abbreviation for Ready-to-Eat-Meals. "I've got a canteen full of water, too."

She climbed back into the Raider and got two of the meals and the canteen. She tossed them up to Narcho and he helped pull her onto the wing. It was late morning on the island and the sun was getting warmer. In their insulated flight suits it was almost cozy. They sat and ate in silence, sharing the canteen. This meal didn't taste any better than she remembered, but she was hungry enough that she didn't care.

Finally she said, "If we don't find the humans today, I've got my slingshot. We'll have something better to eat tonight."

"Better…like what?"

"Squirrel, rabbit, something like that." Kara laughed at the expression on his face. "Didn't you ever go camping?"

"Sure…with a cooler full of beer and sandwiches from a deli."

"I don't mean yours and Flat Top's version of camping. I mean out in the woods minus the cooler."

"I'm afraid not."

"You're in for a treat. Are you ready to go?"

"As ready as I'll ever be. I've cleared as much snow from the wings as I can. You think you can get us out of here?"

"We'll find out."

Kara hated to leave the sunshine and get back into the Raider, but she knew that she didn't have a choice. She started the computers booting and turned on the oxygen. When everything was up and running, Narcho closed the hatch. She used the vertical thrusters to get them a few feet off the snow and then turned the Raider sharply. The wing came free.

"We're out of the snow bank," she almost smirked, "piece of cake."

Taking off in the Raider was much easier than landing. Admiral Adama had asked Kevin to remove all the coordinates for the forest from the navigation computer, and he had complied, but Kara had asked Kevin for the coordinates of the spot where someone had shot at her on her first recon mission over the planet and he had jotted them on a sticky note. She now put those into the computer.

"We're jumping," she said to Narcho.

It seemed strange to be over the island in the late morning sunshine one moment and a few seconds later to be over the forest at sunrise. She had studied the surveillance footage so much that she knew exactly which heading to take. Before she flew in that direction, though, she made several low passes over the area. Part of her plan was to announce her arrival to the humans. She hoped they were still down there. Ten minutes later she spotted the small clearing she had seen in one of her photographs and brought the Raider down.

"Good landing," Narcho said. "Although the sleigh ride last time was fun, too."

"I think you'll like the temperature better here." She looked at the reading from her outside sensors. "It's a balmy 62 degrees Fahrenheit."

"Does that mean I don't get to share your blanket again?" Narcho grinned.

She poked him with her elbow. "It'll get colder at night. As long as you behave yourself, I'll share. Now, open the hatch."

When Kara had shut everything down and they were standing on the ground, Narcho asked her, "What do we do now?"

"We wait. I give the humans a day to find us. I'm guessing they're on foot. If they don't show, we'll go looking for them. I just figured letting them find us would be faster."

"You want your backpack?"

"Yeah."

Narcho climbed back inside and handed out her pack. "How do you lock Sadie?"

"We don't."

"You mean we've got to leave our only way off this planet unprotected?"

"We can shut the hatch, but there's no way to lock it. Come on. There's a stream nearby. I can hear it. We need water."

"You mean leave the ship?"

"Look, stay here if you want. I'm not going far. I just want to go to the stream, get some water and some pebbles and get a feel for the terrain."

He came up and squatted beside her while she was at the edge of the stream filling her canteen. "What are the pebbles for?"

"My slingshot. It's a new one. I need to practice with it. But first we're going to walk the creek bank in both directions for a quarter mile or so. There's a path that crosses the creek right over there. If either the humans or the Cylons have been here, there should be some proof."

Narcho found the strange impressions in the ground near the path before Kara did, but she recognized them immediately for what they were…centurion footprints. After studying them, Kara and Narcho decided that there had been at least four of them heading away from the clearing.

"This changes things," Kara said.

"You think?"

Kara knelt and studied the tracks again. "These aren't new. See? Smaller animal tracks on top of them. They were through here…maybe a day ago, maybe longer."

"So do you think they're hunting the humans or the humans are cooperating with them?"

"There weren't any humans with this bunch. For right now I'll go with them hunting the humans. If I knew for sure the humans were working with them, we'd get back in Sadie and get out of here."

They walked back to the clearing. "So what's our next move?" Narcho asked.

"I think we find some kind of shelter where we can watch the clearing from a distance."

Kara took the expensive hand-held computer out of her pack and turned it on. It was fast. Everything was up in seconds. She went to the section of photographs of the clearing and began thumbing her way through them, looking for a protected place.

The men came out of the woods into the clearing so quietly that her first indication they were there was a change in Narcho's voice.

"Turn around slow, Kara, and keep your hand away from your sidearm."

Slowly she turned. There were three men, all carrying older style assault rifles, and dressed in camouflage-colored clothing, greens and browns and grays that looked homemade. Two of them had thick beards and long hair that was tied at the back of their necks. The third one, the youngest one, had short black hair. He wasn't clean-shaven, but his beard was only several days' growth…maybe a week. He appeared to be their leader.

He gestured with his rifle. "No sudden moves. Hands behind your heads. Down on your knees. Now!"

Kara glanced at Narcho and he said, "Let's do what the man says."

She nodded.

Kara suddenly thought of the night Tom Zarek had forced her father and Karl to kneel with their hands behind their heads at Singer's little airport. Sometimes the choices were to obey or get shot. She laced her fingers at the back of her head and knelt beside Narcho.

The two bearded men came over and while one held his rifle to Narcho's head, the other one took Kara's and Narcho's pistols from their holsters.

The man examined the pistols. "These two are smart…smart enough to bring Colonial weapons, new models. Wear Colonial flight suits, too."

"That's because we are Colonials," Kara said to the leader. "We're from Caprica."

The three men apparently thought her remark was funny. They looked at each other and began to laugh.

"Aye," one of the bearded men said, "Caprica by way of the nearest Cylon basestar."

The leader walked around them. He touched the barrel of his assault rifle to the Viper patch on her shoulder. "Another good touch. What does the other patch say?"

Narcho answered him. "_Galactica_. It's the _Colonial_ battlestar we were assigned to."

One of the bearded men said. "We know what you did to the Colonies. You took those flight suits off dead pilots. You're dirty frakking skinjobs spying on us."

"We're not skinjobs. We're humans…just like you."

The leader had walked all the way around them and now stood in front of them again. "You come here in a Cylon ship and you want us to believe you're not skinjob spies? Think we'll show you our hiding places in the forest?"

"We stole the ship."

The men started laughing again. "You expect us to believe two humans waltzed onto a basestar and stole a Raider?"

"Look inside it," Kara said. "It's been gutted of Cylon equipment and fixed for a human pilot."

One of the bearded men started toward the ship when their leader said, "No. Don't touch it. It's probably rigged to explode if you don't do something right. It's Cylon. That's all we need to know."

Kara looked at the leader and tried to ignore the fact that his eyes were the color of Lee's. "When I told Narch here that I wanted the free humans to find us, I didn't think it would be _three frakking idiots_. We stole the ship on Caprica, not from a basestar, _you moron_."

The leader stepped forward and cuffed her across the mouth with the back of his hand. It wasn't a hard blow and it didn't hurt much, but Kara had never been hit in the face that way before. She'd been in fistfights, but she'd never been backhanded. It was a reprimand, an insult.

She scrambled to her feet and curled her hands into fists. "You want to fight, moron? Let's do it right. Put down your big gun."

Narcho was also on his feet. He grabbed her around the waist and held her. "Lords of Kobol, Kara. You want to get killed? Cool it. Don't lose track of why we came here."

The leader had backed away a few paces, but he appeared to be more amused than anything else. He looked at Narcho.

"Is this little wildcat yours?"

"No, I'm not _his_," Kara said angrily. "I don't belong to a man like a piece of property. If you've got a problem with _me_, you settle it with _me_ and leave him out of it."

"You wear somebody's ring."

"The guy who gave me this ring doesn't _own me_. We're equal."

The leader snickered. "And where is _he_, this _equal man_ of yours?"

"He couldn't make it this trip. Look, I came here to find my father. That's all I want to do. If he's not with you, the Cylons have him. He's been here four months."

"I didn't know skinjobs had fathers," one of the bearded men said. "I heard they're hatched in a tub."

"I told you we're not skinjobs."

"Targa," the leader addressed the man, "did you ever see skinjobs take up for each other like these two just did?"

"No, and I never seen a skinjob lose its temper, either, but it could be an _improvement_ in their programming. Something else meant to trip us up and make us trust them."

The third man asked. "So what do we do? Kill them here or risk taking them back to camp?"

The leader answered him, "If they're new skinjobs, Markham will want to study them. If they're not, then I guess we just got two new recruits." He gestured to one of the bearded men. "You know what to do."

The man turned and handed his rifle to the other. He also had a small crossbow that was attached to a leather strap worn bandolier-style across his chest. He pulled a small pack from his back and took out a length of finely-woven rope.

Kara kept her eyes on the leader while the man tied hers and Narcho's wrists and then wrapped the rope around them, linking them together. They could walk, but they definitely couldn't run.

"We saw centurion footprints at the creek," she said. "What if they're close by? How are we going to get away from them tied up like this?"

The leader said. "If you're not skinjobs and the centurions get you, then I apologize in advance. Targa, get their pack. Now let's move. We've got a lot of ground to cover today."

As they set off with the leader in front of them and the other two men behind them, Narcho asked Kara, "Is _this_ what you had in mind for your plan?"

"Not exactly. I expected a warmer welcome, but we accomplished our first goal. We found the free humans…and in record time, too."

"We may not live long enough to get to your second goal. These humans think we're skinjobs."

"I should have thought of that. I'm sure Lee would have. I mean we did show up in a Cylon Raider. I can hardly blame them for jumping to the wrong conclusion."

"Maybe you should have run this mission by him first."

"Right. About halfway through me telling him my plan, he would have had me locked up somewhere undergoing therapy. I told you what…"

The leader suddenly made a sign with his clenched fist that Kara recognized instantly to mean silence. Ten seconds later she saw why. Coming down the path in the distance were four bobbing shiny chrome heads. The three men melted into the surrounding trees and appeared to vanish.

Narcho grabbed Kara and they rolled together under a bush beside the trail.

She put her mouth against his ear. "This is not enough cover. They're going to see us."

"Shhh. Don't move. We'll never make it anywhere else before they get here."

"They're still going to see us."

The four were probably the same group whose tracks they had seen earlier. Narcho had managed to get his arms around her even with his wrists bound. He pulled her as far under the lower branches as he could.

She knew the sparsely-leafed shrub wouldn't hide them completely. She knew the centurions would see them. She closed her eyes and waited as the sound of metal feet hitting the ground drew nearer.

She got her mouth against his ear and whispered, "I'm sorry, Narch."

"It's better than life in prison," he whispered back.

His arms tightened around her and she realized that when he had climbed into the Raider with her back on Caprica, he had accepted whatever their fate might be on this planet.

The clanking footsteps stopped. Kara opened her eyes and looked up. The centurions stood over them on the path, but they hadn't opened fire. They were waiting on something, some signal or maybe someone.

The answer came less than a minute later when a humanoid Cylon walked up to the centurions and looked down.

Even if Kara hadn't seen him, she would have known his voice anywhere.

Leoben Conoy said, "Well, well, well, what do we have here?"

TBC…


	3. Is She Worth It?

Chapter 3

Is She Worth It?

_Spring came with a whisper of rainbow,__  
__Eternal hope that colors the sky.__  
__I sat at her feet and read poems about love__  
__Yet I knew that her heart had passed me by._

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, Whisper the Rainbow_

_._

"You can come out now," Leoben said to Kara and Narcho.

Awkwardly they crawled out from under the bush beside the trail. After they got to their feet, Kara began brushing decaying leaves and dirt off her flight suit. She was buying time, trying to decide how she was going to handle this totally unexpected development. Their situation had suddenly gone from bad to much worse.

Apparently the fact that they were tied together puzzled Leoben. He didn't seem sure of what to do either. He was as sloppily dressed as the copy on Caprica, the one who ran a bookstore and had saved her life, but this one was rougher looking. He hadn't shaved in a while and his hair and clothes were dirty. Even across the distance separating them, Kara could smell his rank body odor. He was also carrying a Cylon assault rifle.

Kara finally looked at Narcho and grinned. "This is embarrassing. Don't ever tell any of our friends that we managed to get captured twice in the same morning. They'll rip off our Viper patches and kick us out of the Viper club."

Narcho rolled his eyes. "Only _you_ could find something funny about this."

Leoben had decided on the first question to ask them. "How did you get here?"

"Subway. The green line. We got off right over there." She pointed toward the trees.

Leoben tried again. "Where did you come from?"

Kara snickered. "My mother told me the stork brought me, but later I learned the truth."

Leoben studied her. "I want to know where you came from _just now_."

His tone of voice told her that he either didn't find her answers amusing or he didn't understand them. She also realized that she didn't want him to head toward the clearing with his centurions. If they saw the Raider, they would take it and that ship was her ride home. She hiked her thumb toward the trees in the opposite direction.

"I just told you. We came from the woods over there."

"Who tied you up?"

"Some guys who thought we were Cylon skinjobs…like you."

Leoben almost smiled. "Is that what you think I am?"

"That's what I _know_ you are. Who else would be hanging out with toasters?"

"Toasters?"

"Don't tell me you've never heard them called _toasters_ before? These chrome jobs don't take orders from humans."

Leoben scratched his stubbly cheek with a dirty thumb. "How many in the group that captured you?"

She glanced at Narcho. "A dozen, wouldn't you say?"

"At least a dozen. Heavily armed. More than a match for you and your four bodyguards."

"We've been tracking three of them," Leoben said. "We lost their trail yesterday. Now you say there are a dozen."

"Your three must have joined up with some others. It's probably not safe to keep going in that direction. You should probably do a one-eighty, go back where you came from."

Leoben looked around. "I don't feel too threatened right now."

Kara shrugged. "It's your funeral. Sorry, I forgot. You don't have funerals. You download. I hear it gives you a terrible headache, like a _really bad_ hangover. Is that true?"

"I've never had a hangover. I don't drink. That's a human weakness."

"Okay. Then I've got another question about downloading. Do you come out of the goo bath smelling as bad as you do now?"

"Shut up, Kara" Narcho said to her. "What's the matter with you? You want _him_ to smack you, too?"

"It doesn't matter. In a minute he's going to order these toasters to shoot us."

"I don't think we'll shoot you," Leoben said. "I think my brothers and sisters will want to talk to you. We got a special place we take your kind. It's been a while since somebody dropped by wearing a flight suit like yours. I heard that it didn't matter what they did to him, he kept saying he didn't know how he got here. I think you like to talk. He didn't."

Kara gasped. Her knees went weak and she sagged against Narcho. He grabbed the front of her flight suit with both hands and held her up.

"What's wrong with her?" Leoben asked.

"Low blood sugar," Narcho said. "We haven't eaten in a while. She needs to sit down."

"Sit," Leoben said. "I'm in no hurry."

Narcho helped her to the ground and knelt beside her. He whispered, "Get it together, Kara."

She struggled to breathe normally. Leoben had just confirmed her worst nightmare. The Cylons had her father. And they'd tortured him. Maybe even killed him. Yolanda Brenn had been right. Her father had survived the FTL jump and made it to Nereid, but was he still alive? The thought of the man she had grown to love so much being tortured by these machines was almost more than she could bear. He'd been willing to give his life to destroy that basestar and _this_ was his reward? She felt anger rise like bile in her throat.

She gasped softly through clenched teeth as tears came to her eyes. "I'm going to kill all of them…starting with _this one_."

Leoben's hearing was very good. "Is she talking about _me_? Killing _me_?"

"Don't pay any attention to her. She talks whacky when her blood sugar drops. Give us a few minutes."

Leoben's tone turned harsh. "You're both stalling for some reason. Get her on her feet. It's time to go."

Narcho took Kara's chin almost roughly and turned her face to his. "What was it you told me your mother used to say to you? _Suck it up, Kara. Be tough._ Make her proud of you. Your _dad, _too_._"

His words finally got through to her. Narcho was right. She had to suck it up and get tough. If her father was still alive, she had to find him and rescue him. She wasn't going to do that sniveling like a baby and making dumb threats. She put her face in her hands for a moment and took a couple of deep breaths.

"Help me up."

Narcho took her hands and pulled her to her feet.

"What happened to the other pilot?" He asked Leoben.

"I don't know. I don't work at the prison, but a few weeks ago I heard they turned him over to a Three. I think she had something special planned for him. Some of the sisters believe that if the whip doesn't work then we should try the carrot. Me, I'm a believer in using a bigger whip."

"He was alive a few weeks ago?" Kara asked trying to keep her voice steady.

Leoben snorted. "If you could call it that?"

Narcho's hands were still clamped tightly on Kara's like he was afraid she was going to do something stupid. Instead she was looking at Leoben, trying to reconcile the difference between this rough, dirty Cylon and the bookseller who had given her a slim volume of poetry and had saved her life. They weren't the same. Despite the fact that they looked like twins, they were literally and figuratively worlds apart. Caprica Leoben had been right. Two copies of the same model Cylon could be different depending on how they had been shaped by their environment and their experiences and even their programming. Cavil would never have had a reason to shoot this one. He was as bad as Cavil.

She had just looked at Narcho to tell him that she wasn't going to do anything stupid, when she heard a strange whistling noise followed by a thud. When she looked back at Leoben, the shaft of a short arrow was protruding from his throat.

He dropped the assault rifle as he made a choking sound and brought his hands to his neck. They came away bloody. He tried to speak but gagged instead. Blood came from his mouth.

"Holy frak," Narcho said.

The centurions began spraying the nearby trees with bullets. Narcho shoved her to the ground and crouched over her. The sound was deafening. Kara had just managed to get her index fingers in her ears when a metal cylinder the size of a soup can landed near them. There was no time to react, but it didn't explode. Instead several strong pulse waves emanated from it. For a few moments she felt like bugs were crawling over her skin.

The centurions stopped firing. Their arms jerked several times and went still. Their red eyes dimmed.

The three men were suddenly among them.

Leoben had dropped to his knees, the blood now gushing from his neck. The man with the crossbow kicked him onto his back and put his foot on Leoben's chest. He pulled out the arrow and wiped it on Leoben's jacket before he put it back into a quiver attached to the leather belt. Targa grabbed Leoben's rifle, then scooped up the cylinder and shoved it into his pack.

At the same time the leader took a knife and cut the rope at hers and Narcho's waists and wrists. When he finished, he knelt beside Leoben and quickly went through his pockets. He removed a small device that Kara realized was some type of radio or other communication device. He tossed it to Targa who dropped it on the ground and smashed it with the butt of his rifle.

Kara realized by the coordinated precision of their actions and their silence that they had done this before, probably more than once.

Leoben had stopped moving and making the choking sound. His eyes were open and staring. Kara knew he was dead and already downloading somewhere at a res facility here on the planet or on one of the basestars.

No one spoke. The leader didn't have to tell them to follow him back into the trees. Half a mile away they all stopped running and caught their breath.

"What was the cylinder?" Kara gasped.

"It scrambles the circuitry in the centurions' brains. Like giving a human amnesia. They'll wander around out here until the Cylons find them and replace the chips or whatever makes them tick."

"Did you decide we're humans after all?" Narcho asked.

"I decided we'd rather have you than let them have you."

Kara had gotten her breath. "We've got to do something with the Raider. The minute the Cylons find it, we've lost it, and I sure as hell don't want somebody on Caprica sending me a bill for it. Is there anywhere we can hide it?"

Targa said sarcastically, "Sure. One of us can slip it in his pocket."

The leader said, "The cave."

"And how are you going to get it there?" Targa asked.

He pointed to Narcho. "He'll fly it there for us."

"Don't look at me," Narcho retorted. "She's the one knows how to fly that thing."

Kara saw amusement in the leader's eyes again. "So the wildcat knows how to fly a Cylon Raider."

Her chin came up and she smirked. "That's right."

"Okay. We go back to the ship and she takes it and us to the cave."

"There's barely room for two inside. There's no way all of us will fit."

"Okay, then, Targa, you and Beck take the guy. We'll see you back at base camp."

"How do you know she won't fly off with you?" Targa asked. "Take you to the Cylons."

"Because if we're not there in two days, you'll kill her friend." He looked at Kara. "Understood?"

Kara looked at the blue eyes again. "You have my word. We go wherever you tell me to go."

Narcho said, "I don't like this plan."

The leader looked away from her and over at Narcho briefly. "Your vote doesn't count."

Kara said, "It'll be all right, Narch. I'll see you at their base camp…in two days if not before."

The leader had already started walking. "Let's go. That skinjob and those four chrome heads aren't alone. They always hunt in groups."

"I want my backpack. It's got some stuff in it that I need."

He turned around and motioned to Targa. "Give it to her."

Kara retrieved the pack from Targa and hurried after the leader. The others started in the opposite direction.

"You have a name?" Kara asked when she caught up with him.

"Hunter."

She snickered. "How appropriate. Is that your real name?"

"It'll do for now."

They walked in silence for a while until she said, "Aren't you going to ask me my name?"

"Your friend called you Kara. _Wildcat_ suits you better."

When they got to the edge of the clearing, they stopped and he took a small pair of binoculars from his pack. He carefully studied the area around them.

"Do you see something?" Kara asked softly. "Are the other centurions out there?"

"I want to make sure you and your friend haven't set a trap for us. How long will it take to get in the air?"

"It takes a minute or two for all the computers to boot. Pre-flight takes another minute. Then I can lift off. Where are we going?"

"Let's get in the air first."

"The ship has a Cylon transponder signal. It's like a homing beacon. The minute I turn on those computers, they see us on their dradis. I don't want to wander around in the air like a little lost lamb. After what happened back there, they're probably already alerted to something. I know Leoben's downloaded by now. The only thing in our favor is that they don't know about the Raider yet. Where are we headed?"

He was still scanning the clearing with the binoculars. "West."

"You need to be more specific."

He snorted. "I don't usually travel by air."

She slung the pack down from her back and started to open it. He grabbed her wrist in a painfully tight grip.

"I'm not going for any kind of weapon. I've given you my word. Narch is my _friend_. I'd never do _anything_ to put him in danger. There's a handheld computer in the pack with recon maps of the area on it. That's all I want."

Their eyes met and locked. He finally let go of her wrist.

She took the small computer from the pack. On Caprica she could have pinpointed their exact location but since Nereid had no global positioning satellite above it, that software didn't work. She finally found one of the maps that Kevin had created from photographs of their general area. She nudged Hunter and showed him their approximate location. She showed him how to move the map around on the small screen, how to zoom in and out. He studied it for a long time.

"Try not to get fingerprints all over it. Your hands are really dirty," she said.

He pulled a dead leaf out of her hair. "Not as dirty as your face."

Kara rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead. "The Cylons have my father."

"That's too bad." He gave the handheld back to her.

Kara looked at the map. "So which way do we go?"

He pointed but didn't touch the screen. "Roughly ten miles south of here you'll see a river. Follow it northwest about twenty miles and you'll come to a waterfall. Near the bottom there's a big cave. This time of year you can see part of the entrance. Once the snowmelt starts in the high country in a few weeks, you won't be able to see any of it."

"You're telling me I have to fly this ship through a waterfall?"

"You're the one who wants to hide it."

"How deep is the cave?"

"Deep enough."

"So after I get the ship into the cave will I have room to turn it around? It doesn't launch in reverse."

"How much room do you need to turn it?"

"On vertical thrusters I only need about twice the length of the ship to turn it, but I'll need at least five times the height to be on the safe side."

He eyed the ship. "I think you'll have room."

"You think?"

Kara took a deep breath and blew it out. She'd gotten lucky on the snow when she had underestimated the steepness of the slope. There weren't going to be any second chances or do-overs on this landing, no margin for error. If she was off just a little bit on her approach, she would damage the ship, maybe even get them killed.

Hunter must have sensed her hesitation because he said, "We can leave the ship here and catch up with Targa and Beck and your friend. It's your ship…your choice."

"I can't let them get it. It's my ride off this planet."

"Then let's go."

They ran toward the Raider and Kara opened the hatch. She boosted herself inside. He handed up her pack and she stowed it. He put his head through the opening. She had already stretched out on her stomach and was starting the computers. She positioned her feet on the rudder pedals.

"Don't stand there gawking. Get in."

"You weren't kidding about the small space."

He had no choice but to hand the assault rifle up to her. She put it down beside her. Her only thought now was getting off the ground and away from the clearing. The brains of the four centurions had been scrambled by the strange cylinder, but there were probably more of them nearby, probably another skinjob too. The last thing she wanted to do was run into any of them again. Hunter climbed up beside her.

"Close the hatch and spin that wheel until it seals," she told him.

"Do we have to close it? We're not going that far."

"We can't lift off with the hatch open."

He managed to get the hatch closed. She ran through a fast pre-flight as she checked all the instruments. She saw that the seal had engaged. All her systems were ready to go.

Hunter lay on his stomach beside her and put his forehead on his arms. She heard him take several deep breaths.

"You're not going to puke in my ship, are you?"

"No, Wildcat, I'm not going to get sick." He took another deep breath. "I don't like tight spaces."

"Claustrophobic, huh?" Kara wrinkled her nose. "Well I'm not crazy about being this close to you, either. You need a bath almost as bad as Leoben."

He laughed as she lifted off and banked the Raider to the southwest. "We're both going to get one soon."

"What do you mean?"

"How do you think we're going to get out of the cave after you park your Raider?"

...

John Gallagher very slowly became aware of his surroundings. He was no longer walking across the desert. It was much easier to breathe, but Kara and Braedon were gone. He opened his eyes. He was in a hospital room.

There was an IV pole beside the bed with the familiar plastic bag of fluid. The needle was taped in his arm. There was a smaller bag hanging beside the larger one. He recognized it, too… an antibiotic. He'd seen a lot of those after his motorcycle accident and after getting shot in Sovana. He lay for a minute and watched the steady drip of the solution into the line before he felt something on his leg. His eyes shifted downward.

There was a towel draped over him that covered him from his waist to just past the tops of his thighs, but he could tell that otherwise he was naked. Unlike his cell, though, this room was warm, and he wasn't shivering.

A woman in a gray dress and white smock was standing by the bed. She was slim and average height and her silver hair was pinned in a loose bun at the back of her neck. She was humming softly to herself as she dipped a washcloth into a basin of water and continued washing his legs, working her way up from his knees. She had soft hands and a very gentle touch. It had been far too long since he'd felt the gentle touch of a woman.

She was almost to the edge of the towel when he said, "I might be half-dead, but if you move your hands any higher, you're probably going to cause me to really embarrass myself."

The woman looked up at him. She wasn't young. Her face had small lines and a few wrinkles. He guessed she was in her late fifties, maybe a few years older. Her eyes were a beautiful shade of golden-brown. She dropped the washcloth into the basin and chuckled as she took a towel and began drying where she'd just washed.

"If you can joke with me like that, Major Gallagher, then you're no longer delirious. I'm Dr. Cardenas, but please call me Bianca."

"Please call me John. And I wasn't joking."

She smiled. "Now don't you go flirting with me, you handsome rascal. I'm old enough to be your mother."

"You're still a very beautiful woman."

"Thank you," she said modestly.

"I thought the doctor was a man."

"My husband is also a doctor. He's the one you saw when the Cylon woman brought you in. I'd go tell him that you're awake, but he needs to sleep for a few hours. He sat up with you last night. He didn't think you were going to make it. He said no man who'd endured what you had at the hands of the Cylons should die alone. I told him you'd still be with us in the morning and you were. You turned the corner sometime during the night. Your fever began coming down. My husband will say that it was all these antibiotics we've been pumping into you. I think you had a lot to do with it, too. The Cylon woman was right. She said you would live."

For a moment John was overcome with emotion. "I made it all the way to the river. I had my foot in the water when my daughter stopped me and put my son in my arms. I came back because of them. My kids mean everything to me."

"So Kara is your daughter."

"My beautiful smart-mouth daughter."

"You said her name several times early this morning. My husband thought it was your wife you were talking to. I told him it sounded like a father talking to his child."

John tried to speak and coughed instead. He finally managed to ask, "How long have you and the doc been married?"

"Thirty-five years now."

"And he still hasn't learned to listen to you?"

She chuckled again. "Only when he wants to. We met when we were both in medical school. We married, raised a family. We were on a cruise aboard the _Astral Princess _celebrating our thirtieth anniversary when the Cylons took the ship. We've been here ever since." She pulled the sheet up to his shoulders and checked his IV. "I'll let my husband finish your bath later today."

"The two of you are alone here in the hospital?" John asked in surprise.

"This is not a hospital, just a room in their lab. We're not even here most of the time anymore. They come get us when they need us. The rest of the time we live in a settlement. We work at a clinic there. I'm a pediatrician. My husband is a surgeon."

"Settlement? Where's that?"

"I'm not sure exactly where it is except that it's south of here where it's warmer. The Cylons transport us in one of their ships. It doesn't have windows. Some of the humans taken from the Colonial ships and the planets are there."

"Where are the rest of them?"

"Some are probably still in the prison…or dead. We've heard talk of a city and other settlements. We've never seen them but we get produce and meat from them."

"What does everybody in your settlement do?"

"Work the fields mostly. A few escaped in the beginning. The Cylons brought their bodies back for us to bury…and as a warning to the rest of us. The ones who escaped ran because they'd heard talk of some humans living free a long way west of here, but we don't think that's true. My husband thinks it's just a story someone made up to give the rest of us hope."

John decided not to say anything about the lost _Hyperion_ mission. The room was almost certainly monitored electronically.

"How many humans are in your settlement?"

"Five or six thousand at least. Maybe more. The Cylons haven't let us conduct a census, but I'm sure they know the exact number. Our world is very small. My husband and I only see the sick and the injured. Numerous copies of the humanoid Cylons live among us. They control everything with their centurions. A Cylon doctor named Simon runs the clinic where we work and live."

"Is that where they'll take me now? To your settlement?"

"I think the Cylon woman will take you to their city. I understand she came from there."

John decided to play dumb. "Where is the city?"

"The Cylons are rebuilding a ruined city west of here, but I haven't seen it. They took some of the humans from our settlement there to be breeders."

"I'd rather go to the settlement."

"You'll have no choice. You'll go wherever the Cylon wants to take you. She's come here every day, you know, to check on you. She's sat by your bed for an hour or more each time. She'll be in later today."

John ignored her last remark. "How long have I been here?"

"I don't know how long you've been on the planet. This is the fourth day you've been in this room. As soon as she sees that you're getting better, she'll tell us to release you to her."

"Why?"

He saw a disbelieving look in Bianca's eyes. "Certainly I don't have to explain the term _breeder _to you."

"That won't happen. I'm married."

"That doesn't matter to her or to any of them. They're monotheists...what ones who have any religious beliefs. They don't recognize any of our rituals including our marriage ceremony. It would probably be to your advantage to think of the fact that she's attractive and forget the rest. I'm sure a handsome man like yourself has been with women before that you didn't love."

"I haven't been with anyone but my wife since we were married. And the Cylon isn't a woman. She's a machine."

"Where is your wife now?"

"On Caprica."

"You'll never see her again. Certainly you realize that. You're stuck here now like the rest of us."

"What difference does that make?" John said angrily. "I'm still married to her in the eyes of the gods. I still love her."

When Bianca finally spoke again, her voice was filled with sadness and her eyes were filled with tears.

"My children and grandchildren were on Gemenon when the Cylons attacked. My daughter was newly married. My son and his wife had just welcomed their second child. They've all been dead these five and a half years. There's not a day that goes by that I don't think of them and hate these monsters for what they did."

"I'm very sorry about your family."

Bianca wiped a tear from under one eye. "I'm not telling you this to gain your pity but to make a point. Every human who was taken five years ago has stories of equal sadness and horror. Some of them don't understand how my husband and I can do what we do. Some of them call us collaborators or even traitors, but long ago we both swore an oath to Apollo, the god of healing, to never turn away from treating the sick or infirm. Sometimes you have to make a difficult choice. We made ours. You must make yours. All of the Cylons aren't like the ones who run the prison. The Three who brought you here is incredibly naïve compared to her sisters."

"But she'll still take me as her breeder against my will."

Bianca picked up the wash basin and walked to the door. "I'm going to get you some hot soup. You need to start eating. You don't want to be weak as a new-born kitten when she comes for you."

John tried to smile. "I guess you've got your orders."

Bianca walked back to the side of the bed and lowered her voice. "The Cylons despise us humans in so many ways. They consider us their inferiors, and yet in other ways they want to be like us. Some of them want homes and families. They want children. It's pathetic, really. A few human women have had half-breeds although there have been a larger number of miscarriages and stillbirths. Among the few Cylon females who have become pregnant, not a single one has produced a living child. Most miscarry before the second trimester. I could write a book about their fertility problems."

"Then why is the Three taking me as her breeder? Why bother?"

"She'll explain it to you like she did to me. The gods know I've heard it often enough from some of them in our settlement. _And God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the land.__"_

_"So this is a…a religious imperative for them?"_

_"For some of them. _Others simply like what they see and take it. Your Three believes she's commanded by her God. There are far, far worse things that could happen to you, John…but I don't need to tell you that."

"No. I'm very well acquainted with the fine art of Cylon persuasion."

"Then I'm sure you don't want to go back there."

"I don't want to be unfaithful to my wife, either."

"I'm sure your wife thinks you're dead, but even if not, do you not think she would understand and forgive you?"

"Probably, but…it's not just that. The thought of…of being with one of _them_…after what they did to humanity…what they did to _me_…just thinking about what they are. It makes me sick."

"I've seen what they do to those who won't cooperate with them. Take my advice as a physician. Disengage your mind and your heart and let your body perform on a physiological level only. I've found that most of our men are better able to do that than our women. Then again Cylon women are far more attractive than Cylon men."

John closed his eyes and snorted in disgust. The whole concept made him sick.

"I'll go get that soup now," Bianca said softly. "As long as you're my patient, I get the last word. I'll sit here and spoon it down your throat if I have to."

John thought of his mother and almost managed a smile. "Yes, ma'am."

...

All of the Quorum members had left the meeting except Marta Shaw, Caprica's representative. She closed her leather briefcase.

"Madame President, I know I speak for all of our refugees from the other planets in thanking you for your support of this mission. We're aware that funding is limited and that there are many pressing needs right now, but we do need to know the fate of our loved ones on our sister colonies."

Laura was exhausted but she forced a smile. "It's the right thing to do." She glanced at Bill. "The mission will leave soon, I believe."

He nodded. "We've chosen the ship, a scientific vessel, the _Penelope_. Dr. Nylund has his scientific team ready to go. One of our battlestars, the _Galactica_, will accompany the _Penelope_."

Marta said. "I know you will have military personnel on board the _Penelope_. I'd like for my daughter Kendra to be included. It will be good for her career."

"Your daughter is in the military?" Laura asked.

Bill said, "I believe Lieutenant Shaw is currently at the Ministry of Defense."

Marta smiled. "That's correct. She graduated from the Academy a year after your son. She was near the top of her class. Her assignment to the Ministry has not been advantageous to her career. The Ministry of Defense has basically been a non-functioning body for the last five years. There's no chance for advancement."

"That's changing," Bill said. "The Defense Ministry is very important to us now."

"Still, I'd like to see Kendra get this assignment." Marta looked pointedly at Laura.

Laura said, "I'm leaving the choice of a crew up to Bill. He's had a great deal of experience with…dangerous missions. He will want to make sure the entire crew is a good fit."

"What possible problem could the addition of one crew member cause?" Marta asked, her voice edging up ever so slightly.

"No problem," Bill said. He jotted something in his notebook. "I'm sure we can find a place for her."

"Thank you," Marta smiled at him and stood.

After she had left the room, Bill said, "That's why I hate politics. Everyone expects favors."

Laura smiled tiredly. "Now she'll owe you."

"What could I possibly ever need from her?"

"Approval for your budget?" Laura said. "And please don't try to tell me the exchange of favors doesn't go on in the military as well."

"It sounds like she's trying to stage-manage her daughter's career, but I'm too tired to argue with her. One more junior officer won't be an issue. I'm going to make Lee the liaison between the _Penelope_ and the _Galactica_."

"When did you decide to do that?"

"Early this morning."

Their eyes met. "Surely you're not punishing him for…certainly you don't think…"

"I was too hard on him last night. He didn't know. And now he needs something to do with his time so he won't sit around brooding. It will be good experience for him if he ever wants a command of his own one day. I talked to his CO this afternoon. They aren't nearly as busy as they were when the resistance was operating in the city. Most of the interrogation efforts are being shifted to Sovana and that ungodly mess up there. Major Parker has been ordered to transfer about half his interrogators to the Northern Command Group. I think Lee would rather go on the mission to the other planets than be sent to Sovana for an extended assignment. I've got one son serving up there. I'm not anxious to send the other one, too."

"_You_ could keep Lee here in Caprica City."

"I'm transferring both Lee and Major Parker to my staff effective immediately. They're familiar with the Nereid situation. Parker did an excellent analysis of some recon photos after Kara's first trip to the planet. Now that we're going to plan a rescue mission, I'm going to need both of them. I talked to Parker this afternoon. He has a wife and two young children. He wants to stay in Caprica City. He's very willing to take the transfer to my staff even though it means a lateral move career-wise. I just hope Lee will be as agreeable."

"Why wouldn't he be?"

"He may think it smacks of favoritism and he may have problems working for his old man. I know that having a Fleet Command Officer for a father hasn't been easy for him."

"Not just a Fleet Officer, but a Presidential advisor as well."

Bill rubbed his forehead. "Conrad Burgher told me once how hard Lee worked to prove himself at the Academy, and what he put up with from some of the other cadets. There were a few issues in Flight School, too, but Lee overcame everything, finished first in his class and took the Viper Top Gun trophy. I'm more than aware of what kind of guts and determination that took."

Laura smiled. "Lee has always been driven to do his best. I think a large part of it has been proving himself to you. Kara faced some of the same prejudices at the Academy because John was an instructor. Some of the cadets thought he gave her undeserved good scores in the simulator. If anything he was harder on her because he knew what they would soon be facing."

"I was never much of a father to Lee…or Zak either."

"No, you weren't." They sat in silence for a few moments until Laura asked, "Why are you sending the _Galactica_ along with the other ship?"

Bill came out of his reverie. "As a precaution. The Cylons have no Raiders or basestars left in our solar system, but that doesn't mean they didn't leave some centurions or even some skinjobs behind on one or more of the planets."

"Is there any chance they survived the radiation?"

"The centurions possibly could have. The _Galactica_ will check the planets first before the scientific crew is allowed access to them. They're taking a number of unmanned drones they can use to view the surface before the first human is allowed to land."

Billy came to the door. "Sorry to interrupt, but Maya just called down. She wants to know if you will be up soon or if she should get someone to stay with Braedon."

"Tell her I'm on my way," Laura said. She closed her leather-bound planner, stood and looked at Bill. "Maya has a date with Sam Anders tonight."

Bill stood. "So they're still seeing each other?"

"Yes. Would you like to join me for dinner? We've had so few chances to talk lately and after last night…"

Bill nodded. "I was going to stop by Channing's on my way back to the apartment, but I'd much rather join you instead."

Upstairs Laura went straight to the sideboard in the sitting room of her living quarters. She poured two drinks.

"I've wanted to do this all day," she said to him.

He nodded. "That makes two of us."

Maya came to the door with Braedon who was already dressed in his sleeper and clutching his favorite teddy bear. Maya put him down and Braedon ran over to Laura.

"Kiss Mamma goodnight," Maya said to him.

Laura scooped him into her arms and Braedon planted a wet kiss on her cheek. "Say goodnight to Admiral Adama," Laura said to him.

Braedon looked at the admiral shyly. "Nite." He pointed over Laura's shoulder to John's picture on one of the end tables. "Dada."

Laura lifted the picture from the table. It was the same one that had appeared six months earlier on the cover of _The Caprican Gentleman. _Braedon touched his finger to it and said, "Nite, Dada." Then he leaned back in her arms, pointed to the ceiling and said, "Wapta."

"Time for bed," Maya told him as she walked over and took him from Laura. She looked at Laura and Bill. "You need to eat dinner. I'll get Brae down before I leave. Goodnight, Laura. Admiral Adama."

"Goodnight, Maya. Have a good time with Sam tonight."

Maya smiled. Laura had come to think of it as her sad smile.

Maya had told her that Sam wasn't faithful to the relationship. Laura knew that he dated Lissa, John's former girlfriend, and that he occasionally saw Tory Foster. There were probably others as well. As captain of the very successful Buccaneers pyramid team, he was one of the biggest sports stars on Caprica. He was very handsome as well. Laura was sure that women threw themselves at him. She was also sure that he didn't resist all of them. It made her sad for Maya's sake, but then Maya chose to continue the relationship.

"What did Braedon say when he pointed at the ceiling?" Bill asked her. "What does _wapta_ mean?"

"He was trying to say _Raptor._ He can't manage the _R_ sound yet. I think Maya tells him that John has gone away in a Raptor. She's determined that Brae is going to remember his father. Every night Brae tells John's pictures goodnight. There's one in his bedroom that he kisses. Now Maya will probably do the same thing with a picture of Kara."

Laura was suddenly and completely overcome with emotion. She put her hand over her mouth and turned around as the first sob shook her. After a moment she felt Bill's hands gently grasp her shoulders. As she turned and put her arms around him, the floodgate opened and the tears she had held in check all day poured out.

"How could Kara do this?" She sobbed. "John would _not_ have wanted her to leave us…to steal a ship…to go off on some foolhardy mission that will probably get her killed. I don't care how…noble her motives were. How could she?"

Bill helped her to the couch and brought a box of tissues to her. She pulled out several and tried to get herself under control. He handed her the drink that she had put down earlier and she took a big swallow before she blew her nose. She pulled more tissues from the box, mopped her eyes and took another swallow of the drink.

Bill awkwardly patted the top of her knee. She could tell that her tears had made him uneasy.

"I'm sorry. Today has been…"

"No, Laura. Don't apologize. I don't know how you've held it together as well as you have with everything that's happened."

Laura blotted her eyes again. "I've thought about what Kara did all day today. I really think it had something to do with her father."

"What makes you say that?"

Laura could tell that her statement had made him as uneasy as her tears. "Does it bother you when I talk about John?"

He took a sip of the drink and looked down at his glass. "No."

"Then what's wrong?"

"If I'd never put Kara in that Raider, this wouldn't have happened."

"So you blame yourself?"

"Yes."

"Why _did_ you choose her?"

He stood up, walked to the sideboard and poured another drink.

One of Marble House's kitchen staff came to the door. "We've served dinner, Madame President."

"Thank you."

She noticed that Bill carried his drink with him into the small dining room. He waited until the doors were closed before he continued the conversation.

"Why did I pick Kara? Mainly because she's such a damned good pilot. And using that Raider was her idea in the first place. And she wanted to do it. Maybe I was trying to make it up to her that I'd let her father take that Raptor up to the basestar."

"Neither Kara nor I blame you for John's death. He volunteered. You told me yourself…"

"Yes," Bill said emphatically. "Yes, he volunteered, but I still feel responsible."

"I think Kara did what she did because she's trying to honor her father's belief about rescuing the humans on Nereid. Nothing less could have led her to…to commit a crime…to steal a ship and leave Caprica…especially to leave Lee. Maya said it this morning. Kara hasn't been the same since John's death."

"Major Parker and I talked briefly about it this afternoon. Part of the reason he's so damned good at his job is that he's very insightful. He thinks the fact that John took Kara off Picon the way he did when her mother chose to stay behind, and then he got them through that radioactive debris which was something only a very skilled pilot could have done. Then there was Kara's dramatic separation from him and even more dramatic reunion…Parker thinks the fact that they had such a short time together intensified their bond. He thinks it's a strong mix of love and hero-worship on Kara's part. I think you and Parker are saying the same thing in different words."

Again he couldn't look at her and Laura wondered why.

"Yes. I agree. I should have tried harder with her, especially after John's death, but she pushed me away. Maybe I was too much of a reminder of him, of the life we all had together. I'm sure this is partly my fault."

"Laura, this is not your fault. _None of it_ is your fault."

Laura closed her eyes for a moment. It didn't matter what Bill said to her, she knew she would continue to blame herself for not doing more to reach out to her stepdaughter. Yes, Kara had pushed her away, but she was the adult in the relationship. Kara's toughness and outward maturity made it easy to overlook the fact that she was still young and vulnerable in some ways.

Finally Laura said, "We should eat before everything gets cold. My kitchen staff goes to great lengths to prepare healthy meals for me."

"Then you should eat," Bill looked up at her. He smiled. "Eat. Don't just push the food around on your plate."

She smiled at him. "Yes, sir."

After the meal they went back into the sitting room and had another drink before he rose to leave. Laura walked with him to the door of her living quarters. To her surprise he took her in his arms and kissed her, not the mere brush of his lips as he had done before, but a deep kiss full of feeling. It was a moment before she responded, before shutting her eyes and journeying to another time in her life when she was nineteen and madly in love with him. She put her arms around him and responded with a fervor that surprised her.

Bill was the one to end the kiss. He told her he would call her the next day to see how she was doing and with an update on the mission to the other colonies. He left her with one of the soul-searching looks that only he could give her.

Laura closed the door of her living quarters and leaned back against it for a few moments before she returned to the couch and finished her drink. Were it not for the kiss, she could easily have continued to pretend that nothing had changed between her and Bill since John's death.

But the kiss had happened and as she lay in bed later that night thinking about it, she realized that she had wanted it to happen just as much as Bill had. It had been over four months since her husband had died and already his kisses were growing distant in her memory.

She knew she loved John, had loved him passionately. No man had ever made her feel the way he had. His lovemaking had never disappointed her. He had always been there for her. He had given her a son with eyes the color of the sea, eyes like his own. She had never known a man who was a better father. She loved him, but years before John had come into her life, she had loved another man just as deeply. He was here now and John was gone.

She knew that one night, perhaps soon, Bill Adama would kiss her again and that kiss would lead to another and another and she would take him to her bed as she had done before. Only this time would be very different from that summer afternoon when she was nineteen years old and home from the University and Bill had just returned at the end of the First Cylon War. That afternoon she had foolishly taken him to her bedroom in her parents' house.

Her parents were gone now, dead for fifteen years. Her mother would not come home and catch them and call her father. She would not have to see the disappointment in their eyes at her fall from grace. Her father would not tell her that Bill Adama was the wrong man for her. A proud young Viper pilot would not force her to make a choice and then walk out on her when she hesitated.

She and Bill would mend the mistake of the past and carry on with their lives and try to pretend during the time they spent in her bed that nothing had ever happened to separate them. She didn't need John to tell her that Bill Adama still loved her. She had seen it in his eyes.

Laura Roslin had come full circle in her love life and tonight in her exhaustion and grief over Kara and having drunk three glasses of straight whiskey, for the moment, at least, it felt right...until she rolled over and looked at the empty pillow beside her, the pillow that should have been John's.

_Go to sleep, Laura, _she told herself. _And think about this in the morning when you're sober._

...

The door buzzer woke Lee. He sat up in the dark, momentarily confused. After he had visited Dreilide Thrace, he had returned to his apartment, stretched out on the couch, and fallen asleep in minutes.

He fumbled for the lamp and made it to the door just as the buzzer sounded again. He pressed the intercom.

"Yeah."

"Lee, it's Karl Agathon. Can I come up for a few minutes?"

Lee looked at his watch. It was after seven in the evening. He'd slept almost four hours. He was hungry. "I'm coming down," he answered. "We'll walk to Zeno's and get dinner."

He grabbed his coat and rode the elevator down to the ground floor. Karl was outside with his hands in his jacket pockets and his collar turned up. His breath was vaporizing in the night air. Lee felt the bite of the cold as he opened the door. They walked the two blocks to Zeno's fast and hunched against the wind. Neither of them spoke until they were inside and had found a booth at the back.

Lee ordered a pitcher of beer.

When the waiter was gone Karl said, "Flat Top and I took a Raptor up today. Is it true?"

"Is what true?"

"He said Kara and Narcho took some kind of proto-type ship up on a mission and didn't come back."

The beer arrived and Lee poured two glasses. He ordered a sandwich and fries and asked Karl what he wanted.

"I ate before I left the apartment so I'll pass. Is it true?"

"I can't talk about it Karl. I'm under orders from my father."

"Gods damn it, Lee. I love Kara like a sister and Narcho is a friend. Is it true?"

Lee sipped the beer and nodded slightly. "Just because they didn't come back doesn't mean something bad happened to them, and I really can't say any more than that."

"They've gone to the Cylon homeworld, haven't they?"

"I guess Sharon told you about their homeworld?"

"She told me all that she knows. It's in another solar system. It's a damned long way from here."

"She's telling you the truth."

"I never thought she wasn't," Karl said angrily.

"I wasn't implying she was," Lee snapped back, anger evident in his voice as well. He took a deep breath and settled back in the booth. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't take this out on you."

"Me either. How long are they going to be gone?"

Lee shook his head. "I can't say."

"Can't or won't?"

"I don't know, Karl," Lee said sharply. "If I knew, I'd tell you."

"You let her leave on a mission to a hostile world without any idea of when she'll get back?" Lee could hear the disbelief in Karl's voice.

He looked down at his glass of beer. "Kara doesn't take orders from me."

"Lords of Kobol," Karl said. "She didn't tell you she was going."

Lee turned up the glass, still avoiding Karl's eyes. "I would have stopped her."

"What are they doing there?"

"I don't know that, either."

"What do you know?"

"Nothing," Lee said, anger rising in his voice again. "I don't know a damned thing except that she didn't trust me enough to tell me about it beforehand. Instead I get a call from her at midnight last night and…Frak it. I was ordered to keep my mouth shut."

The sat without talking for a few minutes. Finally Karl said, "Flat Top told me he wondered what was going on when Narcho asked Quartararo if he could borrow his car and wouldn't say why. What happened, Lee? I swear I won't say anything. I just want to know. Kara and I went through so much together. I can't even think that I might have lost her now."

Lee took a deep breath. "If this gets out my father will have me court-martialed. I'm already at the top of his list…or the bottom…depending on which list you're looking at."

"My word of honor as an officer and as Kara's friend. This stays between you and me."

"It's not a proto-type ship. It's a Cylon Raider that we outfitted for a human pilot. Kara and I have both taken it to the Cylon homeworld on recon missions. We call the planet Nereid. It's thirty light years away in the Prolmar Sector. The Raider will do it in one jump. Last night Kara stole the ship and took Narcho with her probably because they were about to get caught. She jumped to Nereid. I don't think she plans to come home anytime soon."

Karl looked stunned. "Damn."

"Boggles the mind, doesn't it?"

"Why'd she do it?"

"To try to stop my father from destroying the planet. Kara believes the Cylons took human prisoners there five years ago. Sharon told me there were a lot of humans on the planet, but Kara and I couldn't find any evidence to support her claim."

"If Sharon says there are humans on the planet, then they're there."

Lee was already feeling the effects of the beer. "Back it down a notch, Karl. I believe Sharon. But my father and the others planning this mission are looking for more than a Cylon's word. They want proof. Kara and I couldn't get it. I told my father there was still a lot of that planet we didn't get to recon. We saw maybe five percent of the surface of the main continent. We saw a lot of centurions and a few skinjobs, but no humans."

"Then what made Kara willing to risk her life for something you couldn't prove?"

"She thinks her father is on the planet."

"_What_?" Karl asked in shock. "Her father died when he destroyed that basestar. Are you telling me that Kara has…gone nuts?"

"Before Yolanda Brenn died, she told Kara something that led her to believe John made it to Nereid. I found out this morning that it's possible…in theory…but not very likely."

"Damn," Karl said again. He took another sip of his beer. "So Kara has gone off on some insane _rescue mission_? Is that what this is really all about?"

"It looks that way. She wants to rescue her father and stop mine from nuking the planet."

"What can we do?"

"Nothing right now. My father's engineers are getting another Raider ready but that will take a couple of months. We can't do anything until that happens and we can fly another recon mission."

"And then?"

"Then we go there and rescue the humans if we can find them."

"And destroy the planet?"

"I don't know what my father will decide to do."

Lee's food came and he squirted ketchup on the plate. He dipped a fry into it and wondered what Kara would have to eat on the planet. He wondered if she had taken anything with her.

"Kara's tough," Karl said as if reading his mind.

"She's on a planet full of Cylons," Lee said glumly.

"She's not alone. Narcho is with her. He'll…I started to say he'll take care of her, but Kara can take care of herself."

Lee rubbed his forehead just like his father was prone to do when stressed. "He'd like to take care of her, wouldn't he?"

Karl looked Lee in the eyes. "It's nothing for you to worry about. Noel has liked her since we were at the Academy, but he'd never make a move on her. He's a nice guy, Lee. He respects you and he respects what you've got with Kara."

"That's a comforting thought," Lee said. "considering he risked his career and his life to help her."

"Hell, Lee, half the guys in our class thought she was _hot_. Can you blame them? Narcho knows Kara loves you. He would _not_ try to get in the middle of you and her."

Lee drained the rest of his glass of beer and poured another one from the pitcher. "Of course it's not like he's alone with her on a planet thirty light years away or anything like that."

"Trust me, Lee. You got nothing to worry about."

"How's Sharon doing?"

"Not so good. The doctor has her resting a lot."

"Does he know she's Cylon?"

"She. The doctor is a woman. We told her, but she said she would have probably known anyway. The humanoid Cylons look like us on the outside, but things aren't totally right inside. You'd think with all the…you'd think whoever made them would have completed everything inside and out, but I guess not. The doctor told us Sharon would be lucky to carry the baby to term. All we're hoping now is that she makes it far enough that the baby survives."

"I hope so, too, Karl."

"Thanks. I'd better go. I told Sharon I wouldn't be gone long."

"You can't say _anything_ to her about Kara."

"No. I gave you my word. When she asks why Kara hasn't come by to see us, I'll tell her that she's…I don't know. I'll think of something."

"There's a mission going to the other planets soon…to look for survivors. I'll be on it. My father wants to get me off Caprica. I can't imagine why," Lee said sarcastically.

Karl stood. "How's Zak?"

"Fine so far. I talked to him last week. A couple of guys in his unit were wounded when they tangled with a drug lord's private army. Sovana is a mess right now."

"I guess he and Maggie are still an item."

"Zak didn't say anything about her. I guess we'll find out when he gets his first leave. Is Maggie's still flying out of the air base here on Caprica? I haven't seen her out there lately."

"She's still here, but we don't have anything to say to each other. She always avoids me if she can."

"Kara told me about her confronting you over Sharon."

"I can't blame her. Most of the other pilots feel the same way." Karl put his hand on Lee's shoulder and squeezed. "I'd better go. Let me know when you get back from your mission. We'll get together."

"I'll do that."

"And let me know if you hear anything."

Lee nodded. "I will."

After Karl left, Lee sat and absently ate the sandwich. He thought about all the times he and Kara had eaten at Zeno's. He thought about all the times they had gone back to his apartment afterward and made love.

He wondered if he had been in the Raptor that night instead of John, if he were on Nereid now, would Kara have stolen the Raider and gone to look for him. Yet even as he thought it, he knew she would have. That was just Kara. He knew she loved him, but she loved her father, too. She would have stolen that Raider and gone to Nereid for either of them.

He glanced over at the bar and recognized the man who had been Kara's contact in the resistance two years earlier when he'd first met her. Kara had later found out that his name was Paul, but she had always called him by his code name, Frogman. He saw Lee, picked up his drink and came over to the booth.

"Have a seat," Lee said.

Paul sat. "Where's your better half tonight?"

"She's on a mission."

"On a mission," Paul repeated. He was ex-military and had been in the resistance. He knew not to ask where or what. "Two years ago she told me that one day we'd be rid of the Cylons and that somebody from a certain organization like me and somebody who was in the military like you wouldn't be on opposite sides any longer. She said we would sit down at Zeno's and drink a beer together. I thought it was just the young idealist in her talking. But you know what? Damned if she wasn't right. Here we sit."

Lee thought of Kara and the mission she had undertaken for the resistance, the mission that had blown up a Cylon lab, the mission that had ultimately led Kara to an interrogation room and to their meeting in the hallway outside. In a way Lee owed meeting Kara to this man. He had picked her for the mission that had put her on a hill outside the lab with a high-powered rifle.

He looked steadily at Frogman. "Here we sit having a beer together. Did Kara ever tell you we met because of a job she did for you?"

"She didn't tell me, but as soon as I found out you were an interrogator as well as a pilot, I figured it out."

Lee snorted. "Right now I'm not sure whether to thank you for sending her on that mission or ask you to step out back."

Paul chuckled. "It's tough to be separated when you're young. But you're in the military. You know how it is. You go where you're ordered."

Lee looked at the ceiling a moment. "She wasn't ordered. She…volunteered."

Frogman studied him. "That makes it even tougher to handle."

"You're telling me."

"I remember her showing up here in Zeno's one evening after you'd had a fight. Did she take this mission because of problems between the two of you?"

"She took the mission because…it's complicated. I don't think it had anything to do with me or our relationship. She made a decision based on...her beliefs."

"Beliefs you obviously don't share."

Lee shrugged.

"Is she worth it? That's the question you've got to ask yourself. Are you better off with her or without her?"

Lee thought of his relationship with Kara over the last two years. It had not always been easy. "Sometimes I wonder."

"No, you don't. You know the answer."

Lee finally nodded. "She's worth it."

Paul smiled. "Then you'll wait for her to come back."

TBC…


	4. Out of the Mouth of Babes

Chapter 4

Out of the Mouth of Babes

_There are wise men who say that life here began in the dark of space__  
__In the death of a primordial star or the birth of a galaxy.__  
__There are those who say a divine spark lit the eternal night__  
__And made the ancient gods of Earth, Air, Fire and Water__  
__Who journeyed to Kobol and created a home for their children.__  
__There are those who say that God has always been and will always be,__  
__That He is all powerful and all knowing and wise and forgiving__  
__Of His most flawed creation, the spark of life that rode a comet's tail__  
__To a distant world and became mankind._

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

_._

On Wednesday morning before he went to his small office, Lee stopped by the break room shared by Major Parker's staff. He got a cup of coffee like he did every morning, took it to his desk, and turned on his computer. When it had booted, he went to a news web site and checked the early morning feeds from the city of Sovana. Then he checked the secure military site for anything that the news media might have been unable to access. He had followed this same routine every day since Zak's unit had been posted to that chaotic and increasingly dangerous northern city.

Lee was still baffled by what had caused Zak to join the Marines. He thought when Zak had gotten the public relations job with the Buccaneers that he had found his dream job. He'd done well. He and Sam Anders had become friends. Zak had dated a number of beautiful women, once dating gorgeous blond twins for several months, but he kept coming back to Maggie. Other women couldn't seem to hold his interest the way she did. Lee had even begun to wonder if Zak wouldn't eventually settle down with her, maybe even want to marry her.

Then less than a week after the fighting that had freed them of the Cylons, Zak had enlisted. Lee still remembered the night Zak had met him and Kara for dinner at Zeno's and had dropped that bomb on them.

Lee had asked Zak several times why he'd joined, and Zak had always come back with a smart answer, usually something to the effect that he didn't want Lee to be the only one having fun or that the family needed another hero. Zak was like that. Try to get a serious response from him about a serious subject and you usually got a joke. Barely a week after completing his basic training, Zak's unit had been deployed to Sovana.

The situation up there had begun to deteriorate shortly after the Cylon bombing of that ancient city five and a half years earlier. Nestled in a broad valley in a northern mountainous area, Sovana had always attracted a rugged group of individuals who tended to go their own way. The beautiful scenery, old city architecture and several ancient temple sites had made tourism the main industry. The Cylon bombs had leveled half of the temples and the oldest part of the city and had put an end to the tourists at the same time they had destroyed over two thousand years of history. Smugglers and drug dealers had quickly moved in.

During the Cylon occupation, a strong resistance movement had operated in the city and surrounding small villages. Lee could still vividly recall the time he had spent up there questioning a fifteen-year-old boy who had been arrested along with five men, all of them resistance members. Two of the prisoners had been killed in an escape, but the boy, Neil Speigle, had gotten away with three others. All except Neil had later been hunted down and killed. Neil had vanished and all attempts to find him had come up empty, but Lee had known Neil was alive because of the blogs he had begun posting on a journaling web site under the alias of Martin Spiller.

Not long before the Presidential election in the autumn, Neil had turned up in Caprica City and warned Lee about a resistance plan to blow up several large voting sites. Neil's information had saved thousands of lives, but he had refused Lee's help and had vanished again presumably to a life on the city's streets. A month later his blogs had resumed, but more sporadically than before. Lee always feared the worst when Neil didn't post for a while, but after an absence, Neil would always surface with another blog, now about life on the streets of Caprica City.

After his trip to Sovana, Lee had begun to think that Kara might be the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Now she was on a planet in another solar system and he knew the odds were not in her favor.

Lee sipped his coffee. So much had happened to them and to their world in the last two years. The once beautiful, ancient city of Sovana had continued to deteriorate. The local government had become corrupt. At any time during the last five years Cavil could have sent an army of centurions into the city and stopped it, but he had let it happen because he felt that Sovana was a microcosm of all the flaws of humanity. Cavil had gloated during his speeches as the corruption and the lawlessness had grown worse.

Now Cavil was in a bunker prison deep under Caprica City and the Marines were trying to wrest control of Sovana from the drug lords and the sex traffickers and the smugglers and other criminals. Adding to the problem were the fanatic monotheist cultists who had gravitated to a city surprisingly tolerant of them. They added a volatile edge to a region teetering on the edge of collapse and anarchy.

At the same time that the Marines were trying to restore order, they also had to remain aware of the rights that the citizens were afforded under the Articles of Colonization. The military rules of engagement in Sovana forbid them to fire unless fired upon, but it wasn't always that easy or simple. Creating order out of the chaos that had engulfed Sovana often seemed like a hopeless and thankless task. And Zak, the brother Lee had practically raised, the brother he loved, was in the heart of it.

He scanned the news bulletins. Sovana had been quiet overnight. He was just getting ready to look for a new blog from Neil Speigle when his phone buzzed. Major Parker asked him to come to his office. When Lee got there, His father was seated in a chair in front of Parker's desk.

"Come in and have a seat, Lee, and shut the door," Parker said.

Lee complied. "Dad," he said as he sat.

Bill didn't waste any time on small talk. "I've got to get back for a meeting so I'll be brief. As of next Monday, you and Major Parker will be reporting to me. I'm transferring both of you to my staff."

Lee looked at his CO. "This is…a surprise."

Parker glanced at the admiral. "Your father needs us on his staff as he plans the mission to Nereid."

"I thought I was being sent on the mission to the other planets."

"You are," Bill said. "You're going to be my liaison officer between the _Galactica_ and the _Penelope_. But that won't take all of your time. I want you to start reviewing recon footage and John's notes from the Hoshi journals. I've already called Rick Rafferty. Kevin is going to compile the footage from the three missions you and Kara flew. He'll have it ready for you to pick up tomorrow. I want you to take it with you. I'm arranging a private quarters on the _Penelope_ for you. You can review everything when you're not busy with other duties. Major Parker will have access to the same material. When you get back, we'll all sit down and talk. You went to War College and you've been to the planet. Be thinking about how you would plan the mission. We're not going to get but one shot at Nereid. We've got to do it right. Since it looks like we're going to have to invade the planet and fight on the ground, I'm bringing General Nathan Vargas into our planning sessions."

Lee knew that Irina Hoshi's journals, written during the first scientific expedition to the planet over sixty years previously, had been placed in the permanent archives at the Academy. But he also knew that John had scanned them into his laptop computer, the computer that Kara had left behind with her own notes. Lee would have copies of the original documents as well as John's and Kara's notes.

"Do I still get to fly a Viper one day a week while I'm on your staff?" Lee asked.

"Yes," Bill said. "What will change is that the other four days a week you'll be reporting to the government office building near Marble House instead of out here to the base."

"I'll still be reporting to Major Parker?"

"You will as soon as this other mission is over. While you're on it, you'll report directly to Commander Cain. I've already talked to her. The major has also recommended you for promotion to captain. By the time you get back, the paperwork should have made its way through channels."

Bill stood and both Parker and Lee stood. Lee looked at the major. "Thank you, sir."

Parker smiled. "You deserve it. Between the work you've done for me and the missions you've flown, it's time."

Bill also smiled. "Congratulations, son. Don't I get any lip about the transfer?"

"No, sir," Lee said. "If you can take it, so can I."

Bill was still smiling. He looked at Parker first. "I'll see you next Monday." He then looked at Lee. "I'd like for us to have dinner tomorrow night. Everything is almost ready for the mission to the other Colonies. You leave Friday morning."

"Friday? So soon?" Lee asked in surprise.

"The sooner we get this out of the way, the sooner we can concentrate all our efforts on the Cylon homeworld. There will be a briefing on the _Penelope_ mission at 14:00 out at the airbase tomorrow afternoon. You'll get the official notification later today."

"Yes, sir. And since my social calendar is empty now, I think I can manage dinner tomorrow night."

After Bill was gone, Parker said, "Have a seat."

"I didn't see this transfer coming at all, sir," Lee said.

"Your father called me yesterday afternoon. We talked for quite a while." Parker gestured to some paperwork on his desk. "A week ago I was given a list of eleven names by Fleet Command. That's over half my staff. They're going to be transferred to Sovana."

Lee took a deep breath as Parker's words sunk in. "Was my name on that list?"

Parker nodded. "It was. So was mine. Your father gave me a reason to stay with my wife and children. The post to Sovana would have been better for my career, but I don't want to leave my family. I think I can be just as useful in helping plan the mission to Nereid as I can freezing my butt off in Sovana, questioning drug dealers and fanatic monotheists."

Lee thought of how his father had never hesitated to leave his family for his career. He felt a new respect for his CO. "You'll probably be a lot more effective here helping plan the Nereid mission," Lee said.

Parker smiled. "You haven't been on the admiral's staff for five minutes and you've already learned to kiss ass. That might be a record."

Lee finally smiled as well. "Just being truthful, sir."

"You don't have any objection to taking the transfer, do you?"

"No, sir, but the rest of the interrogators are going to see it as blatant nepotism."

"Do you care?"

Lee realized that while he liked and respected Jill Hadrian, he had never really had any friends among the other interrogators. He knew that to them, he'd always been the admiral's son. It had created a barrier that no one had ever tried to cross, but he was used to that. He'd gotten used to it at the Academy.

"No, sir, I really don't care. All I really care about now is the mission to Nereid."

"We're going to need your help planning this Nereid mission a lot more than you'll be needed in Sovana. No one else on Caprica has been to the Cylon homeworld. You have. You know what the terrain actually looks like."

"I guess Dad realizes things could be worse. He seemed a lot happier today than he did yesterday."

"I think someone else is responsible for your father's good mood. He mentioned that he had dinner with the President last night."

Lee nodded. That explained it. Brandon Parker was one of the few people who knew how long his father had known Laura…or how well. That fact had turned up during an investigation over two years earlier when Cavil had tried to pin a treason rap on Laura. Any other thoughts Parker had on his father's and Laura's current relationship, he kept to himself.

"Well, Lieutenant Adama, I suggest that you go back to your desk and start cleaning it out. You have a short day tomorrow and you leave early on Friday."

Lee almost snickered. "Cleaning out my desk won't take long, sir."

Parker was still smiling. He gestured to the stacks of paper on his desk. "Then maybe you can come back and help me clean out mine."

Back in his small office, Lee looked around. He wondered what his workspace would look like in the government office building where Bill and his staff were housed. He had seen his father's office. It wasn't large, but it was very nicely decorated with most of the furnishings that had once been in his quarters on the _Galactica, _the same things that Bill had told Kara he would one day take back there.

Lee was glad that he would still be reporting to Major Parker. Two and a half years earlier when he'd returned from his year aboard the _Triton_, he'd had a lot of misgivings about his assignment to Parker's staff, but he had shortly realized that he couldn't have gotten a better CO. In that regard he had been lucky.

He went to the supply room and found an empty box for the few personal items on and in his desk. He had everything packed in ten minutes. The last thing he put on top was a picture of him and Kara taken at Laura and John's wedding reception two years earlier. Their arms were around each other and they were smiling at the camera. He shut his eyes. He loved her so much that he ached for her. He had been right when he'd told Frogman that she was worth it. He and Kara would be together again. He knew it. He wouldn't let himself believe otherwise.

…

Laura sat at the breakfast table watching her son try to feed himself with a small spoon. She had held his hand in hers and helped him with several spoonfuls of his oatmeal. She now watched as he tried it himself. He seemed to get the cereal into the spoon fairly well, but he was still struggling with getting the spoon into his mouth consistently. He waved the spoon around and a clump of cereal landed on her blouse.

She smiled at Maya who was sipping coffee. "I think I need a bib like my son's or maybe a plastic suit."

Braedon slapped the tray and said, "Nana."

"Say _please_," Laura said to him.

"Pwease."

Laura put the cut-up pieces of banana into a section of his dish. Braedon dropped the spoon and picked up a small piece of banana with his hand. He had no trouble at all getting that into his mouth. He had mastered finger food quite well.

Maya smiled. "He's learning. I'm afraid you're going to have to change your blouse before you go downstairs."

Laura took her napkin and wiped off the oatmeal. "My cleaning bill is twice what it was before my son was born. Did you and Sam have a nice evening?"

"We did. We went out to eat and to a comedy club afterward. Somebody had comped him two tickets." She smiled. "Never say Sam won't accept a gift from an admirer and he has plenty of those."

Maya had been back the previous night before midnight when Laura had checked on Braedon. She looked bright and fresh this morning, too. Perhaps she hadn't gone to Sam's apartment after their date.

"Did you enjoy your dinner with the admiral?" Maya asked her.

"Yes, it was very nice," Laura answered. "We talked about Kara. We didn't solve a thing, but I feel better."

"You look better than you did yesterday. Admiral Adama really cares about you."

"Yes, he does," Laura said quietly.

During the time that Maya had been taking care of Braedon, Laura had begun to think of her as a friend as well as Braedon's nanny. She probably allowed Maya more liberty in talking to her than anyone except Elosha or Kara. Of course it was no secret that Bill had become her official escort to most of the Colonial functions that she was required to attend, both formal and informal. They had always been more than circumspect, though, always very careful to avoid a look or a touch that might be misconstrued. Maya was very sharp to have picked up what she and Bill had both been careful to avoid…any hint of impropriety when there was none. Of course their somewhat intoxicated kiss the previous evening had probably changed that.

"Do you feel the same way about him?" Maya asked.

"I've known Bill for quite a few years," Laura said. "Naturally I care about him."

"You were lovers once. Is that why you seem to have forgotten your husband after less than five months? Is that why you aren't wearing your wedding ring this morning? Are you ready to move on to the admiral?"

Laura glanced at her hand and realized that she hadn't put on her ring yet. "That was very inappropriate," she said coolly.

Maya held her gaze. "I guess I crossed a line."

"Yes, you did. Who told you about my previous relationship with Bill? Was it John?"

Maya's gaze finally wavered. "No. John never discussed your private life with me. We didn't talk about anything except Braedon and my schoolwork. Sometimes he asked about Sam. That's all."

"Then Kara was the one who said something."

"We went out one night about a month ago," Maya said. "Kara had a few drinks. It was on her mind."

Laura smiled tightly. "Kara has _always_ had a problem with mine and Bill's relationship, which is strictly platonic and has been since I was nineteen years old…long before I met Kara's father. Now, I've got to go change my blouse and get to my office."

She leaned down and kissed her son, carefully avoiding his sticky hands and cheeks. She also avoided looking at Maya, afraid Maya would see the truth in her eyes about Bill, afraid that Maya would be able to tell what had been on her mind the night before. She pushed Braedon's thick, silky brown hair from his forehead.

"I really think we're going to have to get his hair cut again," she said, "although I understand the last one was an ordeal. Maybe we can let it go a little longer."

"I think it's time. John liked Brae's hair shorter," Maya said.

Laura turned, surprised by the curtness in her voice.

"Then by all means get it cut," she snapped.

…

Staying low over the treetops, Kara easily found the river and banked west. When she got near the waterfall, though, she stared in disbelief. The water rushed over the rim two hundred feet above the surface and into a huge basin in the stone. A large rock formation at the near edge of the basin split the water and it then fell in two shorter waterfalls into the river below. The top waterfall was at least fifty feet across. The bottom two falls were twenty or thirty each. Kara didn't see anything that resembled the entrance to a cave on any of the three.

"Holy mother of the gods," she breathed.

Hunter raised his head. Kara could tell by the light of her monitor that he was sweating even though the interior of the ship was cool.

"I don't see any cave," she said as she pulled the Raider into a steep climb up the face of the water, leveling off above the top of the falls.

"Go back," Hunter said, "just not so frakking fast."

"I can't fly this thing any slower. It's not a damned helicopter."

She circled and followed the river downstream several miles before she turned. "Which waterfall…the top or the bottom?"

"The top one. Can you…hover?"

"Vertical thrusters don't work well on water. They need a solid surface. If I get too low and we go into the river, we're frakked. It's not a submarine, either. Where's the cave? I thought you said we could see part of the entrance. Where is it? We're almost there."

"Can you approach it from the side and look? The river's higher than I've ever seen it this time of year."

Kara banked tightly and circled. On her first pass she saw nothing. She continued circling and came around again. This time she saw a darker area behind the cascading water about twenty feet above the surface of the basin. She circled once more.

"Is that it?"

"That's it," he said. "Try to hit it dead center."

Kara banked in another tight circle and began her approach. She was sweating now, too. She wished he hadn't used the words _hit_ and _dead _in the same sentence.

"If this doesn't work, then it's been nice knowing you. I'm going in."

She knew she had to account for the force of the water and adjusted her approach higher. She slowed to almost the Raider's stall speed.

An alarm began sounding. "Yeah, yeah, Sadie, shut up," she said softly. "I know what I'm doing."

They hit the tumbling water and were through. The cave opened up wider past the entrance but not much higher. It wasn't nearly as deep as she expected.

She applied maximum reverse thrusters. Even on the high approach, the underside of the Raider scraped along the floor of the cave. She increased vertical thrusters and when their forward movement stopped, she jerked the ship in a tight turn and brought it down pointing back toward the curtain of water. It wasn't graceful or pretty, not the way she liked to bring in a ship. On the _Galactica_ it wouldn't even have passed for a good combat landing, but they were down in a secure place and the ship was still in one piece…or she hoped it was.

She shut down the engine and the computers. She didn't realize until then that her hands were shaking. Hunter was already spinning the wheel on the hatch. He opened it and tumbled through. He didn't even take his assault rifle.

She lay on her stomach taking deep breaths until the trembling stopped. She knew her tank top and underwear were soaked with sweat. She realized how thirsty she was.

"Hey, you forgot something," she called to him. She put her head through the opening. He was squatting on his haunches a dozen feet away. "Are you okay?"

He looked up and blew out a deep breath. "I'm fine."

She handed him the assault rifle and then her backpack before she climbed out and closed the hatch behind her. The humidity in the cave felt like it was near a hundred percent. She spun the outer wheel to seal the hatch and keep moisture from reaching the interior of the ship. Then she dug around in her pack until she found a flashlight. Hunter didn't grab her wrist this time.

Carefully she inspected the underside of the Raider as best she could. There were deep, parallel scrapes starting about halfway back from the wingtips and running under the belly of the ship. She rubbed them gently. "Sorry, Sadie," she said softly. "Maybe I'll be gone long enough these will heal."

"Your ship's got a name and you talk to it?" Hunter asked. "You're not going to tell me it's got a Cylon brain like those chrome-heads, are you?"

"It had a brain, but our guys took it out and put in the computers. Raiders have some self-healing capability. They're made of a partly-organic material. Without the brain I don't know if she can heal something this deep or not. She healed a couple of bullet wounds once that I'm guessing you or one of your guys put into her, but those didn't affect her structural integrity."

"Does that mean you can't fly it now?"

"I think I can fly it. I just don't think I should take it into deep space or even very high into the atmosphere. The pressure difference might cause it to fracture along these lines like an egg…and I'm the yolk. It's my fault. I underestimated the power of the water. I should have made my approach higher. Maybe I'll get a chance to talk to Dr. Rafferty when I go back…if he'll visit me in jail. I'm sure he's got a formula for flying a ship through a waterfall. Of course I'll need advanced physics to understand it so he'll have to give me the layman's version. That worked just fine when we were talking about my dad and the Raptor jump. All I took was basic math at the Academy. Of course if we hadn't scraped the floor, then I might not have been able to stop before we hit the back of the cave. I'll have to ask Dr. Rafferty about that, too."

"Do you always talk this much?"

Kara realized that she was babbling. It was nerves. "Only when I've come within a few vertical feet of smashing my ship into solid rock and killing us both."

Hunter took her arm and turned her to face him. "You did good, Wildcat. When I heard that alarm, I thought we were going in the river."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence. I feel so much better now." She sat down on a rock, opened her pack again and got out her canteen. She took a long drink before she held it up to him.

"I've got my own. Not that new or fancy, but it holds water." He took a very old canteen out of his pack.

"Gods, where'd you get that thing? My mother had one like it when I was a little kid. She gave it to me to play with when they got new ones."

"This canteen has been on the planet a lot longer than that."

Sitting in the cave with the rumble of the water echoing around them, Kara realized that Hunter had not escaped from the captured ships five years earlier. Neither had Targa or Beck. Hunter's grandparents had been members of the lost second expedition to the planet sixty years before.

"What happened to the _Hyperion_?" Kara asked. "I looked for it at the north polar region a couple of weeks ago where the Cylons put the rest of the ships, but I didn't see it. The crew must have hidden it somewhere."

"Even if the chrome-heads had found it, they couldn't have flown it anywhere. But there'll be time to talk about the _Hyperion_ after we get out of the cave."

Kara got up and walked to the curtain of water that fell in front of them across the cave's entrance. "I don't think we're going out the front door. I hope this isn't the only way out."

Hunter walked up beside her. "You can't see it, but there's a ledge you can walk on until you get about halfway down. Then it's just a ten-foot jump into the basin and paddle to the edge."

"Why can't we see it?"

"The water's hitting it. I told you I've never seen the river this high this early in the year."

"You're crazy as hell if you think I'm going to try to walk out on a ledge that has water coming down on it with that much force. We'd be knocked off onto the rocks in two seconds. There's got to be another way out."

He hesitated and finally said, "There is, but it'll add half a day to our trip. We might not make it back on the second day."

"We won't make it back at all if we get smashed on the rocks and drown, either. I'll walk non-stop if I have to in order to keep your buddies from killing Narch."

"You might have to do that."

"_We_ might have to do that. _We_."

"Narch…that's a funny name."

"It's his call sign. Narcho. His name is Noel Allison."

"What about you, Wildcat, do you have a call sign?"

"Starbuck. It was my father's. He was a Viper pilot in the First Cylon War. He passed it along to me. I'm going to find him and get him back from the Cylons."

Hunter ignored her last comment. He almost smiled. "And your _equal man_, what's his name?"

"Lee. His call sign is Apollo. He's a Viper pilot, too, like me and Narch."

"You all fly Vipers together on Caprica when you're not stealing Cylon Raiders?"

Kara almost laughed. "When we can."

"Lee and Kara. Starbuck and Apollo."

"You learn fast."

"You have to learn fast out here or you don't survive. We should go. Do you have some gloves in that pack?"

"Yeah."

"Good. We'll have to crawl before we get out of here."

"Crawl?" Kara asked.

"The only other way out of the cave, Wildcat. Before we get out, we're going to have to spend some time on our hands and knees in a little tunnel through the rock."

"Now I understand why you'd rather risk getting killed going out the front door. You really don't like tight spaces, do you?"

"Let's just say if you weren't with me, I'd chance the ledge. I just hope we don't meet some of your kin going out the other way."

"My kin?" Kara asked puzzled.

"Wildcats," he snickered. "These mountain caves are full of them."

"That's just frakking great. You just had to tell me that, didn't you?"

"I hope you know how to swim, too."

"Like a fish," Kara said.

"Good. You'll be glad to know we're still going to get that bath…just not right away. "

…

Lee put the box with the items from his desk into the back seat of his car and got into the driver's seat. He didn't want to go back to the apartment yet, but he didn't want to go to Zeno's either. He took out his phone and searched for a number that Kara had programmed into it months earlier.

He was just about to give up when Maya answered. "Lee?"

"Could I come by for a few minutes to see you and Braedon."

"Sure. Where are you?"

"I'm still at the base…in the parking lot."

"I'm getting ready to feed Brae his dinner. We should be through by the time you get here. Do I need to call the gate and say you're expected?"

"Thanks, that's a good idea."

It took him almost forty-five minutes to get back into the city and make his way through rush-hour traffic to Marble House. Lee pulled up to the gate and handed his military ID to the guard. The guard recognized him from the times Lee had been there with Kara, but he still scrutinized the ID and looked at some names on a clipboard before he handed it back and raised the gate arm. Lee parked where he always did when he and Kara were together. He nodded and spoke to the Marines at the entrance. He did the same for all of the men and women he passed, some of whom he knew were plainclothes guards.

Maya had made the necessary calls. A guard allowed him to get on the elevator for the second floor and the Presidential living quarters. Maya had her sleeves rolled up was kneeling by the tub giving Braedon a bath.

Lee knelt beside her. "Hey, little buddy. Remember me?"

Braedon crowed with delight and splashed Lee and Maya in his excitement.

Maya blotted her face with her sleeve.

Lee said, "Sorry about that."

"Who is this?" Maya asked Braedon. "Who's come to see you?"

Braedon was still smiling happily. "Yee."

Maya used a washcloth to clean Brae's face.

"Zak used to scream bloody murder if I tried to wash his face. He hated it."

"Brae's like a little fish," she said. "He's always loved the water."

"Posiden's green-eyed son," Lee said. He was amazed at how much Braedon looked like John, especially when he smiled.

"Kara calls him _little fish_…when she's not calling him star-mapper."

"Posiden was John's…nickname."

"When he and Kara were in the resistance."

"He told you about that?" Lee asked, shocked.

"No, of course not. Kara did. She knows I'd never say a word to anyone." Maya lifted Braedon out of the tub and stood him on the plush mat while she dried him. He began to wiggle and squirm and she finally let him go. He ran out into his bedroom. She laughed. "Not a modest bone in his body, yet."

Maya flipped the lever and water began draining from the tub. She put the towels and washcloth on a towel rack. "What brings you here tonight?"

"I wanted to see you both before I leave Friday morning on the mission to the other planets. I'm not sure how long I'll be gone."

"Laura told me you were going. I didn't think it would be this soon."

"My dad wants to make sure I've got enough to do to keep me busy."

Maya went out into Braedon's bedroom and Lee followed her. She scooped Braedon up. He protested at first, but Maya kissed him all around his neck and soon had him laughing. Lee was amazed at how quickly she was able to diaper him and get him dressed in his sleeper. She put him down and he went back to his toys.

"Could I offer you some tea or coffee?" She asked.

"Thanks. I'll pass. Where's Laura tonight?"

"Having dinner at the Capitol Club with Scott Mickelson and Romo Lampkin."

Braedon held up one of his toy Raptors. "Wapta," he said to Lee.

Lee sat cross-legged on the floor and picked up a Viper. "That's right. What's this?"

"Vipa. Kawa."

Hearing her brother say Kara's name sent a spiral of pain twisting through him.

"When is she coming back?" Maya asked softly.

"I don't know, but she _will_ be back."

Braedon gave the Raptor to Lee and said, "Dada."

"What about your dada?" Lee asked.

"I told him that his father went away in a Raptor," Maya said.

Braedon climbed onto Lee's lap, put his finger on top of the Raptor and clearly said, "Jump."

Lee looked up at Maya in surprise. "Did you tell him John jumped in this ship?"

Maya shook her head. "Kara must have."

Braedon looked at Lee, and suddenly Lee knew that John was alive. He knew that John had survived the FTL jump and was on Nereid. There was nothing logical about the knowledge. It was just there as if it had been transferred to him through the eyes of a little boy. Some things had to be taken with a leap of faith, as Kara had done, unwavering and strong enough that she had staked her career and her life on it.

Braedon's eyes briefly looked wise and knowing and then he was a child again, scrambling off Lee's lap. A moment later Lee wondered if he had imagined the whole thing.

Maya was talking to him. "I'm going to read Braedon a story and get him to bed. Would you like to wait out in the sitting room? We can talk."

"Sure," Lee said.

Maya came over and picked Braedon up. She gave him his teddy bear. Lee stood. "Kiss Lee goodnight," Maya told Braedon.

Lee felt the wet little mouth against his cheek. He ruffled Braedon's hair and suddenly felt the tug deep inside him to have a child of his own one day, a child with Kara. He remembered with clarity the dream or vision he'd had on the island the year before, of Kara sitting on the beach with a baby carrier and a child with a wisp of blond hair. Of everything that had happened in the last two days, that image gave him more comfort than anything else. Some things were meant to be.

He turned and walked toward the sitting room. Behind him he heard Maya say, "Your dada loves you _so much_. Let's kiss Dada goodnight. And then we'll kiss Kara goodnight."

…

John sat on the edge of the bed while Bianca's husband used a stethoscope and listened to his breathing, placing it first on his chest and then on his back.

"You sound much better. You can lie back now."

"I'd like to get up and walk around some more."

The doctor smiled. "Maybe tomorrow. You overdid it this morning and almost passed out. I'm not big enough to catch you if you start to fall."

Reluctantly John lay back on the bed. The doctor was probably right. He was a small man, slim and no taller than his wife. John knew that he had lost weight, but he was still over a head taller than the doctor who had introduced himself as Laszlo Silva. He had asked John to refer to him simply as _doc_. He adjusted the bed so that John was sitting up.

"How bad does my back look?" John asked him.

"You mean other than the bullet scar? It looks like the exit wound from a bullet that struck you under your right clavicle."

"Other than that."

"You have a few thin scars crisscrossing your back. I'd guess from red hot wires. The whips they used to use left much wider scars."

"A few?" John said incredulously. "They burned me over and over with red-hot wires. I just figured…there would be a lot of scars. I can take the truth. Be honest with me. How bad is it?"

"Your back is basically fine. It was the drug."

"No. I'm telling you. They tied me to a chair. They showed me the red-hot wire. I felt it. Believe me. I felt it. They did it over and over."

"They drugged you first, didn't they?"

"Probably. I don't remember. They broke my fingers. One at a time they broke…they broke my fingers." Puzzled, John looked at his hands and remembered the searing pain with each snap. He remembered the terrible pain afterward when he tried to move them, but his fingers now looked fine.

Dr. Silva pulled a chair up to the side of the bed and sat. "We did a complete scan of your body when you were brought in. You have old fractures of a few fingers, four ribs on your left side and one on your right, but there's nothing new."

"A couple of big guys beat me. I know they broke ribs. I felt it."

"I don't doubt that they beat you. You've got a lot of bad bruises, but that's all. The Cylons have a dandy drug. It's a strong hypnotic mixed with a hallucinogenic. It makes the human mind extremely susceptible to suggestion and then your mind carries through with it. They drugged you, suggested something they were going to do to you. Your mind did the rest."

"When they burned me, I felt it for hours afterward. For days. You're saying what I thought they did to me was…drugs?"

"Drug-induced hallucinations. That doesn't mean that the pain wasn't real. It was very real because you believed they were doing those things to you. They learned five years ago that if they did all those things to their prisoners, there were complications…infections mostly. A great many died. Now they use the drug. They can make you think you're being burned or your fingers are being broken over and over and not risk killing you with an infection. It's the perfect way to torture someone. You've been here six days now…long enough that the drug has cleared from your system."

"Are you going to tell me the pneumonia was in my mind, too?"

"No. Your pneumonia was very real. Bacterial streptococcus. It probably got carried into your lungs when you aspirated tainted water."

"That was another one of their favorite tricks. Seeing how close they could come to drowning me. They liked to do it in filthy ice water."

"I warned them about that five years ago."

"I couldn't tell them what they wanted to know."

"I wasn't aware they were still torturing prisoners for information. I thought they had just been experimenting on you with their drugs."

"Is that how they test their drugs? Experiment on human prisoners?"

Dr. Silva nodded. "They always try their drugs on humans first."

"Do you help them?"

"No. But I've seen the results of some of their experiments. They have one they use on uncooperative men breeders. The long-term effects are terrible. You don't want them to have to use it on you."

"What are they trying to do?"

"Their ultimate goal is to develop a drug that insures conception for themselves. They stumbled on these other drugs in the process. The ones who aren't atheists are monotheists. They have a religious book as sacred to them as the Scrolls of Pythia are to us. Their scripture tells them to _be fruitful and multiply_. Apparently they don't get to count what they do in those tubs of goo."

"Your wife mentioned that part of their spiritual belief to me. It's why the Three wants to take me to the city with her."

"Yes. The Cylon woman will take you with her soon, probably tomorrow. Your temperature has been normal for two days. We can't find a reason to keep you here any longer."

John snorted. "If none of the Cylon women have had children, why does she think she'll be the exception?"

"This one is particularly religious. I'd say she's borderline zealot."

"Crazy?"

"Not in the clinical sense although we have no baseline to judge them. She's very certain of her beliefs."

"She picked the wrong guy," John said with conviction. "I've already had this conversation with your wife."

Dr. Silva sat for a moment without speaking and finally said. "She won't blame you if you don't succeed in impregnating her since few of them seem able to conceive and none of those seem to be able to carry a child but a few months. She will understand if she doesn't get pregnant, but she'll be damned upset if you won't even try."

"Look, I appreciate what you and your wife are trying to do, but it's not going to happen."

"If you won't take my advice about co-operating with her, at least let me warn you of something else you might have to deal with."

"Shoot."

"Very often a victim of…prolonged physical abuse such as you have been subjected to will experience a rebound psychological effect if a captor begins treating him with kindness. You were also heavily drugged for extended periods of time. You may have mood swings, periods of anger and depression, even euphoria. You should be aware that you may develop feelings for her that you aren't prepared for and be ready to deal with them. I've seen it happen a number of times in the last five years. There's a term for it. We call it Knossos Syndrome after the psychologist who identified it many years ago."

"You don't have to worry about that. She's nothing but a machine, doc."

"You may change your mind about that. Bianca and I have been dealing with them for over five years now. A few of them we know are kind and sincere and tend to make you forget their origins."

John was suddenly furious. "You're trying to screw with my head, aren't you? Your wife told me you had both made a decision to work with the Cylons. You're just frakking with my head. Have _you_ given me some kind of drug? Is that what this is? Another damned Cylon experiment? Are you telling me that I'm going to forget my wife and fall in love with a frakking _machine_?"

Dr. Silva sighed wearily. "I'm not saying or implying anything of the kind. I assure you I haven't drugged you. I just want you to be prepared for anything that might happen to you psychologically. As my father used to say to me, _forewarned is forearmed._"

"Sure, doc. Whatever you say."

Silva stood. "Can I get you anything? Something else to eat or drink?"

"How about a fifth of whiskey and a ticket back to Caprica," John said sarcastically.

"I'm afraid both of those are quite beyond my ability to provide for you."

John closed his eyes. "Then how about letting me take a nap."

He did what he had done so often in his cell. He let his mind travel to the island, to memories of Kara and Braedon. He remembered the way his son felt in his arms. He remembered Kara's smile. He saw her run after Braedon as he headed for the edge of the water. Laura walked up beside him and slipped her hand into his. She looked up at him, the promise of the evening to come clear in her eyes. He loved her. He would never be able to touch another woman that way, certainly not a machine. He didn't care what they did to him.

He heard a noise but refused to open his eyes. He didn't want to interrupt the reverie. "Just leave me alone. We got nothing left to talk about."

"We haven't talked yet today, John?"

The island vanished. He opened his eyes. The Three stood at the foot of his bed.

"Frak. Just when I thought my day couldn't get any worse, you show up."

She smiled. "Why is it worse? The doctors tell me you're much better."

"You wouldn't understand."

"We'll be leaving here tomorrow. I've come to ask you what kind of clothes you like."

He snorted. "What? After months of keeping me naked and freezing, you're going to let me have something to wear besides these pajama pants?"

She stood for a moment studying him. "I think we're going to have to work on your attitude."

"I thought that's what you'd been doing for the last couple of months. Working on my attitude."

"I didn't torture you. I rescued you."

"What difference does it make which one of you did the torturing?" John asked angrily. "You're all the same. Every godsdamned one of you. Cut out with the same frakking cookie cutter. Loaded with the same damn software."

"That's not true."

He stopped talking, breathing hard, angry at himself that he had let her get to him that way.

Finally she said, "If you won't tell me what you like to wear, I'll have to pick something for you."

"Fine. You do that. Pick something. And while you're at it, bring me my watch and my dog tags and my wedding ring. My flight suit, too. One of your human goons took them when I was…detained. I want them back."

"You won't need your flight suit or dog tags."

"They have sentimental value, something else you wouldn't understand."

"If I bring you those things, will it improve your attitude?"

"You bring me those things and we'll talk about it again."

"You'll like where we're going. It's much nicer than the place you've been."

"A cardboard box in an alley would be nicer than the hell-hole you've had me in."

"Did you live in the city on Caprica, John? Do you like living in a city?"

He closed his eyes. "Look, just go away and leave me alone. I was thinking about my wife. That's one thing _you'll_ never be able to do. Make me forget her."

He waited for the Three to leave the room. Instead she walked around to the side of the bed. She rubbed her hand across his chest in a caress that was both gentle and possessive. He grabbed her wrist. They stared at each other. He knew the hatred was clear in his eyes.

Her eyes narrowed angrily. "Do you _want_ to go back to your cell? Do you _want_ to go back to where you were? To what they were doing to you?"

He took a deep breath. He realized that if she took him to the city, he was much closer to the forest and the mountains and the humans who were living free. Maybe there would be a chance to escape. Maybe he was going about this the wrong way. Maybe the doctors had the right idea. Maybe that's what they'd been trying to tell him. He needed to play along with this Three until they got to the city. He would never escape if she sent him back to a prison cell. He had to look like he was cooperating. He had to make her think she had won. He let go of her wrist.

He took another deep breath. "No. I don't want to go back to my cell. I'd rather go to the city with you."

He saw the look of triumph in her eyes. "I thought so."

She traced her finger gently over the scar on his chest where a surgeon in Sovana had cut a bullet out of him, a bullet that had been meant for Laura. He controlled the urge to wrap his hands around the Three's neck and squeeze. She touched the small scar under his collar bone.

"What happened to you?"

"I got shot by a maniac. He was aiming at somebody else. I got in the way."

She smiled. "You'll have to tell me about it later…after we're settled."

"I like khaki pants and white shirts."

"I'll see what I can do."

He managed a smile. "What's your name? You do have a name, don't you, besides Three?"

"What would you like to call me?"

"The Three I knew on Caprica was called D'Anna."

She leaned over and put her mouth close to his ear. Her honey-blond hair fell across his face.

"Then my name is D'Anna," she whispered.

After she was gone, he closed his eyes and tried to go back to the island, but the soft honeysuckle scent of her hair lingered with him. He was at the beach, but not on the island. He was at the beach on Picon with Kara's mother. She leaned over him, her blond hair falling across his face as she kissed him.

Dr. Silva was wrong. The drug wasn't out of his system yet if the scent of a machine could make him think about Kara's mother, about a woman he had loved for more than a decade. He let himself slip deeper into the daydream of the beach on Picon. It was as good a place as any to escape.

…..

While Maya sat in a rocking chair with Braedon on her lap in the next room, Lee paced the sitting room. Too much had happened in the last three days. Since he and Kara had been there on Sunday afternoon, his world had been turned upside down.

He walked to the tall window and stood looking out over the mall at the lighted dome of the Capitol Building where the Quorum of Twelve was once again meeting as a functioning government body instead of as the puppet forum they had been during the Cylon occupation of the planet. In two days he would leave Caprica behind for a mission to the other Colonies. He didn't know if he would be gone a few weeks or a few months.

He heard a sound and turned. Maya walked out of Braedon's bedroom with him on her hip and a mesh bag of toys slung over one arm.

"He took a long nap this afternoon. He's not sleepy yet. I'm going to let him play a little longer. The staff brought some dinner up earlier. Join me."

She went into the small kitchen off the sitting room. Lee followed her.

"I'm not going to take your dinner."

"They always bring me three times as much as I can eat."

Maya put Braedon and the bag of toys on the floor. Lee sat at the small table while she put several dishes in the microwave. Braedon dragged the bag of toys into the sitting room.

"Will he be okay?"

"Just keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn't climb onto the back of the sofa. That's his latest trick."

Lee positioned his chair so he could watch Braedon. "Has Sam heard from Zak?" Lee asked just to make conversation.

Maya turned and leaned back against the countertop. "He didn't mention Zak last night. I'm not seeing Sam nearly as often as I was."

"I probably shouldn't have asked."

"It's not Sam's idea. It's mine. It's not fair to Sam for me to keep seeing him a lot."

"Why?" Lee asked confused.

"He was getting too serious."

"And that's a bad thing?"

"Kara told you, didn't she?"

Lee was still confused. "Told me what?"

"About what happened to me in the refugee camp. About my little girl and what I did to get her the medicine that I thought would save her."

"She told me you had to go to the black market in the camp when she got sick."

"Hanna was just six months old."

"We saw her name on the memorial wall. I'm really sorry."

"When she got sick, I took her to the medical tent. They couldn't get the antibiotics she needed because the Cylons had bombed the factories so I went to the men who ran the black market. They could get anything for a price, but I didn't have any money. I worked out a deal with them for the medicine. By the time they got it, my baby was too sick. She died, but I still had to make good on my end of the bargain."

The microwave chimed and Maya quickly turned around.

Lee felt sick. "Gods, Maya."

"I know you're wondering what this has to do with Sam. While I was paying off my debt to those men in the camp, I didn't want to take a chance on getting pregnant. I got a birth control patch from the medical tent. It was manufactured by CapGen labs and was infected with the Cylon virus. I'll never be able to have any more children. Sam wants a family one day. It's not fair to him."

"I didn't know. I'm so sorry."

"John is the only person who knows that part of it. I told him that day last year when Laura made her speech at the dedication of the memorial garden. I fell apart at the wall when I saw Hanna's name. John…found me there when they were ready to leave. I told him. I was crying and it all came out. He was so kind to me. He never judged me for what I did."

"Nobody would."

"You'd be surprised, Lee."

Maya put a plate of food on the table in front of him and poured a glass of tea.

"About the virus…my dad said that Gaius Baltar is off the project now and an expert virologist is working on it with a new staff. They'll be able to find a cure. I'm sure they will."

Maya sat down at the small table. She tried to smile. "I can't count on that."

"Have you talked to Sam about it?"

"There's no point. He wants a whole pyramid team of kids one day. He's said it several times. He's only twenty-five. I'm five years older than he is, too."

"You could adopt."

Maya shook her head. "I would be fine with that, but…it's okay, Lee. It would be different if I was in love with Sam, but I'm not." She looked down at her food. "I still haven't…gotten over…I can't forget this soon…not like others I know."

"What does that mean?"

Maya's voice took on a hard tone. "Laura and your father. I know it's none of my business, but…"

Lee held up his hand. "My father wouldn't do that considering…"

"Considering what? That it's only been four and a half months since John died? That he and John were friends? What, Lee?"

"I just don't think he would do something like that."

"I disagree. I saw the way he and Laura were looking at each other last night. I know what kind of relationship they once had."

Lee felt his jaw tighten. "I think you've misjudged both of them."

"How could Laura forget John like that?" Maya asked passionately.

"I'm sure she hasn't forgotten him. I was at their wedding. I've never seen two people more in love."

"After Peter was killed in the bombing, I thought of him _every day_. I _mourned_ him. It's been over five years and I still think about him." Maya shook her head sadly and said, "I just don't understand how Laura can move on so soon."

"We all grieve in different ways. We don't all follow the same timetable."

She sat for a minute without speaking. "You're right. It's not my place to judge how others handle their grief."

He nodded. They ate the rest of the meal in silence.

"That was good," Lee said. "Thank you for asking me to stay."

"I'm sorry if what I said about your father and Laura offended you."

"You're entitled to your opinion."

She reached out and put her hand briefly on his arm. "Kara loves you. You mustn't ever think of what she did as deserting you."

Their eyes met and locked. Maya was very intuitive. "No. I don't think that," Lee finally said.

"I don't know exactly where she went, but I do know why."

Lee found that his pulse had quickened. "She told you?"

"No. But she told Brae and he told me."

"I don't understand."

Maya walked into the sitting room and came back with Braedon on her hip again.

"Tell Lee where Kara went," Maya said to him.

Braedon pointed to the ceiling. "Staz."

"Stars," Maya interpreted. "Now tell Lee why Kara went to the stars."

Braedon smiled. "Bwing Dada home."

TBC…


	5. Be Tough

Chapter 5

Be Tough

_Bored and restless the gods sat upon Kobol's high mountain as they had__  
__Since the Universe was young and the primal forces of creation had made them.__  
__Later they would argue among themselves about whose idea it had been__  
__To create a pair of mortals in their own image and give them a home in a garden__  
__That lay below the mountain, a garden of every possible and wonderous delight._

_Hera blamed her husband Zeus and his brother Posiden for throwing__  
__Thunderbolt and Trident in a drunken game and striking the spark.__  
__Zeus mumbled that it had happened in the fire of a kiss between__  
__The lovers Ares and Aphrodite, god of War and goddess of Love._

_Athena the wise knew they had all played a part and all bore the blame.__  
__The virgin Artemis sat with her twin Apollo, the Moon and the Sun,__  
__The Huntress and the Healer and looked upon their collective creation,__  
__As Man and Woman stood at the garden's edge and took__  
__Their first steps into love and folly and immortality._

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

_._

Laura sat with her Vice-President Scott Mickelson and her Attorney General Romo Lampkin in the private dining room of the Capitol Club. The two men were enthusiastically cutting into pieces of rum cheesecake, the specialty desert of the house. Laura had refused the desert and sipped from her second cup of tea. After spending the entire meal discussing issues currently facing the government, conversation had finally lagged.

Edgar Myles, her chief of security, walked over to the table.

"Tom Zarek would like to speak with you, ma'am."

She turned to look at the door. Her guards had stopped Zarek, and one of them was discreetly checking him with a handheld metal detector.

"Send Mr. Zarek over…if he's not armed," Laura told him and smiled.

When Zarek got to the table, his cheeks were flushed with anger.

"I'm a member of the Quorum. Was that necessary?"

Lampkin stopped before he put another forkful of cheesecake into his mouth. "You're also a terrorist. So the answer is _yes_."

Zarek was clearly still angry. "I prefer the term _activist_, but if you're going to call me a _terrorist_, you need to put _former_ in front of it. President Adar wiped the slate clean for me."

Lampkin pointed his fork at Zarek. "You need to put _former _in front of _President Adar_, and a signature scrawled on the bottom of a piece of paper doesn't change a man's character. You may think you're a respectable man now, but I know better."

Laura knew that Lampkin had lost a close friend when Zarek and his fellow terrorists, or Saggitaron Freedom Fighters as he had once called his followers, had destroyed a government building over twenty years earlier. She didn't want the conversation to escalate in that direction. She cleared her throat to get Lampkin's attention. He glanced at her, understood and resumed eating his desert.

Laura gestured to the fourth chair at the table, a chair often occupied by Bill Adama. The waiter was beside them as soon as Zarek was seated.

"Bring Mr. Zarek coffee, please," she said to the waiter. She looked at Zarek. "Would you care for desert?"

"Just coffee."

Scott Mickelson asked, "What's so urgent that it couldn't wait until we meet with the Quorum next week?"

"Tomorrow morning I'm meeting with a group of Taurons living here on Caprica. They want to know what we're going to do with the Cylons you've got in prison. They're not the only ones on Caprica who want an answer to that question. The people think we're dragging our feet making a decision."

"How we ultimately deal with the Cylons is still under discussion," Laura said pleasantly. "As you may realize there are a number of issues facing us right now, not the least of which is continuing to clean up and repair the bomb damage in the city…and the damage that was caused when we got rid of the last of the centurions. You can let your constituents know that an announcement will come from my office the minute we've made a decision."

The waiter carefully placed a porcelain cup and saucer in front of Zarek who took a sip of the coffee before he asked, "Don't you think that decision should come from the Quorum? From representatives elected by the people?"

"I hope you're using the term _elected_ very loosely," Lampkin commented.

Laura ignored Lampkin and spoke directly to Zarek.

"The Cylons were arrested by agents from a special government task force that works in conjunction with the military."

"So you're considering them prisoners of war?"

"After the holocaust they inflicted on us, why would we not consider them prisoners of war? We can hold them indefinitely without having to charge them with a crime or put them on trial."

"The people expect justice."

"Justice or a firing squad?" Lampkin asked.

"Justice for them _is_ a firing squad," Zarek stated coldly. "They killed billions of humans."

"And you killed several hundred. Are their lives worth less? Does it now become a numbers game? Blow up a government building and kill a hundred humans, you go to prison? Nuke a few planets and kill billions, you face a firing squad?"

"You're defending their actions?" Zarek asked in disbelief.

"I'm merely making a point," Lampkin said. "It sounds like you would you have us follow the letter of Colonial law in one case and the spirit of it in the other?"

"_I _wasn't trying to exterminate the entire human race. I was fighting for the Sagittarons, an enslaved and abused people."

"There's no motive that justifies killing the innocent. None. Most of the people who died in that building you destroyed worked for agencies trying to make life better for the Sagittarons."

"Gentlemen," Laura said in her steel-edged voice. "We need to bring this conversation to a close. Mr. Zarek, the Quorum will know the minute we have reached a decision. I can assure you the Cylons will either spend the rest of their lives in prison or will face a firing squad. Those are the only two options. You can tell that to your constituents."

Zarek stood. "It looks like I came to the wrong group expecting justice for what the Cylons did. I'll tell _that_ to my constituents."

Laura waited until he was out the door before she said. "Dear gods, why did Richard Adar ever consent to let that man represent Tauron on the Quorum? Wasn't it enough to grant him a full pardon and pay him a small fortune for getting his band of criminals to work the tylium mines?"

Lampkin used his fork as a pointer again. "The reason he got the job is that he presented Adar with a petition signed by over twelve hundred Taurons _asking_ that Thomas Zarek be named their representative to the Quorum."

"Signatures that were never verified," Laura said.

"And therein lay Adar's dilemma," Lampkin continued. "As you'll remember, Cavil wouldn't allow anyone to travel to Tauron with the tylium barges except Zarek and his men. Our former President had no way at the time to verify that the signatures belonged to living Tauron citizens, but to deny Zarek the seat looked like Adar was being insensitive to the Taurons. They had been without representation on the Quorum since their member was killed in the holocaust. Adar was in a no-win situation."

"Don't forget that at the time the Quorum had no power," Mickelson said. "Zarek was in a position where he could do no damage."

"Which is not the case now." Laura put down her cup of tea. "I'm afraid Tom Zarek will slowly win the other Quorum members to his way of thinking. I don't want to face a group that is constantly agitating for the Cylons' heads on a platter. It's counterproductive. There are so many other issues we should be concentrating on right now."

Mickelson said, "The mission leaving tomorrow morning is going to Tauron as well as the other planets. Could you have them check out the signatures on Zarek's petition? If we find irregularities, we could remove him from the Quorum and you could appoint someone. Then the seat could be filled by a duly elected member next year."

"The problem with that," Lampkin said, "is that the mission leaving in the morning is about determining if there could be survivors on the other planets. They won't spend much time on Tauron since we already know some survivors live there. I wouldn't want to task a scientific mission with going door-to-door verifying signatures on a petition. That's not their purpose."

"Lee Adama and Kendra Shaw will be on that mission," Laura said. "They won't be participating in the science part of it. Lee has worked as an interrogator and data analyst as well as a pilot for the last two years. I'll talk to his father. If Bill has no objection, perhaps Lee could get the process started. He should at least be able to get voter registration lists for the northern provinces where Zarek found the survivors. That should tell us if the names belong to real people or not. Determining whether they were alive when the petition was signed will be much more difficult."

Scott Mickelson signaled the waiter for more coffee. "Good idea. Unless we can stop Zarek, though, or at least slow him down, I have a feeling he's going to whip the Quorum into a frenzy and have them demanding a trial and execution. We'll look like we're Cylon sympathizers if we don't do something."

Laura said, "Zarek might be convinced to tone down his rhetoric if he knows we're checking out those voter signatures."

"Let me handle Zarek," Lampkin said. "It would be better if a threat, even a veiled one, comes from me and not from the President of the Colonies."

Mickelson nodded. "He's right, Laura."

Lampkin said, "I'll also let him know that there's no _legal precedent_ for trying the skinjobs which is something else we've been working on. They have no right to a trial before a jury since technically they're regarded as machines, but he's right about one thing. The people of Caprica want satisfaction and closure, and it would be in our best interest to provide it for them. The longer we wait, the weaker the position we're dealing from."

"What about a military tribunal?" Laura asked. "They invaded the Colonies and were part of an occupying army. I've already told Mr. Zarek that we currently regard the Cylons as prisoners of war."

Mickelson said, "I like it. What do your law books tell us, Lampkin?"

"I can't go to the law books for this one. We're forging new territory here. They're machines. We can probably do anything we want with them."

"What would we do about their defense?" Mickelson asked. "I don't know anyone on Caprica who would be willing to defend them."

"If we go the military tribunal route, their lawyers would come from the Admiralty Judge Advocate's office. Then it's a matter of orders, not volunteering."

"So true," Laura said. "It won't really matter. There's no question of their guilt. Their trial isn't going to be about _proving_ them guilty. It will be, simply put, a presentation of the facts. That they didn't follow through with destroying humanity was because they wanted something from us, not because they had a change of heart about their belief we should all die. Their participation in using their sterility virus on children should be proof enough that their ultimate goal was humanity's eventual extermination."

Lampkin smiled. "You make the job of my office sound so easy. _The defendants are guilty, your honor. Please sentence them._ What do you want that sentence to be, Madame President?"

"My preference for their fate, however we arrive at it, is to keep them in prison for as long as they live. None of them now in prison have ever expressed the least bit of regret for the holocaust. They never made one move to help us like Sharon and Leoben did. While I think it may satisfy the blood-lust of many Capricans to simply put them on trial and execute them, I would like to see them spend the rest of their lives _atoning for their sins._"

"That has my vote," Mickelson said.

"Mine, too," Lampkin echoed.

"Well, gentlemen, our lives just got more complicated. I'll do what I can to placate the Quorum until we can make arrangements for the tribunal. I'll also speak with Admiral Adama about getting Lee to retrieve those voter registration lists."

"The admiral should have been with us tonight," Mickelson said. "I miss his take on matters when he's not here."

"He's having dinner with his son. Lee leaves early tomorrow morning on the _Penelope_."

"Be wary of Tom Zarek," Lampkin said to Laura. "The man has an agenda. He's trying to make a name for himself. I think he has his eye on an office a bit higher than a seat on the Quorum."

"The gods forbid," Mickelson said. "All we need is a charismatic former terrorist throwing his hat into the ring in the next Presidential election."

When they left the restaurant, Lampkin walked with Laura and her security team to her waiting limo. "Dr. Gaius Baltar paid me a visit this morning and brought me a letter for his Cylon lover. It's quite touching."

"You've read it obviously."

"Every word. I made several copies before I allowed the good doctor to seal it in an envelope."

"He didn't waste any time getting you that letter. It's been what? Two days?"

"He's in a hurry. He also got a job on the _Penelope_. The head scientist hired him."

"Doing what?" Laura asked in surprise.

"He didn't say and I didn't ask. Dr. Baltar was living quite well when he was working for the government. Warehouse preaching doesn't pay the rent. He did say that he hoped his willingness to accept a dangerous job would be taken into consideration when he returns. He wants to see his Cylon."

"I question how truly dangerous the job might be, but his action might actually work in our favor. I'd like to go with you when you take the letter to her. Not to be in the room when you question her but to observe. I haven't been down to the bunker prison since the day after…" Laura twisted her ring and took a deep breath. "Since the day after I lost my husband."

Lampkin said in a somber tone, "We can record the interview for you to watch. You don't have to go down there. You don't have to put yourself through that."

"No, I want to watch it _live_, so to speak."

"You're sure you're up to it?"

"Yes. Bring the letter and the copies to my office after lunch tomorrow. I'll have my secretary call in the morning to set up our trip to the bunker." She started to get in the car and then turned back around. "When we hold the military tribunal, do we try them individually or together?"

Lampkin thought for a moment. "Again we don't have a precedent. They pride themselves on their _democratic_ way of governing, but Cavil always seemed to be the one who controlled everything. He was the man in charge. The others simply pursued their own interests. But it doesn't matter, does it, if they're all to spend the rest of their lives in prison…or all face a firing squad."

Laura said, "No. It doesn't matter. I wonder how their creators managed to make such attractive females and such average-looking males."

Lampkin smiled. "I think their creators were all men. They were indulging in wish-fulfillment with the women and making sure they had no competition with the men."

"Perhaps you're right. Certainly you remember the way Natasi would often dress like a high-class hooker. I'll never forget one time I went to see Dr. Baltar and she came in. She was wearing a short black skirt and sheer top over a black bra. Everything about her screamed _sex_. I'm sure in their creators' eyes it _humanized_ her to make her the object of men's lust."

"I'm sure many men looked at her and felt nothing but that."

"You know there were times I actually felt sorry for her. I think her monotheistic beliefs, misguided as they might be, are sincere. If she could have just toned down the _in-your-face sexuality _then she might had done better at getting her message across, certainly to those college students at the university, but I suppose it was in her programming. I suppose it was something she couldn't overcome."

"I thought her purpose was to seduce Dr. Baltar into wanting to work with the Cylons on the hybrid baby project."

"You're right, Romo. That _was_ her original purpose. She obviously succeeded very well in getting his cooperation."

"I have a feeling that if we allow him to visit her, the next thing he'll ask for is conjugal rights."

"There's no reason not to dangle that carrot when you talk to her tomorrow."

"Would you really consider it?"

Laura smiled. "I don't know, but if she _thinks_ it's on the table, she may be more cooperative in answering your questions."

"Seductress that she is, I wonder why she hasn't tried her charm on her guards."

"The guards are rotated on a regular basis. We don't want any romances or allegiances forming. We also have them under constant electronic surveillance to make sure no one tries to…take advantage of them, either. While I despise what they did, I won't condone ill treatment of them."

"That's commendable of you," Lampkin said. "I'm sure they haven't been so humane to their prisoners." He waited while Edgar held the back door of her car open and she was seated inside. "Tomorrow after lunch, then. I'll see what I can get the Cylon to divulge about their homeworld."

"I'll be waiting." Laura smiled. "If you question Natasi with the same fervor you attacked your cheesecake tonight, I'm in for a treat."

"I'll see what I can do."

"And Romo, the Capital Club's desert forks are sterling silver. I certainly hope yours is not in your jacket pocket right now."

His kleptomania had become a private joke between them. He usually returned everything he took, but not before he had taken something else. Lampkin patted his pocket and began laughing as he strolled off down the street.

…

Lee sat in a booth at Channing's on Thursday evening and glanced at his watch again. His father was over thirty minutes late. The waitress came by and refilled Lee's cup of coffee again. To pass the time and keep his mind off Kara's predicament, he forced his thoughts to the briefing out at the base earlier in the afternoon.

The meeting was held in an auditorium in the admin building. Lee sat on the third row from the front. Just before the meeting started, he glanced around. Of the assembled group most were civilians. He saw only four other duty-blue uniforms and recognized only one person, Kendra Shaw. He wouldn't have recognized her except that he had been introduced to her at Laura's inaugural dance. While Kara was getting drinks for them and talking to his father, Kendra's mother had brought Kendra over and introduced him as _Admiral Adama's oldest son_. Kendra had been polite, but the look on her face had told Lee that she wasn't happy being ushered around the inaugural crowd by her mother for the sole purpose of being introduced to her mother's friends and political acquaintances. As far as Lee had been able to tell, Kendra had not had a date for the dance. There was no _Mr. Shaw_ in evidence either, and Lee guessed that Kendra's mother was either divorced or widowed.

In the briefing earlier that afternoon, Kendra was sitting alone on a row near the back with her arms crossed and a look on her face that said she wasn't happy about being there either. Although Bill had said otherwise, Lee still thought of his assignment as punishment. He wondered if Kendra felt the same way. Before he turned back around, Kendra glanced at him. He nodded and she gave him a half-smile and a shrug.

A colonel that he didn't know got up and gave them the short version of the purpose of the mission. He didn't have to go into much detail. They were all aware of why they were going. Most of those attending the meeting were either the technicians who would operate atmospheric radiation detection equipment or the scientists who would analyze the data. Others technicians would monitor for radio signals or other electronic activity. There were a few medical personnel, too. Lee recognized their light green uniform shirts. His father had told him that they were all radiation specialists, but they weren't for rescued survivors. They were for treating the crew if necessary. This mission wasn't about rescue as Lee had first thought. It was about determining if anyone could possibly be alive to rescue.

When the colonel sat down, the chief scientist got up and introduced himself. Dr. Langley Nylund was tall and wiry with slightly stooped shoulders and thick silver hair. He was wearing glasses with thin black rims that he removed and stuck in his jacket pocket before he began to speak. Nylund had a pronounced accent and Lee finally decided he was from Leonis. Lee then zoned out as he had for much of the colonel's speech. He didn't need to hear predictions of what they would probably find on the other planets. He started paying attention again when Dr. Nylund referred to the honor he felt at being _the leader of this worthwhile mission_. Lee knew how that would go over with Commander Helena Cain. As Dr. Nylund concluded speaking, Lee realized that his position as liaison between the two might be more difficult than he had thought.

When Dr. Nylund sat down, Commander Cain walked to the podium and explained the _Galactica's _role to the non-military personnel. Her explanation was as brief and as dry as the colonel's. Galactica was basically the _Penelope's_ guard dog, her protector. Cain made one thing very clear, though, and that was the crew of the _Penelope, _including Dr. Nylund and his scientists and technicians, took their orders from her.

When the meeting ended, several people in his row stopped to chat with people in front of them. By the time Lee reached the aisle, Kendra was gone. Glancing around at those who had lingered in the auditorium, he saw someone else that he knew, someone who had come in late, Dr. Gaius Baltar. As Lee watched, Baltar made his way down the aisle to Dr. Nylund. The two men greeted each other warmly, shook hands and began talking.

Behind him a female voice said, "Lieutenant Adama."

He turned and found Commander Cain standing in the aisle. He immediately came to attention.

"As you were. I understand from the admiral that you and I will be running this mission."

"I don't think that was my father's intention, sir. I'm a liaison, nothing more."

She smiled. "He thinks a great deal of your diplomatic skills to have put you in that position. Nylund is a brilliant scientist but he's difficult to deal with on a personal level."

"I hope my father's faith is warranted, sir. This is all new to me."

"You'll be coordinating the _Penelope's_ operations that need support from the _Galactica_. Tomorrow morning we'll meet and I'll explain about the Marine escorts for any missions to the planets' surfaces. In the beginning we will err on the side of caution and send escorts with all expeditions…providing radiation levels allow it. Later we may be able to make adjustments. I don't want to expose my Marines unnecessarily. That's where I'm counting on your feedback."

"I'll do my best, sir."

"I received a last minute addition to the _Penelope's_ crew this morning…Lieutenant Kendra Shaw. What can you tell me about her other than that she's Marta Shaw's daughter."

"Nothing, sir. I've only met her once."

"Academy graduate, third in her class, assigned to the Ministry of Defense for the last two years. As far as I can tell she has no clear-cut assignment on the _Penelope_." Cain gave him a pointed look.

_No, no, please, no_, Lee was thinking.

"How would you like an assistant?" Cain asked.

"I doubt my position warrants an assistant, sir."

Cain smiled again. "Nevertheless, you just got one. The admiral said Lieutenant Shaw's assignment was up to me. I'm sure you can find something to keep her busy."

Lee tried to keep his voice positive. "I'll do my best, sir."

"I'm sure you will, Lieutenant Adama. I'll see you in the morning."

Lee walked over to introduce himself to Dr. Nylund who was still talking to Gaius Baltar.

Baltar turned to him and said in a sullen tone, "I didn't know _you_ were going to be on this mission. Here to report everything to your father?"

Lee ignored Baltar's question. "I didn't know _you_ were a part of the mission, either," he said. He looked at Dr. Nylund. "I'm Lee Adama. I'll be helping coordinate any surface missions with the _Galactica's_ Marines."

Dr. Nylund studied him. The silence stretched. Finally he said, "So you're the admiral's boy. I'd expected someone older."

"I graduated from the Academy three years ago."

"What's your field of expertise? Chemistry like Dr. Baltar?"

"No, sir. I'm a pilot."

"Why did a pilot get assigned to this mission?"

Lee managed a tight smile. "You'll have to ask my father."

Nylund chuckled. "You must have done something to incur his wrath. It seems that everyone in the military has come to his assignment on the _Penelope_ kicking and screaming. Or is it as Dr. Baltar suggests…you will function as your father's eyes and ears, a spy among us?"

Lee couldn't decide if Nylund was serious or joking. "I support the purpose of this mission a hundred percent," Lee answered.

"Spoken like a true diplomat." Nylund glanced at Admiral Cain who stood talking to the colonel. "One of us has a reputation for being difficult." He didn't have to say anything else. He just smiled.

Lee now leaned his head against the booth in Channing's and shut his eyes. That's all he needed. A war brewing between Nylund and Cain, a suspicious and sulking Gaius Baltar and an assistant who was politically connected and who didn't want to be on the mission any more than he did. On top of everything else, he had the Nereid material to read and study. On their return his father would expect his ideas on how to approach the mission. He didn't want to make any stupid mistakes in his assessment of the situation either.

Bill walked through the door of Channing's. The cute waitress was at their booth by the time that the admiral got seated.

"Coffee," Bill said before she had a chance to ask.

After she had brought the admiral's coffee, she started to refill Lee's. He shook his head and put his hand over his cup. Channing's coffee was strong. He knew he had to finish packing and get to bed early. He had to be at the airbase before 06:00 in the morning. That's when the shuttle taking them up to the _Penelope_ left.

"Sorry I'm late, son," Bill said.

"No problem."

"Have you ordered dinner?"

"Not yet."

The waitress got out her order pad, pencil poised. "Two specials," his father said to her.

Bill hadn't even asked what the special was.

"All packed?" Bill asked.

"Almost. How long do you think we'll be gone?"

"Roughly six weeks. I don't think it will take longer than that. My experts say four days per planet to scan for radiation levels. I've got two medical ships on stand-by. If you happen to find survivors, those ships will be dispatched. The _Penelope_ will move on. Dr. Nylund will want to spend longer than four days on each planet. One of your jobs will be to keep him focused. Don't let him lose track of the mission's goal. It's not detailed scientific analysis and it's not search and rescue. If the scientists determine the radiation levels are low enough for humans to have survived or you find survivors, then other ships will be sent."

"What if we find Cylons on any of the planets?"

"Cain will notify me immediately. We'll analyze each situation and make a decision."

"Did Commander Cain volunteer to ride shotgun for the _Penelope_?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Just curious."

"She contacted me when the first rumor of the mission got out. She was eager to take the _Galactica_ to the other planets."

"Why do you think she's so eager?"

"She's bucking for a promotion. And she might _want_ to find more Cylons. Don't let her demeanor fool you. She lost her parents and her younger sister near the end of the First War. Cain's a tough one. Twenty years ago she and I were both selected to attend War College in the same class. She was the only woman. Some of the men resented her being there at first. They thought she'd gotten the appointment because her family was well-connected on Tauron. By the end of the class she'd won their respect. She never flinched when it came to making the tough calls."

"I saw Kendra Shaw at the briefing this afternoon. How did she get assigned to the mission?"

"Her mother."

"I thought so. Commander Cain made her my assistant. I don't need an assistant and I don't want an assistant. I plan to spend most of my time working on the Nereid material."

"You need to learn to delegate if you're ever going to have a command of your own one day. This will be a good opportunity."

"I never said I want a command of my own."

"You can't remain a Viper pilot and junior officer for your entire career."

"I'm not sure I'm going to stay in the military after my obligation is up. I've got five more years. After that I'm not sure what I'll do. I might even go to law school."

Bill studied him. "A lot can happen in five years."

His father was right. There was no need to try to plan the future right now. Who knew what might happen when they went to Nereid? Who knew what might happen if they found that some of the Cylons had left Nereid and moved on to Kobol or another planet. Lee didn't want to think about the future. Instead he decided to tackle a subject that he knew was going to anger his father.

"I went by to see Maya and Braedon last night. I wanted to tell them goodbye."

"He's a cute little boy. He looks like John."

Lee took a deep breath. "You need to tell Laura that John might still be alive."

"We've already settled this, Lee. I won't put her through thinking John died out there alone somewhere between here and the Prolmar Sector."

"Don't you think she's tough enough to handle the possibility?"

"Her toughness is not the issue."

"What are you going to do if Kara brings John back from Nereid? Are you going to lie to Laura and say you didn't have any idea that he could have survived?"

"You told me Tuesday morning that you think John is dead."

"I changed my mind."

"Based on what?"

Lee faltered. How could he tell his father that he had seen it in the eyes of a child? "I can't explain it. I just changed my mind."

"That's not good enough, son. The odds haven't gotten any better since we talked to Rick on Tuesday morning. They're still less than five percent."

"Are you sure you don't have another reason for not telling Laura?"

Lee knew he had touched a nerve because of the way his father's expression hardened. "That's enough, Lee."

Many months of estrangement had followed the terrible confrontation he and his father had on the night of his mother's funeral. He didn't want to go there again, but he couldn't let this pass, either.

"Just hear me out and then I'll shut up. I'll never mention it again. You should tell Laura before the two of you…take your relationship to the next level. If you don't tell her, and she finds out later, then she'll feel…lied to at the very least, maybe even betrayed. She may never forgive you. You're an honorable man, Dad. It's who you are. Laura deserves to know the truth. She needs to hear it from you."

Bill looked away, toward the windows of the restaurant and the people walking along on the street outside in the winter evening.

"There something else," Lee went on. "Kara told Braedon that she was going to get their father and bring him home. Brae told Maya. It's only a matter of time until he says it in front of Laura."

Bill rubbed his forehead. "It that what changed your mind? You think Laura is going to put her faith in the words of a child…a little boy who's barely sixteen months old?"

"She might if you tell her that Kara put her faith in Yolanda Brenn."

"Don't tell me you've suddenly become a believer in _that_ mumbo jumbo."

Lee was saved from having to answer his father by the cheerful waitress who put two plates in front of them. The Thursday special was meatloaf. Lee picked up the salt shaker.

"You don't need to do that, son," Bill said. His voice was kind, even fatherly. "I've eaten enough Thursday specials to know. It's already salty enough."

Lee put the salt back at the center of the table. He had no idea if his father would tell Laura or not, but he had cleared his conscience. He had done the right thing. It was his father's decision now.

Bill reached into his pocket and put Joesph Adama's cigarette lighter on the table in front of Lee's plate. Without a word Lee picked it up. He had carried that lighter with him for luck on all of his missions.

His father no longer had to tell him to bring it back. Lee always had.

…

The floor of the cave sloped upward at such a gentle angle that were it not for the water running in thin rivulets at the base of the walls Kara would not have noticed. What she did notice soon after she and Hunter started walking was that the cavernous tunnel was rapidly getting narrower and the height of the ceiling decreasing. The noise of the waterfall was soon just a faint rumble rather than a roar. The light from the cave's entrance became so dim that she could barely see. Ahead of them was nothing but black.

"I think it's time to get out my flashlight," Kara said.

"We don't both need lights. Save yours. It's better and brighter. We might need it later. I've got a small one. I'll lead."

He turned on his light, but it was so dim that when he turned away from her, she couldn't see anything.

"Oh, great. You can see. I can't."

"Don't feel bad. You can fly a Raider. I can't."

Kara took a deep breath. She got the feeling that Hunter was enjoying her discomfort.

"That's what happens when you grow up in a city," he said. "There's light everywhere even at night, or so I'm told. It's different out here. I grew up navigating where nights are really dark. Why don't you come up here behind me and hold onto my pack. I'll be our eyes. We'll do this together."

"Why can't I walk beside you?"

"The tunnel will keep getting narrower. There's rock formations that come down from the ceiling in places. I don't want you to walk into one and knock yourself out."

"Okay, I'm on your six."

"Don't go all pilot talk on me. Just say you'll stay behind me and let me lead."

She snorted. "Touchy about the _pilot_ thing, aren't you?" When he didn't answer, she said, "Okay, you can lead." She snickered. "Don't _you_ bump into anything and knock yourself out."

"I won't. I've got the light. Let's go."

Kara wasn't happy about the way he wanted to proceed, but he'd climbed into the Raider without question and risked his life to help her hide it from the Cylons. She was on his turf now so she did as he said and grasped a strap on the back of his pack. It took a minute but she was able to adjust her stride to match his. Occasionally she would catch just the faintest glow of light on the walls of the tunnel, but then it was gone and she was blind again.

The sound of the waterfall disappeared completely. All she heard was the soft thump of their boots on the floor of the cave. She checked the faint, luminous dial of the chronometer in the cuff of her flight suit. Twenty-five minutes had passed since she'd landed the Raider. She figured they had probably covered at least a mile since they'd started walking.

"You have any brothers or sisters?" She finally asked him.

"A sister. We'll talk later. I need to listen now."

"For what?"

"Anything that doesn't sound right."

Kara wondered if growing up on Nereid had given him better hearing, too, because the only sounds she heard were their boots quietly thumping and her own breathing.

Ten more minutes and he broke the silence. "Keep your arms close to your sides."

"Why?"

"The tunnel's getting narrower." He didn't offer her any other explanation.

He was right. The sound of their footsteps had changed. She caught a glimpse of the walls in the faint light. The tunnel had definitely narrowed. In another five minutes the sound of their footsteps changed yet again. The floor of the cave felt different, softer and stickier, almost slimy. The air changed, too. It no longer smelled of just cold, damp rock. There was another scent, something almost putrid that she couldn't identify. She began stepping on things that crunched under her boots. She looked down but could see only black.

"Yuck, what are we walking on?"

"Small bones." Again he offered no further explanation.

Something brushed her left arm. She gasped and jerked it inward.

"It's okay," Hunter said. "It's just the wall of the cave. We're in the last part of the big tunnel now. It's only about four feet wide. I'm sticking to the left side for a reason."

For the first time since they had left the waterfall, Kara felt her heart rate increase. "What reason?"

"The cave spiders like the other side. More holes to hide in."

Of all living creatures Kara hated spiders the most. Her grip on Hunter's pack tightened. She drew up closer to him and their steps got out of synch.

"Don't freak on my now, Wildcat. They aren't poisonous and we're almost through this part."

"How big?" She croaked.

"Don't worry. We're bigger than they are."

Kara started to hyperventilate and her steps faltered.

"Keep walking. The biggest one I've ever seen is about the size of my hand. They're not aggressive, but we're walking on their webs so they come out of their holes to check. That's why I didn't want you using a flashlight. They're freaky looking. They've lived in the dark so long they don't have eyes but they're really hairy. They're not poisonous but Targa tells me they will bite. You don't want to stop walking. If you do, they'll start exploring."

She wanted to hit him, but was afraid to swing her arm. "You damned jerk. You're enjoying this."

He snorted softly. "Not really, but it's good to see you're human. I don't like tight spaces. You don't like spiders."

"What is this…some kind of frakking test? You still think I'm a skinjob?"

"It's the only other way out of the cave. You're the one who didn't want to go out the front door."

"You didn't mention the damned spiders. The size of your hand…is that counting their legs?"

"No."

"How many spiders?"

"I don't know. I never stopped to count."

"The bones…what are the bones from?"

"Mice mostly. Why they come down here I don't know, but they do. Targa says the spider webs smell like cheese. That Targa. He's a real comedian."

"Could have fooled me," Kara mumbled.

She tried to stop thinking about her flight suit covered with huge, hairy spiders but couldn't. She was as close to losing it as she had ever been in her life. She would rather be in her Viper going up against a dozen Raiders, a hundred Raiders. Her breathing had taken on a trembling quality.

Hunter's voice softened. "Just keep walking, Kara. We're almost through this part. Then the real fun starts. We get to crawl."

She clenched her teeth. Her voice edged up. "Over spiders?"

"No spiders. Just hard, wet rock and a cramped little tunnel. Then you can laugh at me."

She thought of her father and what he must be going through at the hands of the Cylons. This was nothing. She took a deep breath. She could do this.

Narcho had said it to her just that morning. _Suck it up, Kara. Be tough._

…

John sat on the edge of his bed looking at the folded light blue shirt and khaki pants that Dr. Silva had just placed beside him.

"I'll give you some privacy to change," Silva said. "She's waiting."

"Is she alone?"

"She has two centurions with her."

"At least she left the goons behind. If they'd been with her, I'd have been tempted to do something seriously stupid."

"You're not up to anything like that, John. You don't have the strength, yet."

Silva left the room and John stripped off the pajama pants and dressed in the clothes he had been brought. Everything was new. He looked at the label in the shirt. It was a popular Colonial brand. There were some shirts with this same label hanging in his closet on Caprica…if Laura hadn't already had his closet cleaned out. He wondered where D'Anna had gotten the clothes. The pants were a size too large in the waist, but with the belt they were okay. At least they were long enough. The shirt fit perfectly. He sat down in the chair by the bed, peeled the paper barcode label off the socks and put them on. D'Anna had brought him a pair of tan lace-up boots such as construction workers might wear, but they were the right size.

When he looked up from tying the bootlaces, she was standing in the doorway.

"I couldn't find a white shirt in your size."

"Blue is okay. It matches my mood. Although I don't usually wear light blue. It clashes with my eyes. What do you think?"

She looked at him blankly. "Why would it matter?"

"I was joking. I guess programming a sense of humor is a lot harder than it seems. There was an old sci fi television show that had a sort of skinjob on it and he was brilliant but his creator hadn't been able to give him a sense of humor. He...never mind."

She walked over to him. "I have something for you." She reached into the pocket of her coat. "Something you asked for. Hold out your hand."

He did as he was told. She took her hand out of her jacket pocket and placed it over his. When he looked down, he was holding his dog tags and wedding ring.

"Your watch couldn't be located. Your flight suit was taken apart in the hopes of finding something after you wouldn't tell us how you got here. It wasn't put back together."

He barely heard her. She had brought him the two things that he cared about the most. He put the dog tags around his neck and dropped them under his shirt. The metal felt good against his skin. He slid the ring onto his finger. He looked down at it and remembered Laura's eyes as she'd repeated her vows to him during their wedding ceremony. Her eyes were bright and shining and filled with love. He let himself believe for one brief moment that he might see her again. He let himself hope against logic that one day he would touch her face and look into her eyes and kiss her.

D'Anna's words cut into his thoughts. "Don't you have something to say to me?"

"Thank you," he said softly still looking at the ring. The symbol of his and Laura's love was where it belonged.

"We should go."

Bianca and Laszlo were waiting in the hall along with the two centurions. Dr. Silva shook his hand. "Remember what I told you." He then tucked a small brown bottle into John's shirt pocket. "Antibiotics. Finish taking them. You don't want a relapse."

Bianca stood on tiptoe and put her arms around his neck. John leaned down and hugged her. When he let her go, she brushed away a tear.

"Thank you both for everything you did for me. You gave me some good advice. I think I'm going to try to follow it."

D'Anna said, "Hold out your wrists, John."

He stood, staring straight ahead and thinking about getting to the city, about getting that much closer to the forest and the mountains and freedom.

"Do you have to do that to him?" Bianca asked tearfully as D'Anna fastened the shackles to his wrists and ran the chain around his waist, then shackled his ankles.

D'Anna stood. "If I leave him free and he does something unwise…like run…or attack me, these centurions have orders to shoot him. You worked very hard to save him. I'm sure you don't want that to happen."

John shuffled down the hall behind D'Anna, the chain forcing him to take shorter strides. When they were almost to the elevator, he looked back. Dr. Silva had put his arm around his wife and pulled her close to him. Bianca's tears had spilled over and were running down her cheeks. John smiled and winked at her.

"The doc's a lucky man. You're a very beautiful woman."

She choked back a sob and tried to smile.

He turned around before her tears got to him any more than they had and wondered if he would ever see them again.

On the elevator D'Anna said, "The doctors seem very fond of you for someone they've known for only a short time. I don't understand their emotion."

"I think I remind them of their son, the one you killed on Gemenon along with his wife and two children and his sister and a billion or so others."

"Their deaths were God's will."

John realized the futility of arguing with her. How did you argue with a software program? The elevator doors opened on the ground floor. He shuffled off. She turned down a hallway and he followed with the centurions close behind. D'Anna was wearing all black today, slacks, sweater and a knee-length black leather coat that just touched the top of her black high-heeled boots. John was six foot three. With the boots, she was only a few inches shorter than he was. Natasi was tall and so was Sharon.

"Your creator must have had a thing for tall women," he said in an amused tone of voice.

She opened the heavy door that lead outside. "Do you like tall women, John?"

In the comings days and weeks he was going to have to win her trust if he wanted to explore the city. He gave her his best smile.

"I like women. Height has never been an issue one way or the other. I like the black outfit, by the way, especially the black leather. It looks good on you."

She didn't answer him right away. Responding to compliments must have been left out of her programming just like a sense of humor. When they got to the back of a ground transport vehicle, she turned.

"I'll remember that."

Because of the shackles he had difficulty climbing up into the cargo area, but she didn't help him. Neither did the centurions. When he was seated on one side, D'Anna followed and sat beside him. The centurions got in and sat across from them. The vehicle lurched forward. Ten minutes later they were at the small airfield. A Heavy Raider was waiting for them, ready to take off. He caught a glimpse of the centurion pilots sitting in the cockpit.

He turned to D'Anna. "I don't guess I could get a window seat."

She looked at him blankly. "There are no window seats. There are no windows."

"Never mind. I keep forgetting that you don't have a sense of humor."

He walked up the ramp and found a seat. D'Anna sat beside him and again, the two centurions sat across from them.

"What's our ETA?"

She smiled. "What is ETA?"

John thought everybody knew that ETA stood for _estimated time of arrival_. He rephrased the question. "How long are we going to be in the air?"

"Less than an hour. Forty minutes, I think."

He already knew the answer, but he asked anyway. "Then the city isn't far away?"

"Not far. A few hundred miles. It's warmer there."

"I'm all for warmer," he said as he remembered his cold cell.

She didn't seem to get that either or she chose to ignore it.

He settled back in the seat and tried to get comfortable. It was obviously not constructed for a human. He was glad when they landed. They were met by another transport and again he struggled to climb up and get inside. D'Anna was right. It was warmer. By the time he got seated on the metal bench, he was sweating from the effort.

Leaving the prison he had been able to see out the back of the transport, but the centurions now closed the canvas flap blocking his view. He tried to remember the stops and turns they made, but there were so many that eventually he lost track. He wondered if they were driving around simply to confuse him.

"I don't guess I get the grand tour." Again she didn't seem to understand. "Grand tour of the city."

"What do you want to see?"

"Statues, fountains, temples, other historic landmarks?"

"Most of them are ruins."

"I like history. I wouldn't mind seeing some ruins."

"Maybe someday."

"Where are we anyway? What planet? Is this Kobol?"

She looked at him skeptically. "You really don't know?"

He shook his head and kept up the lie he had stuck to through everything they'd done to him. "I've been telling you that for months. I was on a routine flight in a Raptor when something happened to the FTL drive. I know I'm not on Caprica, but I don't know where I am or how I got here."

"It's our birthplace."

"We're on the Cylon homeworld?"

"You act surprised."

"Maybe that's because I am."

His surprise, though, was at her admission of it. She had opened the door for more questions, but he didn't want to act too eager. He didn't want to make her suspicious. His other questions would have to wait.

Another five minutes and they stopped. The centurions got out and pulled back the canvas flap. They were on a long street that was deserted except for several humanoid Cylons. He saw a copy of Six and a copy of Two go into a building across the street. The streets to his left and right contained ruined buildings in various stages of demolition. Hundreds of centurions were working on them.

"Do a lot of you live here?" He asked her.

"Some of us prefer to live in the city. We have our reasons. I know the doctors told you about the settlements. More of us live there."

"Do any of you live somewhere besides the city or the settlements?"

She didn't answer his question. Instead she pointed to the entrance of the building where the Two and Six had just entered.

"This way."

He looked up. The building was obviously new with a very plain façade, at least a dozen stories tall and made of recycled brick. A small older-model centurion was mopping the tile floor of the lobby.

"Where did that one come from?" He asked.

"We have a number of smaller housekeeping models."

In order to summon the elevator, D'Anna leaned forward for a retinal scan and then pressed the up button. The doors opened immediately and they got on. The two centurions were still with them. They went to the twelfth floor, the top. The door to the apartment opened the same way, a retinal scan of D'Anna's eye.

The apartment was nice, not nearly as large as the one he and Laura had shared, but it was well furnished with a plush sofa and two chairs, nice rugs and even artwork. John stopped and looked around. For the second time in less than ten minutes he was surprised.

"Where did all this come from?"

"Many of the ships we took five years ago were cargo ships. Do you like it?"

"It's nice."

He held up his shacked wrists. Without a word she unlocked the restraints, removed them and gave them to a centurion.

He rubbed his wrists. "Are they going to live here, too?"

She looked at them and then pointed to the door. There was a retinal scanner on the inside that the red eye of one activated. The door opened and they were gone.

"In case you're wondering, they'll remain just outside the door."

John walked to a wall of drapes and opened them. Sunlight flooded the room. A balcony constructed like half a bird cage arched from the side of the building. Two plastic chairs with a small plastic table between them were the only items on the balcony. He opened the sliding glass door.

"Don't touch the metal bars," she said. "Besides getting a nasty shock, you'll set off a very loud alarm."

He closed the door. He had never thought it would be as easy as knotting the bed sheets together and sliding down from the balcony.

"I guess the apartment is monitored electronically like the prison."

She didn't answer so he took that to be _yes. _Later he might have a chance to check it out. He walked into the kitchen. It was small and reminded him of the kitchen in Lee's apartment except there were no utensils in evidence anywhere. He opened the refrigerator. It was empty. So were the cabinets and drawers.

"I think I need to go grocery shopping."

She walked to the door of the kitchen. "Your meals will be brought to you."

"Is somebody going to shove a tray through a slot in the door twice a day like they did at the prison?" When she didn't answer, he asked, "What if I want to make coffee?"

She walked over and stood very close to him. "I'll see what I can do."

"I know you found some whiskey in those ships you took? I'd like some of that, too."

"You've asked for a lot."

She studied him with eyes that were intelligent and blue like Sassy's, but so different, somber yet almost childlike. He realized that she wasn't sure exactly what to do next. She was waiting for him to make the first move. He didn't. Finally she put her hand on the back of his neck. The invitation was very clear. She expected him to kiss her. He couldn't make himself do it.

"The doctors told you why you're here, didn't they? Why I rescued you from your cell?"

"Yes."

She slipped her finger under the chain of his dog tags and lifted it an inch. "Do you not appreciate what I brought you?"

"Look, it just doesn't work that way for me. You're going to have to give me some time to get used to…all this. For a couple of months all I knew from you and the others was pain. I'm still not…I can't switch gears that fast. I'm not a machine, D'Anna. I need some time."

She dropped her hand and took a step back. Her voice was cold. "I told you I didn't participate in what they did to you."

John wasn't able to keep the anger out of his voice. "Listen, if some guy who looked just like me had been one of the ones torturing you almost daily for months, had beat you and burned you and drugged you and drowned you, would you be able to…to take him to your bed and act like everything was fine just because I _said_ it wasn't me? Even being a machine, would you?"

"I'll have lunch brought up to you. The doctors said you'd need to rest after the trip. I'll be back tonight."

He'd gotten a reprieve, but not much of one.

When she was gone, he walked around the rest of the apartment. There was a short hall off the living room that led to a bedroom with an adjoining bathroom. All the windows had bars on the outside. Everything was nice but impersonal. It made him think of a hotel. He opened the closet door. Several pairs of slacks hung there along with six shirts, none of them white. He opened drawers. Inside were underwear and socks and pajamas, sweatshirts and sweatpants and t-shirts, all clothes for him. Nothing for her. He wondered if she lived somewhere else and only intended to visit him. He hoped that was the case. But if she wasn't there much, it would take that much longer to win her trust to the point that she might take him outside for a walk…without the shackles and the centurions. He needed to learn the city. The first part of any escape plan was good recon. He had to know where he was in relation to the forest. He was suddenly confused about what he did want…to spend more time with D'Anna or less. He decided to think about it later. The trip had tired him much more than he realized.

He walked back through the living room, out onto the small balcony and sat in one of the chairs. The warmth of the sun felt good. Even as he let his mind wander to the island and his family, he knew that sooner or later he would have to give the Cylon what she expected from him. His body still belonged to them to do with as they pleased. All he had done was trade seven Cylon jailers for one. He had traded one prison for another…bigger and plusher, and he was grateful, but it was still a prison and he was still a prisoner. They still controlled everything, even when he would eat a meal. Dr. Silva had been right. He had become her house pet and he was going to have to find a way to make her believe that he liked it.

He closed his eyes and saw the island the way it looked from the air as he brought the ship over it. He saw the cottage and then he saw his family there waiting for him. The hope of seeing his wife and daughter and son again was all that mattered to him. He would do whatever it took to keep that dream alive.

TBC…


	6. The Stuff of Nightmares

Chapter 6

The Stuff of Nightmares

_First Man and First Woman took a step into the garden  
And looked around at the bounty their gods had given them.  
A world of supreme harmony lay at their feet, life in abundance,  
Every kind of flora and fauna, jewels of fruit,  
And honey-throated birds that sang in perfect pitch._

_On the mountaintop Zeus looked at Posiden and mused,  
How long will it take them to become bored with Paradise?  
Posiden polished his Trident and answered the question with another.  
It all depends, Brother. How much did we make them like us? _

- Kataris, from A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds

.

Lee sat in the transport ship at the airbase and glanced at his watch. It was 06:10. The warrant officer paced down the aisle looking right and left to make sure everything and everyone was secured. He had probably never had this many civilians on his ship before. Most of these civilians had probably never left Caprica either. The warrant officer continued down the aisle. By the time he got back to the front, it was 06:15.

He spoke to their pilots over his wireless headset. "Five minutes."

Lee had been one of the first on board. Gaius Baltar had gotten on with Dr. Nylund who had nodded pleasantly and bid him good morning. Baltar hadn't acknowledged him at all. Lee had never had any personal dealings with Baltar, but he also knew that his father and the doctor had been at odds on more than one occasion about Baltar's work ethic.

Baltar and Nylund had continued on toward the back to find seats. Lee hadn't seen Kendra Shaw get on and wondered if she had gotten her assignment changed or was going to miss the flight. He heard the strident beeping of the stairs as they were retracted. The warrant officer stood waiting to close and seal the door. Then his expression changed.

"How long?" he asked.

He picked up a microphone and addressed the passengers. "About a ten minute delay, folks. Nothing to worry about."

The stairs were repositioned to allow access to the ship.

Lee had a feeling he knew who they were waiting for. He was right. Eight minutes later Kendra came through the door. The warrant officer took her duffel bag and she plopped into the seat beside Lee.

"I got lost. The signs out here aren't very good." Her tone was not sullen, but not apologetic either.

"Faster your harness," Lee said. "These ships launch fast and climb steep."

"I don't guess they'll serve us coffee. I really need a cup of coffee."

"This is not a first-class commercial flight. You'll have to wait until we get to the _Penelope_."

"So what did you do to get assigned to this mission?"

He snorted as he thought of how Kara had kept him in the dark about her plans. "It may have been more what I didn't do. What about you?"

"My mother is Marta Shaw."

"Besides that."

"My career wasn't advancing fast enough to suit her, but mostly she's trying to get me away from my boyfriend. Having a famous parent sucks sometimes. But I'm preaching to the chorus. You know all about having a famous parent."

"It's not that bad…except when it is."

Kendra smiled for the first time. "I think we're going to get along fine."

"That's good because we're going to be working together. Commander Cain will explain, but we're going to be coordinating the scientific expeditions to the planets' surfaces with the _Galactica's_ Marines."

"What do you know about Commander Cain?"

"I'm sure you've got access to a lot more personnel information than I have."

"I don't want to know when she was born or when she got her promotions. What's she like as a leader. Kara was on the _Galactica_ for three months. I'm sure she told you what she thought."

"Cain is a good commander. She's tough."

"Scuttlebutt around the Ministry says she put her battlestar in harm's way to take out one of the Cylon basestars before it could launch any Raiders. Then she jumped the _Galactica_ back to Caprica to help out our Vipers before getting orders to do it."

Lee had heard the same thing…that in a daring and surprise move, Cain had taken the _Galactica_ dangerously close to a basestar in order to launch her missiles into the heart of the enemy. She had succeeded, too. Lee didn't know whether that said Cain was as cool and courageous under fire as some thought or just extremely lucky.

"Everybody was in harm's way that night," Lee finally said. "But the _Galactica's_ Vipers did help turn it around for us over Caprica. We would have lost a lot more if she hadn't arrived when she did."

The transport ship began to move. Lee looked out the window while they positioned for launch.

Kendra said. "I think Cain will be a piece of cake after Mommy Dearest."

"Why doesn't your mother like your boyfriend?"

"He works at an animal shelter. He's saving his cubits to go to veterinary school."

"A veterinarian is an admirable profession."

"Tell that to my mother. His name is Gordon but she never calls him that. She calls him _the dog groomer_ behind his back. She's been trying to get me to date Quorum member Marshall Bagot's son who is a lawyer. He's _going somewhere_ and _doing something_ with his life," Kendra added sarcastically quoting her mother.

"At least my father never tried to tell me who to date."

"Mother thinks six weeks on this mission and out of sight, out of mind will do the trick. You should be glad your father isn't trying to run off your girlfriend."

"No," Lee snorted. "She managed that on her own."

"You and Kara broke up?" Kendra asked in shock.

"She took a mission off planet. With your security clearance I'm surprised you haven't heard."

"Why would she do that?"

"She's had trouble coping with losing her father. She needed a change of scenery."

"Leaving the planet is a big change of scenery. Where did she go?"

"I'm told it's classified. I wasn't involved in planning it. Kara didn't tell me she was going until the last minute. I guess she thought it would be easier that way."

Kendra nodded. "I thought Gordon would be more upset when I told him what Mother had volunteered me for."

The ship was cleared and launched. Lee felt the pressure pushing him back in the seat as they accelerated, left the ground and began the steep climb that would take them to the waiting _Penelope_ already in orbit over Caprica.

"Do you think we'll be going down to any of the planets?" Kendra asked him.

"Us personally?"

"Yes."

"I don't think so. We're liaison officers. We'll be back and forth between the _Penelope_ and the _G_. Why? Do you want to go down to the planets?"

"No. I think it will be the stuff nightmares are made of…my nightmares anyway."

Lee nodded his agreement. The death and destruction of a nuclear holocaust _was_ the stuff of nightmares. And not just Kendra's.

...

John heard the door sliding open behind him. He knew that he had dozed. The sun was almost completely off the small balcony. He turned around. A slender, medium-height man with close-cropped gray hair stood in the doorway. He was wearing white trousers and a white jacket buttoned to his neck.

"I brung your lunch, sir."

John recognized the double-breasted, high-collared jacket of a cook. He stood, feeling light-headed as he followed the man to the kitchen.

Once there he extended his hand and said, "I'm John Gallagher."

The man shook it.

"Aye, Major John Gallagher. I was told, sir."

John sat at the table. "You don't need to call me sir. John will be fine. What's your name?"

"Specialist First Class Macon Doolittle, sir."

He unbuttoned the top three buttons of his white jacket and used a finger to lift a slender metal collar that was hidden underneath. The metal was perforated in several rows of thin lines. Doolittle touched his ear, and John realized that it was some kind of audio device.

He nodded his head once to show Doolittle that he understood. "Something smells good."

A tray sat on the counter by the sink. Doolittle lifted a round metal cover and put a plate in front of him. It was similar to the food he had been served in the hospital…meat in light gravy, potatoes and green beans. There were several slices of dark bread. He remembered the pale drink as having a citrus taste.

Doolittle handed him silverware rolled in a cloth napkin before he turned around. "I'll just put these things away while you eat, sir."

A cloth bag lay beside the tray. Doolittle took some towels and dishcloths out of the bag and put them in a drawer. He placed a bar of soap at the sink before he dampened a dishcloth under the faucet and wrapped it lengthwise around the collar. He was smiling when he turned around.

"It messes up the audio. They can't hear nothing but static now. They'll think you're eating while I wait for you to finish. I remember you from the _Solaria_. You was a Viper pilot during the First War. You ain't changed much, sir."

John looked up in surprise. "You served aboard the _Solaria_?"

"Yes, sir, as a cook. Them stories about you and some of your pilot friends got around. Is the one about you and them two blond Raptor pilots in the shower true?"

John looked down, shook his head and started laughing. "That damned story is going to follow me to my grave."

"So it's true, sir?"

"Unfortunately. How did you get here, Doolittle?"

"I was on shore leave. Me and the missus was on vacation aboard the _Astral Princess_. The Cylons took the ship."

"I met two doctors a week ago, a husband and wife who were on board the same ship."

"It was a big luxury liner. There was over three thousand counting the crew."

"Do you know how many ships they took?"

"Close to fifty is what I heard. Then I heard they went to some of the planets and took people before they died of the radiation. They took other things too…seed and livestock and tractors and such."

Fifty ships tallied with Bill Adama's estimate. John knew that depending on the type of ship, fifty meant there were probably a lot more humans on the planet than Bianca and her husband thought. And if the Cylons had taken others from the planets, the number could go higher.

"I don't know if you heard," John said, "but the _Solaria_ was destroyed during the fighting five years ago."

Doolittle nodded. "I heard."

"There were a lot of good men and women aboard that ship."

"There was, sir. A lot of friends of mine."

"Are there other prisoners in this building?"

"About half prisoners and half skinjobs."

"Do the other prisoners live with skinjobs?"

Doolittle briefly looked away from him. "Mostly they live alone and the skinjobs visit them."

"Men or women?"

"Both."

"You cook for everybody?"

Doolittle nodded again. "In this building. I got a staff of nine."

"Do you live here?"

"I got a room in a building a few blocks away with some others. Nothing nice as this but I'm here most of the time. I just go there to sleep."

"Do centurions follow you everywhere you go?"

"No, sir. The Cylons took my wife to a farm settlement an hour and a half away by air. If I do like they want, I get to see her once a month for a weekend. She gets treated good." He pointed to the collar. "They always know where I am by this. They don't need to follow me."

"Do you deliver everybody's food?"

"Only the prisoners. Skinjobs have their own personal centurions to fetch for them if they don't want to eat in the dining room. Most of my help is like me with families at the settlement…wives or husbands or children that they want to see. Now you'd best eat. They'll be expecting me back soon with your tray."

John smiled. "So I don't get to keep the silverware?"

"No, sir. Just the towels and the soap."

"Will you bring my dinner?"

"Most likely it will be the Cylon woman."

John finished his meal. He remembered the antibiotic that Dr. Silva had given him and took one of the capsules.

Doolittle took the dishcloth from around the metal collar and buttoned his jacket before he asked. "Did you enjoy the food, sir?"

"It was very good, Doolittle. I look forward to more of your cooking."

"Thank you, sir."

"I don't suppose you've got anything stronger to drink in that kitchen of yours than this tea, do you?"

Doolittle said, "I might, sir. What did you have in mind?"

"I was hoping I could order a nice bottle of wine for dinner tonight."

Doolittle picked up the tray. "I'll ask. I can't make no promises. Good day to you, sir."

John walked into the living room and sat down on the couch. As Doolittle left, John caught a glimpse of a centurion in the hall before the door closed. At least one of the two who had accompanied them from the prison was guarding the door just like D'Anna had said.

Lunch had made him feel much better. He stretched out on the couch and within minutes had fallen asleep again.

When he awoke, he knew by the sun that several hours had passed. The ruined building across the street was almost completely in shadow. John stood and stretched then took off the boots, socks, shirt and trousers. Clad only in his boxer shorts, he got down on the floor and managed twenty-five pushups before his arms began to ache with fatigue and he was breathing hard. He rolled over on his back and did crunches until he started to cough. He used to do a hundred of each every day at the Academy gym. He lifted weights and swam laps for thirty or forty-five minutes in the pool three times a week. He had always been lean, his muscles hard and taut, but he knew he was too thin now. He probably looked much the same way he had when he'd returned to Caprica City after months of searching unsuccessfully for Kara five years earlier. John looked bad then and he knew it.

This time he had the Cylons to blame for the way he looked. He had to start getting back in shape, getting ready so that when he was able to carry out his escape he would have the strength and stamina to make it.

He hung his slacks and shirt in the closet and dropped his boxers in a hamper in the bathroom before he stepped into the shower. When he got out, he wrapped a towel around his hips and examined his face in the bathroom mirror. The only new scar he could find was a small one, maybe in inch long, over his right eyebrow. He couldn't remember when during the beatings he'd gotten it. He looked at the faint scar on his left cheekbone, compliments of one of Tom Zarek's men five years earlier. He rubbed his finger over the barely visible twin marks on the left side of his forehead, gotten when he and another resistance member had blown up the Cylon lab. If he stepped back from the mirror, the scars weren't visible at all. He decided that he had been lucky at the hands of the Cylons in that regard. Except for one small new scar, they'd left his face undamaged. But he also knew the months of incarceration and torture had produced scars on his psyche that no one could see.

There was an electric razor sitting beside the sink and a toothbrush in a holder. The Cylons weren't going to allow him to have anything that had a blade. A tube of Colonial toothpaste lay below the holder and beside it a small hairbrush. His hair wasn't long enough to need a brush or even a comb yet. He brushed his teeth and shaved. He didn't get a close shave from the electric razor, but it was better than nothing. The ritual tasks made him feel better. He put on a clean pair of khaki pants and a gray cotton sweater and went back into the living room to wait. In an odd and discomforting way he felt like he had just gotten ready for a date.

How many times in his life had he done that, gotten ready for a date not knowing exactly what the outcome of the evening was going to be? The last time had been when Laura had asked him to President Adar's birthday party at the Libran embassy. The thought of meeting the President of the Colonies for the first time had made him nervous enough, but he had also known that night would tell him if Laura was simply rewarding him for his information on Baltar's lab. Even when she'd asked him to come in back at her apartment, he had still wondered. He'd wondered right up until the moment she'd taken him to her bedroom.

That night had been one of the most profound turning points in his life. They'd made love for the first time, and during their conversation afterward he'd found out that Kara was still alive. He doubted anything was ever going to top that night for him, and thinking about it now was a big mistake. He could feel his body stirring with the memories of what he and Laura had done, of how it always was for them.

He stood up. There was no way he wanted the Cylon benefitting from what thinking about making love to his wife had just done to him. He stepped out on the balcony. Across the street were ruins and beyond that more even taller ruins. He looked up through the bars of the cage. The twilight sky showed a scattering of stars, three of them bigger and brighter than the others…basestars, deadly jewels in the crown of the night.

He left the door open and sat in one of the chairs. He couldn't get used to the quiet. On Caprica, even twelve stories up there would have been street sounds and air traffic. He immersed himself in the quiet of Nereid's ruined city and dreamed of the day he would look at the sky without metal bars in the way.

He knew D'Anna had arrived not because of any noise she made, but because of the way the light coming from the interior of the apartment changed.

"You like it out here?" She asked.

"On Caprica I used to sit on the terrace of the apartment I shared with my wife. Of course our terrace didn't have bars over it."

"What's your wife's name?"

"Laura."

"Laura Gallagher," D'Anna mused. "A pretty name."

John didn't correct her. It was probably better if they didn't know he was married to the President of the Colonies.

"Is Laura pretty like her name?"

"She's very beautiful."

"Does she work or does she stay at home with your little boy?"

He decided to tell her the truth, just not all of it. "She was in the process of leaving her job as a secretary. She'd been promoted to a job in administration."

"What's your little boy's name?"

"Braedon. How do you know about my son?"

"There was a picture in the sleeve pocket of your flight suit…a pretty, auburn-haired woman holding a little boy. I wanted to see if you would tell me the truth."

"I'd like their picture. Please."

"Oh, John, you're always asking for something. Are all humans as needy as you?" When he didn't answer her, she finally said. "I'll have to think about the picture. I enjoy looking at it. Tell me about your apartment on Caprica. Is it nicer than this one?"

"Enough questions for now. I'm hungry. Did you bring dinner?"

"Yes. The cook tells me you asked for a bottle of wine."

Their conversation to this point had taken place with him sitting in the chair and her standing at the door behind him. He stood and turned around. She still had on the black slacks and high-heeled boots, but she had traded the black leather coat and black turtleneck sweater for a white knit shirt that was cut low enough that it showed cleavage and the tops of her breasts. John had always appreciated beautiful women, but she was still a Cylon. Nothing could change that.

He walked by her to go to the kitchen and smelled the faint scent of perfume which surprised him. It was the same perfume Maya wore when she had a date with Sam

"Nice perfume," he said to her. "I've always liked that one. Where'd you get it?"

"From a sister. Her name is Sonja. She knows about these things. She's teaching me."

John wasn't sure what she meant by _these things_, but he let it go. He was more interested in seeing if Doolittle had been allowed to send any wine. He walked into the kitchen. There it sat on the corner of the tray. Doolittle had sent a corkscrew and two wine glasses. John went straight for the opener.

A few minutes later they were seated at the little table. He lifted his glass of wine in a toast.

"To surviving pneumonia, leaving the prison, and having dinner with a beautiful woman…all in the same week."

D'Anna mimicked his move with her wine glass and he touched his to it. Her gaze never wavered, but he thought he saw a faint flush creep up her neck and blush her cheeks. Maybe she did understand a compliment. Caprica Leoben had told Kara that they were capable of evolving although John had never understood exactly what Leoben had meant. Evolution was usually an extremely slow process over many thousands of years. Had the Cylons' creators, whoever they were, figured out a way to speed up the process?

John took a swallow of the wine. It was very good.

D'Anna ate very little. The reporter who had accompanied them on Caprica's presidential campaign trail had a very healthy appetite. D'Anna drank only part of her glass of wine, again different from the Caprica copy who was worldly and sophisticated. Maybe that's another reason he was having such a hard time relating to this copy. She seemed incredibly naïve compared to her Caprica sister.

John ate everything on his plate and was tempted to finish the bottle of wine but stopped after his second glass. The wine left him feeling mellow. He stood and motioned for her to follow him into the living room. He gestured for her to sit on the couch. She complied. He sat beside her, not too far away but not too close, either. He stayed out of touching distance.

The first question he asked was the one he had been wondering about since that morning. "Are you going to live here?"

"Do you want me to live here?"

He hated the way she often answered his questions with ones of her own, but the wine allowed him to control the annoyance in his voice.

"I didn't think I would have any say in the matter."

She smiled. "How do humans normally decide to live together?"

"Fall in love…get married…need a roommate...have to move back home with mom and dad. Take your pick."

She smiled. "I don't think we fit any of those categories…yet."

"Look, I know what the doctors told me, but I'd like you to tell me in your own words exactly why I'm here."

"God has commanded that we increase the numbers of our people."

"Be fruitful and multiply, huh? That's tough to do when you either can't get pregnant or always miscarry, isn't it?"

"Some of us have been chosen by God to carry on our race. I am one of the chosen."

Her answer sounded like religious fanaticism. He moved on.

"Tell me something about yourself.?"

"My model was created twenty-two years ago. I was the third of eight models that our creators made. It was all in accordance with God's plan. There will be twelve when they're through as is foretold in our scriptures."

"So you consider yourself twenty-two years old?"

She seemed confused. "How old do you want me to be?"

"Never mind. It's not important."

"My copy was boxed eighteen years ago. I was only recently unboxed. Is that what you're asking me?"

"What does _boxed_ mean?"

"I had a flaw. Our creators boxed me until they could work on the flaw. They corrected it after they finished model number Eight. Every copy of a model is slightly different. I'm now the newest copy of model Three."

Maybe that explained her naiveté and lack of social skills. She hadn't been around nearly as long as the Caprica D'Anna. She'd probably had limited interaction with humans. Plus someone had tampered with her programming just like they had done with Caprica Leoben's. There were other Leoben copies on Nereid that were very different from the quiet bookstore owner. One of them had tortured him for several months.

"What was your flaw…the one your creators were trying to fix?" He asked her.

"My model was instilled with all our religious history and faith. The creators thought my copy had _too much_ curiosity about God. I killed myself several times because I wanted to see the face of God. That was wrong. We're supposed to accept God's will by faith. It's a sin to want to look upon His face or question His purpose for us. Our purpose is to obey His commandments as is written in our scriptures."

"And that purpose is to be fruitful and multiply."

"One of them, yes."

"Don't you understand, D'Anna? Skinjobs can't carry a pregnancy to term. It's just that simple. They tried on Caprica. It didn't happen. Dr. Cardenas told me that some of you had managed to get pregnant, but you miscarried or had stillbirths. You don't want to go through that. Trust me. Not to mention that I'd be betraying my marriage vows."

Her face took on a petulant, childish pout. "Our God doesn't recognize your marriage vows and neither do we. To us you have no wife."

"Don't you understand that I love her? I don't want to cheat on her whether you consider us married or not."

"Is this _cheating_? Us being together like this?"

"Not technically, but I'd be more comfortable with it if you'd forget the _being fruitful and multiplying_ part."

"Then I should go now? Our date is over?"

He hadn't gotten to ask her but a fraction of the questions he wanted to, but he felt sure that she would be back.

"That would probably be better if the only reason you're here is for sex. If you enjoy my company and just want to talk, then stay."

She stood up and slipped on the black leather coat. She pushed her hands deep in the pockets and looked down. She seemed very disappointed, and for a reason he didn't understand, he suddenly felt sorry for her. Emotionally she was like a teenager just starting to date.

Aware that he had to stay in her good graces, he walked over to her and lifted her chin. He gave her his best smile. "No hard feelings?"

"No." She smiled. "Is it all right if I come back tomorrow night for another date?"

"Sure. I'd like to talk to you again."

She looked at him with her beautiful blue eyes. Maybe that's why she caught him so completely off guard. Her right hand whipped out of her coat pocket. The next sensation he registered was the sting of a needle in the side of his neck. She quickly stepped back, and he saw a hypodermic syringe clutched like a dagger in her hand.

She'd played him, had played him like he was a clueless schoolboy. She didn't seem so naïve now at all.

He clamped his hand over the spot that was burning like a poisonous snake bite. He pressed his fingers into the muscle trying in vain to stop the drug already spreading through his system. His vision blurred momentarily. He felt cold and then hot, some of the same sensations he'd felt when they had drugged him at the prison. But this was different. The walls of the apartment began to bleed the colors of the rainbow. D'Anna blurred and came back into focus. There was a smug expression on her face. A terrible almost uncontrollable wave of anger washed over him.

"Gods damn you," he said, hardly recognizing his own voice because of the fury it held.

He couldn't understand why he'd just felt sorry for her. She was no different from the rest of them, from Doral who had tried to shoot Laura and from Cavil who had told him to do it. For nearly two years John had been unable to recall anything about that day in Sovana. Now he had a vivid memory of bullets impacting his chest, of lying on the concrete runway, looking at the sky, struggling to breathe, waiting for death, praying only that Laura was alive. D'Anna was nothing but a mother-frakking Cylon who had tortured him and who had killed billions of humans. She'd tried to kill Laura and she'd killed Kara's mother. She'd killed the only other woman he'd ever loved.

D'Anna was still staring at him but her expression had changed. "He didn't tell me…I didn't know…I wouldn't hurt you," she stammered as she dropped the syringe. "I told him you wouldn't kiss me. He said this would make you want me. I didn't know."

Behind her the door to the bedroom looked like the nightmarish mouth of hell replete with dancing flames and obscenely writhing bodies. She was right about the drug. He felt an overwhelming rush of desire. She was going to get what she wanted from him after all. Just before he clutched the lapels of her black leather coat and pulled her to him, he saw something in her eyes, something he had never seen before on the face of a Cylon.

He saw fear.

...

There was a faint glimmer of light ahead of Kara. She kept her eyes on it and began to push Hunter.

"Easy," he said, "no shoving." But he quickened his steps.

The light got brighter and they exited the tunnel into a huge cavern with a hole in the ceiling that Kara estimated was at least fifty or sixty feet above them. It was at least fifteen feet in diameter. Sunlight slanted through and made a bright patch on the floor. It made her think of the Temple of Athena on Picon where her mother had often taken her.

Kara stopped and dropped her pack beside her feet. She pulled the elastic off her ponytail, bent over and shook out her hair. Hunter's hand brushed her flight suit behind her right thigh.

"Just a little one."

She glanced around and saw a shaggy spider scurry toward the darkness of the tunnel. It looked as big as a dessert plate. She thought of what would have happened if that spider had crawled up to her neck and gotten into her flight suit. She almost gagged as she shook her hair again before pulling it into a ponytail.

"Check me," he said to her and turned around. He slipped off his pack.

There was a fuzzy dinner plate on the bottom of his jacket. Kara backed up.

"Take off your jacket and shake it," she told him. "But not toward me."

Hunter started undoing buttons. He slipped off the heavy jacket and shook it. The spider plopped onto the cave floor and sat there with its two front legs raised. It looked ready for combat. She had a visceral reaction. She grabbed her pack and walked toward the patch of sunlight. When she was twenty feet away, she turned around.

"It's not following us, is it?"

Hunter laughed as he walked toward her. "It's a blind spider, Wildcat, not a Cylon."

She looked at the spider. It hadn't moved. She walked another ten feet, looked up at the ceiling again and turned around in a circle.

"Wow. This is a totally awesome place."

"My grandparents found it," Hunter said as he walked up beside her. "What do you know about the Thirteenth Tribe who left Kobol?"

"My history teacher at the Academy says the Thirteenth Tribe stopped on this planet and the other Twelve Tribes kept going until they reached our solar system. He deciphered some symbols carved into an ancient stone altar. Connelly said the Thirteenth Tribe worshipped one God and that's why they broke away from the other tribes. Did your grandparents find anything here that says otherwise?

"No. They explored all these caverns and tunnels looking for something that would prove humans had been here longer than twenty-five hundred years. They explored a lot of caves in these mountains. They never found anything. They used to bring me here with them when I was just a kid. It was easier to get in until we had an earthquake fifteen years ago and the main tunnel collapsed. Now the only way in from this side is on your hands and knees."

"What about the hole in the ceiling?"

"Getting to it is dangerous and a lot more trouble than it's worth."

"I guess that makes it safe from the Cylons. I doubt any of them would be willing to crawl to get in here. Can you see chrome-heads on their hands and knees?"

He snorted. "If they wanted something in here, they'd just blow a hole in the side of the mountain to get to it."

He smiled, a really genuine smile, and his blue eyes once again reminded her of Lee. She decided that if he shaved the stubble and got cleaned up, he would be a very nice-looking guy.

Kara laughed. "You're right. They'd just blow a hole in the mountain. That's the way they do things. Nothing subtle about them."

Hunter put his pack and his assault rifle down before he sat on a rock, untied his boots and pulled them off. He took off his socks and stuffed them in his boots. The boots went in his pack. "You might want to do the same thing."

"Why?"

He pointed over his shoulder. "Bath time."

Kara looked in the direction he had indicated. The water between them and the opposite side of the cavern was so clear and so still that she hadn't noticed it. She walked to the edge of a slight drop and looked down. "How deep?"

"My grandfather says thirty feet. It comes from a deep underground spring. Fill your canteen before we get in. The water will be pure until we pollute it."

She did as he said. When her canteen was full, he handed his to her and she filled it, too.

"This water is cold," she said.

"Just wait until you're in it."

"Did your grandparents have to swim every time they came here?"

"No. The tunnel that collapsed in the earthquake is on this side of the water."

He unbuttoned the three buttons at the neck of his shirt and pulled it off. He stood up, unfastened his belt and began unbuttoning his trousers.

"Whoa," Kara said. "How much are you taking off?"

"Everything. You might have some extra clothes in that pack of yours. I don't. Anything that I get wet stays wet."

Kara turned her back to him. She'd spent three months on a battlestar. She'd seen a lot in the showers and the pilot's quarters. She had quickly learned to ignore everything the same way she had in the refugee camp. She had adopted the blasé seen one, seen them all attitude of most of the women on board _Galactica_. This felt different.

Keeping her back turned she said, "Let me think about this."

"Don't think too long. I'm going to put everything in my pack and swim it over to the other side. I'll get yours after I get my rifle across."

"I can take care of my own pack."

"Swimming with a pack over your head is harder than you think. Yours is heavy. You might at least take off your boots. There's nothing worse than walking in soggy boots. You'll get blisters. We've got a lot of walking ahead of us."

Kara took a deep breath. With her back still turned she sat down and pulled off her boots and socks. She stood up, unzipped her flight suit and stepped out of it.

"This is as far as I go."

He didn't answer her. Behind her she heard the splash of water. She got her boots and socks into her pack but her flight suit wouldn't fit. She glanced around. Hunter was swimming backwards, holding his pack out of the water and propelling himself with his legs. She lifted her pack and thought about trying to swim holding it up.

"Okay," she called. "You can help me with the pack. I'll carry my flight suit."

The distance to the other side was about thirty feet. He put his pack on some rocks, turned and swam back to get his rifle. Kara waited, rubbing her arms to keep warm. Without her insulating flight suit, she felt the cold of the cavern. When he got back to the side a second time, she tried to hand her pack to him without looking down.

"Come on, Wildcat, I can't reach it. Do you want me to get out of the water?" Kara glanced down and lowered the pack to him. He was grinning. "I've never seen black lace knickers before, especially not ones that…brief."

"What do the women in your camp wear? Nothing?"

"They wear something, but it sure doesn't look like that."

She stood up and turned around aware that she was blushing. "Lee gave them to me. They're part of a set. Tell me when you get to the other side and get your pants on."

She realized that he was probably telling the truth about her black bikini panties and didn't mean anything by it. She had already realized that Hunter had grown up very differently from the way she had. She listened to the sound of splashing while he kicked his way across.

He called to her, "What you got in the bottom of this pack…rocks?"

"My prom dress and the kitchen sink," she joked. She decided not to mention her mother's pistol.

As if to prove what she had just thought, he said, "I'm not sure what a prom dress is but it must be made of iron." She waited. Finally he said, "Okay, I got my pants on. You can start swimming."

Kara turned and sat on the edge of the water, lifted her rolled up flight suit over her head and slipped in. The temperature was so cold it took her breath. Gasping and trying to keep her head above the water, she did as he had done and swam on her back, holding her arms up and propelling herself by kicking. It was hard enough keeping the flight suit from dipping below the surface. She realized she would never have been able to keep her pack above water.

When she reached the other side, Hunter took the flight suit from her hands and laid it on her pack. He grasped her wrists and pulled her out of the water, keeping his eyes on hers the whole time, not wanting to offend her by looking at her underwear again. She stood dripping and shivering on the side of the pool of water. He turned his back, sat down and began pulling on his socks and boots.

"If you've got some dry underwear in your pack, you'd better put it on. I won't look."

He had not put on his shirt yet and Kara saw four parallel white scars that ran from his right shoulder halfway across his back. There were also two thin blue tattoos that circled his left bicep. She turned away and dug in her pack until she found what she needed. She quickly stripped off her wet tank top, bra and panties and pulled on dry ones. She stepped into her flight suit and zipped it up. The shivering began to abate. When she looked back at him, he had pulled on his shirt and was buttoning his jacket.

"How'd you get the scars on your back?"

He turned around. "A big mountain lion."

"When?"

"A couple of years ago. Targa and Beck kept it from killing me. They got a few scars of their own in the process. They're my uncles, my father's half-brothers."

Kara digested the information. "Yet you're the leader."

"My father was the leader of a bigger group. I inherited the job when he got killed two years ago. There's not many of us left. Sooner or later the Cylons will get us all."

"How many?"

"Seven hundred counting the women and children. Maybe sixty men who are too skilled to go into the forest…like our blacksmith and carpenters. There's another eighty like me and Targa and Beck. When we're dead, the Cylons will take the rest to one of their settlements and make slaves of them. They'll take the younger women as breeders or give them to the human men who collaborate with them."

"What are the blue tattoos on your arm for?"

"A scorecard."

"Girlfriends?"

He snorted. "No, Wildcat, not girlfriends."

"How old are you?"

"I'll be thirty soon. You?"

"Eighteen…and a half."

Hunter picked up his pack and the rifle. Kara sat down on the rock and put on her socks and boots.

"You're young for a pilot, aren't you?"

She picked up her pack and they began walking toward the far end of the cavern. "I went to the Academy a year early. I grew up fast, starting when I was thirteen. It's a long story."

"You'll have to tell me sometime."

"It'll make a good campfire story tonight."

"No campfires on this trip. We can't take the chance."

They came to the end of the cavern and stopped in front of a small, dark opening.

"This is the way out," he said.

"How far?"

"Maybe a quarter of a mile."

"That's not too bad."

"It'll seem like a lot longer when you're crawling."

"Just as long as there aren't any spiders."

"No spiders. It's too wet. They can't build their webs. You'd better get out your gloves."

Kara got her flight gloves out of the side pocket of her pack. Hunter pulled thick leather gloves from his. He then put the pack on his chest instead of his back.

"You need to do the same thing. The tunnel isn't high enough to carry anything on your back. Either carry it like this or push it in front of you."

"Don't you need your flashlight?"

"We can't get lost in there. Keep your head down. Otherwise you'll bang it on the top of the tunnel."

Kara shifted her pack and tried to adjust the straps to make it more comfortable. Hunter took several deep breaths, turned quickly, dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the dark opening.

Kara followed him. Water dripped from the rock above her. She kept her head down to keep it from running down her neck and back. Her hair was soon soaked. Her ponytail began dripping. Hunter was right about the top of the tunnel. She lifted her hand. There was barely six inches of clearance. Crawling was difficult with the pack under her. It kept slipping off her shoulders and she had to stop to get it back on. She could tell from the sound that Hunter was getting farther ahead of her. The quarter of a mile stretched into what felt like five miles. She finally saw light and a tiny opening up ahead. The last twenty feet she had to push the pack ahead of her and worm her way on her belly.

Hunter was lying on his back on a six-foot ledge of rock when Kara wiggled into the daylight. Her hands and knees and elbows hurt. She imitated him, rolling onto her back and stripping off her sodden gloves. They lay like that for ten minutes without speaking. The sun had moved behind the rock face and they were in shadow. Kara stared at the sky and the clouds moving overhead. She listened to the wind in the tall evergreen trees sixty feet below them. The moisture on her face dried. She rolled over, looked over the edge and could see that a trail slanted downward and then switched back on itself. It did that several times until it disappeared into the tree tops. She guessed that was the way they would go.

Finally Kara said, "You okay?"

"I am now. Targa tells me that you got to face a fear to overcome it. I'm never going to get over hating little tight places."

"I'm never going to get over hating big hairy spiders the size of dinner plates."

Hunter sat up and drank from his canteen before he passed it to her. "Let's get moving. We've got a good two hours of walking before we can stop and it's already late afternoon. We've got to get to a certain place."

"Why?"

"The Cylons send out their centurions at night. There's no telling where they might be in the forest. Tonight I think they'll concentrate their efforts around the area where the skinjob found you and your friend, but I don't want to count on it. The chrome-heads can see in the dark. They hunt with infrared." He started down the ledge path ahead of her. "Watch your step. Sometimes the rock is loose and it starts to slide. If you crash into me, we might both go over the edge."

"Then I'll take point," Kara said. "That way if I slip, I'm the only one who goes over."

"Okay," he said good-naturedly. "I'm on your six."

She smiled. "Where are we going?"

"After we get to the bottom of the rock, we'll head off through the trees."

She slid once, landing on her rear end and hurting only her pride. Hunter helped her to her feet and she brushed off her hands.

"I'm okay," she said before he had a chance to ask.

At the bottom of the rock, he pointed the way into the woods. They were in an area of dense evergreens with tall trunks. There was no clear path and she wondered how he could navigate so well. He was walking fast, almost a jog, and she found it was easier to stay behind him. They didn't try to talk. After a little over an hour the light began to fade under the tree cover and Kara could tell the sun was going down. They stopped for five minutes and drank water before setting off again. She had been jogging and working out on Caprica, but she was now so tired that keeping up with Hunter was getting more and more difficult. He was weaving around the tree trunks. Several times she lost sight of him.

"How much farther?" She gasped.

"Not far. Ten or fifteen more minutes. Then we'll stop for the night." He didn't even sound out of breath.

Nearly twenty minutes elapsed before he stopped at the trunk of a huge tree. The light in the forest was very dim now and the air had gotten cooler. She dropped her pack and bent over, gasping. Hunter handed her his canteen and she drank. She was beyond tired, beyond hungry. Her hands were shaking with fatigue. All she wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep.

Hunter said, "Wait here. I'll come back and get your pack."

"What do you mean come back?" Kara glanced up, but he was gone. "Hunter?" She called, her voice showing the stress she felt at his sudden vanishing.

She heard his voice above her. "I'm up here."

She looked up but could see nothing in the dim light. "Where?"

"I'm climbing the tree. Just stay put."

Five minutes later he was back. "You think you can climb it?"

"I don't know. I've climbed a lot of trees, but I'm not a monkey."

"Don't worry about your pack. I'll get it up there. There's hand and foot holds on the trunk that look like tree knots. I know they'll be hard to see. I'm going to get your flashlight out of your pack and shine it for you."

"How high will I be climbing?"

"Twenty, maybe twenty-five feet. The tree is almost a hundred feet tall. Beck says that a couple hundred years ago lightning hit it and knocked the top out. The tree started sending up new limbs. There's an area in the center big enough for a couple of people to sleep. You'll see when you get up there."

He stood on the ground and shone the light up the trunk. The hand and footholds looked exactly like tree knots. She began to climb. The beam of the flashlight got dimmer as she went higher.

By the time she reached the fork, her arms and legs were shaking with fatigue and she had trouble gripping the knots. She kept repeating. _Be tough, Kara. You can do this_.

A small round platform of rough boards had been constructed in the crotch of the huge tree. It was ringed around by limbs that went skyward. She scrambled over his pack and collapsed. Hunter arrived without benefit of the flashlight. He had made the climb twice, both times with heavy packs. She didn't know how he had done it. He now slipped hers off and put it beside him before he crawled over to her. He grasped her shoulder.

"You all right?" He asked softly.

"Ask me in two days."

"You need to eat. I've got some nuts and dried berries. You can have those. I hadn't planned on this excursion."

"I've got a couple of Ready-to-Eat-Meals in my pack. Help yourself. There's some granola bars, too."

He covered most of the lens of the flashlight with his hand to minimize the beam and unzipped the pack. After a minute of rummaging she heard the crinkle of one of the meals and heard him reading, "Chili and macaroni, wheat bread, molasses cookies, pepper cheese spread, moist towelette, one plastic spork. What is a spork?"

"It's a spoon with a notch in the end."

"There's two meals in here."

"Are we going to be on the road tomorrow night?"

"We'll be at the base camp by late tomorrow afternoon. We'll save one meal for lunch."

"So we'll be back by the second day? Targa and Beck won't be sitting around waiting to shoot Narch when the sun goes down?"

"We're actually closer to base camp than they are. We'll be waiting for them. And they won't shoot your friend even if he's dumb enough to escape."

"As soon as I've eaten and gotten some strength, I'm going to hit you for lying to me."

He chuckled. "Wait until we're on the ground tomorrow. Then I'll let you take your best shot."

She was already eating one of the molasses cookies. "You'll regret it," she said as she chewed. "I've got a mean right hook."

He had also taken a cookie. "I'm sure you do."

Kara ate half of the meal, a granola bar and a handful of the nuts and dried berries that Hunter gave her. She began to revive. Carefully she gathered the meal's wrapping and put it in a plastic bag inside her pack. Hunter didn't have to tell her that no evidence of their night here could be left behind. It would be like drawing the Cylons a map.

She knew that as soon as Leoben had downloaded, he had told the others about two pilots in Colonial flight suits. She was sure the Cylons were already looking for them just like Hunter had said. She was also sure that without Hunter and his men, she and Narcho wouldn't stand a chance.

The last remnants of daylight were gone. Through the foliage above them she saw a few stars. The temperature felt like it had dropped twenty degrees. She knew Hunter was cold from the feel of his hands when he'd given her the nuts and berries. As she pulled her thermal blanket out of her pack, she thought about how grateful she was for the insulating flight suit.

"I shared this with Narch last night. I'll share with you tonight. I know you're cold."

"I've been a lot colder sleeping in a place like this."

"So you don't want to share?"

"I didn't say that."

She crawled over to him and they sat side by side, wrapped in the blanket, leaning back against one of the massive limbs that pointed skyward.

"Tell me about the _Hyperion_," Kara said. "Why couldn't they leave the planet?"

"Something went wrong with the CO2 scrubbers while they were in orbit. According to my grandfather it happened less than a month after they got here. They had to bring the ship down through the atmosphere to the surface to try to make repairs. They could never get them working right. Then something happened to the ship's engines. The maintenance crew said the old-style robots sabotaged the system, but my grandfather thinks the spare parts were defective. After they lost the engines, they couldn't have lifted off even if they'd gotten the CO2 scrubbers working. They thought a rescue ship would be sent when they didn't make it back to Libran by the end of the year. A year after that, most of them gave up and started making a permanent life here. Some of them never gave up hope of being rescued, but most of them knew it wasn't going to happen."

"What happened to your robots?"

"Their power packs ran out long ago. They're stored in the ship."

"Where is the ship? I did recon over most of this forest. The _Hyperion_ is big. I never saw anything that even remotely looked like a ship?"

"You'll see tomorrow. How did you know about the _Hyperion_?"

Kara told him about Irina Hoshi and the first mission. She also told him about Irina's journals that she had a copy of on her handheld computer.

"Would you be willing to read some of that journal to my grandfather?"

"He's still alive?" Kara asked in surprise.

"He's eighty-four. He's blind. Cataracts. He and two women are the last ones left from the original mission team."

"Wow," Kara breathed. "I would love to talk to him."

"I think he's going to want to talk to you, too. His mind is still sharp. My mother was his only child."

"Your mother is dead?"

"She died having my sister twenty-six years ago. I was only four. I don't remember her. My father and my grandparents and my aunt and her husband raised me. My sister…she's slow…she's sweet and gentle, but she could never learn like the rest of us. I mean she's learned how to cook and knit and stuff, but she couldn't learn to read. She lives with my aunt."

"Do your uncles have families?"

"No. My father and my aunt Emmalyn were brother and sister. My grandfather on that side had two families. Targa and Beck are his second family. They're not much older than me."

"Do you have any brothers?"

"No."

"I don't have any sisters, but I have a little brother. He's sixteen months old."

"Why'd your parents wait so long to have another kid?"

"He's my half-brother. My mother died on Picon fighting the Cylons. My dad married my stepmom two years ago. I told my little brother before I left that I was going to bring his father home to him. I love my dad. I miss him so much. I stole the Raider and I'm probably going to jail when I get back to Caprica, but if I bring him home, it'll be worth it."

"How do you know he's here?"

"That's another long story. I'm too tired right now to tell it." She shut her eyes and listened to the night sounds around them. "Tree frogs," she said of the cricket-like sounds coming from every direction.

"It's their mating season. They make it hard to hear anything else. You sound like you know something about nature."

"That's part of the growing up young story."

"I want to hear all your stories someday. We know the Cylons nuked all of the Colonies except Caprica, but the prisoners they took have been here five years. No one knows what happened after that."

"I'll tell you…when I'm sure your uncles haven't shot Narch."

"I told you he's safe. Why isn't your man with you instead of your friend?"

"I couldn't tell Lee I was going to steal the Raider and jump it here to Nereid."

"Nereid?"

"That's what we named the planet."

He snorted softly. "Some of my people call it New Libran. I like your name better."

"It means sea nymph."

"Why couldn't you tell Lee?"

"He would have stopped me. His father is an admiral. Lee follows the rules."

Hunter was silent for a while. Finally he said, "I can see why you didn't tell him. It would have put him in a bad position. Betray you or betray his father. Out here you obey the rules or you put everyone's lives in danger. Remember that."

"Why are you fighting the skinjobs and the centurions in the forest? They could wipe you out easy from the air."

"That's a long story, too. Maybe tomorrow."

"Do women fight with you?"

"Not anymore."

"Why not?"

"Since the Cylons brought the humans here five years ago, any captured women fighters get gang-raped."

"Skinjobs participate in gang-rape?" Kara asked shocked.

"Not the skinjobs. They keep a certain type of human around for that…the kind that enjoys it. The highest honor we can attain is killing one of them. That's what the blue tattoos around my arm mean. I've killed two of them. I'm hoping to make it five before I die."

"Why five? Why not ten or fifteen?"

Kara thought he wasn't going to answer her, but finally he said, "I had an older sister. She got captured. She killed herself rather than let them keep doing that to her. I've got two of the five so far."

"Would Leoben have given me to those men?"

"Before they even started questioning you they'd have stripped you naked and staked you out on the ground. They'd have made your friend watch. He would have probably spilled his guts just to get them to stop."

"Is that the reason you came back for us?"

"One of the reasons."

"You have a girlfriend or a wife?"

"Guys like me don't have girlfriends or wives."

"Why not?

"I don't have much of a life expectancy."

"Your dad had a wife and kids."

"That was before the Cylon centurions came here twenty-five years ago. That changed a lot of things."

They sat without talking for a long time. Kara's eyes grew heavy. Her head dropped forward. Hunter helped her stretch out. She had grown used to him by now. He had saved her from something horrible. He tucked the blanket under her and covered her before he curled up on the small platform with his back to her. She pulled the blanket over both of them and thought about Lee. She wondered if he would visit her in the brig when she got back to Caprica. She knew how he felt about his own father and wondered if he would ever understand the love that had driven her to come here to find hers. But most of all she wondered if Lee would ever forgive her, if he would ever look her in the eyes again and tell her that he loved her.

She was almost asleep when Hunter said, "My name is Kyle Franklin. My father started calling me Hunter when I was five years old. I used to kill rats with a sharp stick in the _Hyperion_. The name stuck. Nobody's called me Kyle for years."

"Kara Thrace. I used to kill rats, too, with my slingshot in the refugee camp where I spent a couple of years."

"You're tough, Kara. You got a lot of guts. You don't give up. I respect that. I'm sorry I hit you earlier today."

"I'm sorry I called you an idiot and a moron. It was a bad choice of words."

"Maybe I can find out something about your father. I doubt we can do anything, but I can probably find out if he's still alive and where he's being held. If he's in the city or at a settlement, we might even be able to get word to him. If he's at the Cylon prison, you can forget it."

"An Oracle on Caprica told me that my brother would map the stars on the way to Earth one day. She's the same one who told me that my father had survived blowing up their basestar over the planet."

"We have an Oracle who told us a long time ago that a child would be the peacemaker between us and the Cylons. Nobody believes it. I don't know if you should pay a lot of attention to Oracles. Everybody knows there's no making peace with the Cylons. They want to kill us or enslave us. And Earth is a myth. We all came from Kobol."

"I'd still like to meet your Oracle," Kara mumbled and was asleep a few minutes after she said the words.

The dream was vivid. She was carrying her pack and walking over snow, sparkling and white like miles of diamonds under her feet. She was going to find the _Hyperion_ and tell Admiral Adama that there were people still alive from the mission and that he couldn't nuke the planet. The wind blew the snow in swirling eddies that shimmered in the distance. Then she realized that she wasn't on snow. She was on sand, sparkling white sand that swallowed her boots and made walking difficult. Her pack felt different, too. She reached back. Braedon's little arms tightened around her neck. She was carrying her brother.

The sun had no warmth. The desert air was cold. She crested the top of a dune and saw her father. She shouted _Daddy, wait_, but he kept walking away from her. She started shouting and tried to run, but the sand was swallowing more and more of her feet and legs. She was going slower and slower. Braedon put his hands over her mouth. He had a man's voice and he whispered in her ear.

"Kara. Shhh."

She jerked awake in the dark, not knowing where she was. There was a hand clamped tightly over her mouth. She struggled until she realized that the sound she was hearing was the courting song of tree frogs. Hunter's leg was over hers, pinning her to the platform and keeping her from moving. His mouth was at her ear, his whisper soft and urgent.

"_Cylons_."

TBC…


	7. The Whisper in the Night

Chapter 7

The Whisper in the Night

_The gods who participated in giving Mankind the gift of Love are these:__  
__Hephaestus, crippled god of Fire, homely blacksmith of the gods and__  
__The jealous husband of Aphrodite , beautiful goddess of Love,__  
__Seductress, giver of pleasure, lover of Ares and mother of Eros__  
__Whose love-tipped arrows have caused Mankind so much joy and pain._

_Thus it was that one day Aphrodite left her son under the watchful eye of Zeus__  
__While she met her virile young lover. Her husband came to Zeus__  
__Swinging his great blacksmith's hammer and demanding to know__  
__The whereabouts of his unfaithful wife and the handsome god of War.__  
__Zeus met hammer blows with thunderbolts and in the Garden below,__  
__Man and Woman trembled at the fury in the sky as the two gods fought_.

_Eros escaped his guardian and with the mischief of a small boy__  
__Loosed his arrows upon Man and Woman, piercing their hearts__  
__And opening their eyes to the joys and passions and sorrows of Love.__  
__Hephaestus returned to his forge and sulked, hammering out his pain__  
__Under the mountain and creating volcanoes and earthquakes on Kobol._

_Zeus's wife Hera harangued her husband for his carelessness__  
__And Aphrodite for her adultery and Ares for his unbridled lust.__  
__Eros played merrily at their feet, oblivious to what he had just done.__  
__Posiden laughed to Zeus. Man and Woman know of Love and Lust.__  
__What Gift of ours should we give them next?_

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

_._

Laura slipped on her suit jacket and walked into the reception area outside the Presidential office in Marble House. Romo Lampkin was waiting with briefcase in hand. Laura looked at her secretary.

"We may be gone for several hours."

"Yes, Ma'am. I cleared your calendar for the rest of the afternoon."

"Anything important?" Lampkin said as they walked down the short hall to the portico where her car was waiting.

"Nothing is more important than this at the moment."

Edgar opened the back door of the car and she got in. Lampkin walked around to the other side. After the door was closed, Edgar got into the front seat beside the driver. Laura was just beginning to get accustomed to the amount of security involved in even so small an excursion as a ride across town.

She settled into the seat and glanced at Lampkin who had left on his sunglasses even in the vehicle's dim interior. "I'd like to read Dr. Baltar's letter before we get there."

Lampkin opened his briefcase and took out one of the copies. Before he handed it to her, he showed her the envelope with the original letter sealed inside. "I had him write her name on the outside large enough that she could read it easily from across a table."

"Ingenious."

"That's the whole point, is it not?"

Baltar's handwriting was not illegible, but the letter looked like it had been written in a hurry.

_My Dearest Natasi,_

_I have asked repeatedly to see you and have been denied but have not given up hope. My life has been miserable these last few months without you. I tried preaching at the warehouse but without you to guide and inspire me, I have lost faith. I am undertaking a dangerous mission for the government in the hopes that I will be allowed just five minutes with you when I get back. My fondest dream is for us to retire to a little farm somewhere and live out our days in peace. I think of you often and there are times I can almost hear you speaking to me. No matter what anyone might tell you, never doubt my love for you. Gaius_

"Oh, dear gods, what drivel," Laura said. "_Asked repeatedly_…he asked once. _Lost faith_… he never _had_ any faith to lose. Gaius is a self-proclaimed atheist. _Dangerous mission_…the most dangerous thing he might do is break a microscope slide and cut his finger. I called Bill this morning and he found out that Gaius's job on the _Penelope_ will be analyzing water samples to see what kinds of bacteria, if any, have survived the radiation."

"I especially like the bit about moving to a farm."

"He was raised on an Aerilon farm. He went to great lengths to train himself to overcome his rural dialect and learn to speak with an upper crust accent. He left there as soon as he turned eighteen and never returned. John questioned him about it once. I could clearly hear Baltar's disdain for his humble roots and uneducated parents."

"They died when Aerilon was nuked?"

"His mother was already dead. His father Julius is in a nursing home outside of Caprica City. Two years ago Natasi got him admitted after he attacked several nurses with his cane. Baltar had hired them to take care of him. According to the nursing home staff, Julius is very cantankerous and frequently misbehaves unless they let him putter about in their garden. That keeps him pacified."

Lampkin put the copy of the letter back into his briefcase.

"That's good information to have. I can turn most of the sentiments in the doctor's letter to our favor. He couldn't have done a better job of giving me material to work with if I had dictated it to him. Natasi will zero in on the _dangerous mission_ and I'll take it from there."

Laura smiled. "In this case Baltar's exaggerating has worked to our advantage."

Before Lampkin closed the briefcase, Laura saw a long-stemmed pink rose. John had often sent her flowers. Pink roses were one of her favorites. She could never see one without thinking of him.

"Romo, you didn't…_borrow_ that rose from someone, did you?"

"I paid a street vendor an outrageous number of cubits for it, but I think it will be worth it."

"I'm sure it will show up on your expense account."

He smiled. "Of course."

"You're going to let Natasi believe that Gaius sent her a pink rose?"

"If someone brought you a letter from your lover and a rose at the same time, what would you think?"

"You never cease to amaze me."

"The rose is the opening act. Thank Joseph Adama. I learned it from him."

"He must have been very different from his son."

"Bill Adama has scruples…unlike his father…or me."

"Bill is one of the most honorable men I've ever known. And I'm going to pretend that I didn't hear the last two words spoken by the Attorney General of the Colonies."

"I met Mr. Zarek in the park this morning. We sat on a bench and talked while I fed peanuts to the squirrels. Another outrageous expense from a street vendor by the way. For some reason Zarek saw fit to bring one of his bodyguards with him…Meier. Not a big man, but a tough-looking man…one of Zarek's original Freedom Fighters. They served time together. He was Zarek's right-hand man on the tylium mining expeditions as well. I asked Mr. Meier to take a short walk while I talked to his boss. Zarek asked me to open my jacket and show him I wasn't armed or wired. I asked Meir to open his first. He refused. He was either carrying a weapon or he has no sense of humor, probably both."

"I've seen him before waiting for Zarek outside the Quorum chambers. I think it's fascinating that Zarek is the only Quorum member who sees the need for a personal bodyguard. What did Mr. Meier do when you asked him to leave?"

"He took a walk, but not far. I told Zarek that I thought he was pushing too hard on the disposition of the Cylons. I told him that it was certainly on your agenda and that we have been working on it, but that there were a lot of legal details to iron out. The first thing he asked was if you had sent me to _call him off._ I said _no_. I said the Attorney General's office was concerned about his overzealousness on an issue that has _many_ legal ramifications."

"Of course he didn't believe that I hadn't sent you."

"Of course not. But he's got my denial of it for the record."

"Did you mention the Tauron petition?"

"I told him that if he wanted to speed up the process of dealing with the Cylons, that he might try getting us a petition to that effect with signatures that could be _verified_. Tom Zarek is a smart man. He got the point. Tauron was never mentioned."

"I'm very impressed, Romo."

"That's why you appointed me to your Cabinet. Did you talk to Admiral Adama about having Lee get the voter registration lists from the north of Tauron?"

"I did. Bill is going to speak with Commander Cain since Lee is now taking his orders from her. Bill didn't want to bypass Lee's commanding officer and go directly to his son. That's not how the military does things."

"Involving Cain shouldn't be a problem, should it?"

"No. Bill said he would recommend that Lee and Kendra Shaw make a trip to Quanniq, the capital of the northern provinces to get the lists. When the _Penelope_ reaches Tauron, they can take a Raptor down and be back in less than a day."

"Is Bill going to tell the commander why we need those lists?"

"No, but Cain is very smart. She will probably figure it out. I'm sure she's trustworthy. Bill certainly thinks a lot of her as a commander."

"When do they reach Tauron?"

"It's their second stop…after Picon. Lee will scan the lists and send them back here over a secure data link. I'll get someone on my staff to start looking at them as soon as Bill gets them to me."

Laura leaned her head back against the seat for the rest of the short ride to the bunker prison. Bill had sounded distracted when she had talked to him that morning. Several times she had thought he wanted to say something to her but had not. When she had finally asked if there was something on his mind, he had told her it wasn't a conversation to be had over the phone and that they would talk the following evening when he was due to escort her to a dinner honoring the retirement of one of Caprica's Supreme Court justices.

She wondered if it had anything to do with the somewhat inebriated and passionate kiss they had shared earlier in the week. She wondered now if he had decided that he had made a mistake. She looked down at her wedding ring. She had awakened that morning thinking of her husband, feeling his loss very acutely. Less than five months had passed since the terrible night she had lost him. Perhaps it was too soon. Perhaps Bill had come to the same conclusion. Perhaps he just wanted to tell her he thought they should wait a little longer. If he didn't tell her, Laura decided that she would tell him. He wouldn't take his battlestars to Nereid for many months yet. It wouldn't hurt to wait a little longer.

The car came to a stop and Edgar opened the door. They were at the back entrance to the bunker and all other thoughts vanished from her mind.

...

As soon as Kara stopped struggling, Hunter took his hand off her mouth. While she had slept, a pale quarter moon had risen. It cast just enough light through the foliage of the tree that she could see him. Hunter moved his hand slightly and held up four fingers. She strained to hear something over the shrill croaking of thousands of little tree frogs. Hunter was right. Their mating calls made it difficult to hear anything else. At last she heard what he must have heard…the faint metallic clank of centurion feet and the electronic hum of red eyes that scanned back and forth among the trees.

Kara lay unmoving in Hunter's embrace, their pulses hammering, their breathing quickened, only this had nothing to do with love or sex. This was about survival, nothing more. There was no way they could be seen from the ground, even with infrared. They were too far above the centurions and there was a thick tree trunk between them and those red eyes, but centurion hearing was incredibly acute. She didn't dare move and neither did he.

She had been dreaming and calling for her father. She wondered if they had heard her over the din of the frogs before Hunter had gotten his hand over her mouth. Kara thought again about the fate that Hunter had told her awaited her if she were taken prisoner. She thought about him being forced to watch in an effort to break him and get him to talk. What better prizes could the Cylons get than the leader of the free humans and a Viper pilot from Caprica? She brought her mouth to his ear and whispered, "_Don't let them take me alive_." There was an almost imperceptible nod of his head.

Once she had accepted the fact that death possibly awaited her that night, she pulled into herself and forgot Hunter and concentrated on her breathing…in and out. The blood was pounding in her ears the way it had been that freezing winter night above the Cylon lab when she had looked through the scope of a sniper's rifle and had killed a copy of Simon and then a copy of Leoben. She'd pulled the trigger twice in order to save two human lives, one of them her father's, although she hadn't known it was him at the time.

She forced herself to breathe slowly…in and out…the way she'd done the night they had fought the Raiders over Caprica, the way she had done right before she'd gotten her first kill. Breathing…in and out…heart racing…adrenalin flowing…lining her Viper up like her father had taught her in the simulator…go in fast and go for the kill…never hesitate…never look back to admire your work…go on to the next Raider and take it out and then the next. Breathe…in and out. Colonel Burgher had said it. _A good Viper pilot is made through discipline and training. A great Viper pilot is born to the cockpit._ Her father was a great Viper pilot. It was in her blood. Keep breathing…in and out…in and out, and suddenly she knew that life wasn't going to end for her that night on Nereid. They would fight the Cylons one day for this planet the same way they had fought them for Caprica. She would sit in her Viper again and shoot Raiders out of the sky. She was a pilot like her father. It was in her blood. It was who she was. She breathed…in and out.

After a very long time Hunter put his mouth against her ear and whispered. "They're moving off. I think we're okay for tonight. Go back to sleep. Just try not to have another nightmare."

"I wasn't _trying_ to have the last one," she whispered back.

She heard his soft snicker, the release of tension in his voice. "You're funny, Wildcat."

Neither one of them made an effort to move away from the other. He probably wanted to stay close enough to get his hand over her mouth if she had another bad dream. For her it was simply about connecting with another human being who understood that on this world death was sometimes just a heartbeat away. She had known Hunter less than a day and he understood something about her that the man she loved, a man raised in the comfort of Caprica City, never could. Lee had never faced unrelenting cold and hunger and rats so big and bold they would come into a tent looking for crumbs. Lee had never spent days hunting for food or carrying firewood to cook a meal or thaw drinking water. He had never gone for days without being able to bathe or had to wear someone's cast off underwear.

He had never felt what she had felt when her best friend Karl, closer to her than a brother, had gotten sick with the flu in the refugee camp and there was no medicine. Kara still remembered her horrible fear that the only person who was left from her childhood would die and leave her alone. She still remembered the nights sleeping on Karl's cot with him in the freezing tent, all the blankets piled on them, holding him while he shook and called for his mother in fever-racked dreams. She remembered sitting beside him during the day bathing the sweat from his face and spooning broth into his mouth, begging him to swallow, begging him not to die as more and more bodies were taken from the tents around them and the rats got worse. Kara had never even tried to tell Lee about that. It was hard enough for him just to know she'd been in the camp.

There were still some things he didn't know about her and some things he would never understand. Kara knew that he would _never_ understand her risking death on Nereid or imprisonment back on Caprica to find the father she loved and bring him back to his son. Braedon should have his father watching over him and protecting him and loving him as he grew up. It was the way things were supposed to be.

Hunter understood that about her. He understood the eternal quest to make things right in the universe even knowing that good wouldn't always win. He had seen the best in humans and also the worst of their depravities just as she had. He was a Cylon hunter but he was also hunted by them in a never-ending struggle to survive. He understood looking down the sites of a rifle and pulling the trigger and ending a life, be it human or Cylon. He understood that sometimes it was about crawling through little dark tunnels and getting past big hairy spiders. It was about facing down your worst nightmares, your worst fears, about sucking it up and being tough and not giving up. It was about holding on to another human being in fear and hope and living through the night and being willing to go out and do it all over again tomorrow.

...

John didn't wake up so much as he regained consciousness. He had only one thought…that at some point during the night someone had buried the blade of an axe deep in his skull. The pain was so bad it was almost blinding. His next sensation was overwhelming nausea. No drug in the prison had ever made him feel like that.

He got out of bed onto a floor that felt like the deck of a pitching ship and immediately crumpled to his knees. He ended up crawling to the bathroom where he was violently sick. It was only after he was able to stop dry heaving that he noticed the blood on the back of his right hand. He checked his knuckles but saw no injury, no swelling or bruising. He managed to stand up by holding onto the edge of the sink and found that he wasn't as dizzy as when he'd first gotten out of bed. There was another smear of blood on his chest and some on the top of one leg and on his right cheek. While examining his body for any sign of injury and finding none, he noticed the tremor in both hands. He couldn't stop the shaking no matter how hard he tried.

After his worst night of drinking he'd never had a hangover this bad nor had he ever blacked out to the point that he couldn't remember anything that had happened to him. He remembered nothing since D'Anna had stuck that needle in his neck the previous night. He stepped into the shower and scrubbed away the dried blood and then slid down the wall, sitting on the tile with his knees drawn up until the water ran cold and his teeth were chattering. The nausea was mostly gone by then, but his head still felt like a giant was using it as an anvil. He managed to dry himself and pull on sweatpants and a t-shirt.

Doolittle was waiting for him when he got into the kitchen.

"You shouldn't have bothered," John said as he sat down at the table. He put his head in his hands. "There's no way I can eat anything right now. What time is it?"

"Early afternoon, sir."

Doolittle put a mug of black coffee in front of him. Using both hands John managed to get it to his mouth without spilling any. Doolittle then took a folded piece of paper out of the pocket of his chef's jacket and pushed it across the table.

"She sent you this."

"Read it to me. My head hurts too bad to focus right now."

"It's not a note, sir."

Doolittle unfolded the piece of paper. Two round white pills rolled onto the table.

John's snort of laughter turned into a groan as the hammer came down again. "She's damned crazy if she thinks I'm going to take another one of their drugs."

"You should take it, sir. It'll help the headache and stop the trembling in your hands."

"How do you know?"

"I seen them do this before. It's a vicious drug she give you last night. One of their worst."

"I don't remember anything. Not a damned thing after she jabbed that needle in my neck. Nothing except the walls starting to bleed colors and flames around the door."

Doolittle stood up and turned his back. He put his hands on the edge of the sink. "Most of the time they only have to give a man the drug one time, but a year or so ago there was a tall, good-looking fellow like you. One of the Sixes, the one they call the Overseer, brought him here from a settlement, but he hated all of them. Fierce. I never seen hatred like that before. He was the first man who'd ever resisted her. I think it made her more determined. She kept giving him the drug, had her centurions hold him so as she could do it. I guess she had her way with him. But like I said, it's a vicious drug. After a few months he was drooling and shaking all over and sitting in his own piss. He begged me to cut his throat. He couldn't even hold a spoon."

"What happened to him?"

"I don't know. They finally took him away, maybe back to the settlement, maybe to the prison, maybe they just killed him like he begged them to do. There's some things what I learned not to ask about. It'd be best, sir, if the Three didn't have to give you the drug no more. It'd be best if you just give her what she wants. She's a nice-looking woman. It shouldn't be that hard to do."

"It's not a matter of being able to do it," John said through clenched teeth. "I might have done it last night. That's not the point. The point is I _don't want_ to do it. I'm married. I love my wife."

"Is your wife here on the planet?"

"No, she's back on Caprica."

"Meaning no disrespect, sir, but you ain't never going to see her again."

"I'm still married to her."

"So you're going to be stubborn like the other one? Wind up worse than a palsied old man begging somebody to kill you?"

"It's just so damned wrong! What they're doing is wrong!"

"Nobody's claiming it's right, sir. Not saying as how your wife would forgive you, but then again she ain't going to know it."

"I'll still know about it."

"Again, meaning no disrespect, sir, but how would you feel if it was your wife what the Cylons had took instead of you? Would you want them drugging her to get her cooperation?"

"Why would they have to drug a woman? It looks like the men skinjobs could just take what they wanted without using drugs. Isn't that how it's usually done? It's called rape."

"I guess their God don't condone rape for the purpose of making babies. I guess they think He won't help them if they do that. At least most of them feel that way. I can't speak for all of them. I'm sure that in some cases it's like you said."

"It doesn't seem like their God is helping them at all…drug or no drug. Have you heard of it happening? Any of them made a half-breed baby yet?"

"They only tell me what they want me to know."

"Let me put it this way…have you ever seen a pregnant Cylon woman?"

"No, sir. But all the copies of each model look alike to me. They could be new ones coming to this building all the time and I wouldn't know it."

"What about the human women?"

"I seen some human women with babies. Seen some pregnant ones, too. Most of them live in another building, but I was told they come from the settlements. One of the fellows works in the kitchen said the Cylons don't know nothing about raising babies so they's studying the human mothers with their children to see how it's done."

"What about the babies' fathers?"

"Don't know, sir. I never seen no human men with the babies, just women and a few of the skinjob men, the Twos and the Fours. Never seen no Ones and Fives with the babies."

John took another sip of the coffee and massaged his temples while he stared at the white pills in front of him and tried to think about what Doolittle had just told him.

"Will these pills really help the headache and the trembling?"

"Yes, sir, they'll help the first few times but they quit working after a while."

"Will they help me remember last night?"

"I don't know, sir. You might have some flashbacks for a few days. I don't know how much you can trust what you're remembering. It's probably best if you don't remember."

"Why not?"

"You might not like it."

"There was some blood on me. On the pillowcase, too. I couldn't find anywhere that I was injured."

Doolittle still had his back turned. "I seen her face this morning when she give me the pills to bring you. I think you probably hit her, sir."

John shook his head. "No. I don't hit women, not even Cylon women. Drug or no drug, I'd never have done that."

"Well somebody hit her…more than once by the look of it. She was beat up bad."

D'Anna's face had been fine the last time John could remember seeing her. He shut his eyes and had a brief flash of grabbing the lapels of her black coat. He remembered his desire but also his anger.

"How bad?"

Doolittle took a while before he answered. "She's got a black eye, busted lip, cheek's all swollen."

John swallowed the white pills. "I want to see her. I need to talk to her and find out what I did. Please. You got to help me."

"I don't know about that, sir. It might be best to leave well enough alone for a few days. She'll be back when she's ready."

"Will you tell her I want to see her and talk to her? Her centurion can shackle me and stand right behind me. I don't believe I hit her. Something else must have happened. Come on, Doolittle. You can't tell me I beat up a woman and then tell me to leave well enough alone and wait a few days."

Doolittle sighed. "I shouldn't ought to have said nothing, but seeing as how I did, I'll do what I can, sir. I'm leaving the food. Eat when you feel like it. I brung you a coffee maker like you asked and a tin of coffee. I'll take the bed sheets, too, and get some clean ones sent up."

After Doolittle left, John sat at the table and continued to massage his temples. The white pills began to work. The pain and tremors subsided. He couldn't believe that he had hit D'Anna. In his entire life he'd hit a woman only once. He'd hit Kara's mother, and that was at the end of a terrible and bitter argument, and only after she had hit him first and almost broken his jaw. The fight had happened in the summer a month before Kara's third birthday. Socrata had just told him that she wasn't going to bring Kara to see him anymore, that Kara had begun to cry for him at night and that she was confused about who her father was.

John had felt like his heart was being ripped out. He had told her that he would see a lawyer. She had told him that she had already checked and that under Picon law he had no rights to his daughter. Dreilide was Socrata's husband. He was listed on Kara's birth certificate as her father. She bore his name. John had lost his cool, had told her that he was going to Dreilide and tell him the truth. That he would take her to court and go the DNA route to get the right to see his child. It had been a last desperate bluff. He would never have done it, never have betrayed her to Dreilide that way, but she had believed him. Her face had contorted with rage. She had clenched her fist and hit him so hard it had loosened a tooth and he had hit her back, not nearly as hard, but he'd hit her just the same. It had all been over in seconds. He'd been overcome with remorse. He'd apologized. He'd told her how sorry he was. It hadn't mattered.

Less than a minute later she had walked out of his life for nearly a year, probably the most miserable and difficult year of his life. D'Anna's drug had robbed him of his memory of the previous night, but he suddenly remembered with clarity a painful incident that he had put out of his mind for over fifteen years. Two weeks after his and Socrata's fight, Dreilide had joined a jazz band and had gone on the road with them. Socrata had to put Kara in daycare. John remembered now the hot summer afternoon of Kara's third birthday when he had stood next to a playground fence, smoking a cigarette and watching his beautiful little daughter as she laughed and played with the other children. Someone who worked at the daycare had noticed him and called the police. The officers had immediately assumed the worst. Neither one of them had listened as he'd explained that he just wanted a glimpse of his daughter on the day she turned three. They'd told him that if they got another call about him hanging around the daycare, they'd arrest him. John had been flying for the charter airline less than a year. He knew an arrest like that would end his career as a pilot. He hadn't gone back.

Instead he'd gone to a toy store and bought toys and games and Kara's favorite books and had sent them anonymously to the day care. He'd done it every few months until Kara had gone to school.

Second, he'd gone to a lawyer only to find out that Socrata had told him the truth. Under Picon law, Kara was Dreilide Thrace's daughter. John had no rights where she was concerned. None at all. The lawyer had told him the chances of getting a judge to order a DNA test were almost non-existent. On Picon as well as Gemenon, the family was sacrosanct. Even if he had gotten the test and proved his paternity, suing the Thrace's for visitation rights would be ugly, costly, drawn out and ultimately a battle he had almost no chance of winning. The lawyer had advised him to try to work out something with the mother or forget it until Kara turned eighteen and he could contact her without her parent's permission.

John had tried to move on with his life. He had tried to forget Socrata with her natural blond beauty and blue eyes and the fiery sexual attraction that had always existed between them. Over the course of the next year he'd dated half a dozen different women, but none of them were her, none of them were the woman he loved and wanted. He'd tried to hate her for what she had done but he hadn't been able to do it. She had saved his life in that rehab hospital, and he knew that despite everything, she still loved him.

Maybe that's why when she'd shown up at the door of his apartment almost a year later, he'd taken her back, back into his bed, back into his life, believing that they could still make it work, believing that he would once again get to see his daughter. It had never worked out that way. Kara had forgotten him, Socrata had said, as three-year-olds will do. She called Dreilide _daddy_ and no longer asked for John. Socrata wasn't being cruel. She was just being truthful. She'd shared herself completely with him as she'd always done, their passion unchanged, but she'd shared nothing of their daughter's life.

He'd finally seen Kara again, but only as a spectator when she played soccer for her elementary school team. He had accepted his position on the periphery of her life, lived on the glimpses, the crumbs. He'd put money into a fund for her education and made sure her soccer teams always had good equipment, all done anonymously. He'd watched her grow and develop into a good athlete, watched how sure her aim was with a soccer ball, how good her balance on a skateboard. He'd watched her fearlessness and grace and had known she would make a great pilot one day. He'd loved her from afar, but his love for his child had never wavered.

He'd given up hope of ever being a real father to her until the Cylons had begun nuking the Colonies one by one, and he'd known he couldn't leave his daughter to die on Picon. In an act born of desperation and a father's love, he'd stolen a ship to get her and her mother to Caprica. Socrata had refused to go and had stayed to fight the Cylons. Kara had been with him for only a few hours that night before they were separated again for nearly three years…three years that had changed both of their lives forever just as another dark night over Caprica had changed their lives once again.

He finished his coffee and went to the living room. He stripped to his shorts and began doing pushups. He could remember every single detail of the night he'd taken the Raptor up to the basestar over Caprica, but he couldn't remember anything after D'Anna had given him the drug the night before…nothing except the rainbow walls and fiery door, his own anger and desire and grabbing the lapels of her leather coat.

Doolittle had to be mistaken. Years ago John had made a vow to himself. He would never again hit a woman…not even if she hit him first. The Cylon drug was still frakking with his mind. And Doolittle had been instructed to tell him a mix of half-truths and half-lies. John knew he hadn't hit D'Anna. He might have had sex with her, but he hadn't hit her. He wouldn't hit a woman…not even a Cylon.

...

Lee figured out very quickly that the bulk of the money that had built the _Penelope_ had gone into the scientific labs and equipment and instruments on board. Very little had been allocated to the living quarters, at least not the ones he had seen. When the aide who was showing him and Kendra to their rooms pointed to an open door on one of the lower decks and said, "Lieutenant Adama," Lee thought the man had made a mistake and shown him a closet. Kendra's room across the narrow corridor was identical. Lee had to hold his duffel bag in front of him to get through the door. He turned. Kendra was still standing in the hall with a dismayed look on her face.

"They've got to be kidding. This is somebody's idea of a joke. Please tell me this is somebody's idea of a joke."

Her comment went unanswered. The aide was already gone.

Lee put his duffel bag on the narrow bunk and put the laptop case on the small desk that was wedged between a locker and the opposite wall. There was a built-in fluorescent light above the desk. The computer connectivity ports were in a long power strip just below the light.

He stepped across the hall and looked past Kendra into her room. It looked identical in setup to his. He tried to smile at her. "It could be worse."

"How could it be worse? Some of the kennels where Gordon works are bigger than this."

"I guess they figure if we need to exercise, we can do it in the corridor. It's only six weeks. When I was on the _Triton_ for a year we bunked twelve to a room."

"Gods, remind me not to request an assignment on a battlestar."

"You might want to put down your duffel and hit the head if you need to. We meet with Commander Cain in fifteen minutes and we've still got to figure out where the captain's quarters are. Kara said Cain hates tardiness."

Kendra dropped her bag on the floor of her room. "Where's the head? I might as well learn how far I'm going to have to walk."

"This way." Lee pulled his door shut and they walked back the way they had come. When they got to the bathroom door, one of the male scientists was coming out. Lee stopped. "I'll wait."

Kendra sighed in impatience. "This is the men's room, Lee."

"The bathrooms are co-ed."

"That's just great. I'm sleeping in a broom closet and I get to pee with the boys."

She turned and went through the door but was back out in ten seconds. "I guess you think that was funny. Some guy in there standing at a urinal told me the women's bathroom was next door. What is this? See how dumb you can make Kendra look?"

She stalked off with Lee following. "No, Kendra, I swear I wouldn't do something like that…I really thought…"

She burst out laughing. "You should have seen the look on that guy's face."

Lee let out a breath. "I guess a civilian ship isn't like a battlestar. A guy on a battlestar wouldn't have blinked if you'd come walking in. He probably wouldn't even have noticed you."

"Thanks, Lee. Just when my ego needs a crushing blow, you're right here to give it one."

"I didn't mean…" Lee started, but Kendra had disappeared through the door of the women's bathroom. "What I meant is he wouldn't have noticed you because it happens all the time…on a battlestar. Not that you're unattractive because you're very attractive…"

The crewman who had just come out of the men's room gave him a strange look. Lee finally stopped talking to himself and waited for Kendra.

They hurried to reach the quarters of the _Penelope's_ captain where Commander Cain was meeting with them. They didn't have time to stop for coffee. They reached the captain's quarters on time and Lee knocked.

A deep male voice said, "Come in."

Lee opened the door. Commander Cain and the captain were studying a large video screen behind the captain's desk. The man who now turned toward them was tall with a neatly trimmed graying beard and thinning gray hair. He was wearing a commercial ship captain's uniform. On the screen behind Cain and the captain, Lee recognized the planets of their solar system and the stars they orbited. Lee and Kendra both came to attention.

"As you were," Cain said. "Lieutenants Lee Adama and Kendra Shaw, this is Captain Hector Pontos. He is not military so you don't need to stand at attention, but I do expect you to obey his orders with regard to the running of his ship. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," Lee and Kendra said in unison.

"_Pontos _is ancient Libran," Kendra said. "A derivation of the Kobol root words _pont _and_ os_. It means _father of the fish_."

Captain Pontos smiled. "I believe you're correct, but I've spawned only two. I have a son and a daughter."

Lee saw the smallest gleam in Helena Cain's eyes, but whether she was irked or amused he wasn't sure.

Cain looked at Kendra, "I sincerely hope your Academy education filled your head with something besides knowledge of ancient Libran, Lieutenant Shaw."

Kendra looked straight ahead. She had obviously realized her mistake. Her cheeks turned crimson. "Yes, ma'am…sir. I learned more at the Academy than ancient Libran."

"Good. I have several reasons for asking both of you here this morning. I wanted to introduce you to Captain Pontos which I have now done. And I want to reiterate that I am running this mission and _not_ Dr. Nylund. His teams will visit the planets' surfaces only if I deem it safe for all involved including my Marines. Understood?"

Again they replied in unison. "Yes, sir."

"When we are in orbit over a planet, you will meet with Dr. Nylund at least once per day and prepare a status report for me."

"Dr. Nylund may not have the time or inclination to meet with us every day, sir," Lee said.

"Your father appears to have a lot of faith in your diplomatic abilities, Lieutenant Adama," Cain replied. "I'm sure you can persuade Dr. Nylund."

Lee heard the same hint of something in her voice that he had heard in the auditorium. She probably had little use for nepotism and here he stood only because his father had appointed him to the job.

"I'll do my best, sir."

"I want copies of the previous day's findings and his agenda for the following day. I want to know if there are any problems among the scientists, any differences of opinion about their findings."

Lee knew how difficult all of that information would be to obtain. He wondered if he and Kendra were being set up to fail.

"In short, sir, you want to know everything."

"Very well put. I think we understand each other."

"How will we communicate our report to you?" Lee asked.

Cain paced several steps and turned around. "Good question. I think I'll make a Raptor available for your use. You can bring the report to me each afternoon and we'll discuss it...over tea."

"Will we get a pilot, too, sir?" Kendra asked.

"I was under the impression that Lieutenant Adama could pilot a Raptor."

"Yes, sir. I qualified while I was on board the _Triton_."

"Good." Commander Cain looked at Captain Pontos. "Will you excuse us for a moment? I have something I need to discuss with the lieutenants. Orders from the admiral."

"Certainly," Pontos answered. "My quarters are at your disposal. I'll be on the bridge if you need me."

He left, closing the door behind him.

Cain looked at Lee. "I had a communication early this morning from Admiral Adama. He has a mission for both of you, something that the Attorney General has asked him to obtain. He wants the voter registration lists for the northern provinces of Tauron. After we reach the planet, you will take the Raptor to the provincial capital of Quanniq and obtain the lists from the courthouse."

"Did he say why Attorney General Lampkin wants the information, sir?" Lee asked.

"He didn't say and I didn't ask."

"Should we call ahead and make the request, sir." Kendra asked. "It might save some time if they have the lists ready for us."

"Do it." Cain walked around the captain's desk. "I'm returning to the _Galactica_. We leave orbit for Picon in an hour. We should arrive five hours after that. I'm sure Dr. Nylund's group will be eager to get started, but none of the _Penelope's_ auxiliary craft are to leave this ship without an order from me. Captain Pontos understands this directive. Due to the radiation and radioactive debris in Picon's atmosphere we will maintain a high synchronous orbit over Queenstown. The first air and water samples will be obtained by unmanned drones."

"What about images of the planet's surface?" Lee asked. "Will there be any recon drones sent down?"

"All recon drones capable of transmitting images will be under military control. That's another very sore subject with Dr. Nylund, however since we don't know what we're going to find on the surface, we will evaluate all images first. What happened to the Colonies was an act of war therefore I've been given jurisdiction. I don't trust Nylund's people not to leak something to the press on Caprica. Admiral Adama has made it clear. The last thing we need are gruesome pictures inflaming the public. One purpose of this mission is determining if any humans could have survived the Cylons' attack, not about flooding Caprica with images of horror. Leave that to the men and women who will write our history books."

"Sir, Kara's…Lieutenant Thrace's father piloted the last ship to leave Picon the night after the nuclear basestar exploded. He told me…" Lee glanced at Kendra and thought of the word _nightmare_…"he told me that there was a lot of debris from the explosions of the basestars and the battlestars and quite a few bodies and parts of bodies left in orbit. If the orbit was high enough, they might still be there."

Cain's eyes hardened. "Why am I just now getting this information, Lieutenant Adama?"

"I'm sure John would have mentioned it if he'd still been around when this mission was being planned."

"Since he wasn't, didn't you think to give that information to someone?"

"I wasn't aware of this mission until…. Yes, sir, I should have discussed this with my father as soon as I found out about the mission. I wish I had thought of it before now."

Cain's look was still hard. "I'm going to have a Raptor jump ahead to access the situation. If it's too bad, I'll notify the admiral. We'll bypass Picon and proceed to Tauron. He can send a clean-up crew. Dismissed."

Out in the hall, Kendra said, "I'm off to a really great start with Commander Cain."

"I doubt she thinks too highly of me, either."

"She probably thinks we're both here because of our parents."

"We are."

"Won't Cain have to ask your father about bypassing Picon? Does she really have the authority to do something like that on her own?"

"Apparently she thinks she does. We'll find out. I'm surprised that she'd be so anxious to get to Tauron. She was born and raised in the city of Hypatia. She lost her family there during the First Cylon War when the city was invaded by the old model centurions. Her younger sister Lucy went missing. Cain was at the Academy then, but I think she was home on break when it happened."

"I thought you said you didn't know anything about her."

"I did my homework, too."

"How old was her sister?"

"About ten. Kara heard a story on the _G_ that all they found was Lucy's doll. The story goes that Cain believes the Cylons took Lucy when they left the planet, maybe to use in some of their experiments."

"Took her to their homeworld?"

"That's the story, but you know how things get exaggerated. I just know Cain has a raging hatred of the Cylons."

"That would be a good reason. I'd hate them if they killed my family or took my little sister, not that I have a little sister, but you know what I mean."

"Where did you learn the ancient Kobol language?"

"I went to boarding school starting in the seventh grade, Aerynsun Prep outside of Delphi. We got a liberal dose of the classics. For a reason I don't want to think about, I do well with dead languages. And I don't now ancient Kobolese. The only ones who can still decipher that long-dead language are a handful of scholars. I know some of the ancient Libran language which was based on it."

"I'm still impressed."

"Do you think we can get that cup of coffee? I _really_ need it now."

"I don't see why not. We'll get coffee and then we'll go check in with Dr. Nylund."

Kendra smiled. "That should be fun. I want to see those diplomatic skills of yours at work. Just make sure you don't send him into the wrong bathroom."

Lee rolled his eyes. "Maybe you can tell him what _Nylund _means in ancient…whatever."

Kendra laughed. "A man who thinks fast on his feet. You and I are going to get along just fine."

...

Laura looked through the one-way glass into one of the small interrogation rooms in the bunker prison. Natasi, clad in a shapeless gray jumpsuit that did nothing for either her coloring or her figure, was seated on the side of the table facing the glass. Her wrists were shackled. The short length of chain connecting the cuffs passed through a metal ring on the tabletop, allowing her to move her hands, but only a short distance.

Her tousled platinum hair was clean and shiny. Laura was pleased to see that she looked well nourished. She was not being mistreated. Even though she was pale and wore no makeup, she was still a stunningly beautiful woman. Her creators had outdone themselves when they had made her. For many humans, especially males, Natasi was the epitome of female beauty. When they thought of the goddess Aphrodite, she took the face and form of this Cylon woman.

The door opened and Romo Lampkin, still wearing his sunglasses, walked into the interrogation room. He was carrying only the rose and the letter.

There were two cameras on opposite walls of the room, one trained on Natasi, the other on the chair across from her. The room was brightly lit. In contrast, the room where Laura stood was dark. She could watch Natasi through the one-way glass or watch either of the camera monitors, but Natasi couldn't see her. Everything that happened in that room was being recorded as it always was. For four and a half months the results of those interrogations had yielded nothing as various agents had repeatedly questioned all of the Cylons in custody. Laura wondered if today would be any different.

Lampkin pulled out the chair across from Natasi and sat. He carefully placed the envelope on the table so that she could read her name on the front. He placed the rose beside the letter. Laura watched Natasi's eyes. They finally met Lampkin's. Cautiously she reached for the letter. The chain at her wrists was not quite long enough. Her eyes took on a pleading look.

Lampkin finally spoke. "He misses you very much."

"I miss him," she said softly.

Lampkin pushed the rose across the table just far enough that she could reach it. "Be careful of the thorns. A rose is like the deepest love, but there are always thorns, things to pierce you and make you bleed."

Natasi picked up the rose by the end of its long stem and brought the blossom to her face. She inhaled its fragrance and stroked the soft pink petals across her lips and cheeks. She closed her eyes and her expression changed to one of near ecstasy. After four and a half months in the musty-smelling bunker prison, the scent and feel of a rose must have been a feast for her senses.

"I loved a beautiful woman once," Lampkin said. "Her shoulders were soft like the petals of that rose. I still wake up in the night aching for her, wanting to kiss those soft shoulders. It hurts, doesn't it? It _hurts_ to want someone that you can't have."

Natasi opened her eyes. Tears trembled on the rims of her lower lashes and spilled over. She made no move to stop them. She let them fall and run unheeded down her cheeks.

Laura looked at the monitor. Lampkin's face was unreadable until he took off the sunglasses and she saw his eyes. She believed he was telling the truth about loving a woman with soft shoulders. She remembered the way John would walk up behind her and gently grasp her shoulders. She would tilt her head to one side and he would bend down until his lips touched her skin of her neck. Had he thought of her shoulders that way, soft, like the petals of a rose? A wave of longing washed over her. She still missed him. The loss still hurt, still ached.

She forced her thoughts back to the interrogation room. Lampkin was speaking to Natasi again.

"I know you get tired of them hauling you in here and chaining your wrists to a table. Getting in your face, asking you the same questions over and over, those men with their shirt sleeves rolled up, their bodies reeking of sweat and their breath reeking of cigarettes. Brutal men painted over with a thin veneer of civilization. Just one step removed from our ancestors who carried clubs and took what they wanted. They think that if they yell their questions loud enough and slap the table, if they threaten and get in your face, that you will be more prone to answer them than you were the day before. Impatient men, loud men, the lot of them, aren't they?"

She nodded slightly, the rose still at her lips.

"What do men like that know of aching for a woman whose shoulders are soft like the petals of a rose? What do they know of the _whisper_ in the night that belongs to you and you alone? _What do they know of that kind of love_?"

"Nothing," she whispered.

"But Gaius knows and you know."

Another whisper. "Yes."

"They think because you're a Cylon that you can't love, that you're a machine and _everybody knows that machines are incapable of love._ But Gaius knows better and I know better. You wake up aching for him in the night. You do feel love, don't you? And it _hurts_ because you can't be with him."

"Yes." The tears trembled and fell again.

Laura felt tears come to her own eyes. It did hurt. She did wake up aching for John in the night, wanting the whisper that was hers and hers alone, wanting his kiss, his caress.

Lampkin finally pushed the letter across the table to her. Laura could see the controlled greed with which Natasi carefully tore the envelope. She slipped out the folded letter and before she opened it, she brought her face down to it, trying to catch just a whiff of the hand that had written it and folded it into the envelope. She opened the first fold and then the second. She read quickly yet Laura was absolutely certain that she retained every single word. There was a part of her that was a machine after all.

Natasi's eyes were back on Lampkin. "What dangerous mission? Where has he gone?"

"I'm not sure that I have clearance to discuss it with you."

"Please tell me. What has he done?"

"Let me go ask. Don't go anywhere now."

Lampkin left the interrogation room and opened the door to the room where Laura stood at the glass. "What do you think?"

"Dear gods, you're a _genius_ at this sort of thing."

He smiled. "What do you think about me telling her where he's gone?"

Laura thought about it. "Tell her only that he's leaving the planet, which is the truth, but don't elaborate on the mission. Let her come to the conclusion that it's far more dangerous than it is."

He smiled again. "I'm not the only one who's good at this." He left the room and reappeared on the other side of the glass. He slowly took his seat and paused. His face had resumed a serious almost pained look. "I'm sorry. They won't let me tell you anything about his mission other than he's _leaving Caprica_."

Laura watched Natasi process the information. Saw her eyes widen with fear as she came to the conclusion that Laura had hoped she would reach.

"I see that you do know." Lampkin said softly. "You know where he's going and how dangerous it is. You know how desperate he is to see you now, don't you? He loves you so much that he's willing to risk everything for just _five minutes _of your company_._"

"You can't let him go. He'll be killed or imprisoned."

"Yes, he might be killed _if_ he goes to such a place…and you understand that I'm not confirming or denying anything." Lampkin let the moment stretch before he said, "No one lied to him. He was well aware of all the risks when he accepted the mission."

Natasi's eyes were filled with pain. "Why would he do it?"

Laura thought of John again and the mission he had undertaken. Another wave of pain washed over her and her own tears spilled over. Why had John volunteered for a mission that he had known might result in his death? This interrogation had become as difficult and painful for her as it was for Natasi.

"You know why, don't you?" Lampkin asked softly.

She shook her head. "There were other women for him. He wouldn't take that kind of risk…not for me."

"You really think he wouldn't risk his life for the woman he loves? Wouldn't risk his life to bring us the truth…and keep brutal men from touching those soft shoulders? He knows that you won't be allowed to go much longer without talking. He's trying to protect _you_, the woman he loves."

"Is it too late to stop him from going?"

"What reason would I give them to stop him? Gaius Baltar didn't ask _my _permission to go. I don't have the answers these men want."

"What do you want to know?"

"Tell me everything about your homeworld. Everything."

"If I do that, will you stop him from going? Will you let me see him?"

"If you tell us what we want to know, I will _personally_ talk to the President. You have my word on that."

Natasi lowered her head and picked up the rose again. Laura knew she was trying to come to a decision.

"What hurts more," Lampkin asked softly, "betraying the others or betraying a man who dreams of your soft shoulders and whose love hurts so much he would risk _everything_ to be with you again, a proud man who _humbled himself_ before Laura Roslin to _beg her_ to let me bring you this letter?"

Natasi looked up and Laura knew the Cylon was getting ready to take a step from which she would never be able to turn back. She was going to betray her own kind for the man she loved just as Sharon Valerii had done.

"I applaud your creators," Laura whispered to the glass as another tear slid down her cheek. "They made you much more human than I ever dreamed."

TBC…


	8. The Sorcerer

Chapter 8

The Sorcerer

_Prometheus, a Titan and son of a Titan, wily, intelligent, arrogant,__  
__Listens to the misery of the crippled god of Fire as he tells his story__  
__Of how the creatures called Man and Woman really came to be.__  
__Hephaestus grumbles, I shaped them from the clay of Kobol.__  
__I made them in our image from the rich and fertile earth with a touch__  
__Of blood red sky and the salt of the sea. They were statues, nothing more,__  
__Gifts made to please my kin. Zeus placed my creations in a Garden, and__  
__When the Four Winds breathed them into life, my brothers and sisters marveled,__  
__As if they were responsible for Man's fine form and Woman's shy beauty._

_Prometheus hisses, They disrespect you, brother, as does your wife.__  
__Hephaestus limps to his forge and moans, Aphrodite lies in the arms of Ares__  
__And thinks I will believe that Eros is not the bastard child of Love and War.__  
__She betrays me with my brother and his excuse is that her beauty overwhelmed him.__  
__I gave her gifts. I fashioned for her jewelry of hammered silver and gold.__  
__I placed upon it diamonds and rubies and emeralds and sapphires,__  
__And all it took from the handsome warrior was a soft kiss upon her throat.__  
__She got a golden-haired child with him who is now his uncle's delight._

_Prometheus goads him, Zeus allowed it to happen. Zeus had full knowledge__  
__As did all of your brothers and sisters who turned blind eyes to their dalliance.__  
__You make their shields and their arrows, their winged sandals and their helmets.__  
__You make their swords and spears, their breastplates and fine armor,__  
__You make the very thrones upon which they sit and such is the way they repay you,__  
__Such is their scorn for their crippled brother. Prometheus lowers his voice,__  
__You have the sacred Fire in your forge, given to you by Zeus for your work.__  
__Give it to me, and I will carry it to your creations, to Man and Woman__  
__To light their way through this moonless night. I will give them Fire__  
__To warm their home as Eros has given them Love to warm their bed._

_Hephaestus strokes his beard. Zeus will not let your deed go unpunished.__  
__Yet before he returns to his anvil with renewed vigor, he looks the other way.__  
__Prometheus slips a burning brand from the forge and steals down the mountain.__  
__Zeus tosses in his sleep and has troubled dreams of great cities aflame__  
__As down in the Garden a torch burns bright with the sacred Gift of Fire._

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

_._

Waking to the sound of birds instead of tree frogs in the early dawn Kara had been fine…until she opened her eyes and discovered the platform empty of their packs and Hunter gone. Even her blanket was gone. She had several heart-stopping moments of panic until she crawled over to the edge and looked down.

She saw the two packs on the ground below and as she watched, Hunter emerged from the bushes, still buttoning the front of his pants. She rolled onto her back before he had a chance to look up. She counted off five seconds and looked down again. He was just starting to climb the tree.

"Stay there. I'm coming down," she called softly.

He looked up. "Be careful."

She turned over and wiggled backward until her legs dropped over the edge of the platform and between two of the forks in the limbs. She felt for a tree knot with her feet and not able to find one, she froze.

Hunter called. "Hang on. I'll come get you."

"No. Just talk me down. Tell me where to put my feet. I can do it."

She took a lot longer getting down from the tree than climbing it, but he was patient with her, directing her to where the man-made knots were until she stood on the ground.

She brushed off her hands as she glanced at him. "Thanks. And for getting my pack down, too."

"I think I was eleven or twelve the first time I climbed that tree. I did okay getting up, but I froze halfway down. Targa had to come up and get me. He still kids me about it."

She smiled. "My turn to visit the ladies room."

When she got back, he handed her his canteen. "We'll have to switch to yours soon, mine is almost empty."

She found the last two granola bars in her pack and handed him one. They began walking.

"How far to base camp?" She asked him.

"Twelve miles…give or take a few, but they're not easy miles."

They walked in silence until they finished the snack. Ever mindful of not leaving a trail, she pushed the empty wrappers deep into his pack.

"No more nightmares last night?" He finally asked.

Kara tried not to think about how hungry she still was. "I dreamed about flying. I dream about flying a lot."

"In your Raider yesterday, that's the first time I'd ever been in a ship…one that could leave the ground."

"Did you like it?"

He snorted. "All I could think about was being in a tight place."

"A Viper's not like that…I mean it's a tight fit but you can see out of the canopy on the front and sides and top."

"A Viper is the ship you usually fly?"

"It's a fighter, designed to shoot down Raiders."

"You might have to draw me pictures of these Vipers."

She turned her shoulder to him and pointed to her Viper patch. "They look like this, but I can draw a better one for you. Will I have to scratch it in the dirt with a stick or do you have paper and pencils in this base camp of yours?"

"I don't, but there's a man who does. He escaped from the Cylons not long after they brought the humans here five years ago. We found him almost dead at the edge of the river. He's an artist and a musician. He quotes poetry, too. His name is Daniel."

"How did he manage to escape? I wouldn't think the Cylons let anybody escape."

"He doesn't remember how he got away. He had a bad head injury. We don't have any doctors at base camp. The old ones died. They tried to train others, but like one of them told my grandfather, it's not like going to medical school. We get by as best we can. My aunt is the closest thing we've got to a doctor now. All she could do for Daniel was sew up the head wound and bandage it and hope he woke up from his coma. He finally did, but he couldn't remember anything. He didn't even know where he was…like what planet."

"So this Daniel remembers he's an artist and a musician but nothing else?"

Hunter shrugged. "So he says. My aunt has a soft spot for anyone who's suffered at the hands of the Cylons. She took care of him until he could take care of himself. He couldn't even remember his name for a long time. My sister helped a lot, too."

"What's your sister's name?"

"My father named her after our mother, Theodessa, but we call her Dessa. She and a lot of the kids hang around Daniel because he plays a guitar and tells them stories. Even the dogs like him and follow him around."

"Like a pied piper, huh?"

"What's that?"

"When I was in daycare we had a lot of books the ladies used to read us. One of them was about a guy who had a magic flute and when he played, the children would follow him…animals, too. Until I went to school, I used to look for him on the playground."

"What's _daycare_?"

"Where little kids go while their parents work. A couple of women or girls take care of a bunch of kids."

"We have something like that but we don't call it _daycare_. When do you go to school?"

"I was six when I started school. Five when I went to kindergarten. That's like pre-school."

"We have school. All the kids get taught to read and do basic numbers. The rest I learned from my father or my grandparents or my uncles or from the books. Books are a precious thing for us. We take care of them."

"I can see why. It's not like you're getting any more."

"You must like books. You have one in your pack."

"You can read it if you want to. It's poetry. A guy named Kataris. It was a gift."

"From Lee?"

"From a friend."

Kara knew better than to tell Hunter that the gift had come from a Cylon, the same model Cylon who would have given her to the human rapists. Some things she knew to keep to herself. Hunter wouldn't understand her friendships with two Cylons. It was very different on this planet.

"My other father is a musician and a composer," Kara said. "He's good."

"Other father? How many do you have?"

"Just two. It's a long story."

He grinned. "I know what I'll be doing for the next couple of nights…listening to all your long stories."

Kara grinned, too. "Around the campfire?"

"The fireplace. I'm going to take the lead again. We've got to pick up the pace. We've got some rough going later on that will slow us down. We need to cover some ground this morning. I've got to pay attention to everything around us. I can't do that and talk to you. Understand?"

"I understand, Hunter. Lead on."

They walked for several hours, stopping once and finishing the water in his canteen and eating the rest of the dried berries and nuts he had in a bag in his pack. They crossed several small streams, once on stones, the other time on a log a few feet off the water. She noticed again that Hunter did not stick to a path. She had finally begun to understand why. Paths through the woods would be the first places the Cylons would monitor. He seemed to have an internal compass, though, or he knew hundreds and hundreds of square miles of forest very well. As he'd said, the terrain was getting rougher and harder to navigate.

They were climbing in elevation, the ground getting rockier and the trees fewer and smaller, scrubbier and more misshapen by the wind that came gusting down the nearby mountains. She could tell by the shadows that they had changed direction since that morning. They were traveling more west than north now.

She was also getting tired again, not as bad as she had felt the evening before, but still tired. They entered a narrow cleft in the rock that was soon over twenty feet deep. Hunter walked about a hundred yards until the cleft zigzagged sharply to the left and back right for a short distance. There was an overhang in the rock with a four-foot space underneath. He made a quick check of the area and put his pack down under it. He motioned for her to do the same. Kara heard the distant sound of tumbling and rushing water.

"Snakes are usually gone by this time of the day. They're out sunning themselves somewhere."

"Poisonous?" Kara asked.

"One kind is. Let's eat that other meal of yours. Then we'll rest here in the shade for thirty minutes. Your face is getting sunburned and I know you're tired."

"I'm okay."

He snorted. "I'm tired, if that makes you feel better."

"You don't show it."

"I learned not to. Some of the others see it as a sign of weakness."

He lifted the pack off her back and Kara sat down. While Hunter found the other meal and opened it, she leaned against his pack. The cool shade felt good. He offered the meal to her, but she told him to help himself first. He did. She closed her eyes and let the breeze dry the sweat on her face. She zoned out and let herself drift. Somewhere high overhead she heard the hunting cry of a bird, a hawk maybe. It was the last sound she remembered hearing until Hunter nudged her arm. She dragged her eyes open and propped on an elbow. He was sitting cross-legged beside her. He had finished half the meal and now handed it to her.

He took one of the cookies. "You're not afraid of heights, are you?"

She chewed a bite of macaroni and gave him a look. "I'm a pilot, Hunter." She pointed at the sky. "My job is up there…high up there."

"What about if you're not in a ship?"

She narrowed her eyes. "Just tell me what you're talking about."

"We've got to cross a narrow gorge. We'll be a couple hundred feet above the water."

"Cross it how?"

"There's a natural rock formation over the gorge, but we can't go across the top because it's too dangerous. We've got to go under the bottom of it. There's two ropes. You walk across one and hold on to the other. You'll see. It's a lot easier if you aren't afraid of heights."

"Won't we be targets for the centurions?"

"There's nowhere they can get close enough to shoot at us. You'll see."

"Anything else we got to do to get back to this base camp of yours? Row across a lake of molten lava? Swim across a river full of piranha?"

"No. Once we make it across the gorge, the worst is over. It's downhill and we're an hour from base camp."

"That's good. I thought you were going to tell me we had to fight the Griffin of Gyron or something."

He lay back against her pack and grinned. "The trick with the Griffin is not to fight it. You've got to tame it with a magic spell."

Her eyes widened. "You read _The Caprican Prince_?"

"All three books…about a dozen times each. I learned a lot from reading those books."

Kara smiled. "Me, too. Small universe, isn't it? I was thirteen when I read the first one. I fell in love with Prince Olliver because he had eyes the color of the sky at twilight and wings over his heart. I was dumb about a lot of stuff back then. I was so dumb my friend Karl had to explain what Olliver was doing with the lusty…never mind."

"The lusty wench. I remember that part well."

She snorted. "I didn't even know what a _wench_ was. Then I met Lee…and that's a long story, too…but I thought he was Olliver because he has blue eyes and he was wearing pilot's wings on his uniform. I thought I was his green-eyed princess. We think dumb things when we're kids."

He smiled. "And you're how much older now?"

"I told you. I'm almost nineteen."

"Yesterday afternoon you were eighteen and a half."

"Whatever."

Hunter studied her for a minute with his own blue eyes. "You got the Olliver thing wrong, Wildcat. You're not the princess. You're Olliver. You've even got the wings over your heart. You're the one who's searching for your father. If he's been in their prison, he's been in a place worse than the underworld."

Kara stared at him. He was right. She wasn't the green-eyed princess at all. She never had been.

"You've already performed the first task," Hunter continued. "You tamed the Griffin of Gyron and flew it to the Island of Hesperides."

"What?"

"The Raider. You tamed a Cylon Raider and flew it here from another solar system so two down, one to go."

The moment became almost surreal to her. He was right again. She had mastered flying the Raider. She had jumped Sadie here from Caprica. Now she had to find her father in the underworld.

She got up and picked up her pack. "So who does that make you? The Sorcerer…my guide and protector, the one who teaches me the magic spells?"

Hunter stood and picked up his pack and rifle. He grinned. "You'll have to look somewhere else for your Sorcerer. I'm fresh out of magic spells. If I had any, I'd have made the Cylons disappear."

She let him get in front of her and they continued walking through the narrow rock cleft.

She couldn't get the story of Olliver's quest off her mind. "You're the Sorcerer," she finally said. "That's the only person you can be."

"It's a book. It's a great adventure story. It's not real life. This is real life. There is no magic, Wildcat, no griffins, no adamantine sword or cyclops…no spells or sorcerers…just us and the Cylons."

"The Cylons are the cyclops. And my father is in the underworld."

"But I don't know any magic way to get him out. We'll be lucky if we can find out exactly where he is. Even luckier if we can get word to him. As much as I'd like to be, I'm not your Sorcerer."

Hunter had appeared not long after she'd landed the Raider. He'd kept Leoben from taking her and Narch prisoner. He'd known where she could hide the ship. He'd shown her the way through the cavern and the forest. He'd kept the centurions from finding her the previous night. He would get them across the gorge and back to his base camp…and then she would concentrate on finding her father.

Kara smiled. Despite what Hunter said, he _was_ the Sorcerer, her guide and protector.

...

Saturday morning did not start well for Laura. At breakfast she knocked her teacup off the table and it shattered. She got to Braedon just before he walked barefoot over the broken pieces. She scooped him up and held him while he struggled to get down. Her refusal to let him until the mess had been cleaned up quickly escalated into a full-scale tantrum. The day went, in proverbial fashion, downhill from there.

A month before Laura's inauguration, Braedon had begun going to a playschool three mornings a week with other toddlers who had a parent working in either Marble House or the Capitol Building. Maya had those mornings off. She had chosen to spend her time attending a class at Caprica University where she was still pursuing an education degree.

Braedon enjoyed playing with the other children, but he had gotten sick twice in the last three months. Laura's pediatrician had told her not to worry, that it often took children several years to become accustomed to all the circulating germs and build up immunity to them. Seven weeks ago it had been a sore throat. A month ago it had been an earache. This morning he had awakened with the sniffles. He was feeling cranky and Laura knew that's what had triggered the tantrum, but after yesterday at the bunker prison her own emotions were raw and it was almost more than she could take.

John had always been able to cope with these situations so much better than she could. He had a knack for being able to distract Braedon, to head off the escalation into the tantrums that her usually happy son would occasionally pitch. Maya had told her not to be too concerned, that all children had bad days, especially when they weren't feeling well. Maya had told her that Braedon was one of the best children she had ever taken care of, but this morning's tantrum had triggered a headache for Laura that had lasted most of the day and had left her dreading the evening instead of anticipating it.

She would have given anything to have been able to curl up in front of a fire in her sitting room and lose herself in a good mystery novel. Instead she was going to have to put on a formal dress and do her hair and spend the evening smiling and engaging in small talk with the friends of a retiring Supreme Court justice.

The previous afternoon she had sat for over an hour behind the one-way glass and had listened to Natasi talk about the Cylon homeworld. Natasi knew a great deal despite the fact that none of the Cylons on Caprica had been there for over five years and had ceased all contact with those on the homeworld over four years ago.

Despite Cavil's autocratic rule on Caprica and his iron fist with the military, he and his Cylons had not interfered in the day-to-day lives of most of Caprica's citizens. At first it appeared that they had confined their reproductive experiments to a small segment of the population. The Colonials had discovered the Cylon virus that affected human fertility almost by accident.

In contrast, according to Natasi, the day-to-day lives of the humans on the homeworld were under complete Cylon control. Humans had been taken not only from captured ships, but also from many of the planets after they were nuked. The Cylons had culled physicians and farmers and tylium miners. Those who had agreed to work for the Cylons had been taken aboard a basestar bound for the homeworld. Those who had refused were left behind to the certain death of radiation poisoning or worse.

Natasi didn't know exactly how many, but she had estimated the total number of captive humans to be at least twenty or thirty thousand, perhaps more. They were scattered in a number of small rural settlements where it was warm enough to grow crops three-fourths of the year. They were also working a tylium mine. Any humans who caused trouble or tried to escape from the settlements were either killed or put in the prison on a high plateau to become the Cylon equivalent of lab rats. Some humans from the settlements would be selected to participate in breeding experiments.

Four years previously when the two groups of Cylons had ceased communicating with each other, there was talk of rebuilding the ruined city and moving some of the humans and Cylons there. Natasi said that was probably happening as they spoke.

The humans on Nereid were allowed no freedoms as they had been on Caprica. They did not govern themselves. They were farm workers or servants or they were lab rats for their determination to produce a human-Cylon child through what Natasi called _natural methods. _She said the Cylon faction that controlled the homeworld considered what their brothers and sisters had planned to do on Caprica, the in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination of human women with hybrid children, to be an abomination, a sin in the eyes of their God.

She steadfastly maintained that God had turned His back on humanity for its many sins and that they had not wanted the hybrid children tainted by any contact with such a deeply sinful race, yet she saw nothing wrong with the genocide that had been committed. She had whispered that they believed the children were _their_ miracles, the next step in Cylon evolution.

Romo Lampkin had asked Natasi about her own creators. That was the only question she had refused…or been unable…to answer. She had lowered her eyes once again and had told Lampkin that to talk about the creators was forbidden. Lampkin had asked her if their creators were on the homeworld. She had indicated that they were.

Natasi had told them only one other thing of real interest…that there had been humans already living on the planet when the creators had gotten there at the end of the First War. She had said these humans lived in the forest and mountains west of the ruined city and also in a small agricultural settlement south of the city. The agricultural settlement had eventually been taken over by the Cylons and had been used as a model for the other agricultural settlements. But the others in the forest and mountains had not yet been brought under Cylon control. Natasi did not believe the others would allow them to remain free forever. Four years ago, however, there had been more important matters to attend to on the homeworld than rooting out a small group of humans from their mountain homes. Natasi believed that would have changed by now, but Laura wasn't so sure.

The thin white line on one of the photographs Lee had taken of the forest during the first recon mission probably had been campfire smoke. Kara and John had been right. There _had_ been survivors from the _Hyperion's _second mission and at least some of their descendents were still alive.

At the conclusion of the interview, Romo had persuaded Laura to go back to Marble House and the dinner that was awaiting her. He had waited at the bunker prison for digital copies to be made. He had promised that he would personally deliver a copy to Bill and another one to her. It had arrived at ten o'clock that evening. She had forced herself to watch the entire interview again and had made a number of notes.

"What do you think?" Laura asked Bill when he'd called later that morning.

"She might be lying about the number of humans on Nereid."

"Sharon Valerii told us the same thing although she wasn't able to give us an estimate of the number of humans. She just said…if I remember correctly…_a lot of humans._"

"They're Cylons, Laura. They don't want us to destroy their homeworld. Wouldn't you lie if you thought it would stop _them_ from destroying Caprica?"

Laura rubbed her forehead. "Of course I would. But I believe her. I can't tell you exactly why I believe her, but I do. Call it a woman's intuition if you will. She truly thinks that she's in love with Baltar. Everything she did was in the hopes of getting to see him again and getting us to stop him from leaving Caprica. Agent Darren's best men have been questioning her and the others for four and a half months and they've gotten _nothing_. Certainly you understand how difficult it was for her to betray her own kind. Romo just found an ingenious way to persuade her to do it."

"It's too bad our only way of verifying what she said is now on that planet."

Laura thought of the Raider that Kara had stolen. "We might have to make that leap of faith and take Natasi's word."

Bill didn't respond immediately. Finally he said, "We'll talk about it tonight."

Laura now looked in the full-length 3-panel mirror in her dressing room. She turned and looked at the back of her dress. Made of heavy silk it was a simply styled dark plum color, an off the shoulder design with a draped back. She wore only four pieces of jewelry…the pearl drop earrings and pearl necklace that had once belonged to her mother, her wedding ring and a pearl bracelet that John had given her on their first anniversary. Hanging from the clasp was a small platinum heart set with pavé diamonds.

She walked into the bedroom and picked up the small evening purse with her breath mints, lipstick and handkerchief inside. She walked back into the dressing room and checked the dress once more to assure herself that nothing was amiss.

As she walked back into the bedroom, she could almost see John waiting for her in his tuxedo. He would always leave the bowtie a little crooked so she would come over and straighten it. She would always ask him to fasten the clasp of whatever necklace she chose to wear. She would hold up her hair and he would lean over and kiss her neck first. When they got home she would ask him to undo the clasp. His kiss on her neck then usually led to another kiss and still another.

She glanced at her bedside table, at the photograph of them dancing at their wedding reception. She hadn't even been aware the photographer was taking the picture. She was looking up at John and he was smiling at her. She could clearly remember the love in his eyes that night. The picture was and always would be her favorite of them together. She felt the ache of his loss again and fought down tears as she had already done several times that day. Yesterday's interview had shown her that the wound had not yet begun to heal. She had just buried her grief in her work.

As she walked down the hall to tell Maya and Braedon _goodnight_, she wondered if Bill would be able to sense what that interview had done to her.

By the time she got back to her sitting room, he was waiting for her. He had poured himself a drink. He offered to pour her one but she declined. She didn't want anyone smelling alcohol on her breath as she arrived at the function. Once there, it wouldn't matter as much. She would be expected to toast the retiring justice. She couldn't arrive that way, however, or someone would soon blog that the President had come to the event drunk. The highest office in the Colonies held its privileges, but also its disadvantages.

Bill was wearing a white dinner jacket and black trousers. For the first time she noticed silver in his dark hair.

"You look very nice tonight," she said.

He quickly downed the drink. "So do you."

She picked up her evening bag. "Shall we go?"

Bill nodded. Once again she noticed his taciturn mood and silence. Something was definitely troubling him, and she was sure that Natasi's interview hadn't helped. Laura should have known by now that the evening wouldn't go any better than the day had gone.

...

After several hours John gave up on Doolittle coming back. He finished working out, took another shower and heated the food in the microwave. By then he was surprisingly hungry. The terrible effects of the drug seemed to have cleared from his system. After he ate, he poured a small glass of leftover wine, went out onto the balcony and watched the ruins across the street soften in the twilight.

He had a decision to make. He could let D'Anna give him the drug until he wound up like the guy Doolittle had told him about…or he could give in and do what she expected him to do. He didn't think of it as what she _wanted_ him to do because he didn't believe that this copy of D'Anna even understood what desire was. He'd seen nothing in her eyes or manner to indicate that she was the least bit attracted to him in a sexual way. She had specifically chosen him to try to procreate with for a reason as yet unknown to him. Sexual attraction was not part of it.

Love for his wife welled in him. There was only one way he stood a chance of ever seeing her again. He had to survive and escape. He had to get to the forest and find the free humans. If they went deep enough into the mountains, there was a chance they would survive when Bill brought his battlestars to the planet and nuked the Cylons. And in order to survive until he could escape, he had to do something he didn't want to do. He could do it, though. He could separate that part of himself from his emotions. John sealed his love for his wife deep in his heart and made his decision.

_Forgive me, Laura. Please forgive me._

He had just stood up to get another glass of wine when Doolittle opened the apartment door.

"She told me to bring you to her, sir."

John took the glass into the kitchen and put it beside the sink. He returned to the living room.

Doolittle held the door open. The two centurions stood outside. John hesitated. "They're not going to shoot me when I step into the hall, are they?"

"No, sir. She told them to let you pass with me."

They walked to the other end of the hall. Doolittle stopped outside a door and knocked.

John was shocked. "She lives _here_?"

"Yes, sir. Moved in five, six months ago. I'll leave you now." He walked to the elevator and got on.

The apartment door opened. D'Anna stood in front of him wearing a white terrycloth robe with an embroidered pocket that said _Astral Princess._ She was barefoot which made her several inches shorter than when he'd last seen her. John tilted her face up and studied it. Somebody had hit her hard several times, but he was certain that it had not been him.

If he needed any further proof, he found it when he searched her eyes. She didn't react with any fear, nothing like the fear he'd seen when he'd grabbed her coat lapels.

"Can I come in?" He asked.

She stood back and he entered the apartment. It looked much the same as his. It even had similar furniture. He glanced around before he looked back at her.

"Who beat you up?"

"You did."

"No, I didn't."

She pulled the robe tighter around herself and went to sit on the couch. "Why did you want to see me?"

"Do you have any ice in your refrigerator?"

"Yes."

He walked to the kitchen and opened the freezer compartment. He took out a tray of ice cubes and emptied it into the sink, found a clean dish towel in a drawer and put a handful of cubes into the towel. He folded the towel around the ice and walked back into the living room. He sat down on the other end of the couch.

"Turn around and lie down, put your head here on my leg." She seemed puzzled, but she did as he said and looked up at him. Gently he placed the towel-clad ice on the swollen side of her face. "This always helped me. Who did it? Who beat the hell out of you?"

She wouldn't answer him.

"Is this place electronically monitored like my apartment?"

"No."

"Then why won't you tell me?"

"Why are you so sure it wasn't you?"

"I'm a southpaw, D'Anna. I'm left handed. If I'd hit you, the damage would have been on the right side of your face. It's on the left side. That means a right-handed person worked you over. I've been in a few fights in my life and I've never used my right hand. The other reason I'm sure is that when you opened the door just now and saw me, you didn't react the way a woman would react to a man who'd just beat the hell out of her. So tell me what happened…all of it. And then we'll talk about where we go from here."

"I gave you too much of the drug. Simon didn't explain to me how much to use. I was only supposed to give you half that much, but I'd never done it before and I gave you too much."

John waited. "And?" He finally prompted her.

"You passed out. You grabbed my coat and pulled me to you. I thought you were going to kiss me. Instead you passed out. I didn't know what to do so I went to Sonja's apartment. She didn't come to the door so I got another Six. She came back with me and said you were all right, that you would sleep it off. She helped me get you undressed and into bed. She said when you woke up…naked you would think we'd had sex."

"This other Six is the one who beat you up?"

"She said you would think you had done it and you'd be ashamed of yourself and be more willing to cooperate with me. She did it right there in your bedroom and then she put my blood on you and the pillow."

"She put it on the wrong hand."

"I made a mistake and I failed. I deserved what she did to me."

John lifted the towel from the side of her face. "Look at me, D'Anna. What you did was wrong for a lot of reasons, but you didn't deserve _this_."

"If I was like Sonja, I wouldn't have had to use the drug on you."

"That's not true. I'd have said _no_ to her just like I said it to you." He took a deep breath and put the towel gently back on the side of her face. "It isn't about you not being attractive or…desirable. It's about me loving my wife and not wanting to be unfaithful to her."

"Why are you being nice to me after what I did."

John hesitated. He wasn't sure how to answer her. Finally he said, "I guess it's just who I am. Next question. If I don't do what you expect, are we going to go through this again?"

For the second time she wouldn't answer him.

"I guess that means _yes_. Okay, here's the deal. You want something from me. I want something from you. We trade."

"What do you want?"

"I want to start going on walks with you…around the ruins. I used to walk around Caprica City a lot. I like walking, especially in the late afternoon and early evening. The centurions can walk right behind us if you want."

"If I go out for walks with you, will you make a baby with me?"

"If you let me go on walks with you and go to the temple with you, then we'll go through the motions of making a baby. But not for a couple of days. Your face needs to heal. Then we'll start over. We'll have dinner, a bottle of wine…and no drugs. You'll get what you want. But no drugs. You've got to promise me that."

"Do you find me attractive?"

"Yes, I do. You remind me of someone I met when I was…a long time ago. She had blond hair…about the same color as yours…and blue eyes like yours."

"You cared for her?"

"Yes."

"What happened to her?"

"She died. Why did you choose me, D'Anna? You had your pick of a lot of men. Why me?"

For the first time since they'd met, her voice held an undercurrent of real emotion. "I was praying for guidance at the altar of the ancient temple and I had a vision. I saw a woman in a blue gown holding a little boy. She took him to a prison cell and a man put his hands through the bars. The boy reached out for his father. I knew that man was the one I should pick."

"How did that lead you to me?"

Her voice took on a softness he'd never heard from her either. "I went to the prison. I asked to see the records of the prisoners. I knew when I saw the photograph of the woman and the little boy…your wife and son. She was wearing a blue dress. The child looked like the one in my vision."

"So that's why you don't want to give up the picture. It's part of your vision."

"Yes."

"Could I see it while I'm here?"

She hesitated, but got up and disappeared into the bedroom. She came back with the photograph. She had put it into a small frame. She sat down beside him and handed it to him.

As he looked at the picture for the first time in several months, a wave of strong emotion swept him. He felt tears come to his eyes and he struggled to maintain his composure as he gazed at his wife and son.

"You love them?" D'Anna said.

"Very much." John used the heel of his hand to wipe away his tears.

"Your son looks like you."

John nodded. He was still struggling with his emotions.

"Does your daughter look like you?"

He took several deep breaths and got himself under control. "She has my eyes, but she looks like her mother."

"Our baby will be blond and blue-eyed like me."

"D'Anna…never mind."

He didn't see any point in reminding her again that Dr. Silva had told him that Cylons rarely conceived and if they did, they miscarried.

"You can keep the picture, John."

"You mean it?"

"I can always see it when I want."

"Thank you. You don't know how much it means to me."

"A man should have a picture of his son."

_And his wife._

She lay back and put her head on his leg. Carefully he put the towel with the ice on her bruised and swollen cheek. Something tugged inside of him and again he felt sorry for her. She looked just like the Three who had participated in torturing him, but this copy was almost child-like in some ways and extremely naïve in her understanding of adult relationships. She had chosen him, a man who clearly loved another woman, a man who would never love her even if she weren't a Cylon. If his current situation weren't so serious, he would be tempted to laugh at the irony of it. If he had found himself in this situation at almost any other time in his life, he would simply have taken her to bed without agonizing over it since that's what she wanted and was determined to get from him even if she had to drug him to get it.

D'Anna seemed to understand nothing of his dilemma. She had no sympathy for him because she didn't understand love. She had only one goal, one need, and that was the act of procreation with him, an act that she seemed determined to achieve no matter what it took. She had imbued the whole situation with religious significance, even mysticism. He had to look at their arrangement as a trade.

His thoughts returned to Laura. He wondered where she was right now and what she was doing. He knew she believed he was dead, but he wondered if she still thought of him and missed him. He remembered the times she had come in late and exhausted from her campaign headquarters and had snuggled on the couch with him, her head on his leg where D'Anna's was right now. Lost in his reverie he closed his eyes and began gently and absently smoothing back D'Anna's hair the way he'd always done Laura's.

She sighed, soft and contented. Her hand crept up, found his other hand and slipped into it. Without thinking he laced his fingers through hers and squeezed. With his eyes closed it was so easy right now to pretend that she was someone else.

"Humans are so needy," she said.

He finally answered her. "I don't think we're the only ones."

...

The mess hall of the _Penelope _was a shock to Lee. He had been expecting to find something that resembled the dining facilities for the crew of a battlestar, clean and utilitarian but nothing fancy. The dining room on the _Penelope _resembled that of a high-class restaurant. There were long banquet style tables on one end and smaller tables for four or six people throughout the rest of the room. There were booths along two walls. The tabletops weren't gray metal. They were fine-grained wood. Even more surprising it was located in an outside starboard section of the ship and had a large observation window at one end. At the moment they were facing Caprica and Lee could see the blue oceans and main continent of the planet. It was a beautiful sight.

He stopped short and Kendra almost bumped into him. "Lords of Kobol," he said under his breath.

"What?"

"This is…something else."

Kendra looked around. "It looks okay."

"_Okay_? A battlestar's mess hall looks like a soup kitchen compared to this."

She smiled. "Look, no maître d. I guess the food is free and we help ourselves."

Kendra led the way over to a buffet table. There was a nice breakfast selection. Lee got several different muffins, some fruit and a cup of coffee. As he looked around for a place to sit, he spotted Dr. Nylund and Gaius Baltar sitting alone at a table for four. He and Kendra could do their meet and greet right now and not have to hunt Nylund down later. He waited for Kendra.

Lee stopped at the table. "Good morning, Dr. Nylund, Dr. Baltar."

"Welcome aboard, Lieutenant Adama," Nylund smiled. "You'll have to introduce me to your colleague."

"This is Lieutenant Kendra Shaw. Kendra, this is Dr. Langley Nylund and Dr. Gaius Baltar."

"My pleasure," Kendra smiled sweetly. "Would it be all right if we join you?"

"Please," Dr. Nylund said and indicated the seat beside him.

Kendra plopped down. Lee followed her example.

"Shaw," Nylund said thoughtfully. "Would that be…"

"My mother is Marta Shaw," Kendra smiled again and offered her hand which he shook warmly. She did the same for Baltar and then turned her gaze back to Nylund. "My mother thinks both of you are absolute geniuses. She was very disappointed when I decided to attend the Academy instead of the Science Institute even knowing I have no brain for science unless it's computer science."

Baltar was watching her and toying with his cup of coffee. "That's my specialty." He glanced at Nylund. "One of them."

"I thought you were a reproductive endocrinologist…or was that a virologist?"

Lee said evenly. "Dr. Baltar has had a very distinguished career. He's a man of many talents."

She smiled. "I'm sure he is, but of course I'd be _preaching_ to the chorus if I continue mentioning _everything_ he's done in the last few years or even the last few months. I'm sure _everyone_ knows the impressive skills that are in Dr. Baltar's résumé."

Lee shot Kendra a look that said, _quit toying with Baltar. _

Baltar squirmed. "Yes, well, we all sometimes work out of our field of expertise when we're forced to by circumstances beyond our control. I'm very grateful for the opportunity that Dr. Nylund has given me to return to research."

Kendra turned her attention to Nylund. "I admire you volunteering to take charge of such a diverse group of scientists. That's the thing about the military. There's very little _volunteering_. We go where we're ordered."

Nylund poured some more tea from a small pot on the table. He smiled at Kendra. "I would have thought your mother could have kept you off this mission, Lieutenant Shaw."

"Please, call me Kendra, both of you. My mother is very much in favor of my assignment. She knows how important it is." She leaned a little closer to him and lowered her voice. "What do you think we're going to find?"

"A great deal of radiation and death."

"Besides that."

"A great deal of destruction and nuclear wastelands…but an unprecedented opportunity for learning about the effects of an all-out nuclear war on every aspect of a planet's life."

"So you don't think there will be any survivors?"

Nylund said, "There's no way of predicting that with any certainty. Many who survived the initial blasts will have died by now of radiation poisoning or starvation or worse. I understand the Cylons unleashed their centurions on most planets."

Baltar explained. "Starvation would have been the result of the nuclear winter which would have killed the plant life on the planet. The extinction of the animal life would have followed. It has been over five years…as I'm sure you're well aware. Stored food supplies would have lasted only a short while. Their water supplies would have been irradiated as well."

"But Tauron has survivors."

Lee said, "The Cylons treated Tauron differently because they wanted to preserve the tylium deposits and mines. They destroyed only the two main cities, not the whole planet. The inhabitants of the northern regions are very self-sufficient."

Nylund nodded slowly. "Lieutenant Adama is quite right and very well informed."

"So what is your plan of action?" Kendra asked. "When we reach a planet, what are you going to do first?"

"First we'll get air and water and soil samples at various places on the planet, possibly some samples of organic matter if we can. We'll analyze them for radiation levels. If those are low enough, we will visit the surface and do more tests."

Baltar said, "I'll be happy to show Lieutenant Shaw…Kendra…around and introduce her to the others who will be doing the research. You, too, Lieutenant Adama…if you're interested," he added in what sounded to Lee like an afterthought.

Kendra leaned slightly toward Baltar. Her voice was sweet and sincere. "That's very nice of you, doctor. We both appreciate it. I'm definitely going to take you up on your offer."

Baltar preened like a peacock.

Nylund said, "Well, Gaius, we've lingered long enough over breakfast. It's time to go to work."

Kendra smiled at them. "I'll see both of you again soon."

When they were gone, Lee looked at Kendra. "What the hell was that all about? Were you _flirting_ with them?"

She smiled. "Of course not. We need information for Commander Cain. They've got it. What's wrong with being nice to them?"

"Nothing is wrong with being nice. Just don't carry it too far."

The smile disappeared. "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that. Dr. Nylund is old enough to be my grandfather and Baltar…is just…he's an egotistical womanizer…and I'm being nice. But he does look better since he shaved that ridiculous beard and cut his hair. While he was preaching at the warehouse, he looked like a street person."

"How do you know he was preaching at a warehouse?"

"I saw a photograph of him in the _pulpit_ no less. Funny place for an atheist to be, don't you think? We keep tabs on a lot of people at the Ministry. He's one of them because of his _close_ association with a Cylon, or maybe I should say _former_ close association."

"That's interesting to know."

Kendra lowered her voice. "Special Agent Vladimir Darren, who is a good friend of your CO Major Parker, actually works for a department inside the Ministry of Defense. It's not exactly black ops, but it's close."

"So they taught you that the best way to get information is to flirt?"

"I found out that if I speak a little ancient Kobol, everyone spills their guts to get me to shut up."

Lee picked up his cup of coffee but laughed before he could take a sip. "You have some interesting strategies for obtaining information."

"I'm sure they're not nearly as interesting as some of the techniques you've used in your job. Major Parker's team has a crackerjack reputation for getting information. I'm sure as an interrogator you've often fit your method to the suspect. That boy you questioned in Sovana being a case in point. All I'm doing is stroking Dr. Nylund's ego and Baltar's…" she made a face.

"How did you know about Sovana? That was a couple of years ago."

Kendra smiled. "It's documented at the Minstry."

Lee shrugged in acknowledgment.

"What's wrong with giving Cain what she asked for, Lee?"

"Not one thing. It's what we were ordered to do."

Kendra smiled. "There are a number of women scientists that I'm sure can aid our quest to please Commander Cain. I'll probably have to enlist _your_ help with them."

"That's not my style."

"Come on, Lee. You're very good-looking. You can smile and act interested in what they're doing long enough to get a few facts. I'm not asking you to cheat on Kara. I'm certainly not going to cheat on Gordon. Just put those _diplomatic_ skills of yours to work."

"Why are you suddenly so hot to please Cain?"

"She gave us an order to stay on top of what's going on."

"You want to prove to her that there's more in that brain of yours than a knowledge of ancient Libran."

"There's a hell of a lot more in my brain than ancient Libran and the classics."

"Thank the gods," Lee grinned.

"That's an odd statement coming from a non-believer."

"How do you know that?"

She smiled. "I did my homework on more than just Dr. Nylund and Dr. Baltar."

An undercurrent of anger crept into Lee's voice. "You checked _me _out?"

"Don't sound so offended. We're going to be working together and this is an important mission. I wanted to make sure I hadn't been saddled with a guy who'd gotten everything because of who his daddy is."

Lee was offended, but he realized that there was a lot more to Kendra Shaw then he'd first thought. She was obviously intelligent, and she'd taken Cain's words more to heart than he had. She was looking to shine on _this_ mission, to possibly move out of her mother's shadow. A commendation from a fleet commander would go a long way toward Kendra getting her pick of her next assignment. It might even mean a promotion for her. There was nothing wrong with ambition handled properly. He finished his coffee.

"Okay, so you checked me out. I can't say I did the same for you." He smiled, "So what did you find out about me?"

"Your entire life reads like the son who's always trying to prove something to his father…and himself. Top of your class at the Academy. Top of your class in Flight School despite nearly dying in the deep space simulator and missing a whole week. You push yourself hard. You're your own worst critic. You always strive to do your best and you usually succeed. Your commanding officers have been impressed by your work ethic and your abilities. You don't make friends easily, but you tend to keep the ones you do make. Your best friend for the last five years was John Gallagher. You and your father have always had a difficult relationship made more so by your mother's suicide two years ago, but you've reconciled with him during the last year. You disapproved of your brother's playboy lifestyle until he joined the Marines, but…and this is my personal opinion…you're probably jealous of the easy way Zak makes friends. Your relationships with women were spotty until you met Kara but that hasn't always been smooth sailing. She's an in-your-face type of person. You're more laid back. You're smarter book-wise. She's smarter street-wise. She's a better pilot, but you're a better strategist. She's impulsive. You're cautious. You're both stubborn and once you make up your mind, determined to see a task through..."

"Frak, that's enough," he said angrily. "I'm sorry I asked. Is there some kind of folder on _me_ at the Ministry?"

"I have some good sources. What I've just told you isn't in any database. I left no record of my research on you. One other thing and then I'll shut up. Whatever it was that Kara did earlier this week is what got you unwillingly sent on this mission. Am I correct?"

Kendra had nailed so many facts about his life that he was completely blown away. Lee sat staring out the observation window at Caprica and its blue oceans. Four and a half months ago, on the night they'd fought the Cylons, he'd had to punch out of his disintegrating Viper somewhere between eleven and twelve miles in the atmosphere. He'd fallen into the middle of the ocean, and despite his parachute functioning properly, he'd broken his right leg on impacting the surface. He'd been in the water almost twelve hours before Kara and Karl and Sharon had found him. He owed his life to them, but especially to Kara who had pushed his father to let her go up with a Cylon at the controls of a search Raptor.

But that broken leg had also been the reason that Bill had given the next Nereid mission to Kara. Learning to fly that Raider had set up the situation that had resulted in Kara now being on the Cylon homeworld and him being on the _Penelope_.

"Lee?"

"You're right. Something Kara did is the reason I'm on this mission. And that's absolutely all you're going to get from me on that subject. Right now I just want to know one thing…are _we_ on the same team?"

"Of course we are."

"You're not going to blindside me with a secret, hidden agenda, are you?"

"There is no hidden agenda, Lee. I just want to make sure that I get credit for the work I do."

"I don't care if you take credit for the whole damn mission. That's not what it's about for me. You've already figured out that I don't want to be here, but now that I am, I'm going to do my job."

"I'll get my part done. I'll do Cain's reports and we'll go over them before you give them to her. I'm very good at what I do as I hope I've just demonstrated. Just don't question my methods. Okay?"

"Fine, Kendra. However you want to do it. Just remember if you frak something up, it comes down on both of us."

"I could say the same thing to you. But I'm not going to frak anything up. And you should lighten up. We're kindred souls. Your father wasn't around when you were growing up. My mother sent me to boarding school when I was twelve because she had more important things to do with her life than be a mom. Before that I was raised mostly by a string of nannies. They never stayed long. I'm not sure whether it was me or her that ran them off."

"What about your father?"

"Gregory Shaw. He disappeared into the sunset before I was three. I don't remember him. I think he was just a glorified sperm donor. The only reason I exist is that the voting population likes a woman who has a kid. The money is in my mother's family. I'm sure Gregory got a handsome payout to marry her, knock her up and then make himself scarce."

"Okay, so we both had less than ideal childhoods."

Kendra snorted. "What an understatement. But everything is going to work out fine. You'll see."

Lee glanced at her just as the announcement came over the ship's intercom that they were about to leave orbit over Caprica. He lifted his empty cup of coffee. "To the mission."

"Where do you think we're going? Picon or Tauron?"

"Why don't we visit the bridge? I'm sure you can charm that information out of Captain Pontos."

"Has a Raptor had enough time to jump to Picon and back by now?"

"More than enough time."

"So Pontos knows where we're going?"

"Ship's captains don't break orbit without a destination. It's not like high school and cruising around in your mother's car on Friday night with nowhere to go."

Kendra smiled. "Did you do that?"

"A few times. It seemed pointless to me. A big waste of fuel."

"That's the reason you do it, Lee, just cruising and enjoying the night and the people because once you're past that stage of your life, you're past it. Cruising is for high school. You can't go back and do it later. There's nothing more pathetic than seeing a forty-year-old guy trying to relive his glory days by cruising with the kids on Saturday night."

"You won't get any argument from me, Kendra."

She smiled. "So let's go find out our destination."

They began walking toward the bridge. "So where do you think we're going first? Picon or Tauron?" Kendra asked.

"I hope we're going to Tauron. At least we'll get to _do something_ on Tauron."

"Twenty cubits says we're still going to Picon first."

Ten minutes later they reached the bridge and asked Captain Pontos the _Penelope's_ destination. Lee was glad that he hadn't taken Kendra's bet. If he had, he would have been twenty cubits poorer.

TBC…


	9. Six Interrupted

Chapter 9

Six Interrupted

_A pall hangs over the mountain called Olympus. Smoke from extinguished torches__  
__Floats wraith-like in the early morning air. Word has quickly spread.__  
__Man and Woman have the sacred Fire. Zeus is furious. He sends for Hermes,__  
__Winged Messenger of the gods and tells him to take word to Hephaestus.__  
__A reckoning must be made as to how the sacred Fire was taken from his forge.__  
__The crippled god limps to his brother's throne and mutters but one word, Prometheus.__  
__Zeus flings a thunderbolt in rage at the Titan's disobedience. Bring Prometheus to me,__  
__And the Titan is brought and bound in chains to a rock to feed Zeus's eagle for eternity._

_In the Garden, Man and Woman, struck by Eros' arrows and warmed by sacred Fire__  
__Join in love and the tribe of mankind multiplies while the years pass and Zeus broods.__  
__Posiden says, Do not blame them, Brother. They did not know when they took Fire__  
__That it was forbidden. They can keep Fire, Zeus says and sends again for Hephaestus.__  
__Take the clay of Kobol, Zeus commands, and create a woman, fair of face and form.__  
__And when the Four Winds have breathed the beautiful creation to life, the other gods__  
__Give gifts to her, knowledge of speech and healing, of weaving and cooking, and planting.__  
__All the skills to make the lives of humans easier. Hera gifts her with a name, Pandora. _

_Zeus gives to her his gift, a lidded jar containing all the ills that could plague mankind,__  
__Lust, Greed, Wrath, Envy, Pride, Sickness, Pain, Thievery, Murder, Vengefulness, Grief,__  
__War and Narrowness of Mind. Yet at the last minute he places Hope in the jar as well.__  
__Keep the lid shut tight, Zeus warns Pandora before he sends the West Wind to__  
__Waft her gently down the mountain. As she reaches the Garden with her jar, he smiles__  
__And gives to her his final gift. He bestows upon Pandora the Gift of Curiosity. _

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

Lee walked down the corridor to the crew quarters with Kendra. The journey to Picon would take almost five hours. Captain Pontos had invited them to return to the bridge in four and a half.

"I'd just like to get there," Kendra said. "Why doesn't this ship have an FTL drive?"

"They cost too much to install and maintain. Then you've got to have at least two people on board who have been trained to calculate the jumps. A scientific ship like this one doesn't need to get anywhere in a hurry."

Kendra sighed. "What are you going to do for the next four and a half hours?"

"I brought something to work on for Major Parker."

They reached their quarters. Kendra said, "I think I'll take a nap. Gordon slept over last night."

Lee grinned. "So getting lost this morning wasn't the only reason you were late."

"Come get me before you go back to the bridge," Kendra said before she closed the door of her quarters.

Lee went into his own small room. He'd seen the bunker prison cells where the skinjobs were being held. They were considerably larger. Scientists on board a ship like this were probably in their quarters only to sleep. Lee wasn't even claustrophobic and the tiny, windowless room was getting to him. The pilots' quarters on the _Triton_ had also been windowless, but they were huge in comparison. He picked up the laptop carrying case and walked back to the mess hall. He would read the journals and try to match specific entries with the photographs he and Kara had taken over the planet.

The dining hall was surprisingly crowded for the middle of the morning and then Lee remembered that no one had anything to do, yet. Lee settled for a corner booth on the far side of the room. He chose the seat looking toward the observation window. Battlestars didn't have observation windows like this one. Battlestars didn't have any kind of windows. They were covered with thick armor plating that would withstand most conventional ordnances and even small nuclear ones.

For a few minutes he sat mesmerized by the inky black and unmoving distant stars. There was no sense of motion yet he knew they were traveling a third the speed of light. He went to the buffet table for another cup of coffee. On his way back to the booth he noticed a woman sitting alone at a table who also had a laptop opened. She was studying the screen and then making notes in a spiral bound notebook. She glanced up and smiled as he neared her table. She was attractive and, Lee guessed, in her mid-thirties. She reminded him a little of Maya with her dark hair and eyes.

He remembered Kendra's comment, and putting aside his natural reticence at meeting people, he stopped at her table and held out his hand. "Hi. Lee Adama."

She took it in a firm handshake. "Jerusha Briggs. You're one of our military liaisons?"

He smiled and nodded. "I guess the uniform gave it away. Why are you on board?"

"I'm a biologist. My specialty is plankton." She gestured to the laptop. "I'm boning up on Picon's known varieties, not that I think we'll find much. With that big nuclear basestar exploding in the atmosphere over the planet, Picon is probably in worse shape than the rest of the planets. But I'm sure you already know all that."

Lee not only knew it, he had been visiting his father on board the _Galactica_ the night it had happened. He'd been quietly observing in the CIC with all of the _Galactica's_ senior officers when the word had come that the battlestars over Picon were massing to destroy the Cylon nuclear killing machine. The Colonial battlestars had done it, but the cost had been high. Eight smaller ships destroyed before the one remaining battlestar, the crippled _Atlantia_, had succeeded. She had transmitted only one word before the massive nuclear explosion had wiped out the communication satellites over the planet along with the _Atlantia_ and the remains of the other ships. That one word had been _success_.

The destruction of the huge basestar had saved Caprica, the last Colony, from the nuclear horror visited on the other eleven, but the thousands of Raiders from the five remaining basestars had eventually destroyed over half the fleet's Vipers. President Adar had agreed to negotiate with the Cylons for the control of Caprica and five years of Cylon rule had begun. Lee would never forget, though, the pain in his father's eyes the night that the _Atlantia_ and her crew had stopped the Cylon's killing machine at the cost of all lives on board including that of his friend and mentor, the legendary Admiral Nagala.

Nor would Lee ever forget his father's anger at being ordered back to Caprica four days later to serve on the negotiating team. Lee had later decided that his father's plan to free Caprica of Cylon control had begun to take shape in his mind long before the treaty with the Cylons had ever been signed. Bill had lived through two wars with them and he had yet to soften his opinion of what they had done and what he believed them still capable of doing.

"I remember that night very well," Lee said to Jerusha Briggs.

"You answer to the commander of the _Galactica_?"

"She's my CO on this mission."

"I was in the auditorium at the base yesterday. She impressed me as a control freak."

"She's responsible for everyone's safety. She takes her job very seriously."

Dr. Briggs smiled. "In other words she's a control freak. I'm told there's already a pool taking bets on how long it will be before she and Dr. Nylund seriously butt heads."

"It's my job to see that doesn't happen."

She smiled sympathetically. "Good luck."

"What made you sign on?"

"This is an unprecedented opportunity for research, in both my field and my husband's. He's a geneticist. He wants to see the effects of radiation on the genetic makeup of any species that managed to survive…if there are any. He thinks Picon will be a wasted stop. He's looking forward to getting to Tauron."

"I think everyone will get some planet time once we get there."

Lee went back to the booth and turned on the laptop. While he waited for it to boot, he took Kara's letter out of a zippered compartment in the case. He knew the letter by heart now, but he still read the last paragraph.

_I knew the day I met you that I would never love anybody but you. I know we've fought a lot lately, but you're still the prince of my dreams and I will always love you. Always! I have the strongest faith that we'll see each other again one day. Kara _

She was in another solar system now, on a distant world that orbited a yellow star like their own. Although the sting of her betrayal had barely begun to fade, he wanted her to succeed on her quest to find her father. He wanted her safe return to Caprica. He looked out the observation window at the distant stars and wondered if one of them was Nereid's sun.

"I love you, Kara," he whispered. "Stay safe and come home to me."

...

The sound of rushing and tumbling water that Kara heard didn't get any louder, but the direction changed. It seemed to be coming from all around them now. The cleft in the rock had opened into a narrow canyon but was still only twenty or thirty feet deep. Hunter had dropped back and while he still didn't talk, they now walked side by side.

"So how wide is this gorge we've got to cross?" Kara finally asked him.

"Two hundred, maybe two hundred-fifty feet."

"And there's two ropes," she prompted.

"One above the other. Targa always walks the bottom one facing forward and going hand over hand across the top one. Beck and I slide sideways on both of them. There's metal anchors every thirty feet or so. I think it's easier to get around them going sideways. I'll let you make up your mind how you want to do it."

"And we're a couple hundred feet above the water?"

"Give or take a few."

"A few feet or a few hundred feet?"

"We've never been able to measure it," he said and evaded her question.

"So there'd be no way to survive a fall into the river?"

"No."

Ever since she'd said something to him about being the Sorcerer, he'd seemed to pull into himself.

"Okay," she said. "What's bothering you?"

"Just thinking about getting across that gorge."

"Here's the deal. I make it across your ropes and you tell me what's on your mind."

"I'll take my pack across and come back and get yours. It'll be a lot easier for you without it."

"I can carry my own pack."

He sounded annoyed. "You're my responsibility. We could have gone another way back to base camp and avoided the gorge, but it would have added three, maybe four days to the trip. We would have had to hunt for food. That would mean a fire for cooking. That would mean more chance the centurions would have found us. Don't you understand that if they catch us outside of base camp, we're fair game? I take my pack across and then come back for yours."

"Don't bite my head off."

He managed a grin. "When you see it, you'll change your mind."

They walked in silence again for a quarter of a mile before Kara saw a bend in the canyon and two huge eye-bolts anchored in the rock. Rope was looped several times through each eye-bolt and tied off in other eye-bolts driven into the canyon floor. The sound of the water was louder now, echoing and reverberating through the narrow opening in the rock. They walked to the end and Kara looked at what they had to do. It made her almost dizzy when she looked down.

"Who built this rope thing?" She asked him.

"A group of smart men and some old robots. When my grandfather was young, they had heavy-duty power tools that worked. We've strung new rope a couple of times, but the eye-bolts are the originals. They're titanium alloyed with aluminum. Don't ask me what that means other than they'll last a long time without corroding."

Hunter put his pack and the rifle against the base of a big rock and took out his binoculars. Propping his elbows on the chest-high boulder, he began scanning the natural rock arch that spanned the gorge.

"Where could a Cylon hide on that thing?" Kara asked.

"I'm not looking for Cylons."

"What are you looking for?"

"Snakes. Birds nest in crevasses in the rock. The snakes crawl out there, eat a meal of eggs or baby birds and then go to sleep in the sun. Even if they're not poisonous you don't want to run into a snake going across. Damn. Just our frakking luck. About halfway across, the rock ledge just above the top rope."

He moved aside and handed the binoculars to her. It took almost thirty seconds but she located what Hunter had seen. The snake was probably six feet long and lay stretched in the sun along the ledge. It blended almost perfectly into the reddish and sand-colored stone.

"Poisonous?" She asked.

"Deadly."

She carefully scanned the rest of the rock. She saw nothing else and returned to look at the snake again. It would be less than a foot above their hands as they made their way across.

"So what do we do now?"

He picked up the rifle. "I've got to waste a bullet, but that's not the worst part. In this canyon the shot will echo. Any centurion within a couple of miles will pick up the sound."

Kara grabbed his arm. "Wait a minute. Let's think about this. You kill the snake but the centurions hear it. What good will _that_ do us?"

"I don't know for sure that there are centurions out there. We've got to take the chance. There's no frakking way we can get across with that snake where it is."

"What if we could kill it without making any noise?"

Hunter snorted. "We've already settled that I don't know any magic spells. I'm not a snake charmer either."

"I got a slingshot. Brand new. I'm good with it."

"How good?"

"I can hit a rat in the head at twenty feet…when it's moving. I can hit a stationary target the same size at maybe forty, fifty feet. Beyond that I'm not as accurate."

"We're a hell of a lot farther away from that snake than forty feet."

"Not if we go out on the ropes."

"No! No frakking way I'll let you take that chance. You can't aim a slingshot while you're holding on to the top rope. There's no way."

"There is if you hold on to me. We go out, you get a good grip on the top rope with one hand and you wrap your other arm around me and hold me while I shoot the snake."

He considered what she had just said. "It won't be easy. The wind is always blowing out there."

"I can do it."

Hunter walked a few steps away from her and turned. He studied her. "You're going to have to kill it. If you just make it mad, one or both of us are dead."

"How far can it strike?"

"It's at a disadvantage stretched out on the ledge. Five, six feet."

"We stay twenty feet away. Maybe twenty-five."

"Okay, show me what you can do…here…in the canyon."

Kara got the slingshot out of the side pocket of her pack. She walked the sides of the canyon until she found several roundish stones an inch in diameter, about the size of the glass marble she'd used to knock out Cavil. She stretched and circled her arms to get the blood flowing before she walked back to Hunter.

"What do you want me to hit?"

He took a chalky reddish stone and walked thirty feet down the canyon to a boulder where he drew four rough concentric circles before he walked back to her.

He made a slight gesture with his hand toward the boulder. "Do it."

Kara took aim and fired the first stone. It hit the smallest circle slightly off center. She hit the center of the circle with the next three stones. She turned to Hunter and grinned.

"Okay. Now we do it with me holding you the same way I'll be doing out on the ropes." He took his boot and drew a line in the dust of the canyon floor. "Rope. Stand on it." Kara turned sideways and put her feet on the line. Hunter stood beside her. "The snake is down there on your right, twenty-five feet away on a ledge two feet over our heads. You're going to need both hands getting out there and back. We'll work on that in a minute. So we're there. What do we do now?"

Kara kept her feet straight and twisted her body. It was awkward. Hunter slid as close to her as he could get and wrapped one arm around her waist. "This isn't going to work," she said. "I'm not going to feel secure enough to let go of the rope."

He dropped his arm. "You're starting to understand."

"No," she grabbed his arm. "You're going to have to hold me like this and hold me tight." She leaned back against him and wrapped his arm around her chest. "If you do that I'll feel secure enough to let go of the rope and I can still aim. Now let's just go do it."

"Be patient. I've got to find some way of securing the slingshot so it won't wind up in the river if you drop it."

He walked over to his pack and rummaged until he came up with a long strip of rawhide. He came back and tied one end tightly around the handle of the slingshot and the other end around her wrist. He helped her hunt for some more roundish stones. They found six that she thought would work. She tucked the stones into a pouch on the flight suit's utility belt.

"_Now_ let's go do it," Hunter said. They walked around the boulder and Kara took a deep breath as she was able to see the full view of the gorge.

He said, "It might be better if you don't look down."

"Too late. I already looked."

Carefully Kara tested the ropes. She decided she would slide sideways instead of trying to walk the bottom rope like a tightrope walker and hold on to the top one. She made it to the first set of metal eye-bolts that held the ropes onto the bottom of the rock formation. Hunter followed her. Kara kept switching her eyes between the rope and the snake. It hadn't moved. She got to the next set of eye-bolts and the next.

"That's far enough," Hunter called.

Kara stopped. She felt the wind buffeting her. Hunter caught up with her. He wrapped one arm around the eye-bolt and grabbed the rope. Kara slid back toward him and he slipped his other arm around her, under her arms and across her chest. He carefully tightened it until she was securely against him.

"I've got you," he said near her ear. "You can let go now. I won't let you fall."

Kara used her free hand and slipped the slingshot out of the front of her uniform. The wind buffeted them again. The rope swayed. She looked back at the snake. It looked like it was sleeping. She knew they couldn't stand out there forever. Slowly she let go of the rope over her head. Without looking down she got a stone from the pouch and loaded it in the slingshot's leather pocket. She pulled it back, aimed and let it go. The stone struck the rock less than an inch from the snake's head. The wind was stronger than she had thought. Suddenly the snake came to life and started moving sluggishly toward them, its forked tongue flickering in and out.

Kara felt Hunter tense. She got another stone from the pouch and quickly loaded it. By the time she let go, the snake was ten feet from them. The stone hit it solidly in the head. She didn't know if she had mortally wounded it or not, but it began to writhe and went off the ledge. Her gaze followed it down until she couldn't see it anymore.

Hunter put his mouth to her ear again. "Good job, Wildcat. Grab the rope and go on across. I'll get the packs."

She did as he said, sliding her way along until she reached the other side. It took him nearly twenty minutes to make two trips. Kara unzipped her flight suit part way and sat on top of the rocks and felt the wind dry the sweat that had drenched her. She never liked to kill anything in nature but it had been necessary. She had killed before for food, for her own survival and Karl's, and to save two lives. She knew that she would probably kill again, maybe before she left this planet. Sometimes it was the natural order of things and sometimes you didn't have a choice.

Hunter led her down from the rock into a sheltered area before he got her canteen from her pack. He offered it to her and she drank.

"Are you okay?" He asked.

"I wish that snake hadn't been there."

"You're a damned good shot. Haven't you ever killed anything before?"

She turned up the canteen again before handing it to him. "On Caprica I was in the resistance. I killed two skinjobs to save two humans. I've killed for food, too."

"You've done a lot to be just eighteen years old."

"Eighteen and a half. Now tell me what's bothering you."

"Just something somebody told me a long time ago. I'll tell you about it back in base camp." He stowed the canteen. "Another hour and we'll be home."

"Single file again?"

"I got to be sure we don't run up on any chrome-heads before we get there."

They descended quickly into a woodland that looked much like the area they had started out in that morning. The adrenalin from the gorge began to wear off. Kara was hungry and tired when he finally stopped walking and they drank the last of the water.

Afterward they turned west, angling through the trees and finally came to a series of huge boulders that blocked the path between two cliffs. Hunter began threading his way through them. Kara finally realized that the placement of the boulders created a maze where it would be easy to become lost. They emerged into a narrow tunnel that was covered with vines and continued until she realized that she was no longer walking on rock. She was walking on metal.

"What is this place?" She asked him.

"It's part of the _Hyperion_. It's mostly underground or covered with vegetation now. That's why you never saw it from the air."

They turned down what she now realized was a corridor in the ship and came to an opening that led to a small wooden platform. Wooden steps had been built from the opening to the ground twenty feet below. He stopped at the top of the steps. The path below them opened into a larger area. There were low mounds of earth covered with grasses that had wooden doors. Many of them were open to the late afternoon sunshine. The land with the dwellings sloped downward and beyond was a valley, partially in the sun and partially in the shadow of the surrounding mountains. She could see plowed fields and an orchard and a narrow river and in the distance what looked like a flock of goats and a herd of cattle near a pond. There was also a lake.

Kara stared, her mouth slightly open. She had never seen anything like it in her life.

Hunter nudged her. "What do you think?"

"Wow. When you said _base camp_, I thought you were talking about tents in the woods."

He smiled. "Let's go meet my aunt and my sister. Dessa is going to be fascinated by your flight suit. She'll want to touch it."

"That's okay. I can't wait to get out of it and get a real bath or shower."

"We can manage a bath for you." He grinned. "I need one myself."

Before they started down the steps, she touched his arm. "Thank you for saving my life and bringing me here. You really are my sorcerer."

He grinned. "Just don't start calling me that around these guys, okay?"

...

Laura and Bill sat in the back of the Presidential limousine under the portico of Marble House and waited for her guards to go through all the security checks before one of them opened the back door of the limo.

Bill got out first and offered his hand to help her.

Her driver asked, "Should we hold the car for the admiral, Madame President?"

"I'll call a transport when I'm ready to leave," Bill said.

Laura carefully maneuvered out of the limo. "We won't need the car again tonight, Phil. Thank you."

"Yes ma'am."

Another guard opened the door of Marble House for them. There had been several occasions when Bill had escorted her to an event and they had returned to Marble House afterward and talked in her private sitting room for several hours. Laura knew that some of her staff probably thought she and Bill were already having an intimate relationship. She realized now that she had probably given them cause to come to such a conclusion.

A very bold reporter named James McManus who wrote for the_ Caprica Times _and who disliked her personally and her politics professionally had asked her during a recent press conference if Bill Adama would _continue to_ _escort her_ to official functions. The intent of his question had been clear to her if not to everyone in the room. She had coolly stated that Bill was a long-time friend of hers and had graciously agreed to function as her escort to many of the functions she was required to attend.

Recently McManus had asked if she had been aware of John's mission to destroy the basestar and had approved of it. The prying nature of the question and its implication had so outraged Billy Keikeya that he had told Laura he was going to ban McManus from future press conferences. Laura had told him that he simply couldn't do that. McManus was a veteran reporter for Caprica City's oldest and most trusted newspaper. As much as she had come to dread his questions, she was a firm believer in his right to ask them.

Now she and Bill walked silently along the first floor corridor of Marble House. Neither spoke until they were in the elevator.

"I won't keep you long," Bill said.

"I'd like for you to stay until we resolve whatever it is that's bothering you so much."

"You may change your mind after you hear what I've got to say."

"Does this have something to do with what happened between us Tuesday night?"

Bill took a deep breath. "In a way."

"Do you regret kissing me?"

"No. But I shouldn't have done it."

"I suppose we should just blame it on how tired we were and how much we both had to drink."

"I don't think you're going to let me get away with that excuse."

The elevator door opened. He put his hand briefly on the small of her back as they exited. Other than helping her from the limo, it was the first time he had touched her the entire evening. They walked down the hall and entered the sitting room.

"Should I close the door?" Laura asked.

"Yes."

He walked to the sideboard and poured two straight whiskeys. Laura kicked off her heels and sat on the couch. She took one of the drinks from him.

"All right, Bill, what's going on? We've known each other too long for you to keep whatever is bothering you bottled up any longer."

He sat forward on the couch and rested the drink on his knee. He couldn't look at her.

"I kept something from you on Tuesday night. I thought I was doing the right thing, but Lee talked to me when we had dinner on Thursday. My concern was protecting you. He convinced me I was wrong. I should have told you Tuesday. I'm telling you now."

"This has to do with Kara?"

Bill stood and took several steps before he turned to look at her. It was obvious to Laura that he was struggling with how to phrase whatever was on his mind.

"Just before Kara left, she called Lee." He stopped and stared at the floor before turning up the drink and finishing it.

Laura prompted. "You've already told me that Kara wants to stop the destruction of the Cylon homeworld because John thought there were humans on it."

"That's part of it." He walked over to the sideboard and poured another drink.

"Bill, just spit it out. What is bothering you so much?"

"There's another reason Kara went to Nereid. She thinks her father survived the explosion of the basestar and is there. She thinks she's going to rescue him. That's the bombshell she dropped on Lee Monday night."

"Oh, dear gods. How could she possibly have thought that? Was Kara losing touch with reality in front of all of us and we missed it?"

"No. She wasn't losing her mind. She had two reasons to believe John could have made it. One is logical. The other one isn't."

"_What possible reasons_?" Laura realized her voice had risen and repeated her question more softly. "What possible reasons?"

"It apparently started with something Yolanda Brenn told her before she died."

"What?"

"I don't know. Kara didn't tell Lee exactly what was said. By the time Lee made it to the hospital that night, Brenn had already slipped into a coma. Kara didn't repeat the exact words to Lee on Monday night."

"You told me that no Raptor could jump that far."

"Under normal circumstances one couldn't. That's the illogical part, but Lee told me Kara never doubted _anything_ that Brenn ever told her. You took Brenn's word about letting a Cylon's baby live. You not only let Sharon's baby live but you set her free and helped her marry the child's father. You can't have it both ways, Laura. You either believe Yolanda Brenn was a true Oracle, a true prophet or you don't. You can't choose to believe one thing and not another. You know my feelings. I think the whole prophecy thing is a load of crap."

Bill was right. When Laura had cast the deciding vote that had kept Sharon Valerii's pregnancy from being terminated, she had done it based mostly on her own beliefs and her feelings as a mother, but also on something that Yolanda Brenn had said on her deathbed, something that Kara had told her. _The child must live. _Apparently she had said something else to Kara that night as well, something about John that Kara had kept from her, had kept from all of them, including Lee.

"You're right, Bill," Laura said more calmly. "I can't have it both ways. I can see why you didn't want to tell me. Kara committed a felony based on the word of someone that many people, including you, believe was a charlatan, a crazy woman who spouted nonsense about the future."

Bill walked back to the couch and sat down. "In all fairness to Kara, she didn't just take Brenn's word for it. She asked Rick Rafferty if John could have survived. The odds are very small, but Rick says it's possible."

As his words registered with her Laura began to feel light-headed. She took several quick breaths. "What are you telling me?" She managed to gasp.

"I'm telling you that there's a ten percent chance that John survived by jumping the Raptor inside the basestar in order to set off the explosion. There's a five percent chance that the Raptor made it to Nereid's solar system. That's the main reason Kara stole that Raider. She's gone to the planet to find her father and bring him home."

Laura clutched her hand into a fist over her heart and pressed. She struggled to breathe. Her voice was incredulous. "Are you telling me that John might be _alive_? You've known this since Tuesday morning and you didn't _mention it to me_?"

Bill looked at her with pain in his eyes. "Laura…the odds are heavily against the chance his ship even made it out of that basestar. I didn't want to have to tell you that he possibly survived the explosion but died somewhere in space when his Raptor was thrown out of our solar system. The chance that he's still alive is less than one percent. I didn't want you to have to live with those odds."

"You kissed me Tuesday night knowing my husband might be alive," Laura said bitterly.

"That was…"

"Wrong of you." Laura harshly finished his sentence.

He dropped his eyes. "Yes."

"And Kara, poor girl. Why didn't she say something? Why didn't she talk to us?"

"What could we have done? We're not ready to take on a planet that's occupied by Cylons right now. That's still months away, maybe as long as six. And Kara did talk about it. She just never mentioned her father."

"You're right. Kara talked to me about not nuking the planet. She sat down and talked to me about reconsidering our plan to destroy Nereid. Kara doesn't beg, but she came as close as I've ever heard her to begging me to reconsider what we planned to do."

"She talked to me about it, too, several times, the last time on Sunday before she stole the Raider on Monday night. She was so adamant that she was damned near insubordinate. At one point I thought she was going to get in my face about it, but she finally backed down. On her last recon mission she flew the Raider to Nereid's north pole. She found approximately fifty ships under the snow. The design of one of them was definitely Colonial. Kevin Abinell identified it as the _Bellicose_, a cargo ship with a crew of thirty-eight. It disappeared during the Cylon attack five years ago."

"You failed to mention _that_ to me as well," Laura said angrily. "I count on you to tell me these things. That's your job."

Bill looked at her defiantly. "The ships didn't seem important because Kara and Lee couldn't find evidence of _one single human_ on that planet. Not one! Not a shred of evidence. Not at the prison, not in the city, nowhere. Plenty of skinjobs and even more centurions, but not a single human. I told her that without proof of any survivors, I had no reason to change my plans."

"Kara found _Colonial_ ships. In light of the estimate Natasi just gave us, those fifty ships take on a different meaning now, don't they?"

"If you believe her! We've not got a shred of proof that the Cylons didn't kill every single human on board those ships the same way they killed everyone on eleven Colonies."

"The Cylons took those ships because they wanted _the humans _for their experiments. I wish I had listened more closely to Kara. Instead I just told her we couldn't allow the Cylons to continue producing basestars and gaining strength. I told her that if they came back to Caprica they would annihilate the human race. That they would do like Cavil threatened to do that time I confronted him at the University. He said they would leave Caprica a dead and wasted cinder in space."

"And they _will_ if we give them the chance."

"We're not going to give them the chance, but we're not going to nuke their homeworld, either. Kara is there and possibly John as well and tens of thousands of humans. They're somewhere on that planet. I will not agree to its destruction!"

"Then what do you want us to do?" Bill asked angrily.

"All the Cylons aren't bad. Look at Sharon and Leoben and now Natasi. They helped us. If there were a way to destroy the basestars and free the humans on Nereid…"

"Do you have any idea of the cost in lives and resources it would take to do that? How many pilots? How many Marines?"

"Yet you can justify nuking_ thousands of_ _civilians_? My daughter and possibly my husband, too?"

"We've only got the word of a Cylon that there are thousands of humans on their homeworld. The future of the human race is at stake. I watched Lampkin's interrogation of Natasi. I've watched it several times. I agree that it was masterful. She had an answer for every question he asked her. She might be telling the truth and she might be lying. And remember her information is four years old." Bill's voice rose and become impassioned. "Do you have any idea how many good men and women we would lose trying to take that planet?"

"No, I don't," Laura said softly. "But I'm sure you'll tell me it's too many."

"There were less than six hundred centurions in Caprica City. It took us weeks and cost us the lives of over a hundred Marines to root them out of their strongholds. Those toasters killed several hundred civilians who refused to leave their homes. They made no distinction. They killed them just like they did our soldiers because they were humans and that's what their programming told them to do. According to Natasi the centurions on Nereid are scattered throughout the human population in the farming settlements and at the prison, probably in the city as well. There's a good chance that if we go in on the ground with our troops, the Cylons will simply start _slaughtering the humans_."

"The skinjobs control the centurions. What if we destroy their basestars and the basestar factory and then offer to negotiate with them like they did with us over Caprica five years ago?"

"What would we offer them?"

"We'll be far more generous with them than they were with us. We'll take the humans from Nereid and we will leave the planet to them. We monitor them to make sure they don't rebuild the basestar shipyard, but we let them live on the planet in peace. We let them keep their homeworld and build a life for themselves there. Maybe someday in the future we can negotiate trade agreements. We can co-exist peacefully with them, but that's a discussion for another day."

"It would never work."

"Why not?"

"Because they're _Cylons_, Laura. They want to destroy us and replace us. They won't stop trying."

"I've already seen that some of them can be persuaded and some of them actually want to live with us peacefully. We will never know about Nereid unless we try. I'll agree that we can't leave them as a military presence, but that doesn't mean we have to annihilate them either. In a way they're our children. Ultimately we're responsible for their existence. Destroy their basestars. Destroy that shipyard. But at that point we _will try_ to negotiate a peace with them. I will not condemn thirty thousand humans to death without trying something else first. And I have come to think of the genocide of a new race, a race that exists only because of _our arrogance_ in assuming we could create new life, as repugnant as I find what they did to us."

"I've fought them! They're ruthless! They slaughtered us by the billions!" Bill said, again with passion in his voice. "They took billions of innocent civilians the same way we would slap a mosquito and with the same amount of regret."

"I have never denied what they did, nor will I ever. It was a holocaust unequaled in our entire bloody history of killing one another. But we killed many thousands of them on their basestars four and a half months ago and we will kill many thousands more. It's not a numbers game. Kill one of them for every one of us who died. If we do that, the killing will _never_ stop! An eye for an eye is not always the answer. Surely somewhere on Nereid there are some of them who will at least _listen_ to an offer of peace. Certainly some of them can be persuaded that co-existing with us in the galaxy is preferable to an eternal war."

Bill stood and said wearily. "I believe you're wrong, but you're my Commander-in-Chief. It seems I've got a plan to rethink."

Laura also stood. She searched his blue eyes and saw the pain. She touched his arm. "The warrior and the diplomat. Twenty-five years ago I watched an idealistic young Viper pilot go off to a battlestar. My brave lieutenant was going to win the war and kill _all_ the Cylons."

"And you were headed for college and a career as a diplomat like your father."

"Our lives didn't work out quite the way we thought, did they? Yet in some ways we're still the warrior and the diplomat."

But even as Laura said the words, she knew something had irrevocably changed for them. She understood now why Bill had ended their kiss on Tuesday night. Honorable men don't sleep with the wife of a friend who might still be alive no matter how small the chance. Bill loved her, but he was also an honorable man. It was one of the touchstones of his life.

She saw the resignation in his eyes. "I just hope you're not making a mistake about Nereid, Laura."

She touched his face, gently and sadly, understanding and forgiveness clear in her touch. "So do I."

...

John sat on the balcony in the morning sun and drank his second cup of coffee. He was still thinking about the night before, about the promise he had made to go through the motions of making a baby with D'Anna in a few days when her face healed. She had gone to sleep with her head on his leg, and he had helped her to her feet and into her bedroom. With the only light coming down the hall from the living room, he had turned down the bed covers and helped her take off the thick white robe. He had been surprised to see that she wore nothing underneath.

He had averted his eyes as she had gotten into bed…not because he didn't want to look at her body but because he did…the age-old response of a man to an attractive woman. He had gently pulled the covers over her shoulders and had left, his body feeling the effect of just that brief glimpse. He'd been so distracted that he had walked out and left the picture of Laura and Braedon that D'Anna had said he could take.

At least he knew one thing with certainty. When the time came, he was going to have no trouble giving her what she expected of him. He had gone so long without a woman's touch that just thinking about it now was not doing him any good. He finished his coffee and went back into the living room where he stripped to his boxer shorts and started doing pushups. The morning's workout turned into a long one.

He had just finished a set of crunches when the door opened and one of the Sixes walked in. From his viewpoint on the floor, the first thing he saw was a pair of high-heeled suede boots in a dark rust color. His eyes traveled upward to the tight rust-colored suede skirt that stopped just short of her knees. He finally lifted his gaze the rest of the way. Her turtle-neck sweater was black and long-sleeved, but it was tight enough to show her perfect breasts. The black sweater made her platinum hair look even lighter. The look-alike Six who had questioned him repeatedly at the prison had always worn black…black cargo pants, long-sleeved top and vest and heavy black boots. Black was a good color for an interrogator like her. It didn't show blood.

John stopped doing the crunches and propped on his elbows. _She only looks like the one from the prison. It's not her. _His heart rate ratcheted up a notch, but he still couldn't keep the annoyance out of his voice.

"Don't you people know how to knock?"

She walked over and looked down at him with a smile on her face. In his entire time at the prison, John had never seen the other Six smile. He picked up a hand towel and wiped the sweat from his face and tried not to think about what kind of damage she could do to him with her stiletto heels.

Her eyes traveled over him, lingering on the front of his shorts before they came back to rest on his face. Her voice was throaty.

"I understand now why D'Anna is so taken with you. You're _very _handsome." Her eyes flicked down again and her smile broadened. "Every bit of you."

"She didn't pick me for my looks. She had a vision."

Her voice took on a teasing tone. "If I'd seen you first, I think I would have had _a vision_, too."

John snorted. "Which one are you? Sonja…or the one who beat her up…or another one?"

"I'm Sonja. You might call me her mentor. It's very nice to meet you." She held out her hand.

John got to his feet before he took it. With him barefoot and her in four-inch heels she stood eye to eye with him. She was definitely _not_ the one from the prison. This beautiful Six exuded sexuality, and she was looking at him the way a cat eyes a bowl of cream. He had seen that look in enough women to know that standing around chatting with her in his underwear was probably a very bad idea.

"I'm sure you'll make yourself at home. I'm going to take a shower."

For the first time since D'Anna had brought him from the prison, John locked the bathroom door. He shaved and then showered, taking his time, wondering if Sonja would lose patience and be gone by the time he got back into the living room. He put on a pair of khaki pants and one of the blue shirts. He was rolling up the sleeves when he walked out of the bedroom. Sonja was standing in front of the sliding glass door with her back to the room. She must have sensed his presence because she turned.

"You don't have much of a view, do you?" She said sympathetically.

"I enjoy watching the birds, and it's not bad in the evening after the sun goes down. I'm going to get something to drink. Would you like some coffee or water? That's all I can offer you."

"Nothing for me…thank you."

He went into the kitchen and got a glass of water. She was sitting on the couch when he returned. John sat in one of the big, overstuffed armchairs. "So what's the occasion? Or do I get a visit from all the different Cylon models?"

"No," she smiled. "Not unless you'd _like_ for me to send them around."

"No thanks. I saw enough of you at the prison to last me a lifetime."

"I'm sorry for what they did to you. We're not _all_ like them. I personally don't agree with what they do, but mine is only one vote among many. Most believe that what happens out there is necessary. The Ones and Fives certainly do. Some copies even _enjoy_ that kind of work just like some of you humans do. They gravitate to the prison."

"_All_ of you who enjoy it aren't out there. One of you beat the hell out of D'Anna two nights ago."

"That wasn't me. It was an Overseer. And D'Anna agreed to it."

"It doesn't matter if she agreed to it or not," John said, his voice showing anger for the first time. "I'm well aware that D'Anna _looks_ like an adult woman, but she's like a kid in a lot of ways."

"Are you saying the Overseer took advantage of her?"

"D'Anna refers to the rest of you as her sisters. Sisters don't beat the crap out of each other."

"I'm her mentor, John, not her bodyguard," Sonja pouted. "All she asked me to do was teach her how to seduce you. You turned her down. She got mad at _me_ because she thinks I didn't do enough to help her."

Her remark made John furious. "So you send her to Simon for a syringe and tell her, _jab him in the neck with this and stand back while he hallucinates and wakes up feeling like somebody swung an axe into his skull._"

"I didn't do that. I don't believe in using that drug." She smiled again. "_I've_ never had to use it."

"D'Anna trusts you. She turned to you first the other night. She said you wouldn't come to the door."

Sonja raised her eyebrows suggestively. "I wasn't in a position to go to the door when she knocked. I would _not_ have advised her to let herself be beaten. And I certainly didn't tell her to drug you. I told her you needed time to adjust to your new circumstances and surroundings. I _know your prison experience was horrible_. I know about their drugs and their brutality. I know you almost died of pneumonia. I told D'Anna not to rush you. She wouldn't listen to me. She went to Simon for the drug because she was too impatient."

"Not that it really matters now, but he forgot to tell her how to use it."

"In all fairness to him he probably thought she knew. The use of that drug is disgustingly widespread among the Threes and the Eights, especially the Eights, poor things. They were created as soldiers. They aren't skilled at seduction. They want their chosen men to fall in love with them. It usually doesn't happen fast enough to suit them."

"Wonder why?" John asked, his voice tinged with sarcasm.

"Their religious fervor of the Threes appeals to a certain type of man, but you aren't that type of man. I told D'Anna if she would just give you some time and let me teach her a few things, then she wouldn't have to drug you at all, but she was in such a hurry. I told her you weren't going to turn into a frog if she didn't kiss you by midnight, but once this copy of D'Anna gets an idea into her head, there's no changing her mind." Sonja smiled. "She's like some humans I know…very, very impatient."

John stood up and paced toward the sliding glass door before he turned around. "That just proves she's like a kid emotionally. A couple of years ago my daughter wanted to go to the…she wanted to go off to school a year early. The only way she could do it was if I would sign a consent form because she was still a minor. She wouldn't take _no_ for an answer."

"How old is your daughter?"

"She was sixteen at the time."

"You don't look old enough to have a teenage daughter."

"Well, I am and I do."

"You have a son, too. He's a beautiful little boy. D'Anna came to see me this morning. She gave you his picture last night and you forgot it."

"I know. I hope she'll still let me have it."

"How old is your son?"

"A year and a few months. I don't know how long I've been here."

"D'Anna's face looks much better. Other than a bruise under her eye and the small cut on her lip, you'd never know she'd been beaten. The swelling is gone. She told me you had put ice on it. That was kind of you."

"I was afraid I was the one who had beat her up…until I saw her."

"She told me you wanted her to take you out for walks around the city and to the temple."

"That's right."

"I should warn you. You won't escape, John. I hope you realize that."

"I never thought I could," he lied.

"There are centurions in places where you'll never see them. I'd hate to see your lifeless body brought back here riddled with their bullets." She smiled that mesmerizing smile. "You've survived too much to die in a foolish attempt to escape."

"Did you mention this to D'Anna?"

"No. D'Anna is extremely trusting of you…so I'm telling _you_."

John managed to keep his expression and his voice neutral. "I'll remember your warning…in case the thought should cross my mind."

"What are you going to do about D'Anna? Are you going to refuse her again?"

"Not unless you can talk her out of giving me the drug if I say _no_. I don't want either one of us going through _that_ again. Would you talk to her?"

"It's not my place to interfere in the reproductive attempts of a sister. You should be flattered. It's really an honor to be chosen by one of us."

John rubbed his thumb across his wedding ring. "Putting aside the total conceit of that statement, it's an honor I'd rather do without. I'm married, Sonja. I love my wife. I'd rather you just sent me to a farm settlement and let me work in the fields."

She smiled her seductive smile again. "That would be a terrible waste. You're a very good lover, aren't you, John?"

He snorted. "What difference does that make? I've been _chosen_."

"Be very gentle with this copy of D'Anna. She's what you humans call a virgin. Not physically but spiritually. She's never been with a man."

John sat down in the armchair and rubbed his face with his hands. "That's just frakking great. A gun to my head, a needle in my neck…same difference. Now I find out that she doesn't know the first thing about…what she expects me to do."

"She knows exactly what you're _supposed_ to do. She's not _that_ naïve."

John took a deep breath and let it out. "That doesn't make me feel any better."

"I thought knowing would please you. Not only did she choose you to be her lover, she chose you to be her first. Have you never been a woman's _first lover_?"

"Not since I was fifteen years old. I barely knew what the hell I was doing then."

"I'm sure you do now," she purred and raised her eyebrows suggestively again.

"That's not the point, Sonja. What the hell do I know about you Cylons anyway except you're damned creative at finding ways to cause pain and you're damned quick to use a needle?"

She smiled again. "D'Anna may be naïve about the relationship between a man and a woman, but she's more mature than you give her credit for being. Some of what seems like immaturity is lack of confidence, but there is a small problem. Did she tell you she's a _redefined_ copy of her model?"

"She said your creators had to fix a flaw in her. She was too religious."

"Yes. Fanatically so. She wanted to see the face of God so desperately that she kept killing herself. She said that each time she did it she got a little closer to seeing Him. She was willing to endure the rigors of the downloading process in order to do it. Suicide is forbidden in our scriptures no matter what the reason. Her flaw was fixed, but there were some unintended consequences having to do with her emotional development. She's a test copy, by the way."

"What does that mean?"

"The creators want to see if she'll work out before they allow any more of her particular copy to be unboxed. She's on trial, so to speak. There are many other Threes out there, but only one exactly like her."

"I got well acquainted with one of the other Threes at the prison."

"The original model Three's programming is still in this one, but a _software patch_ is overriding it, suppressing the fanaticism but also some of her more highly evolved emotions. If you can get her to feel some genuine emotions, the old programming will integrate with the new and she should mature very quickly without the fanatical desire to see God. We're certainly hoping she does. I'd hate to see her copy boxed permanently. I've enjoyed trying to help her. It's so rare we get to teach one of our own the way I'm trying to teach her."

"I love my wife, Sonja. I told D'Anna I'd have sex with her because in effect she's got a gun to my head. I'll be gentle with her. I'll do my best to make the experience good for her, but I'm not going to fall in love with her."

"You can pretend."

"I'm not a damned machine like you are," John said angrily. "I can't switch emotion on and off like you do. It doesn't work that way for humans."

"Is that because you think a relationship between a human and _a machine_ is wrong? Are you sure that's not part of your problem? Is love for your wife the _only_ reason you turned D'Anna down?"

"You obviously don't understand what it feels like to love someone or you wouldn't have asked me that question."

For the first time there was an undertone of anger in her voice. "How do you know I can't feel love? That just proves to me how prejudiced you are. Humans even have a dirty little name for us…_skinjobs_. That's the way you look at D'Anna and me both, isn't it? As machines, _skinjobs_ and not as women."

"Maybe I look at you that way because you _are_ machines. I don't care what you look like. You're all machines. Your neural pathways are made of silica just like the first AI robots ever created. You're just packaged a hell of a lot nicer. Somebody loaded software into you. You just admitted that your creators can change the way you think by _applying a software patch_."

Sonja's voice took on a defensiveness that surprised him. "I was trying to put what they do in terms you would understand. Don't you humans learn new things and change your minds?"

"We learn…and we change our minds, but the bottom line is there's nothing you can say or do that will make me _want_ to do what I've been brought here to do."

John knew the minute he spoke that he should have kept his mouth shut, that he should never have let her goad him into expressing his opinion. He had been referring to the whole idea of being forced into functioning as D'Anna's sexual partner. Sonja had taken his words as a personal challenge, a gauntlet thrown down when that had not been his intention.

She smiled seductively again, but there was a slight narrowing of her eyes, something that looked very much like determination. She got up and walked over to his chair. He'd never seen the Six at the prison smile, but he'd seen that determined look in her eyes…only her determination had been to get answers from him. Prison Six would have backhanded him hard across the face at that point. She had done it on many occasions, and he couldn't stop her because he was always tied to that chair. He was prepared to grab Sonja's wrist if she tried to hit him. Instead she quickly pulled the sweater over her head and dropped it on the rug. Her black lace bra revealed as much as it covered. In the shocked few seconds that followed, she slipped the tight rust-colored skirt up her thighs and straddled him. He caught another glimpse of black lace.

"Don't," he said through clenched teeth, but she grasped his face tightly between her hands and very expertly kissed him. When he didn't respond, she drew back, took his hands and put them on her breasts.

"Do I _feel_ like a machine?" She purred as she pressed her body against him.

Her nipples were hard under the thin lace. The minute she let go of his hands, he jerked them away like he'd been burned. It had been too long since he'd last touched Laura's soft skin. He knew he was beginning to lose his battle, had maybe already lost it.

"Sonja, stop it. D'Anna thinks you're her _friend_. For frak's sake, stop it. Don't do this. Please."

"You don't mean that, John. I _know_ you don't mean it. You want this as much as I do."

She grasped the back of his neck, squeezing hard, and licked his ear lobe. He felt her warm breath and then her tongue against his skin as she pulled his head back and kissed his throat. Her fingers were suddenly busy unbuttoning his shirt. She ran her hands up his chest and back down, across the scars, across his flat abdomen, caressing, savoring. Her skin smelled faintly of some warm, exotic spice, of tropical flowers and places far away from the brutality he had suffered in the prison. He'd gone much too long without a woman's touch, and hers was skilled beyond his ability to endure and resist it.

He heard her whisper of triumph. "Oh, John, your body doesn't think I'm a machine. I think I make you as hot as you're making me."

His body had betrayed him. He hated himself for letting her get to him that way. He made another effort to stop her. He grasped the top of her arms and tried to push her away, but she was as strong as the Six at the prison. She grabbed his dog tags and yanked hard. The chain bit into the back of his neck and he let go of her arms. Her eyes glittered now with something besides determination. He saw desire…as real as he'd ever seen it in the eyes of a human woman.

He gave in. He did want this as much as she did, this mindless, physical release that his body craved and that meant nothing to him other than what it was, the pleasure he could give and take in a beautiful woman's body. She kissed him again and he slid both hands into her hair and held her head while he returned the kiss, his mouth and tongue savoring her lips, then her neck and finally her shoulders. With a skill that equaled hers, he slowly kissed the pale soft skin that held the scent of warm spice and the promise of everything forbidden. She closed her eyes and arched her back, pressing herself against the front of his trousers, against his hardness and from her throat this time there came a whimpering moan.

He grasped her hips and held her tightly against him, letting the desire wash through him, taking its measure and gaining control of it. He savored the feeling for a long time before he took her hand and put it on him. "Tell me, Sonja. Is that what you want?"

"Yes," she moaned again. "I want to feel you inside of me." She reached for his belt buckle. He grabbed her wrists and stopped her.

"Not yet," he said softly. "Be patient."

His mouth found her taut nipples, his teeth gently pulling them under the thin fabric. His fingers slid under the lace of her panties and found her hot, wet center, his touch as experienced as her own. It took barely a minute until she again reached for his belt buckle.

Again he grabbed her wrists. He brought his mouth to her ear. "There's a magic word I want you to say, Sonja. In all the time I've been on this planet I've never heard one of you say the magic word. Say _please._ Say that word for me, Sonja. I want to hear you say it."

"Please," she whispered. "Oh, _please_."

He let go of her wrists. Her hands went eagerly, almost frantically back to the buckle of his belt. This time he didn't try to stop her. He knew that it was going to be over quickly for both of them, but it was going to feel so damned good. Oh, sweet Eros, after all this time it was going to feel…so…damned…good.

John could never decide later if the gods were saving him or punishing him, but just as Sonja got his belt unbuckled, the door opened and D'Anna walked in. To say that all hell broke loose was putting it mildly.

TBC…


	10. Wildcats and Catfights

Chapter 10

Wildcats and Catfights

_Mankind has long since left the Garden and journeyed to the far reaches of Kobol.__  
__Pandora's Gift of Curiosity has prevailed over Zeus's dire warning, and__  
__She has opened the jar, spreading the plagues therein to her brothers and sisters.__  
__Only Hope has remained inside. She builds a small altar and places upon it__  
__The jar containing the last gift of the gods and there she remains as__  
__Her days dwindle and fewer and fewer humans come to touch the jar__  
__And offer their forgiveness for the plagues she had unleashed upon them._

_You see, Brother, Posiden says to Zeus. Hope is not enough. Mankind suffers__  
__From your plagues. They have turned away from us. Zeus grumbles,__  
__I cannot take back what is done. Athena looks at the children of the gods__  
__And wisely says, Then give them another reason to return and worship us.__  
__Give the righteous immortality. Zeus ponders her words. You have a point,__  
__But that would make them too much like us. Hades finds the answer.__  
__Create a realm for them after death where the good are justly rewarded__  
__And the evil are punished. Zeus is pleased and gives his brother dominion__  
__Over the Underworld and then he bestows upon his children the gift that__  
__Sets them apart from the animals and the fish and the birds of Kobol.__  
__Zeus gives to Mankind the Gift of Immortal Souls._

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

_._

Months earlier Lee had found Kara's journal on John's laptop and had tried to open it only to find that she had password-protected it. He hadn't understood then what Kara had to be so secretive about. Late Monday night he had realized why she had locked him out of her journal. It had only added to the sting of her betrayal. _Trust. _One little word. Five little letters. Huge implications. Kara hadn't trusted him enough to tell him that she still thought her father was alive much less that she was planning to steal a Raider and go to the Cylon homeworld to find him.

But that wasn't being completely fair to her. She had tried to tell him…in the beginning at least. He'd just been too damned sure she was wrong to listen to her. Lee remembered how he had tried to reason with her during those first days after the fighting when she had insisted that John's Raptor was out there somewhere and that the Search and Rescue teams Bill Adama had sent out would find him.

Maybe it was because Lee was angry that she was being unreasonable or maybe it was because he was hurting from the loss of his friend, but at the end of a week he had finally told her that John was dead, end of story, and that to keep insisting he would be found alive was a total denial of reality. He had told her that she needed to accept her father's death and start dealing with it. He realized now how rough he had been on her, even if his intentions had been good. The truth was that he didn't really know how to deal with her during those first crazy weeks after they had won their freedom. He had his own issues to deal with, a broken leg being only one of them. He recognized now how much both of them had been struggling emotionally.

Lee had known a father all his life although their relationship had been marked more by Adama's absence than by his presence. Even when Bill was around, their relationship had often been adversarial. Kara's relationship with John had been anything but normal. She had found him and lost him and then found him again in about as dramatic a way as possible. She had only been with John for the last two years, but the bond of love that had developed between Kara and her father had astonished Lee. Maybe part of the problem had been Lee's jealousy of that bond. How many times had he wished he had that same kind of bond with his own father? How many times had he realized that he never would?

When the admiral had recalled all the SAR Raptors after a week and the search for John had officially ended, Kara had stopped claiming John would be found alive. In the two weeks leading up to John's memorial service, she'd been quiet and withdrawn, but part of that Lee had attributed to Yolanda Brenn's death and the estrangement Kara had with her stepmother over the fact that Kara had refused to move into Marble House. After Lee's rescue from the ocean, Kara had moved into his apartment. She had never moved out.

Lee knew if John had been there, Kara would never have moved in with him, but John was gone and so Kara had stayed at Marble House only occasionally until the night they'd had the fight over the password-protected journal.

Lee had used the word _obsessed_ one too many times and Kara had angrily stuffed the laptop into its case and had gone to stay at Marble House for a few nights. But like every argument they'd ever had, that one had blown over, too. Four nights later he had heard her key in the lock and she had walked into the apartment. She hadn't explained her absence or apologized for it. She had just walked in and dropped her duffel bag on the floor and plopped down on the sofa beside him. He was the one who had apologized and kissed her and she'd kissed him back and that hot spark that had always existed between them had ignited. Everything had seemed to be normal once again as if anything in their relationship had ever really been normal.

After John's memorial service, Kara's mood had changed once more. She had seemed to find peace. She had concentrated on learning how to fly the Raider. She had talked excitedly about her first recon mission. Lee thought she had finally accepted losing her father. Now he knew how far from the truth that had been. All along she had believed that John was on Nereid. All along she had been looking for a way to rescue him. Bit by bit she had built her plan and four nights ago she had implemented the first phase of it.

What would he have done, though, if she'd told him what she was going to do? He would have stopped her. There's no way he would have let her steal a million-cubit ship and jump it away on an unauthorized mission to a hostile planet. And that was why she hadn't told him. To save her and her career, he would have betrayed her and she knew it.

Now sitting in a booth on the _Penelope_, Lee watched as the box popped up on the laptop's screen asking for the password to the journal just as it had the last time he'd tried to access it. Kara had finally revealed it to him in the letter she had left for him on Monday night. He entered it. _karaluvslee. _She hadn't trusted him with her secret, but Lee believed with all his heart that she loved him. Maybe she had kept her secrets to save him from having to choose between her and his father. For the first time Lee realized that if Kara had told him her plans and he had betrayed her to stop her, there was very little chance she would have stayed with him. Now he just wanted her back. They had the rest of their lives to work on their issues if she just came back to him.

Lee looked at the first journal entry as it filled the screen. It was dated the night of John's memorial service and was only one line, eight words, but Lee could almost feel the hope in Kara's heart as the words leapt from the screen at him.

_Yolanda Brenn saw it. My father is alive!_

…

After Bill left, Laura sat on the couch in her sitting room and tried to process her thoughts. Of all the things she and Bill had talked about that night, only one would not leave her mind. There was the smallest chance that John might be alive.

A wave of emotion swept her. It had been almost five months since the night they had defeated the Cylons and John had disappeared. All that time she had thought of him as dead. If John had made it all the way to Nereid, if he had managed to land safely on the planet, could he have survived for almost five months? Was he a prisoner of the Cylons? Or had he died in the explosion of that basestar like Bill obviously though?

And Kara, headstrong Kara, who believed without question something that Yolanda Brenn had told her about her father, believed it so completely that she had committed a crime to get to the Cylon homeworld and search for him. She had staked her life on an Oracle's words and a physicist's guess of five percent.

Laura's head was swimming and not just from the whiskey.

She got up and walked down the hall and into the sitting room outside of Braedon's and Maya's bedrooms. It was nearly midnight and she expected the lamps to be off and Maya to be in bed, but she was sitting on the couch with a book open on her lap.

Maya looked up. "Are you all right? You look upset."

Laura tried to keep her tone one of normal motherly concern. "Did you have any trouble getting Braedon to bed?"

"Not really. He went right to sleep. I've been checking on him. He's a little stuffy but that's all."

"I want to see my son," Laura said, and unable to control herself any longer, she put her hand over her mouth and choked back a sob.

Maya put the book aside, stood and walked over to her. She gently touched Laura's arm. "What's wrong?"

"Bill…Bill…" Laura choked and couldn't continue. A sob shook her.

"The admiral…did something?"

Laura shook her head.

"He said something?"

Laura nodded and walked over to the end table where she plucked several tissues out of a box. She mopped her eyes, noticing the smudges of mascara.

"I'll be back in a minute."

She pushed open the door of Braedon's bedroom and quietly entered. The base of his nursery lamp was shaped like a turtle and functioned as a night light, its warm yellow glow faintly illuminating the room. She walked over to his crib and brushed her hand lightly over his thick, silky brown hair…John's hair. Braedon stirred in his sleep and then settled. Laura pulled the blanket up to his shoulders and watched his rhythmic breathing, a little stuffy just like Maya had said.

There were times even now that she could hardly believe she had a child, much less one as beautiful and smart and good-natured as Braedon. She knew that his looks and brains were genetic and possibly much of his temperate nature as well, but the rest of this happy child's disposition was due to John's love and care for him.

John loved their child more than his own life. He loved all of them that way. He had proven it by going back to that basestar to destroy it, knowing that he would probably pay the ultimate price. If there was any justice, he was alive and safe on Nereid. If there was any justice, the gods would return a good man and loving father to his son and his daughter…and to her. Laura leaned over and gently kissed Braedon's forehead before leaving the room, pulling the door almost closed behind her.

Maya was standing where she had left her. "What's wrong?" She asked softly. "What did the admiral say that upset you so much?"

"We talked about Kara, about what she had done and why."

Maya hesitated and then said, "I don't know where she's gone, but she told Brae that she was going to get his father and bring him home."

"What?" Laura asked in shock.

"Braedon told me that Kara had gone to the stars to bring his dada home. It's true, isn't it?"

Laura walked over to the table and grabbed another handful of tissues. She wiped her eyes again. "That's what Bill told me tonight. Kara believes John is still alive on a planet outside our solar system."

"Is there any chance?" Maya asked breathlessly.

"Bill says five percent. I don't understand the physics of it, but apparently it's possible. Bill didn't want to give me false hope. He still believes that John died in the explosion of the basestar."

Maya sat down on the couch as if her legs refused to hold her up any longer. "Every night this week I've prayed to Hermes for Kara and last night I added Lee to my prayer. I prayed to the god of travel for their safe journeys. Now I'll pray for John as well."

"Did Kara ever mention anything that Yolanda Brenn told her just before she died?"

"No. I knew she was at the hospital that night, but we never talked about it. Kara had a hard time during those weeks after the fighting. She would come by and play with Brae for an hour or more without saying much to me. I thought she was just working through her grief. Later when she started talking again, she never mentioned it and I didn't ask."

"I worried about her because I thought she was in complete denial, and then after John's memorial service, she seemed to accept what had happened. She seemed much better emotionally to me. I actually saw her smile again. I thought she was finally coming to terms with it."

"I agree. I thought the same thing. We all did."

"Now it appears that she never accepted her father's death because…maybe she had good reason not to..." Laura's voice trailed off.

"You still love him, don't you?" Maya asked quietly.

"Yes."

Tears came to Maya's eyes. "Wednesday night Lee told me that grief is a personal thing, that we don't all follow the same timetable. He's right. I'm sorry for what I said to you at breakfast on Wednesday morning. It was none of my business and…I was wrong to mention it to you."

"It's all right, Maya. I think I understand why you said what you did. You lost so much when the Cylons attacked five years ago. If anyone understands grief, it's you. And all Bill did on Tuesday night was kiss me. He apologized tonight…in his own way. Bill is a good man, an honorable man. You shouldn't think ill of him. We're free from the Cylons because of him and his plan."

"We're free because of what John did, too."

Laura looked at Maya and for a moment their eyes locked before Maya's gaze fell. Laura patted Maya's shoulder. "Don't stay up too late reading. I'll see you at breakfast."

Laura went back to her sitting room, opened the drawer of the small desk that sat on one side of the room, and got out a piece of official Presidential stationery. She quickly penned a note and sealed it inside an envelope. On the outside she wrote the name _Elosha_ and underneath the name and street of Elosha's little temple. She picked up the phone and dialed the internal number of her head of security. When the night supervisor answered, she asked him to send someone to pick up the letter. She wanted it hand delivered first thing in the morning. She told the supervisor to make sure whoever delivered the letter waited for a reply.

Fifteen minutes later Laura had washed her face and was dressed in her nightgown. She went into her closet and got John's brown leather bomber jacket, the one piece of his clothing that she had brought with her from the apartment. He'd had the jacket since he was a young Viper pilot on the _Solaria_. The leather was soft now and the color on the shoulder patches had faded. He had been wearing that jacket on the night he had first kissed her, that magical snowy evening that she had realized she was falling in love with him. She carried it to bed with her, wrapped her arms around it and buried her face against the inside of the collar. It still smelled of him. Tears came to her eyes again.

She didn't address her prayer to any one of the gods in particular because she wanted all of them to hear her.

_Please keep him safe and bring him home to me._

…

John realized immediately that D'Anna Biers knew what was happening between him and Sonja before she entered the apartment. He also knew that there was going to be trouble as soon as he saw the look of hot fury on D'Anna's face.

D'Anna had the small picture of Laura and Braedon in her hand. She flung it at him with such force that the glass shattered and the frame splintered as it struck the wall behind them inches from his head.

"Get up, Sonja," John said quickly, but Sonja wasn't fast enough. Her back was turned to D'Anna and she couldn't make the transition from almost consummating her passion to being able to defend herself. Or maybe she didn't think she would have to. Maybe she was expecting D'Anna and the opening door was no surprise to her, but for whatever reason, she didn't move. That was a big mistake.

With an animalistic snarl, D'Anna came barreling across the small room and bodily slammed Sonja off John's lap with such force that the two women ended up on the floor in front of the couch. D'Anna scrambled astride Sonja's waist and began pummeling Sonja with her fists. Sonja couldn't move her arms away from her face long enough to even fight back. All she was able to do was protect herself from the merciless blows that D'Anna was raining down on her.

John managed to get out of the chair and get his belt buckled. He knew he should try to stop D'Anna, but for a moment he hesitated. He already knew that Cylon women were stronger than a lot of men. D'Anna managed to pry one of Sonja's arms from her face and grabbed a handful of hair. Sonja let out a shriek as D'Anna jerked hard and was rewarded with a fistful of the platinum strands.

John grasped D'Anna's shoulders. "All right. That's enough. Get off her."

D'Anna didn't act like she even heard him. Sonja cried faintly. "Please make her stop."

"Apologize to her," John said to Sonja. "Tell her you're sorry."

"I'm sorry," Sonja whimpered still trying to fend off D'Anna's blows.

The apology didn't seem to make any difference either. John bent down, braced his legs, wrapped both arms around D'Anna's waist and managed to haul her off Sonja. D'Anna was still swinging and now added kicks to her attack. Fortunately Sonja was fast enough to roll over and crawl out of D'Anna's way.

"Get your sweater and get out of here," John said. "I'll handle this."

Sonja was a mess. Her bra straps were partially off her shoulders and her hair was frizzed out and in her face. The suede skirt was twisted halfway around. There were red marks from D'Anna's blows on her upper and lower arms and on her shoulders. She no longer looked like the seductive woman who had jauntily walked into his apartment less than an hour ago.

"Go!" John said harshly.

D'Anna was struggling mightily to get to Sonja. He knew he couldn't hold her much longer and he wanted Sonja out of the apartment if D'Anna got away from him.

Sonja grabbed her sweater and struggled to her feet. She didn't even bother to put it on before she hurried to the door, opened it and was gone.

John dragged D'Anna to the couch and shoved her down on it. Her eyes were still blazing with fury and she was breathing hard. She started to get up.

John put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back into a sitting position. He was almost as angry as she was although he knew that it was partially sexual frustration that drove his wrath.

"No, D'Anna. You sit there and don't you frakking move! What the hell has gotten into you anyway?"

To his surprise she sat still. He buttoned his shirt and rubbed his face with both hands as he paced back and forth in the small room. What a frakking mess.

Sunlight came through the sliding glass doors. Shattered glass from the picture frame sparkled on the floor. John walked over and carefully retrieved the photograph from the wreckage. A piece of broken glass had scratched the bottom of it, but otherwise the picture was undamaged. He glanced at his wife and son before he slipped it into the pocket of his shirt. What he wouldn't give to be back on Caprica with them right now.

He turned around and looked at D'Anna. She still had the surly, angry look in her eyes, but she hadn't moved from the couch.

Finally John said, "Did you get here too early or too late? I'm guessing it was almost too late."

Her tone was sullen. "I don't know what you mean."

"You and Sonja had a chat this morning. You knew she was coming to see me, didn't you?"

D'Anna wouldn't look at him or answer him. She looked down and gnawed at her thumbnail.

"Answer me!" John said angrily.

Her eyes were still downcast. "Yes."

"So where exactly in this little tag-team act were you _supposed_ to come in?"

"I don't understand."

"She was expecting you, but she wasn't expecting you to come in swinging. Right?"

A surly shrug was the only answer he got.

"Sonja was supposed to get me good and ready for you, wasn't she?"

The sullen tone again. "Maybe."

"No frakking _maybe_ about it. Sonja was supposed to start the seduction and you were going to take advantage of her warmup." When she wouldn't reply, John continued, the anger still in his voice. "Where's the surveillance equipment?"

"In the basement."

"Video, audio or both?"

"Both. But not in the bedroom. Just this room."

"So when you realized that Sonja wasn't going to stop like you'd agreed, you had to high tail it up here to stop her. Right?"

D'Anna nodded and then looked up. Tears had filled her eyes, but anger was still apparent in her voice. "You don't understand. I'm not beautiful like Sonja. I don't know how to do those things she does with men. They always want her. She said she would help me. Instead she decided to take you for herself. She deserved what I did to her. Maybe she'll think before she does it again."

Pity welled in him, the same emotion he'd felt on two other occasions. She hadn't been physically tortured, but her creators had messed with her mind and her emotions. In the process of trying to repress her religious fanaticism, they had managed to destroy her confidence in herself. On some level she must have felt what they did to her.

John sat down beside her and took her hand. She snatched it away.

"I'm sorry, D'Anna. I'm sorry things got out of hand with me and Sonja. It shouldn't have happened, but it did. It wasn't all her fault."

"I could send you back to the prison."

John took a deep breath as her words registered. "That's hardly fair when the two of you set me up."

"No," she finally conceded. "Sonja's done it before," she said more calmly. "Not to me but to another Three. She likes to make men want her."

"Then why did you trust her?"

"She said she would help me. She told me to watch what she did on the video and do the same thing."

John twisted sideways on the sofa and turned D'Anna's face to him. He smoothed back her messy hair. "You don't need to do what she does or act like her. It wouldn't be right for you."

"Why?"

"Because that's not who you are."

"I don't understand."

"Do you know why I forgot the picture last night?"

She shook her head.

"Because you didn't have on anything under your robe and I was very distracted when I left."

She looked at him for a few moments before her eyes registered comprehension of what he had just said. "Tell me what you want me to do," she said softly.

"Have you never been with a man before?"

She shook her head and looked down.

"Your creators didn't even give you some memories of being with a man?"

With her eyes still downcast she said, "One time I thought I remembered something but not anymore."

John took her chin and gently lifted her face. "That's nothing to be ashamed of. Do you still want us to do this?"

She nodded.

"Right now?"

She nodded again.

He stood and held out his hand to her. "Okay. We'll take it slow. I promise not to hurt you. Will you trust me?"

She looked up at him. John recognized the look in her blue eyes. He'd seen it many years ago in the eyes of his first real girlfriend, Amelie, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the couple who had agreed to foster him after his parents had died. Even though everything had ended badly for him and that innocent girl of so many years ago, he'd never forgotten her sweet shyness or the trusting way she had given herself to him. He hadn't known enough then to make the experience good for her. Maybe the gods were giving him a second chance with this Cylon woman.

D'Anna stood and took his hand. He leaned down and gently kissed her, trying to avoid hurting the cut place on her lip. He thought about the monitoring equipment.

"Let's go to the bedroom," he said softly.

He thought for a moment that her smile was agreement. Her trusting eyes were on his, but for the longest time she didn't move and then her body slowly collapsed against him. He caught her before she fell to the floor and lifted her onto the couch. Her eyes were closed. He felt for a pulse at her neck. Her heart was beating in a strong, normal rhythm. She was breathing fine. He slid an eyelid up. Her pupil was responsive to light. Her color was good, but she appeared to be unconscious. He took one of her hands and slapped it gently. He called her name. No response.

John stood, went into the kitchen and wet a towel. He squeezed it out, took it and blotted D'Anna's face. She didn't appear to be in any kind of distress. She wasn't pale or sweating. She appeared to be asleep. Only he couldn't wake her.

John took a deep breath. He wasn't sure if it was the right thing, but he had to do something. He went to the door. He was going to bang on it and hope a centurion would open it without shooting him. Instead as he put his hand on the knob and turned, it opened. He stopped in surprise. He hadn't gotten anywhere near the retinal scanner.

One of the centurions turned. When it saw him, its metal hands raised but no weapons extended. He would probably have to cross the threshold for that to happen. "D'Anna is sick," John told it. "Go get a doctor." When the centurion didn't move, John said, "Get Simon. Go get a _Four_." It seemed to understand that because it lumbered toward the elevator.

He sat on the floor by the couch and held D'Anna's hand and watched her breathe. He didn't have any idea what was wrong with her. He didn't think he had done anything. He didn't believe the kiss had done it. Kisses were supposed to wake up the princess, not put her to sleep.

The door opened and Doolittle came in with his lunch. John followed him into the kitchen.

"Something's wrong with D'Anna. I've sent one of the centurions to get Simon."

"I wondered why there was only one outside the door. What seems to be the problem, sir?"

"She's unconscious. We were talking and the next minute she was out cold."

"I never seen one of them when it had something wrong with it."

"How frakking long could it take to get a Four? That centurion has been gone almost thirty minutes."

"It might have had to hunt one down."

"You mean they aren't in communication with each other?"

"I don't really know how them centurions communicate with the skinjobs, sir. Would you want me to wait with you?"

"No. That's okay. I know you've got other deliveries to make."

Doolittle had been gone about five minutes when the door opened and one of the Fours walked in. John fought down the visceral reaction he had to the Cylon model who had drugged him so many times in the prison and who might have been the one who had given D'Anna the drug-filled syringe she had used on him two nights earlier.

John didn't greet Simon, just pointed to the couch. "We were talking and she passed out. That was nearly forty minutes ago. She hasn't moved since."

Simon walked over to the couch and looked down. "Did you see her ingest anything?"

"No."

Simon knelt beside the couch and did the same things John had done. He took D'Anna's pulse and looked at her eyes. He looked up at John.

"Is this the experimental copy?"

"She said the creators had fixed some kind of religious flaw in her."

"Ummm. That's her. She's been worked on a couple of times. I think this is probably something neurological."

"You think…but you don't know?"

"The creators don't notify me when they start fine tuning one of us. How did the injuries to her face happen? They look old."

"Someone Sonja called the Overseer. She did it two nights ago."

"Why?"

"It's a long, disgusting story. So what are you going to do for D'Anna?"

"There's nothing I can do. I'd say let's see if she sleeps it off. You said you were talking to her. Did something happen before that? Something of an _emotional_ nature?"

"She and Sonja got into a fight. The slugging, hair-pulling kind. Sonja got the worst end of it, though."

"Ummm. That's interesting. Intense?"

"Very. D'Anna was furious."

Simon chuckled. "Maybe D'Anna was just getting a little back today by beating up on Sonja."

"I don't think that was her primary motive."

"This copy had most of her emotional responses repressed in an effort to find where the religious fanaticism was coming from. I thought the plan was to bring them back online one at a time to see when the flaw appeared, but maybe they just gave up on her. I wouldn't have thought she could have felt enough emotion right now to get into a fight. What was it about?"

John rubbed his face in embarrassment. " D'Anna walked in and found Sonja sitting on my lap."

"Ah, so you belong to D'Anna and she caught you with Sonja."

"I don't frakking _belong_ to anybody," John said angrily. "But D'Anna did bring me here."

"Ummm," Simon was amused. "And D'Anna won the fight?"

"D'Anna was doing the hitting. I finally got her off of Sonja long enough that Sonja could get out of here."

"If D'Anna is still like this in the morning, then send for me again. There's nobody in the city who can treat her. We'll have to take her to the lab."

"The lab at the _prison_?"

"I see you're familiar with the place. So she brought you from there and not from one of the settlements?"

"That's right."

There was a hint of amusement in Simon's voice. "Were you a dangerous criminal where you came from?"

"I was a teacher."

"Interesting. Let D'Anna sleep. Send for me if something changes. Physically she's fine, but there's definitely something going on in her brain. She appears to be in deep REM sleep. The creators must have done that for a reason."

"Do you think this is what Sonja meant when she said D'Anna's old and new programming would integrate if she felt some strong emotions? You think D'Anna is rebooting and she'll be fine in the morning?" John asked.

Simon chuckled. "Rebooting. That's good. I'll have to remember that."

"In the meantime we do _nothing_?"

"There's nothing we can do. She'll wake up or she won't. I'll talk to Sonja and then I'll report this. If we need to do anything else, I'll come back."

Simon left without a goodbye just like he'd arrived without a greeting. He seemed a lot less concerned about D'Anna's condition than John thought he would have been. But maybe that was because death had no real meaning for them as long as they were near a res facility. If this D'Anna's died, she would just download into another body.

John went into the kitchen and brought his tray back into the living room. He ate the meal and drank the tea. Then he took the empty tray into the kitchen, came back and pulled an armchair close to the couch so he could watch D'Anna. Simon was right. It looked several times like she was dreaming. Her eyelids fluttered and twitched rapidly. Just how long did it take to reboot a Cylon brain anyway?

He closed his eyes. There was nothing to do now but wait.

…

Kara and Hunter started down the wooden steps. She looked around.

"Don't you have any guards? The Cylons could just walk right into this place."

"The first pair of eyes picked us up a mile outside camp. We've been under constant surveillance since then."

"I didn't see anybody."

"You're not supposed to. If you hadn't been with me you would have been stopped."

"Stopped?"

"They wouldn't have shot you, but you would have undergone some serious questioning. You would have been detained somewhere outside base camp until we made a decision about you."

"My faith in your security is restored."

"Here's how it is. Basically we fight the Cylons and they fight us, but there are some places that are off limits. We don't kill them in the city or the settlements. They don't kill us in base camp. They don't use their Raiders on us. The Cylon leaders agreed to that a long time ago because they saw the benefit of using us for their training. Outside the safe areas, anything goes. The only difference is that they can replace their dead overnight."

"So why do you need security at all?"

Hunter grinned. "We don't trust them _that much_. They've got centurions posted all around the city now. They don't trust us either."

They reached the bottom of the steps and began walking down a stone path between some of the dwellings. Up ahead a young woman peeked out of the door of one of them.

"Hunter," she shouted and came running toward them. He handed his assault rifle to Kara. The woman jumped into his arms and he swung her around. Kara smiled. So Hunter wasn't all toughness and lack of emotion.

His sister was shorter than him by four or five inches with dark hair that was braided down her back in one long braid that nearly reached her waist. Her blouse and baggy trousers were made of a natural-colored fabric. Her eyes were blue like Hunter's and Kara realized as Dessa stood smiling shyly at her, that she was a very pretty young woman.

"Are you Hunter's girlfriend?" Dessa asked.

"I'm Hunter's friend," Kara answered her. "You must be Dessa."

She nodded. "What's your name?"

"Kara, but your brother calls me Wildcat."

Dessa started laughing. "You're funny."

Kara glanced at Hunter. "That's what your brother tells me."

Dessa reached out and stroked the arm of Kara's flight suit. "That feels good."

"It doesn't feel so good to me right now." Kara wrinkled her nose. "I need a bath. I smell so bad I can hear myself."

Dessa giggled again.

By now several other inhabitants of base camp, all women, had strolled out of their dwellings and were looking at them. A woman wearing a blouse and long skirt in the same color as Dessa's outfit came out of the same dwelling Dessa had come from. She also had a long braid down her back, but her hair was mostly silver. She was drying her hands on an off-white apron. She walked up the stone path to them.

"This is my Aunt Emmalyn," Hunter said. "Emmalyn, Kara."

"Hi," Kara said.

Emmalyn's tone was neither warm nor friendly. "Well, hello to you. Where did Hunter find you? Wandering around out there in the forest? I guess the Cylons planted you for our men to find. A pretty blond? How original."

"She's not a skinjob," Hunter said. "She's from Caprica."

"Oh, is she now?" Emmalyn asked. "And how did she get here? Have I missed the travel poster announcing the startup of flights from the Colonies?"

Hunter gave Kara a look. "My aunt is almost as funny as you."

Kara smiled. "I don't blame her for being suspicious. Just yesterday I seem to remember three guys laughing at me when I said me and Narch were from Caprica."

Hunter grinned. "Okay."

Kara looked back at Emmalyn. "I, uh, borrowed a ship on Caprica. I'm here to find my father and take him home. He's a prisoner of the Cylons."

"And you thought their prison was in the middle of our forest?"

"I didn't know he was a prisoner until I got here," Kara snapped back and then tried to control her anger. "I hoped he was with you. I was trying to find the free humans. Hunter found us instead."

"That's what worries me," Emmalyn said.

"That's enough," Hunter said to his aunt. "I would never have brought Kara back here if I thought she posed any danger to us. She has a friend with her. Targa and Beck should be back with him later this afternoon. They'll tell us the truth about what's happened in the Colonies for the last five years. They're not the enemy. Don't treat them like it."

Dessa's lips had begun to tremble. Tears filled her eyes and she wrapped her arms around Emmalyn's waist. "Don't talk mean to Aunt Emmie," she said to Hunter.

A man had come up the path from another dwelling and now joined the group. He had a mop of light brown curly hair and golden brown eyes. Kara couldn't tell his age with any certainty. He looked a little older than Hunter. There was a thin white scar on the left side of his forehead that extended from his eyebrow upward until it disappeared into his hair. His voice was gentle when he spoke.

"Is there a problem?" He looked at Kara and held out his hand. "I'm Daniel."

She shook it. "Kara."

"A Colonial flight suit. That's interesting. I thought the Colonies were destroyed five years ago."

"Caprica wasn't."

He looked puzzled. "I thought the Cylons had…I thought…" his voice trailed off and his face looked like he was suddenly in pain.

"It's all right, Daniel," Emmalyn said. "Just relax."

Daniel shook his head slightly and then massaged his left temple. "Sometimes it hurts when I try to remember things."

Kara felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle. Leoben had said those exact words to her in his bookstore one day when she was trying to get him to remember something about the Cylons' creators. He had massaged his temples and said something about how painful it was to try to remember certain things. Kara struggled to put the thought from her mind. She knew what all of the skinjobs looked like and he definitely wasn't one. It was just an odd coincidence. Still…

"Something wrong?" Hunter asked her.

Kara managed a slight smile. "Just tired and hungry…and dirty and sweaty."

"I promised you a bath, didn't I? Sorry, that came out wrong. I didn't mean…"

"Well, if the girl wants a bath and a meal, I can see she gets both," Emmalyn said. "Since you've already promised her the bath, I can tell what's on _your_ mind."

Hunter took his assault rifle from Kara without looking at her. "I'm going down to Targa and Beck's place and get cleaned up." He looked at his aunt. "She's our guest. Treat her like it," he said gruffly.

"Oh, be off with you," she grumbled, but Kara could hear the affection in her voice for her nephew. "Come on," she said to Kara. "The bath and meal are this way, in the house, not out here in the road."

Before Kara picked up her pack and followed Emmalyn, she noticed Dessa smile shyly at Daniel and him smile back at her.

"Come along, Dessa," Emmalyn called. "Kara will be sleeping in our spare bunk. You need to put fresh linens on it."

Dessa hurried after them and came up beside Kara. She rubbed the arm of the flight suit again and then pointed to the Viper patch on the shoulder.

"What's that?"

"That's the kind of ship I fly. It's called a Viper."

"A viper is a bad snake."

"True. A viper is a bad snake, but a good, fast, Cylon-killing ride."

Dessa smiled. "Okay."

Kara followed Emmalyn into the dwelling. She was surprised at the inside. She had expected a dirt floor and walls. It was all wood, fine-grained, light-colored wood although the ceiling looked like it was barely seven feet from the floor. There were no windows. The only light came from the open doorway. The room was obviously where they spent most of their time when they were indoors.

There was a stone fireplace in one wall where pale gray rocks burned with a low blue flame. Wood-framed arm chairs with thick seat and back cushions were arranged around the fireplace. On the far wall was a bookcase filled with books. In the middle of the room was a metal table that had probably come from the _Hyperion_ as had the chairs. It seated at least a dozen people.

On the other side of the room was something that resembled the woodstove in the little stone house where she and Karl had lived for almost eight months before the soldiers had taken them to the refugee camp. The stove rested on a stone slab and had stone behind it. A flue went into the wall. Kara smelled the fresh yeasty aroma of baking bread. Her stomach growled and her mouth watered. Beside the stove was a long wooden counter with a big metal sink in the middle, also obviously from the _Hyperion_. It looked like Emmalyn had been in the middle of doing laundry in the sink.

Emmalyn took a slim taper, lit it in the fireplace and then lit an oil lamp. "This way," she said. Kara followed her through an open doorway into the back part of the dwelling. On either side of a small room were two bunks, side by side. Emmalyn continued into a smaller room, the only one that had a door. She placed the oil lamp on a shelf. There was a stone basin about the size of a small bathtub but deeper. Two pipes with faucets ran down the wall.

"Hot's on the left. Towels are over there. Not what you're used to, I'm sure, but it's the best I can do." Emmalyn said to Kara.

Kara smiled. "It looks great…a lot better than the cave."

"Hunter took you through the cave?"

"We had to hide my ship. I'll let him tell you."

Emmalyn crossed her arms. "He seems quite taken with you, but then you're a new face and a pretty one at that. A word of warning. Don't get your hopes up. Hunter's not going to get serious about anyone. It doesn't fit with what he sees as his mission in life."

"It's not like that with me and him. One of the skinjobs and some centurions caught me and my copilot. Hunter and his uncles saved our lives. I owe him. And he knows I wear somebody's ring."

"Ah, the boy you left behind. How does he feel about his sweetheart roaming around the galaxy without him?"

"I don't know. I left him a note," Kara said sarcastically. "I have a mission, too. I'm here to find my father and take him home. That's the _only thing_ I want to do."

Emmalyn chuckled softly. "Maybe my nephew has met his match. Maybe it's him I should worry about instead of you. Are you hungry?"

"Beyond hungry."

"Take your bath. There'll be food waiting when you're through. Do you need clean clothes?"

Kara indicated her backpack. "I've got some. Thank you."

"The water has a strong mineral smell. It comes from a hot spring, a _very_ hot spring. Be careful and don't burn yourself."

She turned and left, closing the door behind her.

"Thank you," Kara called after her.

She sat down on the edge of the basin and took off her boots. Then she stood and unzipped her flight suit. She found the stopper for the tub and turned on the faucets. The hot _was_ very hot. She had to run a lot of cold. She got her washcloth from her pack. Five minutes later she slid down into the tub. It felt so good that she moaned out loud. She found the soap in a clay bowl and began scrubbing herself. She would have sat in the hot water much longer if she hadn't been so hungry.

She took her last clean set of underwear from her backpack and put on the pair of jeans and the dark blue Academy hoodie she had brought with her. She got clean socks and her sneakers. She dried her hair as best she could with the towel and brushed it back into a ponytail. Before she took the stopper out of the basin, she knelt and washed her dirty underwear and tank tops including the black lace bikini panties that Hunter had seen in the cave. She squeezed everything out. Maybe Emmalyn could tell her where to put them to dry. She took her pack into the sleeping area, propped it against a wall and draped the damp underwear over it.

By the time she walked into the main room, Hunter was sitting at the table. His black hair was still damp and he had shaved. He was wearing a shirt in the same natural color as Dessa's and Emmalyn's outfits. He had cleaned up as nicely as she had thought he would.

Kara put the oil lamp on the table. Emmalyn put two bowls of a thick vegetable soup and a loaf of hot bread in front of them. Kara inhaled the aroma of the bread. She didn't think she'd ever smelled anything that good in her life. They ate the soup and half the loaf of bread before they spoke.

"You clean up good," Kara finally said.

He nodded and smiled. "Likewise. Interesting shirt."

"It's from the Academy where I went to school before I went to Flight School and learned to fly a Viper. My dad taught at the Academy, the simulator."

"You're going to need to explain what you just said."

Behind him Kara saw Emmalyn turn around and look at her with one eyebrow raised. They were saved from a comment when an older woman and a white-haired man appeared in the doorway.

"I hear my grandson is back," the man said.

Hunter got up from the table and hugged the old man. "Grandpa." He looked at the woman. "Celia."

Emmalyn said, "Come in and have a seat."

Hunter helped his grandfather to the table and Celia followed. They sat. The cataracts had given the old man's eyes a milky look.

"I also hear Hunter found someone wandering in the forest and brought her back, a very pretty girl," his grandfather said in a teasing voice.

"Aye, she's pretty," Emmalyn said. "She's sitting right across from you."

The old man held out his hand. Kara leaned across the table and shook it. "I'm Kara Thrace."

"Perry Jaffee. This is my wife Celia."

Hunter had a smile on his face. "Kara has something with her you'll be interested in. Both of you. Tell him."

"I have a handheld computer with Irina Hoshi's journals from the first _Hyperion_ mission. I talked to her twice on Caprica. She was a communication technician on the ship. Her husband was a scientist, Joshua Hoshi."

A smile lit Jaffee's face. "I met the Hoshis just before our expedition left Libran. She was a pretty dark-haired young woman, very pregnant at the time. How are the Hoshis?"

"Joshua died a few years ago. She's frail but her mind is still sharp. They had three kids. Her grandson Louis is in the military. He's a communication officer on a battlestar. Hunter thought you might like for me to read you some of her journal."

"Hunter thought right. And I'd like to talk to you about Caprica and what's going on back home."

"We'd all like to hear about that," Celia said.

Dessa appeared suddenly in the doorway. "Uncle Beck and Uncle Targa are back. They've got another one like her with them."

Kara jumped to her feet and rushed outside. The three men were at the bottom of the steps. Noel Allison saw her. It had barely been twenty-four hours since she'd last seen him but it seemed like weeks. She ran to meet him. Their hug was spontaneous and mutual.

"Are you okay?" Kara asked.

"Fine. You?"

"Me, too. So they weren't too rough on you?"

"They walked my butt off, but they shared their food with me."

"They wouldn't have shot you. Hunter said they wouldn't."

Hunter walked up to them. "Emmalyn has soup and hot bread."

"The bread," Kara told Narcho. "It's to die for."

Narcho smiled for the first time. "That's good because I'm almost dead of hunger right now."

Beck grabbed Narcho's arm good naturedly. "Then let's get cleaned up. Emmalyn don't allow no one at her table who's dirty as we are."

"I don't have any clean clothes," Noel protested.

"We'll find something for you. Get you out of that monkey suit. Have you looking like you belong at base camp in no time."

The three of them walked toward Targa and Beck's dwelling.

Kara looked at Hunter. "I guess we should get back to your grandfather."

"Don't let Emmalyn get to you. She's protective of all of us. She's got her reasons. Someday I'll tell you about her. Her life's been tough."

"If I can handle my stepmother, I can handle your aunt."

"You don't get along with your stepmother?"

Kara shrugged. "She's got a strong personality. I respect her, but we haven't always gotten along. For a long time I thought she married my father just because he knocked her up."

"Knocked her up?"

"Got her pregnant. I keep forgetting you didn't grow up in the Colonies."

"Is your dad a nice-looking man?"

"Very. I've got a picture of him and my little brother in my pack. I'll show you later."

"I heard what Leoben said to you about a Three having something special planned for him. Some of the skinjobs take humans to a building in the city so they can….maybe I shouldn't say anything since we don't know yet."

"Maybe you should say it. So they can _what_?"

"Use them." Hunter looked away from her.

"Use them how? Experiment on them?"

"Use them as breeders. The Cylons are trying to have babies."

"Oh, frak no! My dad…no! He wouldn't do that. Not with a Cylon."

"He wouldn't have any say in the matter. It's a hell of a lot better than being at their prison. According to a source they treat their breeders nice."

"How do we find out?"

"We have a contact in the city. We'll talk about it tomorrow. Tonight we eat and talk to my grandfather and you get a good night's sleep in a bed. We'll talk about it again tomorrow."

"Would your contact be able to get a message to my dad?"

"Maybe. I just don't want to promise you something we might not be able to do."

"I don't guess it's as easy as picking up a phone."

"Nothing we do is easy…or quick."

As they walked back to Emmalyn's, Kara tried to imagine her father with D'Anna Biers. She knew how much he loved Laura. There was just no frakking way.

…

Lee had gotten no farther than the first page of Kara's journal when he glanced up and saw a ship's technician come into the dining hall and look around. He spotted Lee and made his way to the booth.

"Lieutenant Lee Adama?"

"That's right."

He handed Lee a folded piece of paper. "Communication for you, sir."

Lee took the paper. His name was scribbled on the outside. "Thank you."

As the young technician walked away, Lee unfolded the document and glanced at the bottom. It was from Major Parker who had written:

_Need a second opinion. Study photos from first mission starting at hour 0 minute 53 to minute 56. Second mission, hour 0, minute 18 to minute 19. Third mission, hour 0, minute 5 to minute 8. View long range first then close-up. Let me know what you think. B. Parker._

Lee felt a spark of excitement ignite in him. Parker had obviously found something, but he didn't want to prejudice Lee by telling him what. Lee exited Kara's journal and brought up the digital footage from his mission. The special cameras that had been mounted in the Raider's missile wells took a frame per second and time-stamped every frame with the hour, minute and second starting as soon as the cameras were turned on.

The first mission was the one he had flown over Nereid back in the early autumn while Kara had been on the _Galactica_. All they had known about the planet at the time was what John had been able to glean from Irina Hoshi's journal.

He fast-forwarded through the images of the vast snowfield and the southern mountains. At minute 52 he stopped and began viewing the long-range footage frame by frame, clicking through image after image of what looked like a barren, rocky plain. Then the trees started. At minute 57 he still hadn't seen anything unusual. He went back to minute 53 and started over. The plain and then image after image of treetops, nothing but treetops, and then at minute 54, second 48, something slightly different. Lee stopped and studied it. On the image, a tiny line wound into the trees from a small clearing. On the far side of the clearing was the edge of more trees that looked different from all the ones he had viewed before. The treetops were smaller and lighter in color, but that wasn't what made the image so unusual. There were only a few trees showing in each row, but those rows were far too straight to have occurred naturally. Lee felt the spark of excitement grow. He was looking at the edge of some kind of orchard. The thin dark line leading across the clearing and into the forest could be a road.

He brought up the corresponding image from the close-up camera. It encompassed a much narrower range. The dark line was barely visible on the edge of the image, but Lee was now certain that it was a road, a rutted, dirt road. Ruts meant some type of wheeled vehicle. The dark dots in the trees were now much clearer. He jotted a note for Major Parker. _Apple orchard?_

He moved on to the second set of images that Kara had taken on her first mission. At 17 minutes he started viewing each individual image. At 18 minutes 33 seconds he found another anomaly. He saw a large clearing in the forest dotted with tree stumps. He went to the close-ups. The tops of the stumps looked flat, like they had been cut with some type of saw. Also there were no tree trunks in evidence anywhere. They had been hauled away. He jotted more notes for Parker. _Can we get an estimate of how large the clearing is? Who wanted these trees and why? Lumber? Fuel? Housing material? The prison is concrete or something like it. What would the Cylons build with wood? Houses for humans because wood is so readily available? _

The excitement was growing steadily in Lee's gut. Maybe they didn't have images of humans, but they might have evidence of humans on the planet and better yet, rough locations for them. He moved on to the last set of images photographed on Kara's second mission. She had jumped into the atmosphere northwest of the city and much closer to the basestar shipyard. She had spent four minutes over the shipyard and had then turned north. At 5 minutes 49 seconds she had passed over some rolling hills that had several clusters of dark dots. Then there was a patchwork of green and ochre before she had to climb steeply as mountains rose in front of her. Again Lee went to the close-ups. The dark dots were a herd of some kind of animal. Deer? Elk? Cattle? Wild or domestic? There had to be a zoologist on the _Penelope_.

The next images showed patchwork green and ochre areas that could be more pasture. And then at the corner of one of the green areas was another rutted road with something on it. Lee tried enlarging the image, but the pixel count wasn't high enough to get any better resolution. He put it back to its original size and tried squinting his eyes at it. It was roughly T-shaped with the end of the T pointing up the rutted road. The top of the T was identical in width to the ruts.

Lee almost laughed at himself. He had been thinking like the city guy that he was. This was no city vehicle. He was looking at a farm tractor. He jotted the final note to send to Major Parker. F_arm tractor? Sharon mentioned that more had been taken from the nuked colonies than humans. Farm equipment had been high on the Cylon shopping list. _

Lee was so enthusiastic by now that he started over with the entire three missions frame by frame just like Parker must have done. He was so engrossed in the images that he wasn't aware Kendra had walked up until she spoke.

"I guess you were going to let me sleep through lunch."

Lee looked at his watch. Over three hours had passed. "Sorry. I got involved in something."

She looked over his shoulder. "Whatever. Let's eat. Then it should be about time to head up to the bridge."

Reluctantly Lee shut down the laptop. He stuffed the notepad and computer in the case and followed Kendra to the buffet table. Back at the booth he told her about meeting Dr. Briggs.

Kendra smiled. "There's hope for you yet."

"Do you by any chance have a list of the scientists on this mission and their specialties? I'm looking for a botanist and a zoologist."

"Does this have something to do with pictures on your laptop?"

"Yes."

"I have the roster. I'm just not sure I'm supposed to have it. I didn't get it through official channels."

"I don't care how you got it. I don't even want to know. I just want the list."

"After we see what Picon looks like, I'll get it for you."

Lee smiled and nodded. They finished their lunch and walked to the bridge. Lee asked permission to enter and it was granted. Pontos was consulting with one of his deck officers. Lee and Kendra waited quietly until he finished and then he motioned them over. A large computer screen showed the distant planet.

Pontos said, "We're going to enter a very high orbit per Commander Cain's order even though preliminary scans indicate no debris over the planet."

"None?" Lee asked shocked.

"Commander Cain said her recon Raptor didn't find any, which means it was cleaned up by the Cylons or it was in a low orbit which degraded until it entered the atmosphere. It either burned up on re-entry or it's somewhere on the planet's surface or on the bottom of an ocean."

"What do we do next?" Kendra asked.

Pontos answered. "The _Galactica_ beat us here by nearly half an hour. Commander Cain has already dispatched some unmanned drones to photograph the surface and several more to test the radiation levels. She wants both of you on the ship with her when she makes her decision about whether these scientists will be allowed to visit the surface of the planet. You'll bring her decision back to Dr. Nylund."

"How do we get to the _G_?" Lee asked.

"The commander is sending a Raptor to pick you up. You'll get to bring it back with you. The Raptor is already on approach. By the time you get to the aft landing bay, it should be here."

Lee and Kendra went to their quarters. Lee stowed the laptop and picked up the leather zipped binder that held an array of pens and several notepads. He wanted to make sure he wrote down everything Cain told him so he could report it accurately to Dr. Nylund. When he met Kendra in the hall, he saw that she had the same idea. A zipped binder was also tucked under her arm.

"Lead on," Kendra said, "since you're the one who has already deciphered the layout of this maze that passes for a ship. It took me twenty minutes to find the cafeteria again."

"We usually call them mess halls or dining halls on a ship."

He got another eye roll.

"Look, Kendra, I know you're nervous about what Cain is going to decide. I am, too. If she says we don't visit the surface, we're the ones who have to face Nylund with her decision. We'd better have every single reason in order if she says _no go_ to a surface mission."

"I agree."

They threaded their way through the ship, descending a final set of steps and arriving on the small hangar deck just as the Raptor was being raised on the elevator.

The crew chief looked over at them. "You the ones this bird has come for?"

"That would be us," Lee answered.

The Raptor's door began its slow ascent. The pilot got off to sign the prerequisite paperwork. Lee stopped short when he saw her.

Maggie Edmondson began pulling off her gloves as she descended the ramp. Her smile was cool. "Small galaxy, isn't it, Lee?"

TBC…


	11. A Good and Faithful Wife

Chapter 11

A Good and Faithful Wife

_Hades, new god of the Underworld, beholden to his brother for his fortune.__  
__Zeus is magnanimous. Pick the place where you would dwell and there shall be__  
__The realm of immortal souls. Hades finds a place of deep valleys and high meadows at__  
__The convergence of five rivers and there he creates a dwelling place for the departed._

_Tartarus is the deepest level of the Underworld, the gloomy pit of punishment for sinners.__  
__Elysium is the beautiful and sunny meadow of reward for the pious and just.__  
__And the Blessed Isles where golden apples grow becomes the home of great heroes._

_For many years Hades rules the Underworld in solitary majesty and finally__  
__In his loneliness seeks a bride. But none wish to live in the realm of the dead.__  
__Hades roams the land and one day spies a beautiful maiden, Persephone,__  
__Daughter of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest and grains and seasons._

_Enchanted by her beauty, Hades steals her and takes her away to his realm and__  
__Makes her his queen. Demeter laments her lost daughter and searches the land,__  
__Ignoring the fields and crops, forgetting the seasons, leaving the earth in the__  
__Grip of winter. Zeus finally heeds the cries of the hungry and forces Hades__  
__To return Persephone to her mother. The land blossoms at their reunion._

_And when Hades reclaims his bride, Demeter's sorrow brings autumn and__  
__Winter back to the land. Posiden says to Zeus, There is only one solution.__  
__His brother agrees. For part of the year Persephone will dwell with her mother__  
__And for part of the year with her husband. A small gift, Zeus says to his brother,__  
__A mother's joy and a mother's loss give to Mankind the Gift of Changing Seasons. _

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

_._

Lee stared at the Raptor pilot who had come to pick them up, still surprised at who it was.

Kendra nudged him. "It looks like you two know each other. Want to introduce me?"

"Kenda, this is Maggie Edmondson, call sign Racetrack. Maggie, this is Kendra Shaw."

Maggie gave Kendra a half-smile. "So you're the lucky one who got stuck with Lee for this mission. We heard he had a partner."

"I'm not sure I'd call it _stuck with_, but he and I get to run interference for Commander Cain and Dr. Nylund."

Maggie's smile got a little broader. She was apparently enjoying that idea of Lee having to deal on a daily basis with a commander and a scientist who both had reputations for being difficult.

"I thought you were flying out of the airbase back on Caprica," Lee said.

"I volunteered for this mission. Colonel Spencer asked a few of us. Flat Top and Crashdown decided they'd do it, too, just to get off Caprica. We'd like to see what the Cylons _really_ did five years ago. It might do you good to get another perspective. Maybe it will be an eye opener for _you_."

Lee noticed the sarcasm of her last sentence. He was well aware of how much Maggie hated the Cylons. Kara had told him that Maggie's father had been a Raptor pilot on the _Solaria_. He had died when the battlestar had been destroyed during the early days of the fighting. Her mother had later died during the flu epidemic in the refugee camp where Kara and Maggie had met. Kara had introduced Karl to Maggie and the two of them had a relationship that had lasted until well after they had all left the camp and moved to Caprica City together. It had ended before they had gone to the Academy and Maggie had moved on and begun dating Zak. Karl had started dating Sharon Valerii. Kara felt like Maggie had carried her love for Karl for a long time and maybe still had some unresolved feelings for him. Kara also felt like that was why Maggie had shown such hostility toward Sharon.

Lee also knew that Maggie and Karl had almost gotten into a fight outside the men's locker room at the base shortly after it had been revealed that Sharon, now Karl's wife, was a Cylon. Lee wasn't all that surprised that Maggie had volunteered for a mission that would get her off Caprica for a few months.

"What do you hear from Zak?" Lee asked.

Maggie gave him a skeptical look. "You don't talk to your own brother?"

"Last weekend," he said defensively.

She shrugged. "He wasn't too happy about me volunteering for this mission, but I wasn't overjoyed when he joined the Marines either. And it's not like we're able to see each other now. A couple of guys in Zak's unit were wounded last week."

"I talked to him after that," Lee said quickly. "Zak's fine."

"This time. But where he is, that could change at any minute."

"It could for any of us," Kendra said. "Maybe we can sit down and have a nice chat over a cup of tea later, but we need to get to the _Galactica _right now. Commander Cain is waiting for us."

"After you," Maggie said coolly and pointed to the ramp. "Climb aboard and make yourselves comfortable. I've got report to sign. Lee understands. _He's_ a pilot."

Maggie's copilot and ECO Skulls had remained on board. He acknowledged them with a nod and then turned around and busied himself with looking at something going on in the hangar.

"Friendly crew, aren't they?" Kendra said.

Lee shrugged. Later he might tell her why he got the cold shoulder from a lot of the pilots. Most of it had to do with Kara's relationship with Sharon and Karl. She stood by her friends and that hadn't gone over very well with many of the others as soon as they had found out what Sharon was. Of course with everything that Kendra seemed to know, she had probably already figured that out.

Maggie got on board and sat in the pilot's seat. The Raptor door descended and the elevator lowered them into the landing bay. Maggie's takeoff was as flawless as her landing on the _Galactica _five minutes later. Kara had told him that Maggie was a good Raptor pilot, cool and fearless and dedicated. She had finished second in the Raptor division in their Flight School class and fourth overall, coming in only a few points behind Dwight Saunders who had taken the top Raptor honors.

There were times Lee wondered what would have happened if he and Kara had been in the same class. Their flying styles were very different. Kara's style was more seat-of-the-pants, instinct where his was more cerebral. John had once told Lee that he tended to over-think in the cockpit, yet John worried about Kara because she didn't think enough.

For a few moments Lee let his thoughts wander to Nereid. Where was Kara and what was she doing right now? What had she done with the Raider? Had she been captured? Kara was a survivor. She was tough. But would she survive Nereid?

As Maggie smoothly brought the Raptor into _Galactica's_ port landing bay, Lee had to admit that he felt excitement grip him at being aboard a battlestar once again. The last time he had been on the _G_, he had been seventeen and visiting his father when the Cylons had attacked. The experience had tipped his decision toward attending the Academy and becoming a pilot instead of attending the university and then going to law school like his Grandfather Adama had wanted him to do. He had never regretted his decision. He had never looked back.

Becoming a pilot has cost him a relationship, but because of it he had been free when he had met Kara. She had once told him that an Oracle had foretold their love. He had laughed. He didn't feel like laughing now.

Lee felt the Raptor rise on the elevator and then the tow engage that pulled it onto the hangar deck. It stopped with a small jolt. The door rose. He and Kendra descended the ramp.

"Thanks, guys," Kendra called back to Maggie and Skulls. If either one of them answered, Lee didn't hear it. Skulls never even turned around. "What was that all about?" Kendra asked Lee. "Why are they treating us like we have the plague or something?"

"It's not you. It's me. You're just guilty by association. I'll explain later."

"You and Maggie have some kind of history?"

"Nothing like that. She and my brother have a thing. At least I guess they still do."

"You must not talk to him much."

"I talk to him every week. We just don't talk about the same stuff you girls talk about."

Lee felt his temper start to rise. He wasn't sure why he felt the need to explain anything to Kendra. His and Zak's relationship was none of her business.

"Oh, so now I'm one of _the girls_? Does that make you one of _the boys_?"

Lee had to stifle his reply as a young man walked over to meet them. "Welcome aboard, sirs. I'm Galen Tyrol, Crew Chief. Commander Cain wants you to go straight her quarters. She's waiting for you. Do you need someone to take you?"

"I know the way," Lee said, struggling to keep the irritation out of his voice. "I was on another battlestar for a year."

Tyrol looked at Lee. "Some of the crew served under your father when he was the CO of this ship. They have a lot of respect for him. I just wanted you to know that, sir."

Lee barely nodded. Everybody the admiral had ever dealt with seemed to have a lot of respect for him. Lee wondered how many of them really knew the man who preferred having the crew of a battlestar for a family instead of his wife and two sons.

"Thank you for your help, Chief," Kendra said politely.

Lee started off at a fast walk. Kendra caught up with him. "That was pretty damned rude," she hissed. "The man was going out of his way to be nice to you and you brushed him off. No wonder people treat you the way they do."

"He wasn't going out of his way to be nice to _me_. He was telling me what a great man he thinks my father is. You have no idea how sick I get of hearing…"

"So everything I heard about you and dear old Dad is true."

"I'm not going to talk to you about my father and me. And don't go pulling that spook stuff on me, either. It's no big secret that my father and I haven't always gotten along. You don't need to read some secret dossier on me or him to come to that conclusion."

"Don't bite my head off just because you've obviously got a great big chip on your shoulder where your dad is concerned and…"

"Drop it, Kendra," Lee said angrily. "It's none of your damned business. I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you and your mother. I'm sure yours is not the mother-daughter love story of the century, either."

Kendra didn't say anything for a few moments and then she started laughing. "This thing with Commander Cain has got both of us ready to climb the walls. I can see the headline in the _Stars and Bars_ newspaper now. _Diplomatic military attachés cooling heels in Galactica's brig after slugging it out in the corridor over who had the worst parent_."

The tension dissipated and Lee laughed as well.

Lee found Commander Cain's quarters without a problem. The Marine guard outside the door let them in.

Commander Cain was standing at a long table behind her nearly empty desk. Felix Gaeta was with her.

As they entered the commander's quarters, Lee quickly glanced around. Everything that had belonged to his father was gone, the desk and chairs and rugs, even the artwork. It was all now a part of Bill's office back on Caprica. Cain's quarters were spare by comparison. Lee didn't see a single chair. A nice treadmill took up space where his father had a small couch and several chairs. There was nothing on the walls. The only picture he saw was a small one on her desk of two girls, a young teenager and a child of three or four. He guessed that the picture was of Helena Cain and her sister Lucy.

Lee and Kendra came to attention.

Cain barely glanced around. "At ease," she said before continuing her discussion with Gaeta.

She finally turned. "Are introductions necessary?"

"I know Mr. Gaeta, sir. He and I attended the Academy together. How are you, Felix?"

"Fine, Lee. You?"

Lee introduced Kendra, and she and Felix shook hands.

"We have some preliminary footage from the unmanned drones. It doesn't look good," Cain said.

"Are surface missions going to be possible?" Lee asked. "That's the first question Dr. Nylund will ask."

Gaeta spoke up. "Not to Queenstown or Picon City or any of the major centers of civilization. The radiation in the atmosphere has settled in a broad band around the entire planet carried by the atmospheric winds. Anything between 60 degrees north latitude and 60 degrees south latitude would be suicide. The radiation levels are too high even with radiation hazmat suits."

"What about the north or south poles?" Kendra asked.

"We're still waiting on data from the poles." Cain said. "Mr. Gaeta, show them what one of our drones photographed in the ruins of Queenstown."

Lee and Kendra both stepped up closer to the monitor and Gaeta brought up a looping stream of photographs. The images were fuzzy and black and white, but there was no mistaking the metal frames of Cylon centurions. They didn't look like the casualties of fighting. They didn't look damaged like they would have been from bullets or explosives. They looked like they had stopped working and fallen over at various places in the street amid the skeletal remains of mounds of humans and some bulldozers and other heavy equipment.

"Go back," Lee said suddenly. Gaeta stopped and reversed the footage. Lee pointed to the seat of a bulldozer. The hardhat had fallen off the corpse who was still fairly recognizable. "That's Aaron Doral. A skinjob."

"I believe you're right," Cain commented.

Kendra leaned closer. "He was Cavil's right-hand man back on Caprica. I wonder what this copy did to get assigned to corpse cleanup."

"Who cares," Lee said. "The radiation got him, too."

"My guess," Gaeta said, "is that they were cleaning up the bodies when the radiation got too strong. The planet's gravity is still pulling it down from the atmosphere. It ruined the centurions' processors or brains or whatever makes them tick. The skinjobs probably died before that. Neurologically they've got silica pathways, but they're still vulnerable to strong radiation. Even with all the shielding on our drones, the radiation is affecting them and their cameras. That's why we're not getting clearer pictures."

"I don't see how it could get any worse," Cain commented coldly. "Picon will be a sterile wasteland for hundreds of thousands of years."

"Then there's nobody left alive. How could there be any humans down there when the centurions couldn't even survive?" Lee said.

Gaeta switched to another set of images. "This is part of the nuclear basestar. It was too big to burn up completely in the atmosphere and came down about fifty miles north of Picon City. Everything for miles around it is spiking such high radiation readings that they're almost off the Geiger scale. So far the drones haven't picked up any other large debris from the battle, but since a great deal of the planet's surface is ocean, that's not too surprising."

"I'd like to take some of these images back to the _Penelope _to show to Dr. Nylund," Lee said.

Cain looked at Gaeta. "Put something together for him. Also get the data on the levels of ground radiation from near the cities and anywhere else those drones are flying. I won't expose my Marines to it, but I'll leave it up to Dr. Nylund to decide if he wants to take a team down there. I can't imagine he would be that careless of the lives of his people or that any of them would be insane enough to want to go. I just told the drone team to bring them back and put them through decontamination. The radiation is so bad the leader is afraid we'll lose them."

"With your permission, then, sir, if Lieutenant Shaw and I could be given somewhere to work, we'd like to get our thoughts together on how we're going to present this to Dr. Nylund."

"Mr. Gaeta, take them to the officer's wardroom. I'll call my XO and tell him to see that you get some peace and quiet to work."

"Yes, sir," Gaeta said. He looked at Lee and Kendra. "Follow me."

Out in the corridor, Lee said, "You must like being on the _G_. You've been here three years now."

"Almost four."

"Do you hear anything from Shelley?" Lee asked nonchalantly.

"She's done well since she left the Academy last year. I saw her when I was on leave. She's up for promotion to captain. She started dating Troy Minos not long ago."

"That's good. I'm glad she's doing well."

Lee got a sideways glance from Kendra. He ignored it. Mentioning Shelley had probably been a mistake. Kendra would try to pick the information out of him later if she hadn't already heard about it from her source of information.

"It's really bad about Picon," Kendra said. "I was hoping…"

"I know," Lee cut her off as he thought of Kara's mother and Karl's parents and little sister. "We all were."

"Gods damned Cylons," Gaeta said. "They can't put those skinjob bastards in front of a firing squad soon enough to suit me."

Lee got another sideways glance from Kendra. He was sure Gaeta spoke for most of those in the fleet. He started to say something and changed his mind. Picon had been the home of nearly sixty-five million humans. The Colonial Fleet's headquarters had been there. In the face of such massive destruction, Lee knew he could say nothing that would make any of them feel better. He and Kendra would get the photographs and radiation readings and take the information back to Dr. Nylund. He would forget about telling Felix Gaeta that all of the Cylons weren't bent on the total destruction of humanity. The fact that several of the copies had betrayed their own race to help the humans was not common knowledge. For right now Lee would keep his thoughts to himself and concentrate on doing the job his father had sent him on this mission to do.

_…_

Laura had finished breakfast and was watching her son play with his toys when one of her security guards brought her Elosha's reply.

_I would be honored to join you for lunch today. _

Laura told her guard to have a car at the little temple at 12:30, the time she had put in her letter. She called down to the kitchen and told the chef on duty that she would have a guest for lunch that day.

Maya walked into the room. She had the day off and was casually dressed in jeans and a dark pink sweater. She had a jacket over her arm.

"Sam and I are going to take a picnic lunch and drive up to North Lake Park. He just bought a new car…his third one."

Laura smiled. "A sporty little red one?"

Maya smiled also. "This one is silver. The last one was red."

"Have a good time."

"Thanks."

As Laura sat down on the floor with her son, she thought about the one and only time she had been to North Lake Park. Bill had taken her. He was a young Viper pilot and was leaving the next day to go to a battlestar and fight the Cylons. She was eighteen years old and in love for the first time in her life. They had taken a picnic lunch and a bottle of wine and a blanket. Bill had rented a small sailboat and they had sailed over to the island in the middle of the lake. If she closed her eyes, she could still see the shoreline as they had walked hand-in-hand away from where they had docked the boat. She could see the secluded little clearing near the water where Bill had spread the blanket. Laura opened her eyes and looked at her son. The moment of nostalgia passed.

Bill was her past. They had missed their chance all those years ago and again five years ago when they had been on the negotiating team together. The first time his pride had kept them apart. The second time he had chosen to reconcile with his wife and attempt to be a father to his sons. As long as there was a chance that John was alive, there would not be a third chance for them because John and their child were her present and her future. She said another prayer for his safety as she watched Braedon dump a wooden puzzle on the floor. It was one of his favorites, the nursery rhyme of a cow jumping over a moon. She crawled over to him and used a tissue to wipe his nose before she picked up one of the puzzle pieces.

"Tell mamma what this is?" She asked as she held it up to him.

"Moon," he answered.

"That's right. What's up in the sky with the moon?"

"Starz. Kawa."

"Kara's up in the sky with the stars?"

Braedon took the puzzle piece from Laura. He squatted and put the moon into the puzzle. "Bwing Dada home."

_…_

In the early days of John's imprisonment, before the drugs and the brutality had begun taking their toll on him, he had often awakened aroused and dreaming of his wife, of Laura's gentle touch, of the way she would snuggle against him. He would wrap his arms around her and smell the sweet scent of her skin and think he was the luckiest man alive to be married to someone as beautiful and smart and caring as Laura Roslin. Whether or not she would have married him had they not made Braedon was one of the questions he used to torment himself when he was in a mood to doubt his good fortune. The other one was whether she would have stayed with him after Carolanne Adama's death if it were not for their son. He didn't ask himself those questions any longer. It didn't matter. There was almost no chance he would ever make it back to Caprica. There was a much greater chance that Bill Adama's battlestars would show up in the sky one day and nuke Nereid into oblivion and him along with it. Sonja's words had been discouraging. Escape from the city now seemed all but impossible.

John had not wanted to leave an unconscious D'Anna on the couch the night before and so had carried her to the bedroom. He had put her on the bed and had taken off only her shoes and jacket. As usual, he had removed everything but his boxer shorts. He had lain awake for a long time listening to her breathe, but his eyes had finally grown heavy and he had drifted into an uneasy sleep that deepened as his conscious mind gradually let go of his fear that D'Anna's brain was hung in the programming loop from hell, a Cylon Sleeping Beauty who would never awaken.

Eventually he slipped into the realm of disjointed dreams where he had begun to go in his sleep lately. He was at the prison and Simon was plunging a needle into his vein, and then he was on the _Solaria _talking to Nic Singer, an ace Viper pilot and his best friend, and then he was on his motorcycle skimming over a back road on Picon, the dark around him and the sky full of stars, the headlight cutting the night, the wind whistling past him, accelerating into that nearly fatal curve and then he was on the beach with Laura, the same sky full of stars, his arms around her, making love to her, whispering her name, knowing without a shadow of a doubt that he loved her and always would.

Laura's hands were on him in a gentle caress. He welcomed her touch. He'd waited so long for it, so long to have her back in his arms again and yet something didn't seem right. The dream was too real. Slowly he opened his eyes. The light outside the windows was the palest gray. It was well before dawn. His mind registered where he was at the same time it also registered another soft touch that was not a dream. D'Anna was awake and her hand was gently caressing him, feeling the result of his dream.

He carefully reached for her and realized that she had taken off the rest of her clothes. He spoke softly so as not to startle her. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine." She took his hand. "Show me what to do."

There was never any question of what was going to happen with them. He had promised her. The gods had given him a second chance to do this right and he was more than ready.

Sonja had been right. D'Anna may never have been with a man before, but she wasn't naive. She had a basic knowledge of the ways the act could be accomplished. He understood what she wanted to do.

He helped her, his hands grasping and moving her hips until she cried out, her fingers tightening convulsively on his shoulders. The moment, so long delayed for him, was as good as he had known it would be.

He pulled her down against him and held her, not letting her leave him right away, the good feeling lingering. She finally slid down beside him but he still kept his arm around her and settled her against him, her head on his shoulder. He had to hold her. He always had to hold Laura. This was the best part afterward, holding his wife against him, her head on his shoulder, her soft hair falling over his arm and chest. He felt himself sliding into the dream again and let sleep claim him as he thought of his wife and how much he loved her.

_Please forgive me._ He wasn't even sure by then whose forgiveness he was asking, Laura's or D'Anna's because he'd wronged them both. He'd made adulterous love to D'Anna while thinking of his wife. He wondered briefly how the gods would call him to atone for what he had done. He hoped they understood why he had done it. His last thought before he submerged into sleep was to wonder if his atonement would be to stand before Laura one day and tell her what he had done. Would his punishment be her rejection or her forgiveness? Either one would become his burden to bear.

_…_

Laura and Elosha were to eat lunch on a small terrace adjoining the inner courtyard of Marble House. She didn't think Richard Adar and his family had ever used the terrace because when she had first seen it, the potted shrubs and flowers were overgrown and the beautiful little fountain of Posiden with his dolphins was not functioning. Laura had quickly changed that. She loved the terrace back at the apartment she and John had shared. They had often eaten meals out there in nice weather. Once they had even made love there on a very dark night.

She had asked the garden staff of Marble House to clean up the little terrace and get the fountain repaired. The job had taken them nearly a week, but the transformation was worth it. The stone floor was scrubbed and the dead leaves and other debris of winter were removed. Several of the large pots now overflowed with early spring flowers, tulips and daffodils and hyacinths. The white marble fountain was spotless. From the outer rim the raised snouts of Posiden's dolphins spouted sparkling streams of water into the basin while the god himself stood in the center, his trident raised. Beautiful young women sat around his feet, their toes skimming the water, the hems of their marble gowns translucent in the sunlight. Laura knew they were the nereids or sea nymphs who always accompanied the sea god. She knew how fitting it was that John's code name in the resistance had been Posiden. He had told her that he had chosen it to honor his father who earned his living from the sea. Laura had teasingly told him that he had chosen it because Posiden was always surrounded by beautiful women and she knew that John's life had been filled with beautiful women. But she also now believed that from the moment he had first kissed her that he had never seriously looked at another woman. On the night she had last seen him, Laura had never been more certain of her husband's love for her.

Her chef and his staff had set a little table in a protected corner of the terrace under a jasmine-covered pergola. She had left Braedon with one of the women on her staff who filled in on Maya's days off. Laura was waiting inside the door to the portico when the car bringing Elosha pulled up. The two women greeted each other warmly. Laura believed that her friendship with Elosha had been a gift from the gods. For the last several years she had turned to Elosha for advice and comfort at every crisis in her life and Elosha's calm understanding and wisdom had never failed her.

"I am pleased to see you looking well," Elosha said.

"Thank you. I'm so glad you could join me today."

Elosha smiled. "An invitation from the President is hard to refuse. How is your son?"

"He has a runny nose right now, but other than that he's fine. He's with one of my staff. I told her to bring him down for a short visit when she finished feeding him."

They reached the terrace. "This is beautiful. A quiet and serene place."

"Now that the weather is getting warmer, I come here to relax. The sound of the water is soothing to me."

"You like the sea god, then. It's a beautiful fountain."

Laura smiled. "Posiden is my favorite."

"How is Kara? I hoped I might see her today as well."

"She's on a mission?"

"Still? Lee stopped by to see me last Tuesday. He told me she had undertaken a dangerous mission. He asked me to pray for her."

"She's still gone. Lee is on a mission now as well. He's aboard the _Penelope_. It's a research ship visiting the other Colonies. I'm sure you've heard of their mission."

"All of Caprica has heard of their mission. The ship bears one of my favorite names. Penelope was the good and faithful wife of an ancient king. She raised their son and kept the kingdom running while she waited patiently for her husband Odysseus to return although many had given him up for dead. She also turned away many suitors."

Laura nodded, trying not to draw any parallels to her own life, and yet without Elosha even being aware, her words had again comforted Laura. Penelope's husband Odysseus had indeed returned to his wife after most of his countrymen had given him up for dead.

Her chef pushed a small cart out with tea and their salads. "The first course," he said with a flourish.

"Thank you," Laura told him. He seemed to want to hover so she smiled. "We need a bit of privacy." When he had retreated through the glass-paned door and closed it behind him, she said, "You understand I'm speaking to you now in the strictest confidence."

"Then you are speaking to me as your priest?"

"Yes. Did Kara ever talk to you about the possibility that John might be alive?"

Elosha's eyes widened in surprise. "No. After I performed the marriage ceremony for her friend and the young Cylon woman, Kara asked me to pray for her father. That's all. How could it be possible?"

"Yolanda Brenn saw something. On her deathbed she told Kara whatever it was she had seen. I need to find Keshia, Yolanda's companion. She's the only other one who heard everything Yolanda said to Kara that night. I need to know exactly what was said."

"Keshia may not remember. That night was very difficult for her. She loved Yolanda very much."

"Kara told me," Laura said gently. "Do you know where Keshia is now?"

"She works downtown at a shelter for homeless women and children. It's run by the Delphi Sisters of Hera. My own little temple gives them a portion of our donations. They do good work and struggle to get by. Keshia has a room there. All she asks for the work she does is shelter and meals."

Laura thought briefly of the huge amount of cubits that the government was pouring into their defense systems and to ready their battlestars for the coming fight on the Cylon homeworld. She knew other programs had suffered.

"I think I need to visit the shelter very quietly and make a personal donation to them," she said to Elosha. "The gods have blessed me. It's my turn to give something back."

Elosha reached out and placed her hand on Laura's arm. "Perhaps Penelope's story is also your own."

Tears flooded Laura's eyes. "Please pray that he comes to no harm."

"I will pray for his safety and also for his return to you."

_…_

The second time John awakened that morning was not from a gentle caress but from D'Anna's cry of, "_Let go of me._"

The rising sun flooded the bedroom with light. Two centurions stood just inside the door. A naked D'Anna was struggling with Simon.

"What the hell," John said and sat up. He started to throw back the sheet. One of the centurions locked its weapon on him.

"Don't move and don't interfere," Simon ordered him. "We're not going to hurt her. The creators want her back at the lab so they can make sure she's all right."

"I'm fine," D'Anna said. "There's nothing wrong with me."

Simon had her wrists in a tight grasp. "You don't know that. You went quietly the last time. Why are you fighting now?"

"I don't want to go," she said desperately.

"Gods damn it," John said. "Let her go. I'll talk to her. There's no need to hurt her. At least give her some privacy to get dressed."

"We don't share your human modesty, but I don't want to damage her. You have five minutes."

Simon let go of D'Anna. He motioned to the centurions who backed out of the doorway. John got out of bed and pulled on his shorts. D'Anna sat down on the other side of the bed and began to cry. He walked around the bed, sat down beside her and put his arm around her.

"I don't want to go with them," she sobbed.

"Have your creators ever hurt you?"

"No."

"What do they do?"

"Ask me questions. I don't even see them. I stand in a room and put my hands in the datastream. I hear their voices inside my head."

"What's the datastream?"

"The way they communicate changes in our programming with us."

"You need to get dressed and go with Simon. I don't want him or the centurions to hurt you. I'm not going anywhere. I'll be waiting right here for you to get back."

She gnawed her thumbnail again.

"Come on, D'Anna." He picked up her clothes from the floor. "Get dressed. If you don't do it, you know Simon will…or he'll have the centurions haul you out of here naked. You don't want him to do that."

She took the clothes. John stood up and she began dressing.

"Was everything all right this morning? Did you enjoy it?" She asked.

"Everything was fine this morning, and I enjoyed it very much. I hope you did, too."

She kept her eyes down. "I didn't know it would feel that good. Can we do it again when I get back?"

He walked over to her and pushed her hair from her face. Again the feeling of pity washed over him. "We'll do it again when you get back." She put her arms around him and he held her.

Simon came to the door. "Let's go."

Without looking back, D'Anna went with him. The apartment door opened and they were gone. John took a shower and put on sweatpants and a t-shirt. He went into the kitchen and made coffee. When it was ready, he took his cup out to the balcony to wait for his breakfast to be brought. Clouds had moved across the sky and covered the sun. Birds flew in and out of the broken windows in the long-abandoned building across the street. The wind brought the smell of rain and the distant rumble of thunder. It reminded him of the ocean. The first drops hit the edge of the balcony and splashed his feet. He closed his eyes and thought of the island, of waves breaking endlessly on the shore, of a blanket under the stars and of being in the arms of the woman he loved.

_…_

Kara opened her eyes to dim light. For a few moments she thought she was on the _Galactica_ because she was in a bunk and then she remembered where she was. She was on one side of the little sleeping room at Emmalyn's dwelling in base camp. The two bunks across from hers were empty, the covers pulled neatly over them. She heard voices and laughter coming from the next room. She smelled baking bread. The room wasn't cold but it wasn't warm either. She got up and quickly pulled on her jeans and sweatshirt. She fixed the covers on her own bunk as neatly as theirs. She found her brush in her pack and brushed her hair. She was then unable to find the elastic for her ponytail. She finally gave up and went into the bigger room with her hair down around her shoulders. Four sets of male eyes turned in her direction.

"Hey, Kara," Narcho said.

"Good morning," she replied and realized that she felt self-conscious as Hunter and his two uncles appraised her.

Emmalyn was standing at the stove with her back to the room. "So you're finally awake."

"Don't start on her," Hunter said to his aunt.

"Do you cook, girl?" Emmalyn asked.

Before she could speak, Hunter said, "Her name is Kara."

"Do you cook, Kara?"

"Yes, I do," she answered and heard an edge of defiance in her voice. "I've even cooked on a wood stove before."

"Have you now? And where on Caprica would you need to use a wood stove to cook?"

"When you live in the woods without any electricity," Kara answered and saw Narcho stifle a laugh.

In the course of consuming more than a few beers one night on the _Galactica,_ she and Karl had told Narcho and Flat Top some of the things that had happened to them while they had lived in the little stone cottage, including their trial and error cooking on the wood stove. At the time it had happened, it hadn't been so funny, but as they had retold it that night around a table full of fellow pilots, the stories had gotten funnier.

Emmalyn used her apron to grasp the handle of a large frying pan and lift it off the stove. She put it on a thin, flat stone slab that sat on the wooden counter.

"I could use some help. Dish up these eggs while I get the bread out of the oven."

"You had to wait for me to get up to get some help? What's wrong with one of these guys helping you?"

Hunter stood up and looked at Kara. "I'll do it. Have a seat."

"No, I'll do it. I just want to know why four big strong guys get to sit on their rear ends and wait to be served like they were _princes_ or something."

Targa and Beck had been watching the exchange and finally started laughing. "I think you got yourself a handful with this one," Targa said to Hunter.

Emmalyn turned to Kara. "My brothers and my nephew risk their lives every time they go outside the camp. They do it for all of us and they ask nothing in return. A lot of days they go without any food. The least I can do is feed them when they're here."

Kara thought about her words. "Fair enough." She looked at Hunter. "Sit down. I owe you. All of you. You saved my life."

Emmalyn smiled her approval and turned back to the stove. Kara walked over and began dividing the scrambled eggs onto the six plates.

Narcho got up. "They saved my life, too." He took two of the plates Kara had fixed and put them in front of Targa and Beck. He returned and got two more.

Kara glanced at him. Their shared smiles reflected the easy camaraderie that had developed between them while they were stationed on the _Galactica _and had continued back on Caprica. "You're a good wingman, Narch. I owe you a beer when we get home. In fact I owe you a whole case."

He was still grinning. "And who's going to let us have beer in jail?"

"What's this about _jail_?" Emmalyn asked as she turned the hot loaf of bread out of the pan onto a plate.

Narcho picked up the last two plates and sat down. "I should have kept my mouth shut."

"No, she deserves to know she's harboring two Colonial fugitives." Kara looked Emmalyn in the eyes. "I stole the Raider that I flew here. The government invested a lot of cubits in it. They equipped it for reconnaissance missions. I've brought it here twice before. We know this planet is the Cylon homeworld. My father is here. He's their prisoner. I've come to get him and take him home."

"And your friend. What's his story? Why is he here? Another missing father?"

"No. The Raider was being kept at a special hangar outside the city. I needed help getting it out onto the runway. The plan was for him to leave after that, but we tripped a silent alarm and almost got caught. If I'd left him behind, he would have gone to jail."

"I see. And your sweetheart. Why wasn't he the one helping you?"

"He wouldn't have helped me. He would have stopped me."

"As well he should have. A young woman has no business stealing a ship and coming to a hostile world to do something impossible. If the Cylons have got your father, you'll hardly be stealing him back from them. Your sweetheart's a smart man, I'd say."

"His father is an admiral," Hunter said.

"An admiral, is he?"

Kara said. "It was his plan that freed us from Cylon control four and a half months ago. He's more than just an admiral in the fleet. He's an advisor to the President of the Colonies."

"Who just happens to be…" Narcho started.

Kara cut him off, "A very smart _woman_."

She glanced around and saw the surprise on everyone's faces. She saw that Narcho also realized she wasn't ready to reveal her relationship to Laura Roslin.

Beck said, "A woman! The President of the Colonies is a _woman_?"

Emmalyn bristled. "And what, pray tell, is wrong with a woman leading the Colonial government?"

Targa quickly said, "Not one thing, Em, not one thing. You run base camp. We all know that."

"Hush. You'll give this girl and her friend the wrong idea. I can barely keep you two and my nephew in line, much less the whole camp."

Hunter had been watching Kara the whole time. She knew he was the only one who realized she had cut Narcho off for a reason.

"Let's eat," Hunter said. "These eggs are getting cold."

Emmalyn put the loaf of bread on the table. Beck reached for it and she slapped his hand. "You're not in the forest. You're at my table. The blessing first."

"Sorry," he mumbled. The three men bowed their heads. Kara glanced at Narcho and they did the same.

"We give our thanks for this meal to Hestia, goddess of hearth and home, and to Demeter, goddess of the harvest, and we give our thanks to all the gods who watch over the ones who protect us. Keep them safe. Amen."

Everyone dug into the food. There was a plate of cheese on the table and the men cut big slices. They ate mostly in silence. When they were through, Targa and Beck got up, thanked Emmalyn for the meal and left. Narcho tagged along with them because Beck was going to show him how to make the arrows for his small crossbow. They were going hunting later that day for rabbits.

"Maybe we can share recipes for rabbit stew," Kara said after they were gone. "Except I'm sure your recipe will be a lot better than mine."

"If you know how to make rabbit stew and cook on a wood stove, then it sounds like you've not always led an easy life," Emmalyn said.

Kara started clearing the empty plates from the table and putting them in the sink. "You might say that. I didn't use a crossbow, though. I got the rabbits with a slingshot." She glanced at Hunter and he smiled.

"I can vouch for her skill."

"Maybe you'll tell us your story tonight, then."

Emmalyn turned the taps over the sink and water came from faucets like in the tub. She handed Kara a cloth and a bar of soap. Kara pushed up the sleeves of her sweatshirt and began scrubbing the plates.

"Where's Dessa this morning?" She asked.

"She was up and gone an hour or more ago. She ate a slice of cold bread from last night and an apple. She took her basket. She's off somewhere, probably down in a meadow gathering lemon grass and leaves from a plant we use for the tea you drank with your breakfast."

Hunter smiled. "Keeping Dessa indoors on any nice day is impossible."

"Aye, it's all I can do to get her to let me brush and braid her hair."

"She's beautiful," Kara said, "It's too bad that she's…" she stopped. "I shouldn't have said anything."

"No, go ahead and finish what you were going to say."

"I was going to say _slow_."

"It happened when she was born. Poor little thing had the cord wrapped around her neck. A fair shade of blue she was. I thought I'd never get her to breathe. Her mum bled out right there in front of us despite everything we did to try to stop it. I'm sure it wouldn't have happened on Caprica where you've got hospitals and doctors."

"Hunter told me your doctors had all died."

"We've got a few medical books and the old doctor's instruments and a few of us do what we can to take care of the rest, but we're none of us educated. We just do what we can with the little knowledge we've got."

Hunter said, "Emmalyn knows all about using herbs and other things to heal."

Emmalyn snorted. "For all the good it does."

"It does a lot of good," Hunter said. "You saved my life after that mountain lion got me."

"It was more our prayers and you being too stubborn to die."

Hunter grinned. "You've got your story. I've got mine."

"Don't you worry about Dessa running around alone out there?" Kara asked.

"Nobody in base camp would touch Dessa," Hunter said. "Not if they want to stay alive."

Emmalyn said, "Daniel often goes with her. He's mixed some paint colors from grinding minerals and herbs. When he found some bloodroot down along a creek bank, you'd have thought he found a vein of gold. He likes to go out to the meadows and paint."

"What does he paint on?" Kara asked in surprise.

"He knows how to make a thick paper from the stalks of a plant that grows wild in a high meadow close to the other end of the valley. That's what he spends the winters doing, pulping up those plants and mixing them with a paste he makes from another plant and then pressing them out in sheets. Beck peels the bark off a white tree for him, too."

"And brushes? What does he do for brushes?"

Hunter said, "Markham found some old ones on the _Hyperion_. Daniel has already said he could make more brushes from a bit of cat fur or hog bristles. Beck told him he'd carve some handles for him. That's what Beck does in the dead of winter if we're snowed in. He carves things out of wood."

Kara smiled at Hunter. "You're a talented family."

He grinned. "Not me. I can't even carry a tune. You should hear Daniel sing. One of the old men here in base camp said he has perfect pitch."

"So which Colony did he come from?" Kara asked casually.

Emmalyn said, "He doesn't remember anything that happened to him before some of our men found him washed up on the bank of the river below the dam. I've never seen anyone closer to death who recovered. We think he must have escaped from the city after the Cylons started bringing some of the humans there."

"He doesn't even remember how he got in the river?"

"Why so curious about Daniel, girl?"

"No reason. I just think it's odd he doesn't remember anything. I had a roommate at the Academy and she'd had a…a traumatic experience…when she was younger and gradually she started remembering it.

"Well maybe Daniel will start remembering one day. We don't talk about it because it causes him pain to think of it. Personally I think there was someone with him, possibly family, and the centurions killed them. I think that's what is too painful for him to remember."

Hunter said, "After Daniel was brought to the camp, Targa and Beck took a couple of men and went upriver searching the banks. They found a place near the bottom of the dam where the ground was disturbed like there had been a scuffle. They found a lot of dried blood and several sets of human footprints."

"Aye, and half a dozen centurion footprints."

Hunter nodded. "It's just a theory, but we think Daniel and another Colonial escaped and made it as far as the base of the dam when the centurions caught up with them. Targa said from the size of the other human footprints, it was either a woman or a young person. Maybe it was Daniel's wife. The centurions shot both of them and they either went into the river on their own or were thrown into the river. They must have thought Daniel was dead."

"You never found another body, though?"

Emmalyn said, "The water at the base of the dam is deep enough to hide a thousand bodies."

"So I guess we'll never know," Hunter said.

"Unless Daniel remembers," Kara said. "Why do you think he was at the dam?"

"He followed the river out of the city," Emmalyn said.

"Or the tunnel," Hunter added.

"There's a tunnel?" Kara asked.

"He didn't come through any tunnel. How could he even have known about the tunnel?" Emmalyn asked defensively.

"What tunnel?" Kara asked again.

Hunter said. "There's a maintenance tunnel from inside the generator plant at the base of the dam. It carries the electrical lines into the city."

Emmalyn said, "The only ones who use the tunnel are Cylons. Daniel didn't come through that tunnel. He wouldn't have known about it."

"Wow, that's interesting," Kara said.

Her thought that Daniel might be a Cylon was too strong to ignore, but she decided to keep her mouth shut for now. He didn't appear to be a threat to the humans in base camp. And he didn't appear to be recovering his memory the way Boomer had. Of course Boomer didn't have a bad head injury either. She had died on Troy when she had destroyed the mining colony's dome and then she had downloaded. And when Kara had first started talking to Leoben, he hadn't remembered Cavil ordering a centurion to shoot him on the basestar either. Not until Kara had started questioning him and prodding him to try to remember. She decided that the first opportunity she had to talk to Daniel alone, she would ask him a few questions and see how far she got.

"So what are we going to do about finding my father?" She asked Hunter.

"We're not going to do anything today. I thought we'd take some bread and cheese and some mead and walk through the valley. I'd like to show you base camp."

Emmalyn raised her eyebrow at Hunter. "Make sure you take her friend with you. I'm sure he'd like to see the valley. And take Dessa, too. She'll be heartbroken if she finds out you've left her behind."

"I'll go get my canteen," Kara said.

Emmalyn followed her into the small sleeping room. "The wind will make a mess of your hair if it's down like that. I'll be glad to braid it for you."

Kara followed her back into the large room. Emmalyn sat in one of the chairs by the fireplace and Kara sat on a low wooden stool in front of her. Emmalyn expertly brushed Kara's hair back and began braiding. It took almost no time before she tied a piece of ribbon tightly around the end of the braid. Kara thanked her.

"Don't go rolling around in the grass now or you'll lose the ribbon."

Hunter had been putting bread and cheese and few apples into a small basket. He rolled his eyes upward but didn't say anything.

Kara smiled. "I'll try to control myself."

When they got outside the dwelling, Hunter said, "I know you probably don't believe it, but she likes you. She'd never have offered to braid your hair if she didn't."

Kara snickered. "I thought it was so she could tell if I'd been rolling around in the grass with…anybody."

Hunter smiled. "Okay. That, too."

They strolled down the stone path that widened into a grassy lane. Occasionally Kara saw women outside of the dwellings. Several were hanging laundry on lines strung between two poles. Kara saw a wide cloth sling tied around one woman that she was sure contained an infant. Another older woman was sitting in a straight wooden chair in front of the doorway. She was knitting. Another was kneeling between the rows of a small garden. It looked like she was pulling weeds.

"Where are the men?" Kara asked.

Most of the ones who aren't working the fields are doing their turn standing guard or patrolling in the forest. A few are shearing sheep. Some are out hunting. It's safer on the far end of the valley. The Cylons hardly ever go all the way around there because their communications with the city don't work as well from that distance."

"How far to the other end?"

"Almost twenty miles."

"How far are we going to walk?"

"Three, maybe four miles. We're going to the apple orchard. It's a good place to eat lunch. The apple trees are blooming right now. It's a good place to see the whole valley."

Hunter greeted everyone but they didn't stop walking. Kara was aware of the stares she was getting.

He said, "It's what you're wearing. They've never seen anything like it before."

"I thought it was because I'm with you."

He shrugged. "We'll have a gathering in a few days and introduce you and Narcho to everyone. They've already heard all about you, but they'll consider it an insult if we don't. Other than Daniel, most of the people who live here have never seen a human from the outside world, much less talked to one. They'll have a lot of questions for you. You and Narcho might want to get together and decide how much you want to tell them."

"I thought we'd be looking for my father in a few days."

"Tomorrow or the next day we should have some news from the city. It takes almost a week to pass it along the communication line which is person to person. This is not the place to be if you're going to be impatient."

"I just feel like I need to be doing something to find him."

"Hang on for a few days. Targa and Beck and I were out there for almost three weeks. It's good to get back into base camp and relax. Emmalyn needs to fatten us up before we go back out again."

"I'm being selfish. I'm sorry."

"What did you stop Narcho from saying about the President of the Colonies this morning?"

"You've got to promise me you'll keep it to yourself."

He stopped walking, took her arm and turned her to him. His blue eyes locked on hers. "You should know by now you can trust me."

"The President of the Colonies is married to my father. She's my stepmother. I think things would go really hard on my dad if the Cylons found out."

She saw the surprise in Hunter's eyes as he assimilated what she had just said. He let go of her arm and they resumed walking. "Anything else you held back?"

Kara nodded. "Lee's dad wants to bring his battlestars here and nuke this planet because it's the Cylon homeworld. He thinks if he doesn't, then they'll come back one day with dozens of basestars and destroy Caprica."

The shock in Hunter's voice was clear. "He would kill all the humans on our planet just to get the Cylons?"

"That's just it," Kara said. "He doesn't believe there are any humans on the planet. I tried on my recon missions to find proof, but I couldn't find any. Obviously I didn't fly over the right places because you tell me there are a lot of humans here."

"Besides us, there's eight settlements. I don't know exactly how many humans are in each one, but at least a couple of thousand. There's humans in the city, too. Not as many. Maybe a couple of hundred. They're mostly breeders or they work for the skinjobs."

"Do you know where the settlements are?"

Hunter nodded. "Most of them. So any day now we can look for those battlestars to show up and…"

"No, the admiral isn't ready. He's still months away from being ready, and even if he was ready, as long as I'm here I don't think my stepmother would let him do it."

"You don't think?"

"She wouldn't let him."

"She wouldn't let him kill you, but she would let him kill her husband? That doesn't seem right."

"They all think my dad died when he destroyed a basestar over Caprica. I've got to tell you the whole thing or none of this will make sense."

As they walked around the edge of a big field where men and woman were plowing and planting, Kara quickly told Hunter everything that had happened starting with the night they had won their freedom. He didn't interrupt her or ask any questions. He just listened to her talk. She finished by telling him about stealing the Raider.

"So you're here to find your father because you put that much faith in the words of an Oracle?"

"And because a brilliant man told me it was possible. And because I believed you were here…the free humans and the prisoners from five years ago. I think what Admiral Adama is planning is wrong. I couldn't stand by and do nothing."

"You risked your life to find your father and to keep the admiral from bombing us?"

"Go ahead and tell me I'm crazy. Tell me I've frakked up my career and my life. Tell me I'm going to prison for what I've done. Lee would say it to me. He wouldn't hesitate. He doesn't believe in Oracles. He doesn't even believe in the gods."

Hunter stopped again. In the distance they could see Dessa talking to two girls who were watching a herd of goats. Hunter whistled and she waved and started toward them.

He finally said, "The Oracle I told you about. The crazy one who said a child would be the peacemaker between us and the Cylons. She's dead now. She has been for fifteen years or more. When I was still a kid, maybe eight or nine, Emmalyn sent me to take her some herbs or something. She was an old woman by then with white hair like spider webs. Her eyes were black like a crow's and…I don't know any other way to say it…she scared the hell out of me. Targa told me I was acting like a silly little girl and to get over it, so I took the stuff to her. She grabbed my wrist with her bony fingers and I almost wet my pants. But she wouldn't let go. She told me that one day I would be a leader and help save my people. Real prophetic, right? My father was a leader. Then she told me the thing I've never been able to forget. I've been thinking about it ever since I saw your eyes two days ago. She told me that one day I would save the life of Posiden's green-eyed daughter and that she would take me to another world to tell our story. Well, you've got the green eyes and I probably saved your life. But you said your father's name was John Gallagher, not Posiden."

Kara took several deep breaths, her thoughts racing almost too fast for her to grasp. "When he was in the resistance on Caprica, my father's code name was Posiden. The Oracle that I knew was blind. The first time I went to see her she called me _Posiden's green-eyed daughter._"

Hunter's eyes met hers. In the space of a heartbeat and without saying another word, they had both acknowledged the importance of the parts they had already played and would soon play in the future of two different worlds and in saving many thousands of lives on a beautiful, green planet that orbited a distant star.

TBC…


	12. The Apple Orchard

Chapter 12

The Apple Orchard

_Zeus, unrepentant lover of beautiful women-nymph, goddess and human.__  
__Hera, his jealous and wily wife, learns that Zeus has taken his infidelities__  
__Away from Mount Olympus to the quiet glens and valleys of Kobol where his__  
__Current passion has fixed upon a beautiful woodland nymph who dwells there._

_In the heat of a summer afternoon Zeus steals away from the mountain to spend__  
__A few hours in the arms of his lover. Hera waits a few moments and follows.__  
__With stealth and cunning learned from eons of being married to a deceiver,__  
__She trails her husband to a lush, hidden mountain grove and there encounters__  
__Echo, an Oread, a mountain nymph, a teller of tales, in love with her own voice._

_Here the accounts differ depending on who relates the saga, but all agree that__  
__Echo's beautiful voice and amusing stories distract Hera while her husband__  
__Escapes back to Olympus. Whether Echo is knowledgeable of her part or__  
__An innocent maiden who wishes only to impress Hera with her story-telling skills__  
__Makes no difference to Zeus' wife when she discovers her husband's escape._

_Her wrath falls upon Echo. Henceforth, Hera says, Echo's only power of speech__  
__Will be to repeat the words of others. Zeus feels no guilt at Echo's fate.__  
__A gossiping woman deprived of her speech is not the worst disaster that__  
__Could befall Kobol. His brother Posiden laughs. She is not made__  
__Completely without the power of speech. Be careful 'tis not your__  
__Cries of passion with your nymph that she repeats throughout the valley._

_Zeus broods and vows to stay away from the mountain abode of Echo.__  
__Hera smiles. Echo's Gift to mankind is also Hera's gift to herself._

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

The rain finally drove John off the balcony and into the living room. He got another cup of coffee, stood behind the sliding glass door and watched gusts of wind drive sheets of water down the street. He wondered if the ship carrying D'Anna had gotten airborne before the storm had started. He wondered how long the creators would keep her. Simon had told him nothing. The Cylons obviously felt no obligation to keep him in their information loop. He was their prisoner. They told him only what they wanted him to know. He'd gotten more information from Doolittle and Sonja than he would have thought possible. He believed that Doolittle told him the truth, or what he thought was the truth. Sonja he didn't know about. Nothing she had said sounded like a lie, but how would he know?

The Six on Caprica had been a master at manipulation. Laura had told him how often during the negotiations that Natasi was the one who had come up with some small concession that had made the humans feel like they were getting much more than they were. She'd had only one weakness and that hadn't emerged until after the negotiations were over. She had fallen in love, or the Cylon equivalent of falling in love, with Gaius Baltar. Of all the humans on whom she could have picked to bestow her affections, he was a poor choice. Brilliant and narcissistic, Gaius Baltar was in love with only one person…himself.

John had never had any personal dealings with Natasi, but Sonja was like Caprica's Six, beautiful, manipulative and seductive. He hoped she had learned from her experience the previous day and now stayed away from both D'Anna and him. He wondered if Sonja had any idea what had happened to D'Anna. Was _she_ in the Cylon information loop or not? She had seemed exceedingly well informed, but maybe they all were. Maybe Sonja had just chosen to tell him what she thought would work to her advantage.

The rain was so loud that John sensed rather than heard the door open. He turned. Doolittle entered with his breakfast tray.

"Morning, sir."

John followed him into the kitchen. "I hope you got here before the rain started."

"Long before. I didn't see D'Anna on the couch. Did she wake up?"

"Simon came and got her just after sunrise. He's taking her back to the lab. Do you know how long they might keep her?"

"Sorry, sir. They don't tell me things like that."

"I thought maybe they would tell you to hold her trays for a day or two."

"She don't usually get no tray. Sometime I get an order to fix one of them a tray like after she was beat up a couple of days ago, but not often. Most of the skinjobs eat in the dining hall."

"Where is it?" John asked.

"On the first floor behind the lobby. I brung you something. I found it on the sidewalk when I come to work this morning. I started to throw it away and then I thought of you." He picked up a ball from the tray and tossed it to John. "It's not much, but I know you said you was bored. You might set the lamps on the floor and try a little handball off the wall."

John caught the ball in his left hand and examined it. It was a child's solid red rubber ball that fit the palm of his hand. He squeezed it. "Thanks. Where do you think it came from?"

"Probably from one of the kids. Ever now and again I see women pushing strollers down the street in front of the building. Sometime there'll be another kid, maybe four or five years old, tagging along."

"Human women?"

"Yes, sir. Them what the Cylons brought from the settlements, I guess."

"I never see any women on the street back here."

"The sidewalk's too broke up on this side. Too hard to walk much less push them strollers."

"I see centurions go down the street a couple of times every hour. It looks like they're making rounds."

"Yes, sir. Sentries."

John bounced the ball on the floor and caught it with his right hand. He repeated the move and caught it with his left. Maybe it would help him get back any hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity he had lost during his months at the prison.

"This is good. Thanks, Doolittle. Any luck on getting me a bottle of booze and a couple of books?"

"I passed your request along, sir. That's all I can do."

"Passed it along to who?"

"Don't know. There's a clipboard in the kitchen. Each time somebody asks for something, we write it down along with the apartment number. You're 12-H. One of them must take the list each night. The next morning there's a new page on the clipboard. Anything they want us to bring up is left on a table with the apartment number. That's how I got the coffee maker I brung you."

"How often do the Cylons give people what they request?"

"Not often. Most just quit asking for anything."

"How many people live in this building?"

"About a hundred. There's about thirty what live in the building I live in. We all work for them doing something…cooking mostly. Some do maintenance work what the centurions can't do. There's another building with the human women and children. I don't know how many live there. They do their own cooking and cleaning. One of the men heard that the Cylons want it to be as normal as possible. They don't have no centurions in that building because it scares the kids. Scares their mothers, too."

"The Cylons must not be worried about them trying to escape if they let them take strollers out."

"Where would they go, sir?"

"Good point. How many _humans_ in this building?"

"Fifty to sixty. The rest is Cylons, maybe a few more humans than them. That's all I know, sir. I need to be getting back to my deliveries. Them oranges on your tray, they're a gift from the one called Sonja. She said you'd understand why she give them to you."

"Thanks again."

He couldn't meet Doolittle's eyes. He knew what the man probably thought he had done to earn a gift from Sonja.

At the kitchen doorway Doolittle turned. "I think your apartment is on the list to be cleaned today so don't be surprised if a little centurion comes in and starts running a vacuum cleaner."

"Centurions do the cleaning?" John said in surprise.

"Yes, sir. They got those what carry weapons and those what push mops. They's smaller than the ones what's out in the hall, but them mop-pushers can kill you just like the other ones can and they's no friendlier. They get around to each apartment about once a week. Just let it do its thing and you'll be fine, sir. It'll take your dirty laundry and bring it back clean tomorrow. There's some big washers and dryers in the basement."

"Centurions run those, too?"

"Yes, sir. They do all the laundry for the building, humans and skinjobs. They's even got a couple what knows how to iron shirts and pants."

The door opened and Doolittle was gone.

John remembered the centurion mopping the lobby the day D'Anna had brought him to the city. The thought of a centurion scrubbing the toilet brought a smile.

He sat down at the table and took the cover off his plate. Eggs and toast and a generous helping of potato pancakes. He picked up one of the oranges, his gift from Sonja. An apology for yesterday or a thank-you for pulling D'Anna off her and allowing her to escape? He didn't really care. He peeled the orange. It was good, ripe and juicy, the first fruit he'd had in months. The food here in the city must come from the settlements. That meant regular air transportation routes. Lee's recon footage had shown no roads.

He ate the meal, then washed and dried the dishes and utensils and put them back on the tray. He poured the last cup of coffee and took it into the living room. The red rubber ball reminded him of his son. John had taken one away from him when he was younger because Brae wanted to gnaw on it. Just before that fateful night when John had taken the Raptor to the basestar, his son was finally beginning to understand that a ball was for throwing instead of munching.

In some ways, thinking about his son was as painful for him as thinking about his wife. Unlike Kara's childhood, John had thought he would be around for Braedon's. He'd had so many plans for them that would probably never happen.

He wondered how many human women and children were in the city now. Doolittle had said the Cylons were studying them to see how mothers cared for their children. He hoped that was all the Cylons were doing with them. He walked to the sliding glass door. The rain was still coming down but not as hard, and the wind had died down. The sky seemed lighter. The storm was passing.

Finally he sat on the couch and threw the rubber ball against the wall with his left hand and caught it with his right. He was not as accurate throwing with his right hand. Practicing would temporarily alleviate his boredom.

Thirty minutes later the rain had almost stopped. He got up, opened the sliding glass doors and smelled the freshness of the morning. The rain had cooled the air. It felt like a day in early spring back on Caprica. He thought about how nice it would be to get out and walk, just walk for miles.

Eventually he sat back down on the couch and threw the ball against the wall again and wondered what the Cylons did to pass the time. He tried to imagine some of them sitting in the cafeteria playing Triad or some other card game. Did they understand the concept of boredom? How did they communicate what was going on with each other? Certainly their communication wasn't all word of mouth. Did they have mobile phones? Did they have Cylon television? A wireless station? He wondered if there was such a thing as a Cylon News Network, a CNN like the Caprica News Network. Was there a Cylon internet? Maybe they didn't need computers. Maybe their brains were wireless communication devices.

Did they read books? Did they look at art? He'd never heard of a Cylon creating anything. Back on Caprica when Kara had first taken him to meet the Leoben who ran the bookstore, John had told him that Cylons had no culture, no art, no literature. Leoben hadn't argued with him. Maybe when D'Anna got back, he would ask her what they did all day to pass the time.

He threw the ball against the wall again. Compared to yesterday, today was going to be a long, boring day.

_..._

Colonel Saul Tigh was standing outside the officer's ward room by the time Lee and Kendra and Gaeta reached it. The three of them stopped and came to attention. Lee even managed it without gritting his teeth. Tigh was Bill's best friend and had been for longer than Lee had been alive. Bill and Saul had bonded as young Viper pilots during the First Cylon War, although Lee knew Tigh hadn't been at the controls of any kind of ship for a long time. When Bill had been given the _Valkyrie_ as his first command, he'd brought Tigh aboard as his XO. He'd taken Tigh with him to the _Galactica_, his second command, but when Bill had been appointed as the senior military advisor to President Adar, he'd had no need of an XO. Tigh had stayed aboard the ship although Lee knew his father and the colonel spent time together every time Tigh got shore leave. Their friendship had remained strong.

Bill had saved Tigh's career more than once…his life, too, but Bill had to have known about Tigh's drinking problem for years and what drove it. Or had Bill simply ignored Tigh's problem the way he had ignored Carolanne's? It seemed to Lee that his father had a nearly unlimited capacity to ignore what he didn't want to see, often something that was right under his nose.

Kara had told him that Commander Cain tolerated Tigh but did not like him. She had inherited the colonel and she seemed to have done a good job of dealing with a problem that was not of her making.

"Lee Adama," Tigh said in his slightly raspy voice. "It's been a while."

"Yes, sir," Lee said. "This is Lieutenant Kendra Shaw."

"Shaw?" Tigh looked momentarily puzzled and then apparently remembered. "You must be the one Commander Cain mentioned. Daughter of the Quorum representative from Caprica."

"Yes, sir. Marta Shaw."

"Well, we're just running over with the offspring of the famous. All we need now is Starbuck and we'd have three of a kind instead of a pair."

_Oh boy_, Lee thought. Tigh was in an ugly mood. Lee knew that the colonel didn't like Kara because of her friendship with Sharon and because Kara had protected Sharon's identity as well as that of Leoben.

If Tigh's day was running true to the way Kara said they normally ran, the _Galactica's_ XO had already taken a couple of discrete sips from the flask he always carried. If he knew about Picon, he may have had an additional sip. Both Tigh and Adama had lost friends and a great many fellow officers when the Fleet's headquarters had been destroyed. They now knew that the rest had died of radiation poisoning, an ugly and very painful way to go.

Kendra said sweetly, "I didn't get to meet you at the inaugural dance, Colonel Tigh, but I saw you and your wife. She's a gorgeous woman."

Tigh grunted but said nothing. Lee didn't know if Kendra had made a mistake mentioning Ellen or not. It probably depended on whether Ellen was being blatantly obvious or discreet about her infidelities at the moment.

He preceded them into the ward room and turned on the lights.

Gaeta said, "I'll go get the images and radiation readings."

"It's all yours," Tigh said and gestured to the room. Lee and Kendra entered and put their leather binders on the table.

"Thank you, sir," Lee said.

Tigh turned to go and then turned back around. "Your father's put a lot of faith in you. Don't let him down."

Lee stood with his jaw clenched and looked straight ahead until Tigh had disappeared. "Let's get to work so we can get out of here," he said to Kendra.

"What's _his_ problem with you?" She asked.

"Who knows. He told Kara one time that I was still wet behind the ears. I'm sure he thinks my father made a mistake assigning me to this mission. Maybe Tigh thinks he should have been the diplomatic liaison officer."

Kendra snickered and perfectly imitated Nylund's accent. "How much have you had to drink _today_, Colonel Tigh?"

Lee smiled. Kendra either had foreknowledge of Tigh's problem or she had gotten a whiff of his breath.

"I think we should just lay out the facts for Dr. Nylund," he said. "I think we should show him the drone photographs and give him the radiation readings. He's a smart man. I don't think we're going to get any argument from him about visiting Picon. I think he'll be ready to move on to Tauron where he knows his people can get on the planet."

"I agree. I'll think he and Commander Cain will have the ceremony first thing in the morning and then we'll leave."

"What ceremony?" Lee asked.

"The one honoring those who died on the planet. My mother told me that no matter what we found on each planet, there would be a ceremony honoring the dead and then a Raptor would drop a memorial wreath."

"My dad forgot to mention _that_ to me. He's not big on ceremonies. When he got his promotion to admiral, I think he would have preferred to have it done quietly in his office. President Adar thought otherwise."

"I saw the picture. The current President on one side and the future President on the other. They were pinning the admiral's bars on his collar. So he and Laura Roslin were tight even then."

"He and Laura have known each other since they were young. Their fathers were good friends."

"He's functioning as her official escort now. Any chance they might take it further?"

"I don't think so. But what do I know? I'd be the last person to find out."

"How do you feel about it?"

"Feel about what, Kendra?" Lee snapped. "Being the last one to find out?"

"Your father and the President of the Colonies."

"It's none of my business. He's made that more than clear to me."

Lee was saved from any further discussion of his father and Laura by Felix Gaeta's return. He handed Lee a small USB drive. "These are the photographs we were looking at earlier. The radiation readings are on there, too."

Lee took the drive and put it in his pocket. "Thank, Felix. Kendra and I will head back now. I think we're going to present the facts to Dr. Nylund the same way you and Commander Cain presented them to us."

"Good luck. If you and Lieutenant Shaw would like to come back one evening, we've usually got some good Triad games going on. The commander made sure we were stocked with some good ambrosia, too. I know we could find a couple of empty bunks if you didn't want to fly back to your ship."

"That sounds nice," Kendra said. "Maybe we can."

On the way back to the hangar Kendra said, "Who's Shelley?"

"Someone who graduated from the Academy with me and Felix. They're friends."

"Are _you and her_ friends, too?"

"I dated her for a few months when we were students. It never got serious."

"Did she _date_ Gaeta, too?" Kendra asked skeptically.

"They're friends like I said. I hope they've got a Raptor ready for us to take back to the _Penelope_. I don't want to hang around here right now."

Lee wasn't surprised to find that the Raptor was still being prepped.

"Sorry, sir," Chief said. "We weren't expecting you back this soon."

Lee paced. All he wanted to do was get back to the _Penelope_, talk to Dr. Nylund and draft his reply to Major Parker's message. Parker had probably already gone to Bill with his discoveries. Lee was now certain there were humans on Nereid. If there were orchards and farms, then it wasn't an insignificant number.

"Are you sure you know how to fly a Raptor?" Kendra asked. "I was watching Racetrack. It looked complicated."

"You're welcome to see if she can give you a ride back," Lee snapped again and then added sarcastically, "You two seemed to have hit it off so well."

Kendra turned around and walked a short distance away. Lee knew she had done it so the deck crew wouldn't see an argument like they'd had in the corridor. He wasn't sure why he was in such a foul mood. Kendra had already backed down once. He couldn't expect her to keep doing it. Kara would have been in his face a long time ago over his behavior. In many ways she had much more of a temper than he did. He started to walk after Kendra and apologize when he heard his call sign.

"Apollo."

Lee turned. Dwight Saunders was walking across the hangar deck toward him. Alex Quartataro was with him. Both were wearing flight suits. Lee waited for them.

"Flat Top, Crashdown" he said. "I heard you volunteered."

Flat Top was grinning. "Nobody will ever accuse us of having good sense. How are you? I haven't seen you out at the base in a while."

"Too much going on," Lee said.

"So who's your partner?" Crashdown asked. "I'd like to meet her."

"She's got a boyfriend."

"So? I'd still like to meet her."

Lee motioned for Kendra and she walked over. He made the introductions. Saunders was sharp. He recognized her name immediately. He asked her which way her mother was going to vote on sending more troops to Sovana. Kendra told him she wasn't privy to her mother's thoughts on the matter. Saunders teased her and said that he bet after a couple of beers she would remember. Kendra smilingly told him he wouldn't be that lucky. They all chatted for a few more minutes and then Saunders told Lee he wanted to talk to him privately. They left Kendra and Crashdown talking and walked around behind a Viper.

"Tell me about Noel and Kara," Saunders said.

"I was ordered to keep my mouth shut."

"Come on, Lee. Noel and I have been roommates since the Academy. He's a good friend. Crash and I took a transport out to the salvage yard north of the city to get his car on Tuesday morning. There were MPs all over the place. He had to sign his life away just to get his car back. What the hell happened out there?"

Lee shook his head. "I can't talk about it."

"Yes, you damned well can. Kara is my friend, too. What did they do? Are they in a brig somewhere?"

"No, they're not in a brig."

"One of the pilots at the base told me that Vipers were scrambled Monday just after midnight. They had a Cylon Raider on dradis that jumped away before they got to it. Were Kara and Noel in that Raider? Did the Cylons take them?"

Lee didn't say anything, just shook his head.

"You have my word as an officer. I won't say anything. Just tell me what happened to them."

Lee looked down for a moment. He wanted to tell Saunders something, but didn't know exactly what to say. Flat Top wouldn't accept an explanation of _on a dangerous mission,_ and let it go at that.

Saunders went on. "There's another rumor going around. They were testing some kind of secret FTL technology and instead of jumping away, they crashed into the ocean or the ship went somewhere and they can't get back. Is that what the military is covering up? Are they dead?"

"No! They're not dead!" Lee shot back. He took a deep breath. He had to be realistic. It had been five days. If Kara and Noel had made it to Nereid, there was no guarantee that they were still alive. Yet he couldn't let himself believe that anything bad had happened to them.

"I think they're okay," he finally said. "But I don't really know. We have a…prototype ship, a modified Raider. Kara knows how to fly it. She took it."

The shock on Saunders' face was clear. "Are you saying she _stole_ _it_?"

"Let's say _borrowed it_."

"Why?"

"That's all I can say."

"What was Noel doing with her?"

"My guess is that Kara couldn't do all of it by herself so she asked him to help her. They tripped a silent alarm. She took him with her rather than leave him for the MPs."

Saunders angrily hit the Viper with the side of his fist. "Oh, man! They've both frakked their careers all to hell."

"It's not their careers I'm worried about."

"Where did they take this prototype ship?"

"I've already said more than I should have."

"Did they go off chasing Cylons? Some secret mission the two of them cooked up? Because that sounds like something Noel would be idiotic enough to do. He's hated the Cylons since his sister got killed when they bombed the big temple in Delphi. If he thought he was going to get a chance to take out some more toasters, he'd have gone with Kara in a microsecond."

Kendra walked around the side of the Viper with Crashdown following her. "Chief said our Raptor is ready."

Lee said. "I've got to go. Dr. Nylund is expecting us back with the news about Picon."

Saunders nodded. "Thanks, Lee."

Kendra smiled at Flat Top. "You can corner him some other time. He'll be back as soon as we get to Tauron."

Flat Top grinned. "I hope he brings you with him."

Kendra was still smiling. "He'd better. We're a team."

They boarded the Raptor. Lee said, "You can sit up front if you'd like…unless you don't want to see the way I handle a Raptor. I might crash into the launch bay doors, maybe miss the landing bay altogether. I might not even be able to find the _Penelope_."

Without a word Kendra got into the copilot's seat. "You're way too serious, Lee. I should have just kept my mouth shut."

When they had cleared the launch bay, Lee said, "I'm sorry I'm in such a rotten mood. I shouldn't be taking it out on you. This hasn't been a good week."

"That's an understatement. What were you and Lieutenant Saunders talking about?"

"He and Noel Allison are roommates. Enough said?"

She nodded. "He's a very nice-looking guy."

"Saunders?"

She rolled her eyes. "No, Colonel Tigh. Who else would I be talking about? What do you know about him?"

"He was valedictorian of Kara's class at the Academy. He took top honors in the Raptor division in their Flight School class. Kara says he's nice, not to mention polite, the kind of guy you wouldn't mind bringing home to meet your parents. He helped her on the obstacle course. She likes him. She and Saunders and Noel hung out together a lot during Flight School."

"What do _you_ think of him…one Academy valedictorian to another?"

Lee shrugged. "He's a nice guy. He makes friends easy. I don't know anybody who doesn't like him."

"Does he have a girlfriend?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"Just curious."

"Kara told me that he dated Diana Seelix off and on while they were at the Academy and during Flight School, but she was killed during the fighting."

"Were they serious?"

"I didn't get that impression, but I don't really know."

"Maybe he's not interested in dating anyone yet."

"I'll be glad to ask him for you."

"I'm not _that_ interested in him. Most good-looking guys have a girlfriend. Of course he's a pilot and some pilots don't like to get tied down to one woman."

Lee smiled. "That sounds like experience talking."

"Why would you say _that_?" He picked up a slight defensiveness in her tone.

"No reason. Should I tell Saunders that you'd like to get better acquainted?"

"No…because I'm not."

"Then why did you ask about him?"

"I told you I'm just curious."

"Aren't you curious about Quartararo?"

"He already volunteered the information that he's available."

"He hit on you?"

"He asked me if he could buy me a beer on our next trip over."

"What did you tell him?"

"Only if you and his friend were invited. I said we were a team."

"I'm surprised Quartararo made a move on you. I told him and Saunders you have a boyfriend."

"Thanks," she said in a peeved tone of voice.

"What? I shouldn't have mentioned your boyfriend?"

"Lieutenant Saunders probably has a girlfriend anyway."

"Then what does it matter if I mentioned your boyfriend to them?"

"Just frakking forget it," she snapped angrily. "Gods. Forget I _ever mentioned it_."

Lee didn't say anything else and concentrated on bringing the Raptor into the _Penelope's_ small landing bay. If he had just had the same conversation with a guy, there would have been no doubt what was going on. Of course he wouldn't have had the same conversation with a guy. A guy would have done like Quartararo had done and hit on her. Lee decided that he had a better chance of understanding the Cylon brain than how some women thought.

_..._

Laura knew how much her guards hated unplanned trips, and she rarely asked them to take her anywhere that hadn't been put on her agenda early enough for them to carefully plan her security. But after Elosha left and Laura had gotten her son down for his afternoon nap, she called the security supervisor on duty and told him she needed a car brought around that would not attract any attention. He didn't argue with her. He knew better. She was the boss. All he asked her was if he had missed something that should have been on her schedule for the day. She politely told him that she was making an impromptu trip. He asked for the address and then asked her to give him twenty minutes. She agreed.

Laura was sure that she would not have wanted to hear what he said after she hung up. She turned to the woman who would listen for Braedon. Laura's plans were to be back before her son awoke from his nap.

"I shouldn't be gone but about an hour. I'll have my mobile phone. Call me if you need me."

She went to her bedroom, got a jacket and tucked a scarf in the pocket. She wrote a personal check to the Delphi Sisters of Hera, then folded it and put it in her other pocket. Her chief of security was waiting for her when she got downstairs.

Edgar looked at her skeptically. "The address you gave me is not in the best part of town. We need additional guards. I'd like to take several cars."

"No. One car, my driver and two additional guards will be sufficient. I'm not going to make this into a motorcade. I don't want to attract any attention. My visit will be brief."

"I don't recommend you getting out of the car once we get there. Tell us who you need to see. We'll bring them to you."

"No. The whole point of going is for me to speak with someone inside. In private. Are we ready?"

Laura did not want to speak to Keshia in the transport vehicle because she did not want anyone, even her trusted guards or her driver knowing she had come to ask a woman about the words of an Oracle.

When they left Marble House, she had three additional guards instead of two. Edgar was with them. He was in the front seat with her driver. A guard sat on either side of her in the back seat. Laura thought of the many times she and John had gone out to eat with just the two of them in his car. Of course she hadn't been President of the Colonies then. She sighed.

The building that housed the shelter was in an older, rundown section of the city. On the way they passed a free medical clinic that was closed because it was Sunday. Kara had once delivered medicine to it on a motorcycle.

Laura remembered the time that Kara and her father had gone back to the refugee camp after it had been dismantled and part of it had been turned into a memorial garden. Neither John nor Kara had ever talked to her about what they had experienced there. All Laura knew was that it had strengthened the bond between them. She was now filled with hope that Kara was alive on Nereid and that she would find her father also alive and well and that she would bring him home and they would be together as a family again.

The car stopped at the curb in front of a nondescript three-story structure that was sandwiched between a shoe store and a small mom-and-pop grocery store, both closed for the day. The narrow alleyways between the buildings were clean instead of littered with trash like so many of those nearby.

The sign on the door of the shelter was small. The front windows on the ground floor had been bricked up. Laura realized that was probably for a reason. They housed battered and abused women as well as homeless women and children. They probably didn't want to advertise their presence. One of her guards got out. He looked both uneasy and out of place in his dark blazer and crisply pleated tan slacks.

Laura tied the scarf over her hair, slid over and exited the car. "Wait a minute, ma'am. Please," the other guard said.

Laura walked up the three steps to the door and rang the doorbell. A disembodied voice over an intercom asked her to identify herself.

"Laura Roslin. I'm here to see Keshia."

By now two of her guards were hovering behind her. Edgar was on the sidewalk looking up and down the street. The immediate area was deserted except for an old man sitting on the steps of a building across the street. He was drinking something out of a bottle wrapped in a paper bag and barely glanced at them.

The voice on the intercom said, "Step in front of the peephole, please."

Laura complied and heard the door click as the lock released.

"Wait for me," she said to her guards. "In the car, please." She quickly entered the building and closed the door. She removed her sunglasses and pushed back her scarf. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. She was in a hallway with two larger rooms on either side. One looked like a reception area. Both rooms were empty. A woman in slacks and tunic much like Elosha always wore stood just inside the door. From somewhere in the back Laura heard the faint sound of women's voices and a child's laughter.

She held out her hand. The woman took it. "So it is you. I thought someone was giving us a false name. It happens frequently. Some come to us too afraid to give their real names."

"It's really me, but I don't need your services. This is a social visit."

"I'm honored. I'm Sister Eirene. I run this humble place. If I'd known you were coming we would have been better prepared with some refreshments."

"That's not necessary. I apologize for dropping by unannounced. I've come for two reasons…to bring you a small gift and to see one of your workers, Keshia. I hope she's available." Laura took the folded check from her pocket.

She heard a faint but audible gasp from Sister Eirene as she looked at it. "Your generosity is…"

"Long overdue," Laura smiled. "The gods have blessed me so richly. I can't think of a better place to return some of that blessing."

Another woman had come into the hall. Sister Eirene turned to her. "Go get Keshia. Tell her she has a special visitor."

"Is there somewhere private she and I can talk?" Laura asked.

"My office. This way."

Five minutes later Keshia walked into the small office. She was dressed much the same as when Laura had last seen her many months earlier. She wore a long skirt and colorful blouse and had a narrow multi-colored scarf wound through her dark hair. Her skin was no longer pasty-looking, though, and her clothes no longer hung on a thin frame. She looked more like the robust, bronze-skinned woman Laura had met over a year previously.

"Madame President, this is a surprise."

Sister Eirene quietly backed into the hall and closed the door.

Laura took Keshia's outstretched hands. "Please call me Laura. You look much better then when I saw you last."

"My work here has been a comfort. The need is so very great."

"They're lucky to have someone like you."

"Yolanda foresaw it. She told me that my gift was to serve others. Everything I do here is to honor her memory."

"It's Yolanda I've come to see you about. I hope my question doesn't cause you too much pain, but I need to know what she said to Kara in the hospital."

"She said very little. She was already…breathing was difficult for her…the pneumonia…"

"I'm sorry to have to ask you to try to remember, but it's _very_ important to me."

"Will Kara not tell you?"

"I can't talk to Kara right now. She's undertaken a dangerous mission. I think her reason for doing so has something to do with what Yolanda told her that night."

Keshia rubbed her forehead with the tips of her fingers for a few moments. There was pain on her face as she made the mental journey back to the night that Yolanda had died.

"She spoke of Kara's lover falling from the sky and she spoke of a child. That day she spoke several times to me of a child…even before Kara got there. I thought she was talking about a young boy we knew at the temple in Delphi, but I'm really not sure. She could have meant another child."

"When she spoke of Lee falling from the sky do you remember exactly what she said?"

Keshia shook her head. "Something about light and a long way up. Kara told us that Lee had fallen into the ocean from far up in the sky. This is what I believe Yolanda saw. I don't remember anything else. I'm sorry."

"That's all right. You've told me what I need to know. She called Lee by name. That's what she saw."

"No, not by name. She called him _the one named for a god_. Kara had told us many months earlier that he is called _Apollo_ by his fellow pilots. We both knew who she was talking about."

Laura's breath caught. Yolanda hadn't said Lee's name. Laura tried to temper her hope. Yolanda hadn't said Lee's name, but she hadn't said John's name either. _The one named for a god _could apply to either of them.

Keshia went on. "The doctors told me that Yolanda's brain was not getting enough oxygen from her lungs despite the extra they were giving her. It caused her to be very confused. She thought we were in Delphi at the temple where she served as a priest. Early that morning she thought she should get dressed and offer the sunrise prayer. Later in the day before Kara arrived Yolanda first spoke of a child, a boy. Several times she said that the child must live. Once she told me, '_he will be the peacemaker'. _I still don't know what she was talking about_."_

So Yolanda hadn't been speaking of Sharon Agathon's child at all, but it made no difference now to Laura. She had followed her conscience and her beliefs and her feelings as a mother when she had cast her vote deciding the fate of Sharon's unborn child. If the gods were willing, the child would be born and would live, the first human-Cylon child born of a Cylon mother.

Laura reached out and grasped Keshia's hand. "Thank you. I can't tell you how much I appreciate what you've told me today. I'm sorry I asked you to recall those painful memories."

"Yolanda was very fond of Kara and her father as well. Were it not for their generosity and kindness, Yolanda would have died several years ago. I think of them often. I will pray for Kara's safe return from her dangerous mission."

"Thank you. Now I had better go before one of my guards decides to break down the door."

Keshia walked down the hall with Laura. "Your visit will be the talk of this humble place for weeks."

Laura smiled. "I'm certain life around here isn't _that_ dull."

Sister Eirene was waiting at the door. She took Laura's hand again. "Thank you for your generosity. Your gift will feed many women and children for a long time."

"I would prefer you keep my donation our secret. I'm sure you understand."

Laura put on her sunglasses, pulled her scarf over her hair and exited the building. Her guards were waiting for her. When she was in the car, Edgar handed her a mobile phone.

"Admiral Adama is on the line. He's been trying to get in touch with you. He finally called the security desk. They transferred the call."

Laura felt in her pocket and realized that she had left her mobile phone on her desk back at Marble House. She took the phone from him.

Her first words were, "Oh, please tell me that Kara is back safely. Please."

"No," Bill answered quickly. "We've had no word from Kara. I'm calling about her friend Agathon and his wife. I think you should come to my place. I'd rather not discuss this on mobile phones."

"I'm on my way." She ended the call.

Bill still lived in the small apartment in the historic district near where Laura and John's apartment was located. She knew the street name but not the number. She gave it to her driver. Bill would never have called her and asked her to come to his place unless something was wrong. She sighed. She would have to think about Yolanda Brenn's words and her reference to a peacemaker another time.

_..._

Kara was still trying to decide what to say to Hunter about the Oracle's words when Dessa joined them.

Hunter finally looked away from her to his sister. "Where have you been this morning?"

She held up a basket. "I got some tea leaves for Aunt Emmie, and I went to see Daniel. He was drawing a picture of a woman. He thinks her name was Lucy."

"Does he draw a lot of pictures of people?" Kara asked.

Dessa shrugged.

"I'd like to see his pictures. Can I go with you next time you go to see him?"

Dessa smiled. "Sure. Daniel likes company. He sings while he paints. Sometimes he says rhymes. He calls it poe…poe something."

"Poetry?" Kara asked.

"That's right. You're smart. Daniel will like you."

"We're going to the apple orchard," Hunter said to her. "Want to go with us?"

She nodded enthusiastically.

"We need to stop by Targa and Beck's place and see if Kara's friend wants to go?"

"I'll go get him," Dessa said and quickly darted down a path in the opposite direction.

"She really is like a kid, isn't she?" Kara asked.

"She thinks she's eleven years old. She's sweet and she's innocent. Your friend would do well to remember that."

"Narch would never make a move on Dessa. He values his life. Besides, I'm sure Targa and Beck have already had a talk with him."

Dessa came back almost dragging Noel Allison. "What's this about an apple orchard?" He asked.

"Road trip," Kara answered him. "We're going to see part of the valley. We thought you might want to go along. We've got food and mead."

"Sure, why not. What's mead?"

"Aunt Emmie won't let me drink mead," Dessa said. "I'm not old enough."

Hunter explained. "It's brewed from honey. Emmalyn's own recipe. It's good."

Narcho grinned. "You had me at _brewed_. What are we waiting for?"

Kara walked up beside him. "I thought that would get your attention. You know in that outfit if you let your hair grow long and grow a beard, you and Beck could pass for brothers. It looks like you've already started on the beard. When was the last time you shaved?"

"Monday morning. A person I was helping _steal a ship_ failed to mention I'd need my shaving kit."

Kara grinned. "The person you were helping _steal a ship_ didn't mean for you to come with her, either."

"Somebody must cut hair around here. Hunter's is short. He must know where they keep the razors, too."

"I shave with my knife," Hunter said and winked at Kara. "I keep it sharp enough."

Kara grinned and said to Noel, "Just make sure you tell me when you're going to do it. I want to watch. It'll be a good story to tell everybody in prison. _You'd better stay away from that Noel Allison. He's so tough he shaves with a knife._"

"I can't wait until you have to wash those jeans and sweatshirt. I'm sure Emmalyn will loan you something to wear. That'll be a good story to tell the rest of the pilots. _You won't believe how she looked wearing a long dress…with an apron_. _I even saw her milking a goat._"

Kara started laughing and shoved him. "Not going to happen."

He laughed and pushed her back. "Is, too."

"Is not."

"You've already got your hair braided. They'll have you looking like a valley woman in no time."

Kara shoved him again. "Will not."

Will, too."

"Enough," Hunter said in a good-natured way. "You two are worse than Targa and Beck, and I didn't think that was possible."

They came to a large wooden structure, the only one of its kind in the valley.

"Our communal gathering place," Hunter said to them. "It serves as our temple, too, only we don't have any ordained priests anymore. They all died. There's two women who know most of the rituals and ceremonies and how to burn the sacred fire. They do the weddings and funerals and dedication ceremonies."

Dessa said, "It's fun when people get married. We dance and sing and laugh and have good food. The grownups drink mead."

"I'll bet you're a good dancer," Kara said to her.

She smiled shyly. "I like to dance. It's fun."

"Your communal building has windows," Narcho said. "None of the other structures have windows."

"That's because we don't have any way to make glass. These windows all came from glass in the _Hyperion_. During the winter a lot of people come here during the day and work because they have enough light to see."

"Work doing what?" Kara asked.

"Sewing, knitting, weaving. There's two small looms in there. Someone is usually teaching something to the kids, reading or how to do numbers."

Dessa said, "We learn about the _Hyperion s_o no one will forget."

"Let's keep moving," Hunter said. "You'll get to see the inside of the communal building in a day or two."

The apple orchard wasn't as far as Kara had thought it would be, but it was higher up on the side of the valley. After about a mile they took a path that veered southwest and began to climb, switching back and forth several times as it ascended. By the time they got there, all had stopped talking and were concentrating on breathing. The trees were in full bloom, their white blossoms tinged with light pink and unfurled buds a darker pink. Their soft fragrance was all around and the air buzzed with the bees that were busily flying from flower to flower.

Narcho looked uneasy. "I don't want to get stung."

"Then don't bother the bees," Hunter said. "They won't bother you. They're way more interested in the pollen. These trees don't self-pollinate. Without the bees there won't be any apples. We have a couple of people in base camp who keep bee hives."

Dessa took Narcho's hand again and began pulling him up the hill. "Come on. I'll show you a bird's nest."

Kara found a grassy spot under the first row of trees and plopped down. Emmalyn had been right about the wind. There was a strong breeze that would have made a tangled mess of her hair. She looked out over the entire valley. The view was breathtaking. She saw the river and in the distance a small lake. There were plowed fields and pastures filled with grass and colorful wildflowers. Another herd of goats was grazing nearby under the watchful eyes of two young boys. There were paths or roads leading around the valley. She saw a cart on one being pulled by a shaggy horse. She didn't think she had ever seen anything as beautiful.

Hunter sat down beside her. "What do you think?"

"The word _paradise_ comes to mind." They sat without speaking for a moment and then Kara said, "You know something about an apple orchard as well as hunting Cylons."

"When you grow up in a small group of people, you learn a little bit about a lot of things. I know how to plow and plant. I can shear a sheep but I'm slow. I can even milk a goat. I can provide you with a list of my accomplishments. The list is long, but the entries are very short."

Kara smiled. "I'm impressed."

"Are you making fun of me, Wildcat?"

"No, I'm not making fun of you. Before I went to the refugee camp I lived in a little stone cottage with a guy who was like my brother. I was thirteen and he was fourteen. We both learned how to do a lot of things."

"The two of you lived there alone?"

"That's where I learned to use a slingshot and skin a rabbit and other stuff. Karl taught me how to fish, too. We had a garden. We lived there almost eight months before some soldiers found us and took us to a refugee camp."

"Pond fishing or stream fishing?"

"Pond. There was a creek close by but not much in it but crawfish that were too little to mess with."

"We've got streams and ponds here in the valley. Maybe tomorrow we'll go fishing."

"You said we'd get word from the city tomorrow."

"I said tomorrow or the next day. It'll happen, Kara. Neither one of us can make it happen any faster than it will. Relax and enjoy this while you can."

She thought about what he had just said. He was right. She had to stop obsessing about her father for a day or two. She couldn't change his circumstances right now even if she knew where he was. That would take some real planning. She had to face the fact that rescuing him might not even be possible. But she wasn't ready to go there yet. She would wait for word from the city to see if any of Hunter's people knew anything.

"You're right. This is a beautiful place. You've got everything you need to live here in your valley. You said the Cylons don't bother you in base camp. Why don't you stay here all the time? Why even go out in the forest at all?"

"Because eventually they'd come looking for us. It's part of the agreement."

"Make a new agreement. Tell them you're not going to kill them anymore and to leave you alone. Tell them you want to live in peace. Maybe they'll share some of their technology with you. Maybe they'll let you trade with the other settlements and the city. Just because you've done something the same way for years doesn't mean you can't change it."

"It wouldn't work."

"Why not? You'll never know unless you try."

Hunter leaned back on his elbows and looked at the sky through flowering branches. "I don't mind going out in the forest and hunting them."

"So what you're saying is that you don't want to change it."

He shrugged. "They've got no reason to want to change. We have to go along with it. This arrangement suits them just fine."

"It suits you, too. You enjoy it," Kara said, wondering why she hadn't seen it before. "This place is just too damned peaceful for you. Farming and fishing is too tame to do all the time. You like the adrenalin high you get when you're stalking them. You get off on planning your strategy to catch them and destroy them. You like shooting the skinjobs and knocking out the brains of the centurions with that gadget in a soup can."

"Listen to who's lecturing me. You can't tell me that a fighter pilot doesn't get off on shooting down their Raiders. You can't tell me you don't like the feeling when you get a good kill."

She didn't answer him because he was right and they both knew it. She has stayed on an adrenalin high the whole night she had fought the Cylons. She had become a pilot in order to fight the Cylons.

Instead she said, "When you killed Leoben, I could tell you and Targa and Beck had done it before. How many times?"

He shrugged again. "I don't know. I'm not keeping score. I've been doing this for fifteen years. And it isn't just Leoben. We've killed all the skinjob models, even the females. They come out in the forest hunting us, they know what they're going to get. So you're right. I like it. I'm just like my father. He liked hunting them, too."

"And it got him killed, didn't it? How many of you have died since you started doing this?"

"I can take you to the cemetery. You can count the stones. Besides, none of us is going to live forever."

"Except the Cylons because they download. You'll never be able to even make a dent in their numbers. Don't you see how stupid it is what _you're_ doing? On Caprica we didn't fight them until we could kill all of them. What you're doing is just crazy. It goes against any kind of…good battle strategy. It's insane. You can't kill Cylons one at a time."

"This is our war with them, Wildcat, not yours. We do what we have to do."

Suddenly Kara realized something that she should have seen earlier. "You let Leoben take me and Narch on purpose, didn't you? The rest of the time I was with you, we never traveled on a path. After you captured us, you marched us straight down that path like lambs to the slaughter."

He didn't answer her.

"Son of a bitch," Kara said angrily and started to get up.

He grabbed her arm tightly and pulled her down beside him. "Not so loud. You were never in any danger."

"Never in any danger? Those centurions were…"

"Shooting at us, not at you."

"That doesn't matter. You frakking used us as bait."

"Listen to me, Wildcat. We'd been out there for almost three weeks. We were a long way from base camp. We were out of food and we were getting tired. We could never get the jump on them until the gods dropped you out of the sky. You were a gift. You can't blame us for taking advantage of it."

"You never thought me and Narch were skinjobs, did you? You knew we were humans from the start."

"No, I didn't know at first. That's the truth. I didn't know for sure until Leoben didn't recognize you."

She sat in angry silence, refusing to look at him.

He said, "You'd have done the same thing if you'd been in our place."

"What makes you think I would have done the same thing and risked someone else's life?"

"You brought Narcho here not knowing what you would find. I call that risking someone else's life."

"That's different," Kara said quickly. "His chances were…"

"Not as good as they were on the planet you came from. You had no idea what you were going to find here."

"I did have some idea. I'd been here twice before."

"Not on the ground, you hadn't. And you risked _my life_ to take us through that waterfall and hide your ship. You didn't even hesitate."

"Then why'd you go with me?"

"Because my gut told me you could do it. My point is that you and I are more alike than you think. So come down off that moral high road you're trying to walk. I didn't notice you shedding any tears over that dead Cylon. Didn't you say you'd killed two of them on Caprica? Didn't they download?"

She snorted. "They didn't consult me afterward. So you let Leoben prove we weren't skinjobs and then you killed him."

"He and his centurions would have killed us if they could have. That's why they're out there. That's what they do."

"Don't you ever get tired of it? Don't you ever just get frakking sick and tired of it?"

He finally let go of her arm. "Sure. I get tired of it. And when I do, I come back here and I spend a little time. I help out with whatever needs to be done. Then I go back out again."

"What the hell kind of life is that?"

"It's the only life I know. Don't you understand, Kara? Everybody in this valley depends on me and those like me. Without us going out there, the Cylons would take this place and make slaves of everybody." He gestured out over the whole valley. "The way of life that you see would be gone along with our freedom."

Kara wrapped her arms around her knees. "When I was fifteen, I was living in a refugee camp on Caprica. We lived in tents. We had to walk a quarter of a mile to take a shower, almost a mile to eat in the mess tent. I was glad to leave that place. More than glad. There's got to be a better way, a better life for you, for all of you."

He smiled. "Maybe that's why you're here. Maybe Posiden's green-eyed daughter is going to change all that."

Before she could answer him, Narcho and Dessa rejoined them. Dessa came over and sat down beside her. She rubbed the sleeve of Kara's sweatshirt.

"That's soft. I like it."

"So are we ready to break out the mead?" Narcho asked.

Hunter handed him the basket. "It's in the old canteen. The other one is full of water."

Narcho made a face. "Water? I've drunk enough water in the last couple of days to last me a year or more."

"You'd better get used to it," Kara said. "I think our days at McGee's and Zeno's and The Shark Rider are over for a long time."

"When we get back to Caprica. But we're not there yet, so I'll take some mead."

"What's Caprica?" Dessa asked.

"It's a place outside base camp," Hunter said. "A long way from here."

"Have you been there?" She asked him.

"No, I haven't been there, but Kara and Narcho have. That's where they live."

"Are they going back?"

"Someday," Kara said. "But I've got to find my father first. Hunter's going to help me."

Dessa smiled and put her head against Kara's shoulder. "I'll help you, too."

"Of course you will," Kara said.

The wind ruffled through the apple trees and white petals fell down around them. The breeze was cooler higher up on the side of the valley than it had been down in the camp.

Dessa cupped her hands and let some petals fall in them. "Like snow. Does it snow in Caprica?"

"It snows," Narcho said. "A couple of months ago it snowed and we couldn't fly that day so we had a big snowball fight out at the base, the Raptor pilots and the Viper pilots. We kicked their…behinds."

At the mention of snow, Kara's thoughts traveled to another time later that same day. She and Lee had taken Braedon out on the back lawn of Marble House to play in the snow. Brae had been bundled up in a one-piece suit with a little hood. She remembered his rosy pink cheeks and the way he had looked at the snowflakes on his mittens, how he had tasted them. He had laughed, even when he had fallen down in the snow. Lee hadn't been able to do much because he was still walking with a limp and he didn't want to reinjure his healing leg. He had taken pictures of them, though, of Kara holding her snow-suited brother. Her father should have been there to see Brae enjoy his first snow. At that moment under the falling apple blossoms, Kara wanted her father. She wanted to sit beside him and feel him put his arm around her shoulder and kiss her on the top of her head. She wanted to hear him say, _I love you, baby_. She missed him so much. Tears stung her eyes.

"What's wrong?" Hunter asked softly.

"I was just thinking about my little brother. About him playing in the snow. About how my dad should have been there to see it. He's a good father, a really good father."

"You have a little brother?" Dessa asked. "Where is he?"

"He's back on Caprica," Kara said.

"How old is he?"

"He's seventeen months old now, but I still think of him as a baby."

Dessa smiled and leaned over and whispered to Kara, "Hunter has a baby. Her name is Esmari."

TBC…


	13. Fair Winds and Following Seas

Chapter 13

Fair Winds and Following Seas

_Beautiful Circe, sorceress, enchantress, w__eaver of magic spells, seductress,  
__Who turned brave men into docile beasts u__ntil she met Odysseus on his journey home  
__From war back to his own country a__nd the arms of his loving wife Penelope. _

_Circe offered his sailors plates of food and honeyed wine and sugared __pomegranates,  
__And when they had eaten and drunk their fill, she turned them into swine who__  
__Groveled at her feet. Odysseus, forewarned of her powers over men and her__  
__Treachery, made a charm of protection from a rare herb called moly, blessed__  
__By a priest and infused by the gods with the deepest love of husband and wife. _

_He took Circe to bed and won her favor and persuaded her to release his men.__  
__Yet he tarried with her while his ship was repaired and his men rested and__  
__He drew maps and plotted his course and made plans for his long voyage home._

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

The dream was one that John had often since he'd been on Nereid. He was standing against the wheelhouse of a fishing trawler out on Virgon's North Sea. An icy pre-dawn wind was blowing, and he was trying to light a cigarette. He would get one drag, maybe two before he would have to throw the cigarette overboard. His boss had already yelled at him to get to work even though no one else was on deck yet. His numb hands were cupped around the lighter, but the wind kept extinguishing the flame. He was sixteen years old.

If life had worked out differently for him, if Amelie's enraged father hadn't been waiting for them that cold spring day when they got home from school, if he hadn't beaten them both half to death and caused her to lose the baby, John would be a father, probably also a husband. He would be working in the cannery next to his father-in-law in order to support his wife and child. Instead he was on a fishing trawler struggling to learn one of the toughest jobs on the planet, struggling to follow in his own father's footsteps, struggling to understand how the gods could have taken his father and his four brothers all at once, struggling to forgive his mother for killing herself, struggling to forgive Amelie's father for killing their unborn child, struggling to forgive Amelie and her mother for turning on him and blaming him for everything, hurting from Amelie's rejection, hating himself for what he had done, trying to make sense of it all.

John opened his eyes. The icy wind and pitching ship were gone, but the feelings lingered. The light outside his bedroom windows did not yet reflect sunrise.

He sat up in bed in an attempt to banish the remnants of the dream. He'd spent two merciless years aboard that trawler. He had picked up some bad habits. He'd started smoking, a habit he'd given up only when he began having dinner with Laura several years ago. And because he was a tall, skinny kid with a big chip on his shoulder, he'd been picked on a lot so he'd learned how to use his fists. But those two years had also toughened him in ways he would come to appreciate only later in his life. Above everything else, he had learned that he had what it took to overcome adversity and survive. There had been only one time in his life since his days on that trawler when he had almost thrown it all away.

He got up and put on his sweatpants and t-shirt and made coffee. He took his cup out on the balcony and waited for the rising sun to turn the broken windows across the street to shards of dust-covered gold, waited for the rising sun to warm the cool spring morning enough that the goose-bumps on his arms disappeared. As he stared at the ruined, collapsing buildings of a long-vanished civilization, he thought of the way he had once viewed the vastness of Virgon's oceans, the cold green rolling seas that seemed to have no end. He would stand on the deck of the trawler in those rare moments he had nothing to do and stare at the horizon that stretched in all directions. Back then it was his whole world.

When he was sixteen years old and even seventeen, he wanted to sail that ocean, to take his own ship someday and sail wherever he wanted to go, to feel the wind at his back, to explore. _Fair winds and following seas_. That's what the wives and girlfriends always wished their men before they left port. That's what his mother had always said to his father when she kissed him goodbye as he headed out. John knew life wouldn't always be fair winds and following seas for him, but it was a nice dream for a kid whose life was far from what he wanted.

He had just turned eighteen when he realized that life had other horizons waiting for him. On his second morning of a week when the trawler was tied up in port for repairs, John passed a military recruiting office that had been set up in an old building near the waterfront. He stopped in front of the window and looked at the poster of a battlestar. He was still too hung over to realize that the smiling, handsome crew members on the poster were models who had been paid to pose so realistically in their crisply pressed uniforms. What caught his eye was the beautiful blond in the tailored blue jacket with the gold wings pinned above her heart.

The woman standing beside him as he stared at the poster was the one he'd spent the night with. He had been walking her to her waitressing job at a local diner when he'd stopped in front of the spotlessly clean display window. She wasn't as young or as pretty as she'd looked the previous evening in the bar where he'd picked her up or she'd picked him up. He still wasn't sure which way it had happened, but what had happened at her apartment later had been extremely satisfying for both of them. In the morning she told him if he'd come to the diner with her, she would give him breakfast and the best cup of coffee in port. It was an offer he couldn't refuse.

As he stood staring at the poster, trying to make up his mind whether or not to go in, she told him she had to get to work. He almost left with her, but something compelled him to go inside and listen to the recruiter make his pitch. It took him only a few minutes afterward to sign a piece of paper. He had been motivated partially by a sense of patriotism. That's what he told the captain when he went back to the trawler to get his few belongings. But patriotism wasn't his only motive. He'd also done it because it would possibly give him a chance to get on a battlestar as part of the crew. He decided that he'd rather die fighting Cylons among the stars than go down in the cold North Sea like his father and his brothers had done.

Two days later with everything he owned in a duffel bag, he was on a transport ship to Picon with over sixty other young recruits, a few of them like him, with no family and no one to leave behind. The First Cylon War was nearing the end of its tenth year with battles raging in space over many of the planets and surface battles being fought on several colonies most notably Tauron.

The tough physical life he'd lived for two years made basic training a breeze. The captain of the trawler could have taught his drill sergeant a thing or two. Near the end of basic he took several written tests to see where his aptitude lay and one morning a week later, he was ushered into a hangar and told to climb into a Viper simulator. For the first time in over two years, the gnawing pain in his heart began to recede, replaced by a sense of purpose. He knew what he had been born to do. Space was an ocean that dwarfed the rolling seas of Virgon. Space was where he was supposed to sail and a Viper was the ship he was supposed to sail it in. It took only ten minutes in the simulator to convince the ones who were testing him of what he already knew.

He was fast-tracked through Officer Candidate School and then Flight School. No one ever mentioned his lack of a high school diploma. He was motivated like he'd never been before. He studied hard and passed every test near the top of his class. He understood the instruments. He had an instinct for flying that one of his instructors said happened only rarely. He had the makings of a good Viper pilot and Viper pilots were dying at an alarming rate late in the tenth year of the war. Getting another good pilot was all the military cared about. He decided that the ones who had failed to mention his lack of a diploma probably didn't think he would live long enough that it would matter.

Two days after he got his wings, he was on a transport to the _Solaria_. The next day he was sitting in a launch tube ready to fly CAP with a dozen experienced pilots. Thirty minutes into the routine mission twenty-eight Raiders jumped into space on top of them and he got his first two kills. Within a week he got two more. He shared a bunk with the hottest Raptor pilot on board. He was on his way to making a reputation for himself and not just for his skills in the cockpit. His days of struggling to survive on a fishing trawler on the cold North Sea of Virgon were behind him. Only rarely did he think about the fact that he walked much closer to death every time he went out in his Viper and took on Cylon Raiders than he ever did on that trawler. He lived for those moments his Viper sat in the launch tube and he took that two-second, three-G ride into the stars. It was the time he felt the most alive.

As he drank his coffee and watched the birds climb into Nereid's dawn sky, John yearned to be at the controls of a ship once more. He yearned to feel it leave the ground, to defy gravity and sail on that cold blue ocean of air. He yearned to do the thing that had defined his life for the last twenty-five years. He hadn't felt that way in a long time.

_..._

After Lee and Kendra returned from the _Galactica_, Kendra was unusually quiet as they stood in Captain Pontos' quarters and Lee explained the findings on the planet's surface to Pontos and Dr. Nylund. Not surprisingly, once Nylund had viewed the footage from the drones and looked at the radiation readings, he accepted the results with a somber countenance and agreed with Cain's assessment of the insanity of visiting the planet.

All he said was, "So we will go to Tauron next and my scientists will have something to do."

Word spread quickly that there would be no expeditions to the planet's surface and why. During the evening meal, the dining hall was quiet and subdued. Lee and Kendra ate together but said little. Lee wasn't sure whether it was because of everyone's mood in general or because of the awkward way their conversation about Dwight Saunders had ended.

After the meal, Lee retired to his tiny quarters, finished his reply to Major Parker's query, encrypted it and sent it through a secure channel. It wasn't a mission-critical message, but it would go a long way toward justifying Laura's decision not to allow Nereid to be nuked.

After Lee sent the message to Parker, he showered and went back to his quarters. He was too tired to tackle any more of Kara's journal. Instead he got into his bunk. He thought he would have trouble falling asleep, but he managed to read only a few pages of the paperback book he had brought with him. The next morning he couldn't remember what he had read and knew he would have to start over.

When he knocked on Kendra's door to get her for breakfast, she told him that she wasn't ready yet and to go ahead without him. He didn't wait for her like he knew he probably should have since they were a team. Instead he ate breakfast alone in the same small booth he had occupied the day before. When he was almost through eating, he saw Kendra come in, get a plate and take it to an unoccupied table near the observation window. She didn't even look around to see if he was there or not. She was sipping her coffee and staring into space.

When Dr. Nylund tapped his fork against his water glass and announced that the memorial ceremony would begin in ten minutes, Lee got up and joined Kendra.

"Are you okay?"

She shrugged. "Yesterday was a bad day all the way around."

"I agree."

"My mother would say that we got the worst over first. It's got to get better."

"Not necessarily. The only planet that we know has survivors is Tauron. All the rest might be just like Picon."

"Gods, how depressing."

"It'll get us home sooner," Lee said. "I mean if Nylund's scientists can't go to the surfaces of the planets and do their thing."

"I wandered around the ship for a while last night. I got out my map and followed it. I think I'm beginning to understand how the decks are laid out. I went up a level and checked out some of the labs. I stumbled on Dr. Baltar in one of them. He was chatting up a woman or trying to. I think I gave her a chance to escape so of course he started talking to me. I thought I'd never get away, but he did let me use his secure data link to send a message to Gordon."

"I would have let you use mine," Lee said.

"It was late. I didn't want to bother you."

"Are we okay about yesterday?"

"Lee, I'm fine about yesterday." She tapped her fingers on the table. Finally she said, "I checked my email last night. I didn't have any from Gordon."

"It's only been two days, Kendra."

She made a soft huffing noise. "If you were on Caprica and Kara was on a ship, wouldn't you have sent her something by now?"

"When I was on Caprica and she was on the _G_, the Cylons wouldn't allow email access for anyone. She got one ship-to-shore call a week. We wrote each other letters."

"Letters?" Kendra smiled. "Old fashioned letters?"

"The mail ship made the rounds to all the battlestars and back to Caprica twice a week."

"How often did you write to her?"

"Two or three times a week."

"Wow. Long letters?"

"A couple of pages. Hers were shorter, but Kara's not much of a letter writer. She's more of a face-to-face type of person."

"A couple of pages," Kendra repeated. Lee could hear the surprise in her voice. "How could you find enough to say to fill a couple of pages?"

Lee shrugged.

Kendra looked out the observation window and said glumly. "I can't even get a couple of sentences out of Gordon. Not even a _How R U?_"

"I'm sure he's busy working."

Kendra rolled her eyes. "It's the weekend. He doesn't work on the weekend. I'm sure he found time to play a couple of hours of games on the web and go out to drink beer with his friends, but he couldn't find time to send me a few frakking sentences in two days."

"Kendra, some guys just aren't good about keeping in touch. My brother Zak's not. Three-fourths of the time I call him."

"Why are you defending Gordon? You don't even know him."

"I'm not _defending_ him. I'm just speculating about why he might not have sent you an email."

Kendra had just started to say something when the big screen on the opposite wall of the dining hall flickered and came on. Commander Cain was standing behind a slender podium in one of _Galactica's_ hangar bays. It looked like half the crew of the ship was assembled behind her. She and all the officers were wearing their dress gray uniforms.

Lee and Kendra stood and came to attention while Commander Cain's short speech for Picon's fallen citizens was displayed on the large screen. Cain's face was grim. At the end she repeated Pythia's prayer for the dead without looking at her notes. The words were obviously firmly in her memory. Near the end Lee detected the slightest tremor in her voice, the first indication he had ever seen of her feelings. He wondered if Cain was thinking of her sister Lucy who had disappeared from Tauron during the First Cylon War twenty-five years earlier.

Cain directed their attention to the Raptor maneuvering into place between the two ships. They watched as the door rose and a large evergreen wreath dotted with white flowers was pushed out into space. It hung there above the planet's gravitational pull as the Raptor moved away. Lee discretely glanced around the dining hall. Some of the scientists were openly weeping. Grief was palpable in the air. He knew that some of them had family and friends who had died on the planet. They had probably known for over five years that the chances of anyone surviving were almost none, but being faced with the certainty of it had brought back the pain fresh and sharp. Lee glanced around again. Gaius Baltar was not among those present for the ceremony. Maybe having a Cylon for a girlfriend had kept him in his quarters or hiding in one of the labs.

Lee glanced at Kendra. Her face was a closed mask. Her eyes were dry and yet he felt that she was dealing with something. Maybe it was still her feelings about not hearing from Gordon, and maybe she had known someone who had died on Picon. He didn't say anything and looked at the wreath as it hung motionless now between the two ships. He tried to understand how the Cylons could have hated humanity enough to want to annihilate them.

Thirty minutes after the ceremony they broke orbit. The journey to Tauron would take almost six hours. Kendra said she was going to continue exploring the ship. Lee went back to his quarters, got John's laptop and returned to the dining hall. He got another cup of coffee and settled into his favorite booth. He thought of the letters he had written to Kara while she was on the _G_. He thought about how long they might be separated. If she returned to Caprica today, he wouldn't get to see her until the _Penelope's_ mission was finished. That might be almost two months. His conversation with Kendra had given him an idea. He would write letters to Kara and save them on the laptop and print them for her when she returned.

He would tell her what had happened to him since she had taken the Raider. He knew this letter would be just the first of many. There were so many things to tell her, but he decided to start with the most important thing.

_Dear Kara. I love you._

_..._

Laura sat in the car and waited while two of her guards checked Bill Adama's apartment. She knew that her impatience showed, but she understood why they had to do it. Edgar told her that Bill could have been coerced into making the call. She knew better. Bill Adama would have died before he would have done anything that would have put her in danger, but she had to let her security people do their jobs.

The small but extremely nice apartment was above the separate garage of a very elegant house in the historic district. The driveway wound up behind a row of tall evergreens that hid it from the road. Laura hadn't been to the apartment since John had lived there. Bill had moved in after she and John had gotten married, after Bill had sold the house where he and Carolanne had lived. Lee had told Kara that the house was too big and too full of memories for his father.

The admiral apparently enjoyed living in the little apartment because after two years he was still there. It was a quiet, peaceful place and the elderly widow who owned it was adamant about her privacy. She didn't bother Bill and he didn't bother her. It suited them both perfectly.

Laura sat in the car for ten minutes wondering about the delay. Edgar finally returned and told her that there were two young people with the admiral who were acting _hinky_. He said they'd been searched for weapons even though the admiral had assured him there was no cause. When she asked him to explain _hinky_, the only words he could come up with were _nervous _and _jumpy_.

Laura smiled. "Edgar, if you and Boggs were searching me, I'd act _hinky_, too."

"You can go inside now," Edgar said. "Boggs will stay with you."

"Boggs can wait outside. I know the young couple. They saved Lee Adama's life. Sharon roomed with my daughter at the Academy. If they bothered the admiral on a Sunday afternoon, then they're the ones who need our help."

"That may be so, ma'am, but she's still a Cylon."

"And your concern is that she and her husband have lured me over here to harm me?"

He looked directly at her. "My job is to _protect_ you. That's what I'm doing."

"Yes, you are. And you don't know how grateful I am for everything you do for me, but I am also very certain that harming me is not the reason Karl and Sharon Agathon turned to Bill Adama today."

Laura got out of the car and climbed the outside steps to the apartment door. Bill opened the door before she knocked. Karl and Sharon sat huddled on the small sofa. They were holding hands. Laura could see Sharon's slightly rounded belly. She quickly did the math. Sharon was about five months pregnant now.

Laura's guard Boggs stood at the end of the sofa.

"Thank you," she said to him. "Please wait outside."

"Ma'am…" he started.

Laura gestured toward the door. "Please. These young people mean me no harm."

"She's a…"

"Frightened young _pregnant_ woman," Laura finished for him. "You've searched them. You know they're not armed. The admiral is here with me. Please."

Boggs left reluctantly, saying, "I'll be just outside the door."

Bill was wearing a pair of faded camouflage fatigues and a slightly wrinkled olive green t-shirt. He hadn't shaved that day either. She wasn't even sure he had combed his hair.

He walked to a small table that sat against the wall and was piled with stacks of paper where he picked up a drink.

"Could I offer you something?" He asked her.

"No, thank you. What happened?"

Bill gestured to Karl and Sharon. "Tell Laura just like you told me."

Karl said, "We went out for lunch today and then we went for a walk. The doctor told Sharon it was all right to walk, just nothing too strenuous." He squeezed her hand.

"When we got back," Sharon said, "our apartment had been broken into. Our things were trashed." Her voice caught, "even a blanket that Kara gave us for the baby."

Karl continued. "They spray-painted _Cylon_ and _Cylon Lover _in red all over the walls. Some of our clothes were slashed. Most of the furniture, too." He put his arm around Sharon.

"Our bed was…" Sharon put her hand over her mouth and couldn't go on.

"Somebody urinated on our bed and pillows," Karl said.

"You didn't call the police?" Laura asked in surprise.

Sharon shook her head. Karl said, "We didn't want to hang around that long."

Bill said, "I think there was some concern the police might not have been entirely sympathetic…all things considered."

Karl said, "It's not like it's any big secret. The other pilots know. A lot of people out at the base know. I was afraid whoever did it would come back. All I could think about was getting Sharon away from there."

"Why would someone from the base do something now? They've known for months."

Bill said, "I got word about Picon from the _Galactica_ this morning. Cain sent me a message. I was waiting for the official report before I called you."

Laura's eyes met his. "Bad?"

"It couldn't be any worse. Cain's message was classified and encrypted, but I don't know how tight Dr. Nylund's security is on the _Penelope_. I've got people checking into the possibility of a leak, but we may not find anything."

"So you think word has leaked out about Picon and that's what prompted the destruction at Karl and Sharon's apartment?"

Bill sipped his drink. "It's one theory. I'm leaning toward it. I agree that a lot of people at the base have known about Sharon for over four months. It's too much of a coincidence that this happened less than a day after Picon's fate was discovered."

Karl said, "So you're saying someone from the base heard about Picon and trashed our apartment?"

"I think what Bill is saying is that without some kind of proof, there's no way to be sure who did it," Laura said. "It may have been someone from the base who heard the news and reacted badly to it or someone on the _Penelope_ could have managed to get word to someone back here on Caprica."

"What are we going to do?" Sharon asked. "If it was just me and Karl it would be different, but now we've got the baby to think about." Her hand instinctively cradled her belly.

"How are you doing?" Laura asked softly.

"I've had a few problems," Sharon said.

"Morning sickness still?"

"No." She glanced at Karl. "That's over, thank God."

Karl said, "Our doctor told us the baby is small, but she's…she looked…on the ultrasound she looked perfect so far."

Laura smiled. "So you know it's a girl? I remember when John and I went for my ultrasound. He was so sure we were having a girl that he was smug about it. I had no premonitions either way. You should have seen John's face when the image…proved him wrong." Laura blushed. "It was very clearly a little boy."

Sharon smiled knowingly and Bill took another sip of his drink.

Karl said, "We're going to name her Hera."

"A beautiful name. I'm sure she'll be a beautiful baby."

Bill cleared his throat, "This is a nice conversation, but it doesn't solve our immediate problem."

"If it was just me," Karl said, "I'd go back to the apartment and wait for whoever did it to come back."

Sharon said, "No, you wouldn't. They'd kill you as quickly as they'd kill me."

"Let's not talk about killing," Laura said. "We're not going to let that happen."

Bill said, "What was done at your apartment was a cowardly act. They probably waited for you to leave. I think it was done to scare you, to intimidate you. If they had wanted to harm either one of you, they would have waited for you to come back."

"You think we should go back there and clean up what we can and act like nothing happened?" Karl asked.

"No," Laura said. "You simply cannot take that chance, especially with Sharon's condition. The people or the person who trashed your apartment might be cowards, but the next ones might not be. I have a solution that you probably won't like, but I believe it will provide a very safe place for Sharon until we can work something out on a more permanent basis. Unfortunately Karl can't go with her."

Karl said, "If you're sure Sharon will be safe, then I'll find somewhere to stay."

"What do you have in mind?" Bill asked Laura.

"There's a shelter downtown run by the Delphi Sisters of Hera. I can assure you of their discretion. They have a lot of experience protecting women." Laura smiled. "I'm very certain they will find a room for Sharon. I will personally take her there."

Karl began nodding. "That's a good idea. I like it." He turned to Sharon. "You'll be safe. That means the baby will be safe. That's what matters."

"But what about you?" Sharon asked.

Bill said to Karl. "I need a pilot to shuttle reports between Caprica and the _Galactica_ for the duration of their mission. I'm going to stop all communication between those ships and Caprica except in an emergency. You and a copilot would jump a Raptor to the _G_ three or four times a week. Bring Commander Cain's reports back to us and take her anything we need to send to her. I'll give you special envoy status and a room out at the base. You'll have to stay overnight on the ship each trip."

"Yes, sir. I'll do it," Karl said.

"Will we get to see each other?" Sharon asked as she looked longingly at Karl.

Laura answered her. "The shelter isn't a prison. I'm sure something could be arranged where you could meet nearby, perhaps for dinner. It wouldn't be like sharing an apartment, but for right now, I feel like it's a very good option."

"It's settled then," Bill said. "Laura, if you would take Sharon with you and get her to the shelter, I'm going to call the base and have them send a jeep with some MPs to take Karl back to their apartment. Karl, get what you can salvage and lock it up if you can. Bring everything back here. Laura can send someone to get Sharon's things tomorrow and get them to the shelter."

Karl and Sharon both stood. Karl said, "Thank you for your help, sir. I'm sorry we bothered you on a Sunday afternoon, but…"

"We didn't have anywhere else to go," Sharon finished for him. She looked at Laura. "Thank you, too. When Kara gets back from her mission, will you tell her what happened and where I am. She always…I know how she stood up for me. She never would let anyone say anything bad about me or Karl."

"I'll tell her." Laura walked to the door and opened it. "Boggs, Sharon will be coming with us. We're going back downtown. Please let Edgar know."

When Karl and Sharon were down the steps, she closed the door and waited for Bill to get off the phone from calling the base and asking for a jeep and three MPs to be sent to his apartment.

"Thank you," she said to him.

"They helped save Lee's life. I pay my debts."

Laura nodded. "You should have called me about Picon."

"I didn't want to bother you on a Sunday. Nothing is official yet."

"Tell me what you do know."

"Not even Cylon centurions could withstand the radiation. There's evidence they were trying to clean up Queenstown when the radiation ruined their processors or whatever makes them function. The readings are still off the scale."

"Oh, dear gods."

"Cain conducted a short memorial service this morning. A wreath was dropped from a Raptor. They were leaving for Tauron afterward." Bill glanced at his watch. "They should be there by now."

"When will you have the official report about Picon? Billy has promised the press an announcement as soon as we know. If there has been a leak, I won't be able to delay. I don't want people hearing rumors and innuendos. The truth is bad enough."

"The report will be on my desk in the morning."

"Would you join me for lunch tomorrow? We can discuss it. I'll tell Billy to schedule a press conference for mid-afternoon."

"I'm always at your disposal, Madame President."

She smiled. "I know you're a busy man, but please don't make me feel like my lunch invitation is an imposition."

"Lunch with you is never an imposition." He took another sip of his drink. "What happened at Karl and Sharon's apartment today didn't come as a surprise to me. The only surprise is that it hasn't happened before now. Too many people know what she is."

"You seriously think someone in the military trashed their apartment?"

"Not necessarily. People talk."

"We should have done more to protect her."

"You need to understand that the majority of the Colonials on this planet view her as no different from the ones we're holding in the bunker prison. She represents the evil that killed their families and friends and almost destroyed humanity. She represents a clear and present danger of what's still out there."

"I know what she is and I'm sure there are many humans who view her as the embodiment of evil, but she helped us, Bill. She helped _you_. She aligned herself with us at great peril to herself. She fed Cavil false information for us. You said it yourself. Lee is alive because of her and Karl…and Kara."

"I'm repaying that debt right now."

Laura sighed. "She's young and she's afraid for her unborn child. I saw it in her eyes. When you're pregnant you think about everything you do and about how it will affect the baby. She loves Karl. I could see that, too. They need to be together."

"You can't put her picture on the front of the _Caprica Times_ and say, _This is a good Cylon. Leave her alone. Let her be with her husband._"

"I have no plans to do anything like that," Laura snapped. "I…you're not serious."

He almost smiled. "No, I'm not serious. I just think you should be aware of coming across as too much on their side when you discuss the Cylons with people in the government. Don't let this one incident color your perspective. _She's_ no danger to us, but somewhere beyond our solar system there are others who are. You're the elected representative of the humans. That's where your allegiance should be."

"Are you lecturing me on my _civic responsibility_?" Laura asked incredulously.

He took a long drink from his glass of whiskey. "You don't need me lecturing you on that. I know how you feel about Cavil and crew, and I think you're well aware of how the public is going to react to the news about Picon."

"Do you really think the people of Caprica were expecting _good_ news about Picon after five and a half years?"

"We humans aren't always logical. I think we have an almost unlimited ability to hope even in the face of dismal odds."

Laura thought of John and tears came to her eyes. "Yes, we do." She turned to go. Bill said her name softly.

She turned around.

"I'll see you at lunch tomorrow. Take Sharon to the women's shelter and go back to Marble House and rest. It's Sunday. Spend the time with your son. He won't be a little boy forever."

Laura nodded. She wondered at the irony of Bill telling her to spend time with Braedon. Was it regret for his own past that she had just heard in his voice or was it only fatigue and his impending dread of what was to come when they would fight the Cylons for control of Nereid?

_..._

"This stuff is good," Narcho said and took another swallow of mead.

"It's not all for you," Kara said automatically while she looked at Hunter. It took a few seconds before he realized what Dessa had just said to her. He finally dropped his eyes and looked out over the valley.

"What's to eat?" Narcho asked, totally unaware of the news that Dessa had just whispered.

"You have the basket," Hunter said. "Help yourself or get Dessa to show you the bread and cheese. I'm sure they'll be hard to find."

"No sarcasm," Narcho said. "I can't help it if I'm picnic-basket challenged. I didn't want to start unwrapping everything."

Dessa scrambled up from Kara's side and went to sit beside Narcho. "I'll help."

"Be my guest." He smiled and handed the basket to her.

Hunter stood and brushed off his hands. "I'm going to walk around the trees and check for winter damage."

Kara looked at the rows and rows of apple trees. There were hundreds. "Won't that take a long time?"

Hunter walked off.

"Don't drink all the mead," she said to Narcho. "We aren't going to carry you back to base camp." She caught up with Hunter. "I think I remember you saying you didn't have a wife or a girlfriend."

"I don't."

"But you've got a kid."

"That's none of your business, Wildcat. Just stay out of it."

"Oh, so nothing else has been off-limits for us to talk about and suddenly this is none of my business? I tell you all about my life but you can't talk about yours?"

He didn't answer her.

"So that's why everybody was looking at me funny. I guess they think I'm next. Even your aunt tried to warn…"

He turned suddenly. "My aunt has no business talking to you about me like that. It's none of her business either."

"How old is your kid?"

Reluctantly he said, "Almost three months."

Kara's voice was harsh, her tone accusing. "Have you been to see her yet…since we got back yesterday? Have you seen her?"

"Her grandmother won't let me see her. She lets Dessa visit her any time she wants, but she won't let me in the door. Dessa gets to help feed her and bathe her, but her grandmother won't even let me frakking look at her."

Their eyes met and she saw pain. His jaw was clenched tight. Kara softened her tone. "Her _grandmother_? What about her _mother_? Isn't she the one who should decide something like that?"

"She's dead."

"Childbirth?"

Hunter started walking again. "No, her husband killed her."

They walked along silently for a while until Kara said, "I'm sorry."

"It was my fault. The equinox celebration last spring. Too much mead. One stupid mistake on my part."

"Did you force her?"

"No, but two people are dead because of it."

"_Two_ people?"

"After he killed her, he came after me. He had a knife. Same one he killed her with. We fought. I'm not very good with a knife. I was lucky."

"What would have happened to him if he'd only killed her?"

"He would have been given a choice. A firing squad or the forest…alone and with no weapons. He might have lived a few days longer if he'd made that choice. Instead he came after me. Maybe he wanted me to kill him. He was a dead man any way it went down and he knew it."

"Justice is harsh in base camp."

Hunter stopped walking. He reached up and snapped a small dead branch off an apple tree. "We don't have a jail. We don't have people to spare keeping a jail. We don't have crime in this valley. Everybody is too busy trying to stay alive. Since the _Hyperion_ came to the planet that's only the second time there's ever been a killing. The first one happened years ago, a long time before I was born. My grandfather and the other expedition leaders made the law. We all agree to abide by it…every single person in base camp."

"A firing squad or to send people into the forest?"

"For the crime of murder. We added the forest choice after we made the agreement with the Cylons. My grandfather thought it would be another deterrent."

"So you had too much to drink and had a one-night stand and got this woman pregnant, but she was married to another guy. How did he figure out that Esmari wasn't his?"

"Her mother told him after she was born. Esmari has my dark hair. Or so Dessa says. And her mother wasn't married when she and I… She got married when she found out she was pregnant. I wasn't even here then. I was out in the forest. I heard about it when I got back. I wondered, but…I didn't know if she'd been sleeping with him or not. We never talked about it. Like I said, it was just that one night. A few days afterward I went out again. Emmalyn thinks her mother forced the marriage. After Emmalyn told me about it, I stayed away from her. We never talked again."

Kara snorted. "Would you have married her if you had been here?"

"I'm not good husband material. We've talked about that. My life expectancy isn't too great. He was a better choice for her."

"That _better choice_ killed her! You think that was _better_ for her?"

"I don't want to talk about this anymore. I've told you what happened. Now drop it."

"No, I don't want to _drop it_. You've got a little girl," Kara said, surprised at the emotion in her voice. "Little girls _need_ their fathers. You need to be a _father_ to her."

"Tell that to her grandmother. Because of me she lost her daughter _and_ her son-in-law _and_ she's got the responsibility of raising a grandchild. Now let's get back to Narcho and Dessa."

"What was her name?"

"Juliana."

"Did you love her?"

"I cared about her. I should have been stronger. It's not like I didn't know what to do."

"Why don't you tell her grandmother you want to see your daughter?"

"You think I haven't told her I want to see my child? She said I'd see Esmari over her dead body. What kind of man would I be if I took Targa and Beck with me and had them hold the grandmother so I could hold my daughter?"

"Can't your grandfather and Celia help?"

"My grandfather talked to her. Emmalyn talked to her. Half the frakking camp has talked to her. My grandfather told me to give her some time and let her get over her loss. She's still grieving."

"Three months is long enough to keep your kid away from you. It's not grieving now. It's revenge. My father told me it was his fault my stepmom got pregnant. I think it was during one of the lectures he used to give me about Lee when I was sixteen. I had to set him straight. I'll tell you the same thing. It's never all one or the other. It's _both_. It's not all your fault. Last spring, she wanted it as much as you did, didn't she?"

They walked in silence for a while until Hunter said, "A few years ago I used to read _The Caprican Prince _to her and some of the others during the winter…parts of it anyway. We don't hunt Cylons when there's much snow on the ground. Tracking's too easy…for us and for them."

"Read to her? How old was she?"

"A few years older than you. She'd sit with the younger kids and listen to me read. Now drop this, Wildcat, please."

Kara was beginning to understand how it could have happened. She thought of the first time she had seen Lee. She had thought he was a prince, a blue-eyed prince with wings over his heart. She had grown up a lot since then, but she still understood how a girl could have looked at Hunter and seen a blue-eyed prince. Kara understood why Juliana would have named her daughter Esmari, too. For the first time since she had met him, Kara felt sorry for Hunter. Under his tough, capable exterior there was a lot of guilt and pain. She wanted to tell him that she understood, but he was in his own world now and she let it go.

Together they walked in silence back to where the other two had spread the picnic lunch. Narcho had taken his pocket knife and carved a tiny Viper, or what he said was a Viper, out of a piece of cheese. Dessa began laughing as he tossed it into the air and caught it in his mouth. Kara got the impression he had already done it several times.

"He usually does that with peanuts," Kara said to Dessa. "After he's had a couple of beers and doesn't mind acting like a fool."

Narcho handed her the canteen. "This mead is good stuff."

Kara grinned. "Obviously." She took a drink and held it out to Hunter. He shook his head and got the water canteen. He looked out over the valley.

Hunter was a good man. Kara knew he would be a good father. He needed a chance to be with his daughter while he was in base camp. Kara had not thought she would be able to repay him for saving her life, but maybe she could try.

_..._

John had hoped Doolittle would have heard something about D'Anna by lunch on that second day since Doolittle seemed to hear a lot of things, but he hadn't. After lunch, John decided to make the game with the rubber ball more difficult. He pulled one of the armchairs around so that his back was to the door and he had the greatest distance to one of the walls. The two rules were simple. He had to make his throw accurate enough that he could catch the rebound without moving from the chair. He had to switch his throwing and catching hands each time. At first he got up from the chair to retrieve the ball with almost every throw. An hour later he was rarely missing a catch. In the middle of the afternoon, he heard the door open. He waited. At least he could quit worrying about her now.

"Hello, John." The voice wasn't D'Anna's.

He almost missed his catch. He didn't turn around. "Hello, Sonja. _Goodbye_, Sonja."

He heard the sultry pout in her voice. "Is that any way to greet an old friend?"

He threw the ball and caught it. "We're not _old friends_, Sonja. We're not even _new friends_."

"I brought you something. A thank you gift for getting D'Anna off me."

He didn't turn around. The ball hit the wall accurately. "Leave it by the door. I'll get it later. I'm busy right now."

"I wore something special just for you. Don't you want to see?"

"No, I don't."

She didn't say anything while he threw the ball three more times. He didn't turn around to look at her. He knew better.

"You've been here four months…and two days."

"That's about what I figured."

She waited while he continued to throw and catch the ball. Her voice finally took on an annoyed edge. "You owe me, John."

"What the hell do I _owe_ you, Sonja? I pulled D'Anna off you. I kept her from messing up your beautiful face. Didn't you learn anything from the other day?"

"We don't need to worry about D'Anna. She's still at the lab."

"Why are they keeping her so long?"

"It sounds like you care about her."

"It shouldn't surprise you that I'm concerned about her. I played a part in what happened to her. So did you. So did the Overseer who beat her up. I just want to know she's all right. That's all."

"Four days is a routine visit for her after she's had one of her episodes. She won't be back until day after tomorrow. Do you want to sit here for two more days playing with a child's ball while you wait for her?"

He snorted as he threw the ball. "What choice do I have? I'm your _prisoner. _Remember?"

He heard her take a deep breath. "We'll go for a walk this afternoon."

"No thanks. I'm not fond of shackles or collars and leashes."

"No shackles. No collars and leashes. We're just six blocks from the center of the city. We've rebuilt the square. The big fountain is working again. I think you'll like it."

He upped the ante. "I'm not interested in walking around with centurions dogging me, wondering if I'm going to make a wrong move and they're going to shoot me."

"No centurions either. Just you and me. You'll give me your word not to run and I'll trust you. You might be our prisoner, but I'm sure you still think of yourself as a pilot in the Colonial military. Don't you officers pride yourselves on your word of honor…_Major_ Gallagher?"

She'd called him on it. John hesitated and finally said, "I'll wait for D'Anna to come back and keep my life simple. She said she'd take me for a walk."

He'd asked her, but D'Anna had never agreed.

"I'll take you to the temple tomorrow. We'll make a whole day of it. It's on a hill outside the city. The view is beautiful. You can see the forest and the mountains and the river from there. I'm offering you a sure thing. You've got no guarantee with D'Anna. There's no telling how she'll be when she comes back from the lab. There's no telling what the creators might have done to her brain. They made her forget her religious fanaticism. They might make her forget you. Do you really want to put _that much_ faith in her?"

He threw the ball and missed the catch. She'd won. He wasn't willing to take the chance. He wasn't willing to blow a sure thing. He'd never learn anything about the city by sitting in the apartment. Slowly he stood up and turned around. Sonja was still standing by the door with a bottle of very good whiskey in her hand. She was wearing a black leather miniskirt and black stiletto heels. Her long-sleeve black shirt was pulled together and tied in a knot at her slender waist.

Her expression didn't change, but he could tell from the triumphant look in her eyes that she knew she had won.

He walked over to her, ignoring the way his conscience was screaming at him. The desire to get outside and recon the city was overriding every other feeling at the moment. He would deal with the guilt later.

He took the bottle of whiskey from her hand and put it on the floor. He put his hands flat on the wall on either side of her head and leaned in until his mouth was at her ear.

"What guarantee do I have that you'll do what you just said you'd do?"

She slid her hands under his t-shirt and up across his chest. "You have my word," she purred in that sultry tone.

He tried to ignore the sensation of her hands on his skin and the faint spice scent of her neck. "The word of a Cylon."

"_My_ word, John. _My_ promise." Her hands slid down and under the waistband of his sweatpants. He heard the slight catch in her breath. It matched his own. She was good, not rough yet not delicate either. But it was no surprise to him that she knew what she was doing. She'd no doubt had a lot of experience.

He lowered his mouth to her neck. "Are you a screamer, Sonja? Because if you are, I don't want your centurions coming through that door and shooting me because they think I'm hurting you."

"You really think you could get that kind of response from me?" She smiled.

"You wouldn't be here if you didn't think I could get that kind of response from you. You'd be with one of the other guys you don't have to give the drug to, like the one you were with the night D'Anna went looking for you." He put his mouth against her neck again, lingering over the kiss.

He heard another catch in her breath. "I can promise you that…no centurions will come through that door…no matter how much noise we make."

He drew back and looked at her eyes. "So where do you want to do it? On camera in the living room or in the bedroom or right here against the wall?"

She smiled but didn't move. "I turned off the surveillance of this apartment. It will look like a malfunction in the monitoring equipment if D'Anna should think to look."

"And if I tell her and she sends me back to the prison like she threatened to do last time, will you come get me?"

"Why would you tell her?"

"Because she deserves to know. Because I'm not going to get caught between the two of you again. Take your pick. They're both right answers. So…we either stop now or you promise to come get me."

"I'll come get you. Take off your clothes. I want to see you as well as feel you."

He kissed her ear lobe. "What did I tell you about the magic word?"

"P_lease_ take off your clothes."

He stepped back and pulled the t-shirt over his head and dropped it on the floor before he pushed the sweatpants down and stepped out of them. "You don't mind the scars?"

"It's not your scars that interest me. Do you want me to take off my clothes?"

He slipped his hands under the short skirt. As he'd suspected, she was wearing nothing underneath. "No, you're fine. Just lose the shoes."

"Why?"

"You'll see."

She stepped out of the stiletto heels and was instantly five inches shorter. He liked that. It was purely psychological and he knew it, but he liked being that much taller than she was. He unbuttoned her shirt down to where it was tied in the knot. She was wearing nothing under it, either. He cupped one perfect breast, catching the hard nipple between his fingers and squeezing.

"So, we do it right here?"

"Yes," she said breathlessly. "Yes, right here. I want to do something new."

"You mean none of those men you don't have to drug has ever frakked you against a wall, Sonja?"

"No."

He slid the skirt up around her hips. "You wouldn't lie to me, would you?"

"No, John, I wouldn't lie to you."

"Well, they get an _zero_ for imagination. Or maybe you just intimidate the hell out of them."

She smiled. "But I don't intimidate you. That's why I like you."

He snorted. "Now I know you're lying to me."

"Show me how you do this…please."

He kissed her and slipped his hand under her skirt, finding her wet and ready like the last time. But to do this right they had to both be very ready. He caressed her, moving with the rhythm of her body, and taking as much of her hands on him as he could. He was almost to the point of telling her to stop when she whimpered. He knew what that little shuddering whimper meant.

"Put your arms around my neck, Sonja. Tight."

She complied. He lifted her just enough that he entered her in one swift, hard motion, pushing her back against the wall and holding himself still inside her for a few moments. Her gasp and soft moan told him she was as ready as he was. She understood exactly what they were going to do now. Exactly. She wrapped her long legs around him. When the moment came for her, she didn't cry out. She barely made a sound. Maybe it was her pride. Instead she put her mouth against his shoulder and bit him, not hard enough to break his skin, but hard enough that he felt it. He didn't know if it was punishment or tribute, but it snapped the last remnant of his control.

For a few moments there was nothing but pure sensation for him and then he became aware of their ragged breathing and pounding hearts, her arms still around him, their bodies still joined, the pleasure beginning to taper. He braced one hand against the wall and held her tightly with his other arm, enjoying her vulnerability until her legs finally slid down the outside of his and her feet were once again on the floor. Her arms relaxed. She pulled his head down and kissed him lightly on the mouth.

"You forgot to say _please_," she whispered.

He didn't kiss her back. "I've got to take a shower and get dressed. Come back in thirty minutes…_please_…in something a little less…provocative. And you might want to wear some comfortable shoes."

"Why don't you come to my place when you're ready? I'm one floor down. Apartment 11-A."

"I'm sure those centurions are going to let me leave this apartment and get on the elevator."

"There are no centurions outside your door anymore. That was D'Anna's idea. It's overkill. There's no way you would be allowed to leave this building without one of us, so guarding your door is ridiculous. You've basically got free run of the building now…except the ground floor. You shouldn't try to go there without me or D'Anna. It might prove very unpleasant for you."

"The elevator operates with a retinal scanner so how am I going to get on it?"

"The retinal scanner is all for show just like the one on your door. It's not necessary. Just press the down button and then the one for eleven."

She pulled the hem of the skirt down over her hips, straightened it and then buttoned her shirt. She put her hand on his shoulder for balance as she stepped into the heels. They were eye to eye once again.

"We'll stop downstairs and pick up some refreshments. I know a nice little place to eat dinner, but they're not open for business yet. We'll improvise."

He bent over and picked up his clothes from the floor with one hand and the bottle of whiskey with the other.

She walked to the door and opened it. The centurions were gone.

"Thank you…for the whiskey," he said.

She turned and gave him another of her seductive smiles. "Thank you…for teaching me something new. I'm sure my _younger_ lovers can do a lot _more_ with it."

The door closed. He didn't want to admit how much her last barb had stung, but she might be screwing with his head. He didn't see how a younger guy could have done what he had just done any better, but that was probably his damned pride talking. He took the bottle of whiskey into the kitchen. As he put it on the counter, he looked at his wedding ring. _Quid pro quo_ as Romo Lampkin would say. A favor for a favor. He'd traded sex for a chance to get outside and get an honest assessment of his chance for escape. He'd paid Sonja with the only thing he had that she wanted…his body. A trade. That's all it meant to him. Nothing more. If he ever made it back to Caprica, he would tell Laura what he had done and why. She would either forgive him or she wouldn't. Not knowing would probably haunt him later. Right now he had a Cylon city to recon.

_..._

Kara got up earlier on her second morning in base camp than she had on her first. Emmalyn had just brought a taper from the fire and lit the small oil lamp. She had on a long-sleeved full-length gown. Kara stood in her tank top and underwear and wrapped her arms around herself for warmth and shivered.

"Up early today, are you?" Emmalyn said.

"I need to wash my jeans and sweatshirt later this morning."

"Aye, so you'll need something to wear."

Kara thought about the way Narcho had teased her. There was no avoiding it. "I don't want to put my flight suit back on. I didn't bring anything else."

Emmalyn took several folded garments from the shelves built along one wall of the sleeping area.

"These are Dessa's, but you're slim like she is. They'll fit you. The lighter-colored skirt is a petticoat. Put it on first. The other one goes on top of it. We've nothing so fancy as those black lace knickers of yours, but there's a pair in that stack with a draw-string."

"Thank you," Kara said. "I'll help you fix breakfast for the men."

Before Emmalyn turned her back and pulled the gown over her head, Kara saw her smile.

She wished she had a full-length mirror to see how she looked but not from vanity. She had never thought she would ever be wearing a long skirt with a petticoat underneath and a blouse that buttoned at the sleeves and tied at the neck.

When she walked into the big room, Emmalyn turned and appraised her. She smiled again. "We need fresh eggs for breakfast. Dessa, take Kara with you."

A minute later Kara and Dessa were walking down the stone path. The sun was barely showing over the mountains. Kara shivered. Early spring in base camp meant very cool mornings and cool evenings. Dessa pointed the way between two mounds that had wisps of smoke coming from tubular metal chimneys. They came to a large wire enclosure and another mound with a wooden door. Dessa lifted the latch on the wire gate and went in.

"So this is where you keep the chickens?"

Dessa nodded. "These are roosters. The hens are inside. You better wait out here. They don't know you. I help feed them. They know me."

When Dessa came back out a few minutes later, she had a dozen eggs in the basket she carried.

"So where does Esmari live?" Kara asked casually.

"I'll show you."

They walked back out onto the stone path. Dessa stopped and pointed down a smaller path. "Down there where the blue chair is sitting outside."

Emmalyn was waiting on them. "I was about to send out a search party."

"It's my fault," Kara said. "I asked Dessa to show me where Esmari and her grandmother live."

The surprise on Emmalyn's face was clear. "Hunter told you?"

"After Dessa let the cat out of the bag."

Dessa frowned. "I didn't let a cat out of a bag."

Emmalyn took the basket of eggs. "Kara was making a joke. Brush and re-braid her hair. Then she can do yours."

Dessa brushed Kara's hair with gentler strokes than Emmalyn had used the day before, but her fingers were just as nimble and she redid Kara's braid in less than a minute. It took Kara longer to do Dessa's, but she decided it was good for her first effort.

"You can go get Hunter and your uncles," Emmalyn said to her. "Kara will help me."

As soon as Dessa was gone, Emmalyn said, "You should stay out of it. Hunter won't appreciate your meddling."

"Keeping his daughter away from him is wrong. I'm going to visit her after breakfast."

"I'm not saying that I agree with how Seléne has chosen to handle things, but it's her right. We follow the laws of Gemenon where family matters are concerned. Hunter wasn't married to the mother. As wrong as it might seem, he has no claim to the child."

"It doesn't _seem_ wrong. It _is_ wrong," Kara said. "He should at least be allowed to see her. Little girls need their fathers."

"I've talked to Seléne. Hunter's grandfather has talked to her. She's pulled deep inside her grief and her anger right now. Perry said we should leave her be for a while. There's those of us who help her out with food. Dessa helps with the baby. We're doing all she'll let us do."

"What about her husband?"

"Dead, the same time my husband was killed. We lost eight men that day and thirteen wounded. That was a bad day for us. Seléne was a bitter woman even before she lost her daughter. You'll get nowhere with her."

"I've got to try," Kara said.

Emmalyn gave a short sigh. "I should have known a girl who would cross the stars to look for her own father wouldn't let something like this go. Just don't be disappointed when she sends you packing."

Dessa returned and the men filed in after her. Kara waited for Narcho to notice her outfit. "Not one word or you're a dead man."

He grinned. "How much is this going to be worth when we're having a few beers one day at Zeno's?"

Kara laughed. "By the time we get out of jail, we'll be so old I won't care." She saw Narcho glance at Targa and Beck. "What?"

"I'm not going back with you," he said. "I'm staying here to fight the Cylons."

Kara sat down at the table across from him. "What?"

"I joined the military to kill Cylons. I haven't done much of that, yet. One night. That's all we had to go against them. These guys can use my help. Besides, there's only room for two in that Raider. That'll be you and your dad."

"I've already thought about that. I can make two trips. I jump into the atmosphere right over the boneyard and land and let him out. By the time Vipers are scrambled, I'll be away again. I'll come back for you. I can land right here in the valley and pick you up. It'll work."

"Listen to what I'm saying, Kara. I _want_ to stay."

She looked at Hunter and then Targa and Beck. "Did you talk him into this?"

Narcho's voice got firmer. "_I'm_ the one who talked _them_ into it."

"You could get yourself killed here before we…in the next couple of months."

"What's waiting for me back on Caprica? You just said it. Prison. My military career is over. I'd rather stay here if it means I get to kill a few more Cylons."

Emmalyn sat down at the table. "It's time to eat. Put your fussing aside for the meal. Now bow your heads for the blessing."

As Kara listened to Emmalyn's words of thanks, her mind was racing. Nothing was turning out the way she had planned. Nothing. She ate her meal in silence while the men talked. In just four days Hunter and his uncles had accepted Narcho in a way they would never accept her. She didn't belong in this world. She didn't belong in a long skirt and a petticoat and draw-string knickers. She didn't belong in a world where all women did was cook and clean and wait for their men to come back from fighting. She belonged on Caprica or on a battlestar with the other Viper pilots. She belonged with Lee...if he would still have her.

When the meal was over and Targa and Beck left, Noel took her arm and walked outside with her. They looked at each other for a long time.

"Tell me you understand," he finally said.

"I understand that right now this is all new and exciting. I don't think you've thought it through."

"It's better than prison."

"Admiral Adama will be coming here with his battlestars in six months or less. We're going to need you in a Viper when he does."

"Don't you understand that neither one of us will be in a Viper. We'll both be in the brig. We stole a frakking ship. We're both UA right now."

"You might get killed here."

"I'm willing to take that chance."

"Then I don't guess there's anything left to say, is there?"

"Don't be like that, Kara. Ever since I got here, I feel like this is where I'm supposed to stay. These people are fighting for their survival."

"I know."

"I'll see you later. Beck's going to let me practice with his crossbow this morning."

When she turned, Hunter was standing in the doorway. "It really was his idea. I'm not crazy about taking your copilot, but we need every good fighter we can get. He's motivated."

"His father and his sister were killed five years ago during the bombing. His mother died a year later. He blames the Cylons for that, too. He said she never got over what happened to his sister. She was a priest. The Cylons bombed her temple. The Oracle I told you about…that's how she got blinded. She was a priest there, too."

"I could tell something was eating at him."

"So where are you off to?"

"I'm going to help with the planting today. We'll go fishing late this afternoon, maybe catch dinner. You can ask Narcho…or not. Dessa is going to visit Daniel later this morning. I know you'll want to go with her."

"Maybe I'll just wander around since I look like a valley woman now."

He grinned. "Valley women don't wander around. They're always busy doing something."

He walked away up the stone path. Kara began unbuttoning the cuffs of her blouse so she could roll up her sleeves and help Emmalyn wash the breakfast dishes. Emmalyn had beaten her to it. She pointed to a basket on the table.

"Something for Esmari's grandmother...some flour and a jar of honey. I would send Dessa, but it seems she decided to wash your jeans and sweatshirt for you. Maybe you could deliver the basket instead."

Their eyes met briefly. Kara nodded.

"He loved her, you know," Emmalyn said. "He would never admit it, but I helped bring him into this world. I watched him grow up. He loved her. He was just too stubborn to admit it. He said he didn't want her left to the charity of others if something happened to him."

"She loved him, too?"

"Oh, yes. She loved him. He's the only one she ever loved."

"That's all the more reason he should be able to see his daughter."

"Then take the basket...and tell Seléne how far you've come to find your own father. Tell her how much you love him and how much he loves you."

Kara picked up the basket. "I am going to find him," she said stubbornly.

Emmalyn turned back to the sink but not before Kara saw her eyes fill with tears. "I'm sure you will, child. I'm sure you will."

TBC...


	14. Cylon City

Chapter 14

Cylon City

_Penelope, wife of Odysseus and queen of Ithaca, mother of their son, Telemachus,__  
__Kissed her husband and saw him off to fight with Achilles in the Trojan War.  
__The conflict raged for years as Penelope waited patiently and faithfully for her love._

_At the war's end the ship bearing Odysseus and his men homeward was blown__  
__Far off course and was feared lost. The days turned into weeks and the weeks__  
__Became months and Penelope mourned. Her beauty and her position as queen caused__  
__Many men to look upon her with favor and covet a place by her side as her husband,__  
__But Penelope remained true to Odysseus. Her courtiers grumbled and told her that__  
__She must choose among them. Penelope devised a plan. She had a loom brought__  
__And set up in her chamber and told her suitors that when she had finished__  
__Weaving a tapestry that chronicled her husband's brave battles in the war,__  
__She would choose one of them as her new husband and king of Ithaca. _

_Every day they watched as she wove and every night in secret she unraveled__  
__Half the work she had done that day. Thus she delayed until Odysseus returned and__  
__Took his place by Penelope's side as husband of his good and faithful wife. _

- Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

_._

When Kara arrived at Seléne's dwelling, the first thing she saw was a small shaggy goat tethered by a long rope to a stake. The animal was grazing placidly on grass. She warily walked around it, but the goat paid her no attention. The door to the dwelling was open and the early morning sun shone across the clean wooden floor. The inside was about the same size as Emmalyn's, but there much of the similarity ended. Instead of the long rectangular table there was a small round table that had five mismatched chairs pulled close to it. There were no bookcases or padded chairs. A cot was pushed against the wall beside the fireplace. Near the cot sat a wooden cradle and a rocking chair. Seléne was sitting in the chair holding Esmari.

Kara stopped and knocked softly on the door. Seléne looked up and beckoned her inside.

Only when Kara was nearer did her expression change. "I thought you were Dessa with the light behind you like that. Who might you be?"

"My name is Kara. Emmalyn sent you some flour and honey." She held up the basket.

"I should have known. You're the outsider that _he_ brought here."

There was an awkward silence. Kara finally said. "That's me."

"Do you know how to hold a babe this young?"

"I have a little brother. I started holding him the day he was born."

Seléne stood, handed the child to her and disappeared through the door toward the back of the dwelling without another word. Kara heard the bathroom door close.

She looked at the sleeping child. The first thing that struck her was how small Esmari seemed, yet she looked healthy. Her cheeks were rosy pink. She had on a little knitted cap but Kara could see a thin covering of black hair underneath. She looked for a resemblance to Hunter, but Esmari looked like a baby to her. She tried to remember when Brae had started to look so much like her father. Probably when he was closer to a year old.

Seléne walked back into the room. "Do you mind holding her while I get something to eat? She's been fussy the last few days. Sit in the rocking chair if you like."

Kara sat. In a few minutes Seléne brought a cup of tea and a piece of bread smeared with honey and sat in a straight chair by the fire. Kara rocked while she and Esmari's grandmother studied each other. She was dressed like most of the other women in the camp, but instead of the long braid that seemed to be favored by many of the others, Seléne wore her gray hair tucked up beneath a cap that was tied under her chin. She was probably about Emmalyn's age, but she looked older, her face careworn, dark circles under her eyes. She was shorter than Emmalyn and thinner. Her face looked almost gaunt. Her expression was sad.

"Tell Emmalyn I thank her for the flour and honey."

"That's not the only reason I came here today."

"My daughter wasn't good enough for him…him being a leader. I guess you being an outsider who can fly a Cylon ship will be good enough for him. And you're a pretty blond like my Juliana was."

"Okay, let's get a couple of things straight from the beginning. Hunter loved your daughter. And it's not like that with me and him. I wear somebody's ring. His name is Lee and I'm going back to him. I came to see you this morning because Hunter saved my life. I'm trying to repay the favor."

"By telling me what a good man he is and how wrong I am to keep his child from him?"

"I don't need to tell you that. You already know it. It's because of Hunter and his uncles and the men like them that you aren't some Cylon's slave right now."

"I don't need you to tell me what our men do," Seléne said but her voice held more fatigue than anger. "My husband was one of them."

"Then why won't you let Hunter see his daughter?"

"Because he used my sweet girl for his own pleasure and then left her for another to take care of."

"That's not true and I think you know it."

"You're an outsider. You know nothing of life here."

Kara knew she wouldn't gain anything by snapping back at Seléne like she wanted to. She took a deep breath.

"Some things are the same no matter where you are. Do you know why I came to this planet?"

"I hear your father is a Cylon prisoner. You think you're going to rescue him."

"Do you know what I did to get here?"

"I know you came here in a Cylon ship."

"I stole that ship. I'm going to jail when I get back, but it will be worth it if I find my father and take him home. He was willing to give his life for me, for all of us back on Caprica. That's why he's here now. Hunter's willing to do the same thing for all of you."

"Some of our men have already given their lives."

At the sound of her grandmother's raised voice, Esmari stirred and Kara began rocking her once more. The little rosebud mouth made sucking motions in her sleep.

"My mother was a…soldier…like Hunter," Kara said softly looking at the sleeping child. "She died fighting the Cylons on Picon when I was thirteen. She and my father weren't married. She kept him away from me. I didn't even know he _was_ my father until the night he got me off the planet and saved my life."

Kara looked up from the baby. The unspoken question was in Seléne's eyes.

"I don't know why," Kara said. "I never got the chance to ask her. He won't tell me because he won't say anything bad about her. I'm not even sure he knows. He's a good father. He's gentle and he's kind and…I wish my mother hadn't kept me and him apart." Kara felt tears threatening. She stopped talking for a moment. "I wish…" She had to stop again. She took several deep breaths. "I just know that I love him and he loves me. I wouldn't trade the few years we had together for anything. I'm going to find him and get him back from the Cylons. I'm going to take him home to my little brother so he won't have to grow up without his father."

"You'll as soon bring the moon down from the sky as you will take him from their prison."

"He might not be in their prison. He might be in the city."

"You'll not take him from there, either. You'd best forget this crazy plan of yours and get back to Caprica and the man you're pledged to. Start your own family and forget about this place. There's nothing can be done for your father or for us either."

Kara shook her head and said, "No. I don't believe that, and I won't go back without him."

"If you involve Hunter and our men in it, you'll get them and yourself killed and then where will we be? I don't care for myself, but I don't want this babe to grow up a Cylon slave if they let her grow up at all."

"Hunter loved your daughter. He thought he was doing the right thing by letting her marry someone else. He regrets it now. Give him a chance. Please."

"He had no right…he knew how she felt about him…he took advantage…"

"No, you can't put all the blame on him. When my dad found out about what Lee and I had done, I know he wanted to blame Lee. I told him it was was as much my fault as it was Lee's. Juliana told you the same thing, didn't she?"

Seléne finally said, "She didn't have to say it. I knew it. She loved him. I'm the one who talked her into marrying the other one. I didn't want her to live a hard life raising a child by herself. You've no idea what it's like being a woman alone here, all your kinfolk dead, struggling to survive, depending on the charity of others and what little you can eke out of a garden."

"Then let Hunter be a father to his little girl. Let him help. He wants to just like my dad wanted to be a father to me. Give Hunter a chance to love Esmari the same way my dad loves me." Tears came suddenly to Kara's eyes and spilled over. She wiped them away. "Give him a chance. Please. Don't be so proud. Esmari will _never forgive you_ if she doesn't get to know her father."

They sat in silence for a long time. The only sound was the rocking of the chair on the wooden floor.

Finally Seléne said, "I'll think on what you've said. You can put her in her cradle. She'll sleep now. I've got diapers to wash and peg out on the line so they'll be dry before nightfall."

Kara knelt and gently placed the sleeping child on the small mattress in the cradle. She pulled the blanket up to her waist. "I can stay and help."

Seléne huffed as she stood. "Don't tell me you've washed diapers before."

"No, but I don't think washing diapers is exactly rocket science. I can manage."

"It's not the most pleasant task in the world. I rinsed them already but they need a good scrubbing with soap."

Kara rolled up her sleeves. Hunter had saved her life. If this helped her repay that debt, she would do it. A few minutes later she was standing at the sink. It wasn't washing diapers that she was thinking about. It was how glad she was that none of the other pilots were here to see her do it. She could live down a lot of things, but a Viper Top Gun washing diapers in a bucket of soapy water was probably not one of them. She tried to imagine the grief that Louanne Katraine would give her. It was not a pleasant thought.

_..._

"Bad news," Kendra said as she sat down in the booth across from Lee. "I just got off a comm link with a government clerk in Quanniq."

He looked at her blankly for a moment.

"The capital of the northern provinces on Tauron."

"Oh, right. Will they have the voter registration lists ready for us?"

"The Cylons used conventional bombs on the city. The two government buildings and their computers were destroyed five years ago. The government is being run from an old warehouse right now. Their rep to the Quorum of Twelve, aka Tom Zarek, is supposed to be getting them new computers and help in rebuilding the parts of Quanniq that were bombed, but he hasn't come through with anything yet."

Lee snorted. "Why doesn't that surprise me? He's too busy promoting his own agenda which seems to be getting himself elected to a higher office than the Quorum. So what does it mean for us that the government has no computers?"

"The clerk said we'd have to visit each of the provinces to get the original printed lists. We need to take a laptop and a portable scanner. The clerk gave me the names of the towns. There're five of them."

"Oh, great," Lee said. "That's really how I want to spend the next couple of days. Visiting the cold northern provinces of Tauron one by one."

"You know that Tauron was one of the poorest Colonies of the twelve until tylium was discovered under the tundra."

Lee grinned. "I took Colonial History at the Academy just like you did."

"Then you know about the ongoing conflict with some of the native Taurons and the tylium mining companies? You know the natives objected to being run off land they had occupied for a thousand years?"

"They were well compensated."

Kendra sighed. "Money doesn't always make up for losing your ancestral home. Their land was considered worthless until the tylium was discovered."

Lee snorted. "You and Kara should get together. I seem to remember having a similar conversation with her about what happened on Tauron. Her mother's Marine unit was sent there when Kara was a little girl. Her mother got wounded while they were subduing one of the uprisings."

"I don't know why I expected you to see it from the side of the _little guy_."

"I'm looking at it from the side of who legally owned the land. The tylium companies bought it. The home owners were compensated. They had no right to come back and engage in acts of sabotage after they'd sold out."

"What about all the land that nobody owned outright? The land that the natives had hunted on and preserved for years? The land that the _government_ of Tauron leased to the mining consortiums? What about their private security forces running the natives away from their ancestral burial grounds at gunpoint?"

Lee took a deep breath. "Look, Kendra, we could argue about this for hours. Both sides made mistakes. Both sides paid the price in blood. Laura Roslin's parents and her brother were killed by a suicide bomber while her father was on Tauron trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement between the natives and the mining consortiums. That's why the Marines were sent in."

"Then you should understand that we might not be welcome in these towns and settlements we're going to have to visit."

"We won't be there long enough to stir up any trouble. Now let's move on…please."

Kendra shrugged. "You're right. Time to move on. I pulled up some maps from an archive I found in the _Penelope's_ main computer. None of the provinces have spaceports. Two towns show small airfields. Two don't, but there had to be a way to get supplies to them so there should be airstrips nearby. The most northerly town has a facility for the tylium barge shuttles. I hope they don't object to us landing there."

"Commander Cain will have to clear it for us since we'll be in a military ship. We'll need some kind of transportation once we land. What kind of distances are we talking about…from the airfields to the towns?"

Kendra leafed through the stack of paper and pulled out several pages. She studied them. "At least five miles for the two listed airfields. It's hard to tell on these maps."

"That's too far to walk. I might have to find a vacant lot and set the Raptor down in town."

She placed the map of Tauron's northern provinces in front of him. She had drawn red circles around each town they would need to visit. They were spread out roughly in the shape of an inverted _V_ and looked like they were anywhere from a hundred to three hundred miles apart. The base town for the tylium mines was at the top of the _V_. It would be the coldest and the most remote.

Lee studied the map. "I say we start with the western-most town and work our way east unless you've got a better idea."

"That sounds like as good a plan as any. What have you been working on this morning?"

Lee minimized the document. He didn't want Kendra seeing the letter to Kara he was still writing.

"Just something I brought with me."

"I talked to Captain Pontos. He said Commander Cain wouldn't have the drone reports ready until tomorrow morning so we can't leave for the surface until after we get them back to Dr. Nylund. She's not in a big rush. Since we couldn't spend any time on Picon, they're going to give the scientists six days on Tauron instead of four."

Lee smiled. "You've been busy. Did you talk to Dr. Nylund, too?"

"I had to leave something for you to do."

"Kendra, I don't expect you to do everything. We'll go talk to Dr. Nylund right now…together…or I can do it by myself if you'd like to kick back and have another cup of coffee."

She smiled. "We'll do it together. Then you can get back to that letter you're writing to Kara."

Lee shut the laptop and stood. He was embarrassed, not because he was writing the letter but because he was slacking off, not doing the job he'd been sent to do. As they left the dining hall to look for Dr. Nylund, he vowed to do better.

"It's okay, Lee," Kendra said. "I didn't want this assignment, either."

"That's no excuse for letting you do all the work."

"When we go down to the planet, you'll be flying the ship. I'll just be along for the ride. It'll even out. We each have our skills. I happen to be good at digging up information from a computer. You're a good pilot. You'll get us down to the planet and back safely. We'll get those voter registration lists for the Attorney General and transmit them like Commander Cain has asked us to do. Just think about all the things you'll have to tell Kara."

"We're going to need flight suits and helmets. I didn't know we were going to need them or I would have brought mine. There are always extra ones on board. They might not fit perfectly, but I won't risk going down through the atmosphere without them."

"We'll need some heavy jackets, too. I looked up the average temperatures in the north of Tauron for this time of year. They range from a balmy twenty degrees above zero to a chilly twenty below. And that's during the day…without any wind chill factored in. Nights get colder."

"I plan for us to be long gone from the planet before nightfall. If we don't make it to all the towns, we'll make another trip."

"So," Kendra said, "you think we should go over to the _Galactica_ this afternoon to get those flight suits? If we spend the night over there you can talk to your pilot friends, maybe play a few hands of triad. I'd rather do that than get stuck talking to Dr. Baltar again. We can get the drone reports early tomorrow morning and get them back to Dr. Nylund so he can decide where to go first. Then we can head for the surface and get those lists."

"Sounds like a plan."

Kendra smiled. Lee knew better than to mention the name that had just crossed his mind. But he did wonder if the lack of an email from Gordon had increased Kendra's eagerness to get back to the _Galactica _and spend time with a certain Raptor pilot.

_..._

Sonja had told the truth about the elevator. Even without the retinal scanner, both the down button and the one for the eleventh floor worked fine. John got off and walked down the hall. Apartment 11-A was on the opposite end from his apartment. He knocked on the door.

He heard a faint, "Come in."

The door was unlocked. Sonja stood in the living room wearing black slacks, low-heeled black boots and the black turtleneck. Her apartment was twice the size of his although the furniture and rugs were similar. What immediately caught his eye, though, was a tall bookcase filled with books.

"What do you think?" She asked.

"Nice."

She followed his gaze which was on the bookcase instead of her. He walked closer to read some of the titles. There were Colonial history books and both classic and modern novels. He even saw some of his favorite science fiction authors.

"I was asking if my outfit meets with your approval."

He glanced at her and then back at the bookcase. "You're fine."

"You like books?"

"I like to read. I asked for some books as well as a bottle of booze."

She smiled. "One thing at a time. Would you like to look at the view from _my_ balcony?"

He walked over to the sliding door. The balcony wrapped around the end of the building. There were no electrified bars caging it. Instead of a crumbling ruin, the view was of a nice park across the street. At eleven floors up he was looking down at the tops of many of the trees that bore the unfurling light green leaves of early spring. On the other side of the park there was block after block of razed buildings. Beyond that were miles of what looked like newly plowed and planted fields. In the far distance he saw the forest and then mountains that stretched from the west to the north. The northern peaks were snow-capped. He tried to calculate the distance. The edge of the forest was at least twenty miles away, twenty miles of open fields and razed buildings with nowhere to hide. The mountains were probably seventy-five to a hundred miles distant, maybe farther.

Sonja walked up beside him and pointed. "The temple is south of the city on that hill. We'll go there tomorrow. It's much too far to walk. I've arranged transportation for us."

He followed the direction she indicated and saw the ruins. From this distance everything looked very much like the sketches in Irina Hoshi's journal. The Cylons obviously hadn't tried to restore the temple yet. Sonja seemed to read his mind.

"We're building a new temple in the city on the site of what was probably a sports arena. We plan to preserve the ancient temple and study it. Would you like to visit the park across the street? It's been cleaned up and restored."

"Sure. Let's go."

They rode the elevator to the ground floor. Instead of walking through the lobby and out the front door, Sonja turned right and walked down a hallway. John followed her. The hallway ended in the kitchen where eight humans were cleaning and preparing vegetables for cooking. They glanced up, but didn't stop working.

"Is our picnic dinner ready, Mr. Doolittle?" Sonja asked.

"Yes, ma'am." He handed her a soft woven bag.

Sonja slung it over her shoulder. "Are you ready, John?"

He glanced at Doolittle's expressionless face and nodded before he followed Sonja back up the hall. Doolittle was probably thinking about two blonds, a fight and history repeating itself. He and Sonja exited the building. The centurions on either side of the door let them pass. They turned toward the park.

"We've done a lot with the city," Sonja finally said.

"You'd never know it from my balcony."

"We'll get there eventually."

"What are you going to do with the city when you finish rebuilding it?"

"Live in it, of course."

"With your human captives? Are you going to have a hundred fancy breeding facilities like the building we live in?"

"All of the humans who live in the city aren't captives. You'll see."

"I hear you have some women living here with their children. You're studying them to see how to be good parents…that is when you figure out how to have babies. But you've only got half of it right. You need those babies' fathers to have families."

Sonja smiled. "Their fathers are with them. These families are the beginning of new life in a city that hasn't heard the laughter of children for a thousand years."

They reached the end of the block and crossed the deserted street. Two centurions making rounds were walking down the sidewalk. Another centurion was standing at the entrance to the park. They walked past it.

"So how does it know who to let past and who to shoot?"

"One of us comes here with each human the first time. If the human is to be allowed access on her own, the centurions are told. Their memories are very good." She smiled. "They haven't shot anyone by mistake yet."

"I notice you didn't mention _me_ to your centurion."

"You haven't gained my trust. I know your motive for…giving in to me at your apartment. I know you didn't want to do it. I felt your anger and yet your pride in your considerable sexual skills wouldn't let you leave me unsatisfied. Pride is a sin, John. God rewards the humble."

He snorted. "I don't remember you lecturing me about pride while I was satisfying you."

"The point is that you're really very transparent. I know you better than you think, and I know what you want."

"What do I want, Sonja?"

"To escape, of course, and you think this is the first step."

"You're wrong. What I _really want_ is to go back to Caprica to my wife and children and put this nightmare behind me."

"Even if you manage to get out of the building, there's nowhere for you to go. You'd be hunted down and killed. I hope you won't be that foolish."

He didn't answer her. They walked down a newly-laid brick path to where four paths converged. A white marble fountain about eight feet tall and fifteen feet in diameter was at the apex of the paths. Water bubbled from the mouth of a brass fish at the top and dripped over the sides of three increasingly-larger bowls into the bottom basin. Several birds were perched on the edge of the top bowl and flew away as he and Sonja approached. Sonja indicated a bench facing the fountain. They sat.

"This was a city of water," she said. "It's filled with fountains. We're slowly restoring them, working our way outward from the center."

"What do you call the city? You must have named it."

"The creators call it Cylon City…but I like its old name of Azurra better. The Thirteenth Tribe named it for a book in our scriptures. Azurra was a great prophet of God. She foretold the exodus of all the tribes from Kobol and the downfall of the twelve who worshipped false idols. Our race is the instrument of God. We have fulfilled His plan as was spoken by His prophet."

"We aren't completely downfallen yet."

"There is only one true God, John, one Divine Being. The many gods that you worship are false idols."

He didn't respond. He knew better than to start arguing religion with her. Instead he realized that he'd traded a piece of his integrity for a chance to get outside and find out what he already knew. Escape was impossible, at least on foot.

"Did you hear me?"

"I heard you."

"You don't have a comment?"

"No comment."

"What are you thinking about?"

"Something personal that I don't want to share with you."

They sat in silence listening to the birds singing while he began to consider other possibilities of getting away. A vehicle might allow him a better chance. He would see what kind of transportation she had arranged to go to the temple. That would give him a better idea of what was available.

Finally she asked. "How long have you been a pilot?"

He took a deep breath. "Since I was eighteen years old."

"You're a Viper pilot?"

"_Was _a Viper pilot. During the First War. That's what I told you during my many interrogations."

"I wasn't at any of your interrogations."

"Didn't you look at the tapes? I told every one of you the same damned thing about a hundred times each."

"Looking at someone tied to a chair and being drugged and beaten and tortured disturbs me. I told you that I don't agree with what they do at the prison. What they did to you is despicable."

"Then why are you asking me the same things they did?"

"I'm trying to understand what happened to you. You're different from the rest of our guests. I _need_ to understand why you're here on this planet. It's _very_ important to me."

"I'll tell you what I told them. I don't know what happened or exactly how I got here. It was some kind of accident. I can promise you I'm not here because I want to be."

"I know. You want to be on Caprica with your wife and your little boy."

He didn't bother commenting.

"Did you know that your Raptor was taken apart just like your flight suit?"

"I'd have been surprised if you hadn't. You Cylons are very thorough."

"We have several Raptors that we captured during the fighting five and a half years ago. Your Raptor was compared to them. It has an interesting addition. Two of them, in fact."

"I don't design or build the ships, Sonja. I just fly them."

"Both are devices that we think were created for the sole purpose of controlling another ship. What are those devices and why were they on your ship?"

At some point during his interrogation sessions, they had begun asking him about the devices. He had always maintained that he hadn't been aware of them. He stuck to his story.

"I don't know anything about those devices. For all I know you planted them there."

"Why don't I believe you?"

"I don't know. Why don't you?"

"Because you're lying and we both know it. Your Raptor was also transmitting a Cylon homing beacon. Why would it have been doing that?"

"It wasn't transmitting anything because all the ship's electrical systems were fried by whatever happened to it."

Before she could ask him anything else, they heard voices that drew steadily nearer to them. Two women pushing strollers came into view on one of the brick paths. The women saw him and Sonja and pushed the strollers toward the fountain. Sonja beckoned them over.

One of the women was young, not much older than Kara with reddish-blond hair and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. The sleeping child she pushed was seven or eight months old with fuzzy blond hair. The other woman was a little older, mid to late twenties. She was fair-skinned with short brown hair. The child she pushed had light mocha skin and dark curls and was probably a year old.

"This is John," Sonja said to them. She turned to him. "Gianne and Petra and their daughters, Sofia and Cassandra."

John nodded at them. Cassandra was trying to get out of the stroller and get to the fountain.

Petra said, "We call her Cassie. She loves the water."

"My son loves the water, too." John got up from the bench and knelt on one knee by the stroller. He smiled at Cassie. "Hey, there."

Petra asked. "How old is your son?"

"Seventeen months." Cassie studied him with beautiful brown eyes. "Is she walking yet?"

Petra smiled. "Not by herself. She's just nine months old. Hold her hands and she'll be fine."

John lifted the child from the stroller. All he could think of at the moment was how much he wanted to see his son. Seeing these children had brought a rush of emotion, a deep ache that he struggled to deal with. He stood Cassie on the brick and took both small hands in his own. Bending over he let her walk to the fountain. She tried to reach over the rim but wasn't tall enough. He picked her up and held her so that she could see the dripping and bubbling water.

The two women glanced at each other and then at Sonja. They were probably aware of why human men were in Cylon City. They probably thought he was her breeder…or one of them. He looked back at Cassie. She was equally fascinated by the water and by him. He smiled at her.

"She's a beautiful little girl. They both are."

"Thank you," Petra said.

Sonja stood and John recognized it as their cue to leave. Petra walked over to the fountain and took her child. Cassie began to fret and squirmed to get down. It reminded him so much of Braedon that the ache deepened.

"Let me know if you ever need a baby sitter," John said.

Petra glanced at Sonja. "That would be nice."

Sonja walked away up one of the brick paths that led through the park. When John caught up with her, she said, "You'd really like to babysit those children?"

"Yes, I would."

Her tone was amused. "Even if I told you they're both half-Cylon?"

"It doesn't matter to me what they are. They're kids. I love kids."

"That surprises me."

"Why?"

She smiled seductively. "I don't know. Maybe because when I look at you I see the lover instead of the father."

"That would be the _prideful_ lover, wouldn't it?"

"You're mocking me."

"Are those little girls really half-Cylon?"

"Yes. They are."

"I guess it took a couple of years to get the artificial insemination to work. That's how they finally had to do it on Caprica."

"Artificial insemination is against God's will. It took several years of trying, but these children were conceived naturally."

"You're joking," John said in disbelief.

"No, I'm not joking. Ask Gianne and Petra if you don't believe me. Cassandra is the child of a Four. Sofia is the child of a Two. Cassandra and Sofia are our first successes. There will be many more. These children are our future."

"Just these two so far?" He asked.

"Seventeen little girls. Our youngest was born three weeks ago. All were fathered by Twos and Fours."

"The same Twos and Fours?"

"No, of course not. Different copies. They're not greedy. That's a human characteristic. They've all formed bonds with their children's mothers. They live as families."

"What about the Cavil and Doral copies? Haven't they got what it takes to make babies?"

"The Cavils want nothing to do with human women. Each has his pets among the Cylon women, but I can assure you that I'm not one of them. I don't see eye to eye with our Number Ones on several important issues…their treatment of prisoners being only one of them. The Cavils think that eventually we will produce a pure Cylon child. They're determined it will be one of theirs. They want to do what the creators did…create life, only do it naturally."

"And the Dorals?"

Sonja said disdainfully. "They're too busy following the Cavils around trying to gain their favor. The Ones want nothing to do with human women so neither do the Fives."

"They're like that on Caprica, too. I heard somebody refer to one as _Cavil's lap dog._"

Sonja laughed so hard she had to stop walking. "That's priceless. I'd tell my sisters, but the Overseers are fond of the Fives. They might not appreciate the slur."

"Caprica's canines probably didn't appreciate the slur either."

"Oh, John. I like your sarcastic sense of humor."

"I was serious. So seventeen little girls from Cylon fathers. How many babies have you Cylon women had?"

Sonja stopped laughing and resumed walking. They reached a part of the park where the brick path led through some beautiful flowering shrubs. John was reminded once again that spring had come to Nereid. Life was beginning anew on this planet as it had every year for millions of years. Sonja finally stopped and turned to him.

"We haven't had any babies…yet. We've had a number of problems that our creators will eventually find a way to correct. Some of the copies have conceived, but none has managed to give birth to a live child. Most of us miscarry before the fourth month. A few have made it longer but the children were stillborn."

Her face betrayed nothing, but John heard the slightest change in her voice, a saddening.

"Even you?" He asked softly.

"Three times. I miscarried twice. The last time was an ectopic pregnancy. The fetus implanted in the tube. Eventually it ruptured. I was hemorrhaging internally, in terrible pain, going into shock, but the Simon attending me didn't realize what was happening. He thought it was just another miscarriage. I knew something else was wrong. I begged him to get one of the human doctors but Cavil wouldn't let him. I died in agony. That was over two years ago."

"But you downloaded."

"Some of us remember our deaths. I remember my last one vividly. It won't happen to me again. I've made sure of that. I went to your surgeon friend Dr. Silva. He performed a small medical procedure on me. He did it at great peril to himself. Our creators have outlawed any form of birth control for us…except abstinence, and while that might suit the Fives, it doesn't suit me. Dr. Silva understands. He said it should be _my_ choice, _my_ decision. He did the surgery late one night at his clinic in the settlement. His wife assisted him. No one else knows. They risked their lives to help me. I risked being boxed to do it, but I won't have Cavil or anyone else controlling my life, forcing me to go through that over and over again. I'll leave the _being fruitful and multiplying_ to others. God has another purpose for me."

They continued walking. "I'm sorry," John finally said.

Sonja glanced at him. She had regained her composure, but he saw the glisten of unshed tears. "You shouldn't think you're the only one who has scars, John. Or secrets."

_..._

Laura looked up from the report on Picon and took off her reading glasses. She was with Bill Adama and Billy Keikeya in a small conference room near her office in Marble House. The salad that she had picked over for lunch was pushed forward on the table. She had made notes about what she was going to tell the press as she had read through the report.

"I've called an emergency session of the Quorum for two o'clock today. I'm going to tell them first."

Billy said, "The press conference is scheduled for three."

Bill leaned back and crossed his arms. "Getting it all over at once."

"We scheduled the press conference for 3:00 so my session with the Quorum won't last all night. I'm sure Mr. Zarek will try to use this to advance his case for putting the Cylons on trial and executing them immediately."

"How are things going with Attorney General Lampkin's case?"

"I haven't met with him since Natasi's interrogation. I had her moved out of her cell on the lower level into a small suite several levels up. She's still a prisoner, but her living conditions are much better. I've arranged for a monotheist priest to visit her. I've also seen that she has a book of their scriptures."

"Do the other Cylons know why she was moved?"

"No one told them, but they're not stupid. I'm sure they figured it out."

Billy asked, "Are you going to let Mr. Lampkin have a go at any of the others?"

Bill answered him. "I don't think we have anything to effectively bribe them with…or do we?"

"No," Laura said. "Natasi was vulnerable because of her feelings for Gaius Baltar. If any of the others have similar weaknesses, we're haven't found them yet. They were all offered better quarters quite early if they would tell us about their homeworld and their resources. None of them took us up on the offer."

Bill said, "Speaking of Cylons and love, how did things go with Sharon Agathon when you took her to the women's shelter?"

"Ultimately very well." She looked at Bill and smiled. "You told me yesterday that we humans have an almost unlimited ability to hope even in the face of dismal odds. What I saw at the shelter shows me that some humans have an unlimited capacity to forgive."

Billy stood. "If you'll excuse me, I'll start getting things ready for the press conference."

When he was gone, Laura said, "Yolanda Brenn had a companion named Keshia who loved her very much. Keshia now works at the shelter. When Sister Eirene called Keshia down to the office to ask her about available rooms, Sharon told them that she was a Cylon. She said she wanted the two women to know who they were sheltering."

"Is she out of her mind?"

"She had no way of knowing about Keshia and Yolanda. I literally held my breath. If _anyone_ has a reason to hate them, it's Keshia. I'm not sure what I expected to happen, but Keshia gave her room to Sharon. She said there were folding cots in one of the larger rooms and that was all she needed." Tears came to Laura's eyes. "I've never personally seen that kind of compassion or forgiveness in anyone. I'll admit I was very humbled by it."

"You did it when you cast your vote allowing Sharon's child to live."

"I had my reasons for doing that, primarily my own feelings as a mother. I'm not sure I can say I've forgiven the Cylons en masse for what they did. I'm not sure I can ever do that, but I'm willing to look at some of them now as individuals."

"And now you have to face the press and tell them the fate of everyone on Picon."

"Yes. That's going to be difficult."

Bill sat for moment. "I've suspended communications between the two ships and Caprica unless there's some kind of emergency. I sent Commander Cain an encrypted message this morning explaining the possible leak and telling her to notify the captain of the _Penelope_. She sent a message back confirming receipt. They went dark a few minutes later. The two ships will still communicate with each other. Lieutenant Agathon is jumping a Raptor to the _G_ early this afternoon. He'll bring back the drone reports from Tauron in the morning."

"What about the voter registration lists that you asked Lee to get."

"We should have them by Thursday."

Laura sighed. "I know I'm hoping for too much, but maybe those lists will show that Mr. Zarek should not be occupying Tauron's seat on the Quorum. They might show that all those signatures he presented to us were not legitimate."

Bill smiled. "You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

"Yes, I would. He's walking a fine line right now between expressing his views to the Quorum and the press and suborning sedition. I think beneath those expensive suits he now wears with such flair there still beats the heart of a Saggitaron Freedom Fighter, a man who will use any means at his disposal to get his way."

"He's being watched. Agent Darren has someone on him twenty-four seven."

"Good."

"Major Parker came to see me this morning. He went over the Nereid recon photos frame by frame and then asked Lee to look at them again. They concur on several points. Do you have time to hear their conclusions?"

"Of course I want to hear what they found."

"There are apparently humans on Nereid. How many we still have no idea, but they're there…unless the Cylons have taken up farming on a large scale…and clearing land and planting orchards. Your decision not to allow the planet to be nuked was the right one."

"And Kara?"

"She's been gone a week. The more time that passes, the greater the chance that she's been captured…or…"

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to.

"I refuse to believe that she won't come back."

Bill looked away for a moment. "You realize that if she does, she'll have to answer for her theft of the Raider, she and Lieutenant Allison both. We're talking prison time."

"And if she brings her father home?"

"She still broke a number of laws. If I make an exception for her, then what about the next pilot who wants to steal a ship for personal reasons?"

"She didn't steal the ship. She borrowed it."

She saw the flash of anger in his eyes. "No. You won't get away with that. You're not going to throw the cloak of the Presidency over her theft and her insubordination and her disregard for everything this uniform stands for. This is a military matter. You'll stay out of it. I know she's John's daughter…"

"When I married him, she became my daughter, too."

Bill stood. "That's all the more reason for you to step away from it. Don't test me on this, Laura. You won't like the results."

"Why are you so angry at her? Is it because of what she did or because she was right about the humans on Nereid or because she loves her father so much she made a very unwise decision?"

She saw some of the fight leave him. "It's almost two o'clock. Go meet with the Quorum. We'll talk about this again…if Kara comes back."

He walked out of the room. Bill was right. Kara had broken the law…and yet Laura couldn't bear the thought of her stepdaughter going to prison. She was wrong to steal the Raider, but she had done it because of her convictions about the humans on Nereid and her love for her father. Was there ever a right reason to do a wrong thing? Laura felt the beginnings of a headache behind her eyes.

She stood and wearily put on her jacket. She was wearing the same black suit today that she had worn to John's memorial service. She thought it was appropriate attire as she announced to the press the death of an entire planet. She feared in the days to come that she would wear this suit again and again as word of the fate of the other colonies came back to Caprica.

She picked up her notes and looked at her wedding ring. In Buzz Jessups' moving eulogy he had said that John would want to be remembered not as a hero but as a father. Admiral William Adama would be remembered as a great military leader, a hero whose plan had freed them of Cylon control, but he would never be remembered as a father.

_..._

"I don't like the helmet," Kendra said to Lee. "It makes me feel like I can't breathe."

They were carrying flight suits over one arm with the helmets tucked under the other and were following an ensign to the overnight quarters they would share with several other pilots on the _Galactica_.

"It doesn't bother me, but then I'm not claustrophobic. Without the flight suit and helmet I'd never have survived punching out eleven miles up in the atmosphere during the fighting."

The ensign stopped in front of a hatch. "Your quarters, sirs."

"Who else is in here?" Lee asked.

The ensign looked at a clipboard. "Lieutanants Agathon and Rogers. They're in from Caprica for the night and will be leaving in the morning."

"Agathon? Karl Agathon?" Lee said in surprise.

"I don't have a full name, sir. Initial is _K_."

"That's him." Lee pushed open the hatch. The eight-bunk room was empty.

"They might be in the shower, sir. They just arrived about twenty minutes ago from Caprica."

"Thank you," Lee said. He and Kendra entered the room. Lee turned to her. "Sorry about you having to bunk with three guys, but everything on the _G_ is co-ed including the bathrooms and showers. All battlestars are that way."

Kendra shrugged. "I'm sure Commander Cain wants me to have a new experience. So we just pick a bunk?"

"Take one that's not already claimed."

Kendra stopped at the first set of bunks. "This one is okay…the bottom."

Lee had just thrown his things on the next bunk when Karl walked through the hatch with wet hair and a towel wrapped around him. The way the towel was draped didn't leave much to the imagination.

Karl did a double-take. "Lee? What are you doing here?"

Lee smiled. "Just being a good liaison officer. My partner in crime, Kendra Shaw. Kendra, this is Karl Agathon."

"Hey," Karl said.

Kendra's cheeks were red. "Nice to meet you. I'll wait in the hall." She quickly exited the hatch.

Lee also headed for the hatch. "I'll catch you later, Karl. We'll talk. If she gets lost, I'll never find her."

Karl grinned. "First time on a battlestar?"

"First overnight. FYI. Racetrack and Skulls are on board."

"At least now I can cross them off the list. Neither one of them could have trashed our apartment."

"What?"

"Go. Catch up with your partner. I'll tell you later."

Kendra was standing against the wall in the corridor waiting for him.

"That was awkward," she said. "I don't know battlestar etiquette."

"When somebody is changing clothes, you just turn your back. He turns his. You don't look."

Kendra grinned. "You never peeked at any of those hot females you bunked with?"

"Who says I bunked with any _hot_ females?"

Kendra smirked. "I know that look. Lee Adama has a secret. Does Kara know you peeked?"

He grinned. "She knows I'm human. She probably peeked, too."

"Let's go see what Commander Cain wants. Then we can do a little socializing."

Ten minutes later they were in Cain's quarters. Her announcement was a shock.

"Admiral Adama has ordered all communications back to Caprica suspended except in case of an emergency. He thinks news about Picon might have been leaked from someone on board the _Penelope, _but we can't be absolutely certain. We want all news about the other colonies strictly controlled. When the President makes the announcements to the press, we want them to be factual but not inflammatory. Everything will be sent via a courier now. We currently plan four runs per week."

"Yes, sir," Lee and Kendra said in unison.

"You're leaving tomorrow for the surface of Tauron?"

"Yes, sir," Lee answered. "We found out that we're going to have to go to five different places to get the voter registration lists. The master copy was destroyed when the Cylons bombed Quanniq. It may take more than one day."

Cain almost smiled. "Take care of my Raptor, Lieutenant Adama. I want it back in one piece."

"Yes, sir."

"And take warm jackets. If you don't have them, see the captain in charge of _Galactica's _Marines. They're always well prepared. I'm sure he can find some for you. Dismissed."

Out in the corridor Kendra said, "What do you think that was all about?"

"I don't know."

"Do you really think somebody from the _Penelope_…leaked information?"

"It looks that way."

"Gods, who would be that stupid?"

"Maybe whoever did it didn't think they were doing anything wrong. There's a hundred scientists aboard. They don't think like the military does. It could have been something innocent, but my father was right to shut down communication."

"So that's what your friend Lieutenant Agathon is doing on board. He's a courier."

"Probably."

"He's also married to a Cylon."

"That's right. Do you have a problem with that?"

She shrugged. "Not a choice I would make, but then I'm not him. Let's go get some warm jackets."

By the time they got the jackets and took them back to their quarters, it was time for dinner. When they got to the mess hall, Lee looked around and spotted Karl eating with Dwight Saunders and Alex Quartararo. He glanced at Kendra. She had also spotted the trio.

She smiled. "Want to join them?"

"Sure. Unless you object to eating with a guy who's married to a Cylon."

He got no reply.

During the meal they talked about the pyramid playoffs.

"Anders has been off his game for the last couple of weeks," Saunders said.

The others agreed. Lee remembered what Maya had told him about Sam wanting to marry her and why she wouldn't accept. He wondered if that was affecting Sam's concentration.

"It's probably a woman," Quartararo said. "When a good player like Anders can't score for a whole game, you can bet some woman has got his head all frakked up."

"Watch your language," Saunders said. "There's a lady at the table." He looked directly at Kendra. "Would you like to join us in a game of triad after dinner if Crashdown promises to refrain from cursing?"

"I've never played triad before. I'm sure I'd be terrible."

Quartararo grinned. He actually believed her.

Later in the officer's wardroom, Kendra joined a triad game with Saunders and Quartararo and several other pilots while Lee and Karl sat together at a small table and each had a beer. Karl told him what had happened to his and Sharon's apartment. Lee was shocked, but his father's order to stop communication back to Caprica now made more sense. Karl also told him that Sharon was going to live at a women's shelter until they could figure out what to do.

"I'm sorry that happened to you two," Lee said. "If Kara was here she'd be fighting mad."

"I know. Any word?"

Lee shook his head.

"She's all right. I know she is. Kara's tough." They sat without talking for a few minutes until Karl asked, "What's with Saunders and your partner?"

"Who knows. She told me she has a boyfriend, but you'd never know it to look at the way she's flirting with Flat Top."

"What do you want to bet she doesn't make it back to our quarters tonight?"

"I don't think she'll go that far. She likes the attention. She's feeling ignored by the boyfriend."

"Flat Top could do a lot worse."

Lee took another sip of his beer. "So could she. When you and Kara and Sharon were on the _G_ last fall for three months, did Kara ever…flirt with anybody like that?"

"No! Gods, no! What made you even ask that question?"

Lee shrugged. He wasn't sure why he'd asked.

"Sometimes Kara would sit in here when we were off duty and write letters…to you and her dad mostly…Maya, too. I don't know why, but that seemed to get under Kat's skin. She and Kara never hit it off. Everybody soon figured out that Kara was a better pilot. Kat used to stay on her case, called her _Nug-get_ all the time. One day Kat came up behind her while Kara was writing. She was trying to read over her shoulder so she could give Kara grief about it. Kara shoved her chair back like she didn't know Kat was standing there. Knocked her on her ass. Katraine came up swinging but she missed. Noel Allison grabbed her around the waist from behind and picked her up to keep a fight from starting. You know how short she is. She was spitting mad, kicking and swinging. About that time Colonel Tigh walked in and said, _Is there a problem in here? _Narcho and Kat straightened up and said they were just horsing around. Kat left and Kara went back to writing her letter like nothing had happened. I went over and sat down at the table with her. She never looked up, but under her breath she said, _frakking stim junkie_. If we had been on the _G_ much longer, they'd have gotten into it somewhere, somehow and probably both wound up in hack. If Kara's your friend, she'll go to the wall for you, but if you get on her bad side…watch out."

"Kara and Noel Allison…they hung out together a lot?"

Karl shrugged. "We talked about this, Lee."

"She's with him now. He's the one she asked to help her."

"That's because she knew he'd be stupid enough to do it. Kara loves you. What's the matter? Don't you trust her?"

There was that word again. _Trust_. Unable to meet Karl's eyes, he turned up his beer. He was afraid Karl might see the tiny bit of doubt that was there. He wasn't sure when it had crept in or why, but it was there now. He glanced at the next table. Kendra had just won a hand of triad and was laughing.

"How did this happen?" She asked innocently.

Lee said to her, "Looks like you found a good luck charm."

"Keep telling her that," Saunders grinned. "She might let me buy her another beer and walk her home."

Lee watched as Kendra and Saunders engaged in the age-old courtship ritual of two people who were attracted to one another, the glances and smiles, the way she grabbed his hand when he pretended to try to look at her cards.

Lee knew that Kara loved him. He knew it. She would never do what Kendra was doing now, and yet he felt doubt prick at his heart, a tiny sharp needle that drew blood.

_..._

Seléne tied an apron around Kara's waist. In the pockets were what she called pegs. Kara called them clothespins.

"My husband carved these for me," Seléne said. "Be careful and don't jam them down too hard over the line. You'll break them."

"Beck whittles things out of wood. He could make you some more."

"I don't go begging folks for things."

Kara shrugged and carried the basket full of clean, damp diapers outside. The clothesline was strung between two posts near the dwelling. She hung a diaper over the line and stuck a clothespin on it. She was on her third diaper when she saw the three ships approaching low from the west. She stopped and shaded her eyes with her hand. It took her only seconds to identify them. They were Heavy Raiders.

Fear clutched her. Her first thought was that they were going to strafe the valley and base camp, but before she could even shout for Seléne to stay in the dwelling, the Raiders slowed and landed in a meadow half a mile away.

She ran to the doorway. "Cylon ships," she said breathlessly. "Do they come here often?"

Seléne's eyes grew large. "Not in years. You're sure?"

"I'm sure." Another fear grabbed her. "They're probably looking for me and my copilot."

"Could be. It's too late to run now. Running would just give you away. Stay put. See what they want."

In less than ten minutes, a dozen centurions marched up the main path. Behind them walked a One and a Two and a dozen more centurions. Cavil had a bullhorn.

"Everyone out of your…houses…or caves…or whatever you call these things. Assemble out here. If you don't come out voluntarily, you will be dragged out."

Seléne went to the cradle and lifted Esmari. She handed the baby to Kara. "Let's go."

Together they walked up to the main path. Others had come out of their dwellings. She saw Narcho with Targa and Beck. She didn't see Hunter. Emmalyn and Dessa came walking down the path toward them. Dessa was clutching Emmalyn's hand. She was clearly frightened. The women stood together without speaking. The centurions began entering the dwellings. Cavil walked up the path, calling his orders over the bullhorn until he got to them and stopped. He was wearing a heavy wool coat and a fedora hat. His face was flushed from the exertion of walking uphill from the meadow. He took off the hat and fanned himself.

Emmalyn said, "What do you want?"

"To talk to your leaders. Where are they?"

"My nephew is working in the fields. His grandfather is old and blind and it will take him a few minutes to get here. You can speak to me."

Cavil looked her up and down. "I'll wait."

In the distance Kara saw centurions going to the fields and rounding up the men who worked in them. She glanced over at Narcho and Beck. Narcho had started toward her but Beck had stopped him. They stood beside the path with some other men two dwellings away.

Hunter's grandfather Perry Jaffee and his wife Celia slowly came up a side path. Jaffee had a long staff that he tapped against the stones in front of him. Celia held his arm and helped guide him. They stopped when they got to Cavil.

"So, old man, we meet again," Cavil said.

"What are you doing here? This is a clear violation of our agreement. You don't bother us in base camp."

"I want to talk to your grandson. He's the leader of the fighters, is he not?"

"Whatever you have to say, you can say to me."

"We'll wait for him."

The centurions checking the dwellings drew nearer. Kara saw Hunter and several men coming up the road.

Hunter walked up to Cavil. "Take your centurions and get the hell out of here. This is not our agreement."

"Neither is harboring fugitives."

"Look around. We don't have any fugitives here. Just hard-working people."

Kara saw the copy of Leoben slowly making his way among the people gathered on either side of the road. He stopped at each small group and carefully looked them over. He was getting closer to Narcho. Kara's heart was pounding. Narch still hadn't shaved. She now realized that was a good thing. Dressed in some of Beck's clothes, he looked a lot less like he did four days ago. Kara rocked Esmari back and forth in her arms as the child slept.

Cavil pointed to Leoben. "Four days ago you killed him in the forest."

"It was a fair kill," Hunter said quickly.

"I'm not disputing that. Before you killed him, he'd captured two Colonials dressed in flight suits. A man and a woman. What happened to them?"

"We let them go. They were none of our concern."

"You…let…them…go. You didn't even question them?"

"They were in a hurry to get somewhere, and they weren't inclined to talk. We weren't inclined to hang around waiting for Leoben's friends to show up. They went one way. We went another."

"Two strangers in flight suits in your forest and you let them go. I find that hard to believe."

Hunter snorted. "It's not part of our agreement that we catch your escaped prisoners for you."

"That's just it. They weren't escaped prisoners."

"What were they?"

"That's what we want to know."

"Sorry. We can't help you."

Kara glanced down the path. Leoben had finally moved on from Narcho. Her heart was pounding so hard that she had to force herself to breathe normally. Behind them a centurion entered Seléne's dwelling.

Cavil put the bullhorn to his mouth and addressed the inhabitants of base camp.

"Harboring fugitives violates our agreement. You're putting yourselves in mortal danger. Give up the two pilots. We'll leave and you can go about your business."

Perry Jaffee said, "We can't give you what we don't have. There are no fugitives here. My grandson and his men came back into camp two days ago. No one else has entered or left since then."

Cavil lowered the bullhorn. "We've spent the last four days searching every square foot of the forest near where they were captured. They're not there. Neither is their ship."

Hunter said, "Then search the forest somewhere else because they're not here. Where in this valley could we hide a ship?"

Leoben was almost to her. Kara could understand how he might not have recognized Narcho, but he would surely remember her. She was the one who had mouthed off to him. Sharon had said they downloaded with their memories intact. But then again, the Boomer copy hadn't remembered dying on Troy. The Leoben who ran the bookstore on Caprica hadn't remembered being shot by a centurion, either. All she could do was hope that this Leoben didn't look at her and remember a smart-mouth blond in a flight suit.

Kara looked down at the ground and rocked Esmari and waited. Leoben stopped in front of her. She glanced up and then back down. Cavil had walked over to them.

"What's your name?" Leoben asked.

Before she could answer, Seléne said, "Her name is Juliana and she's my daughter. She's holding my grandchild. Leave her be."

Leoben took Kara's chin and forced her face up. She kept her eyes down, afraid to meet his. Before he had a chance to spend any time studying her, though, Hunter grabbed Leoben's arm and jerked him around so they were facing.

He snarled, "Take your filthy Cylon hands off her. She's my woman and she's holding my child and you'll not touch either one of them."

Cavil looked at Leoben. "Is it her or not?"

Leoben finally shook his head. "I can't remember. I don't think so. The woman was blond, but this isn't her. She's too young."

Cavil seemed exasperated. "Do you see anyone else it might have been?"

Leoben turned and started back down the path toward the Heavy Raiders.

"I guess not," Cavil said.

Hunter walked over and put his arm around Kara. "Take your centurions and go," he said. "The people you're looking for aren't here."

"No one leaves this valley until we've finished searching the forest. We're using Raiders and centurions. We'll kill anyone who tries to get out."

"I've still got men in the forest," Hunter said.

"Your men can return to this valley, but no one leaves it. We'll catch those pilots and find their ship if we have to tear the forest down tree by tree."

"You're wasting your time. They're long gone by now."

"No. Their ship hasn't left the planet. We're sure of that. We'll eventually find it…and them. They'll tell us if you sheltered them. We can be very persuasive." He started to follow Leoben toward the ships and then turned. "Your older sister was easily persuaded."

Hunter took only three strides to reach Cavil. He hit the Cylon so hard that he stumbled backward and fell on the stone path. Two centurions locked their weapons on Hunter and waited for Cavil's command to fire.

Hunter was seething. "Get up you son of a bitch. Let's finish it right now."

Kara quickly handed Esmari to Seléne and ran to Hunter. She wrapped her arms around him and got her mouth to his ear. "No! It is _not_ your destiny to die here today. Don't do something stupid. Please. He'd love to have them shoot you."

Behind her she heard Esmari begin to wail.

Kara's words finally got through to Hunter or maybe it was hearing his daughter cry. She pulled him away from Cavil who got shakily to his feet and wiped blood from his mouth.

"Humans have so many weaknesses. Rage is a weakness and love is a weakness and so is your pathetic attempt to keep your race alive by making those mewling, puking babies. You'd be doing it a favor by killing it now and ending its suffering."

Kara struggled to hold Hunter. "No," she said softly. "He's the pathetic one. If you kill him, he'll just download. If his centurions start shooting, we all die including your daughter, and we _won't_ download." She could feel him shaking with anger. She got him to look at her eyes. "Esmari needs you. Your people need you. _I_ need you…alive. Remember the Oracle's words. Don't do this. Please."

The fight went out of him. He put his arms around her. She could feel his heart pounding…or was it her own?

"You're right," he said against her ear.

"How touching," Cavil said sarcastically.

Then he turned without another word and started toward the meadow and the ships. The centurions retracted their weapons and followed him.

Hunter kept his arm around her until the Heavy Raiders were in the air. The fever pitch of emotion began to abate. The valley residents started drifting back to what they were doing before. Hunter dropped his arm and stepped away from her. Everything suddenly felt awkward between them.

Seléne walked up and put the red-faced, wailing child into Hunter's arms. "Now's as good a time as any to learn how to change and feed her. Dessa will show you about the diapers. I'll milk the goat."

Emmalyn gently pushed Dessa forward. "Go help your brother."

As Hunter and Dessa followed Seléne toward her dwelling, Emmalyn turned to Kara. She used the bottom of her apron to wipe her eyes. "The gods brought you here for several reasons. I think we've just seen one of them."

"It looks like they stranded me here, too," Kara said with dejection in her voice, "Cavil said we can't leave the valley. I can't go look for my father. I can't even get back to my ship. I'm stuck here."

Perry Jaffee put his hand on Kara's shoulder. She turned to look into the clouded eyes. "Many years ago our Oracle told me that before the end of my lifetime, three strangers would come to our valley, and that they were harbingers of a great change. Two have come...you and your copilot. All we can do now is wait for the third stranger."

TBC…


	15. Secrets

Chapter 15

Secrets

_Odysseus, brave and cunning warrior, king of Ithaca, husband of Penelope,__  
__Fought alongside Achilles in the Trojan War until the siege of that great city__  
__Became a stalemate. Odysseus said, Let us build a great wooden horse__  
__Hollow inside and fill it with thirty of our best men. Then we will sail our ships__  
__Down the coast and out of sight. The Trojans will think we have given up__  
__And will draw the horse into their city for a great victory celebration. _

_The Greek army built the huge horse and put thirty warriors inside and pulled it__  
__To the gates of the city. They left it as an offering to the goddess Athena and then__  
__Withdrew their ships. The people of Troy pulled the giant horse into the city__  
__And celebrated well into the night. In the dark hour before dawn as the Trojans__  
__Slept in drunken stupor, the men climbed out of the wooden horse and opened__  
__The gates of the city to their fellow warriors who were victorious over the Trojans. _

_The army of Agamemnon celebrated as Odysseus set sail for Ithaca__  
__And began his long journey home to his loving wife Penelope._

Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

_._

Lee rolled over in his bunk and looked at his watch. Nearly midnight and he hadn't heard Kendra come in yet. He and Karl had left the officer's wardroom before 23:00. Kendra and the others were still playing triad. Karl's copilot and ECO Rogers was already in his bunk and was asleep when they had come in so they had quietly gotten undressed and gotten in their own bunks. Lee had pulled the curtains and turned on his reading light. He had tried to get back into his paperback book but couldn't concentrate and had found himself rereading pages with little comprehension of the words on them. Finally he had turned off the light and opened the curtains. A red exit light was always on above the hatch. As his eyes had adjusted to the dimmer glow, the features of the room had emerged from the darkness. He had heard Karl or maybe Rogers snoring and the soft hiss of the _Galactica's_ ventilation system as it circulated air. Lee waited for sleep that would not come.

He rolled onto his back and put his hands under his head and thought about Kara. It had been exactly one week since she'd stolen the Raider. Seven days without any word. He knew that Kara and Karl had survived on vegetables from a garden and canned rations and small game for almost eight months before they had been picked up by soldiers and taken to a refugee camp, but she and Noel Allison were alone on a hostile planet. She couldn't have taken enough provisions to last for more than a week. He imagined them running and hiding, trying to find water, hunting for food.

How long could they keep it up before they were captured…or killed…or simply died from starvation or something worse? They might already be in a Cylon prison. He knew what the Cylons did to prisoners. He knew about the torture. Everybody in Major Parker's interrogation unit had heard the stories. Lee knew what would happen to two Colonial pilots caught on Nereid. He propped on his elbow and shook his head to clear it of those terrible thoughts.

He had extracted a promise from his father before he had left for this mission. Bill had said he would notify Lee the minute Kara returned although in his father's promise there had been the unspoken words _if she returns_. Lee knew his father didn't have much faith that Kara would make it back to Caprica because Bill Adama was a realist. Lee wouldn't let go of the hope. He couldn't.

The hatch opened and Lee heard the low murmur of voices. Light from the corridor spilled into the center of the room. He lay back in his bunk.

There was a giggle and Kendra whispered, "I can't see. Where are the lights?"

Saunders answered. "You don't want to turn on the lights. You'll wake everyone up. Give it a minute. Your eyes will adjust."

"A whole minute?"

"Or five."

They stepped inside the room and Flat Top pushed the hatch door shut. Kendra reached up and put her arms around Saunders' neck. He pulled her against him as they began kissing. Feeling like a voyeur, Lee closed his eyes. He tried not to listen, but in the quiet, it was impossible not to hear them. The kiss had started out passionate. Lee could tell it was deepening.

"I could stay for a while," Saunders said barely above a whisper.

The pause before Kendra answered was a long one. "Not this time."

"Maybe next time?"

Instead of an answer, Lee could tell they were kissing again.

"I think I can see to make it to my bunk now," Kendra whispered. "Thank you for walking me home."

"I'd like the chance to do it again."

There was the sound of another kiss and then the hatch quietly closing. He heard Kendra at her bunk. He opened his eyes. She was unbuttoning her uniform jacket. She was also smiling. He closed his eyes. He wanted to ask her if she was really interested in Flat Top or was just using him to boost her ego after being ignored by Gordon. Of course Flat Top probably wouldn't care about her motive if she wound up in his bunk or he wound up in hers. Lee knew it was none of his business. He needed to forget about it. What Kendra Shaw and Dwight Saunders did was their business.

He rolled onto his side. Seeing the way Kendra and Saunders had kissed made him think of Kara again. That last Sunday they'd been together eight days ago had been long and tiring. They'd had two long days back to back…the Saturday Kara and flown her last recon mission and the next day when they'd met Bill at the boneyard to discuss it. They'd gotten up before 04:00 on Saturday morning so they could be at the boneyard before 05:00. That hadn't made any sense until after she'd stolen the Raider and Rick Rafferty had said he'd let Kara watch him key in the code to both the external and internal alarms.

Lee now realized with sudden clarity that Bill's stubborn refusal to consider a rescue of the humans on Nereid had played as large a part in Kara's decision to steal the Raider as her decision to rescue her father. Those quick recon missions to Nereid had covered only a fraction of the planet's surface. Humans were there and Major Parker had by now made Bill aware of it.

Lee now understood why Kara had insisted they visit both Braedon and Dreilide Thrace on that Sunday. The clock had already been ticking on her plan. They had been late getting back to his apartment that night and he had expected her to grab a beer and collapse on the couch. Instead she had pulled him into the bedroom just like she had done the night before. The hot, physical attraction that had been present from the moment they had met had not diminished over the two years they had been together. Lee had no idea at the time, but she was saying her goodbye to him as well. Afterward she hadn't seemed to want to let go of him. She had gone to sleep curled beside him with her forehead against his shoulder and her arm across his chest. He tried to imagine now what had been going through her mind at the time. Had she even once considered telling him what she was going to do?

Kendra must have stubbed her toe or bumped her head on the bunk because he heard her curse softly. He knew she wasn't drunk. She had barely touched her first beer. There was a rustling and then her curtains were pulled shut. He looked at his watch again. Fifteen minutes after midnight. Lee didn't want to start thinking about what happened every time he and Kara made love. All it took was the thought of how her body felt against him and he reacted. He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow to stifle a groan. It was going to be a long night.

_..._

John and Sonja emerged from the park onto another street. They walked without speaking for several blocks. Sonja's story had gotten to him and she probably knew it. He wondered why she had confided something so personal and yet so potentially dangerous. Unless, of course, it was a lie. Then again, it really didn't matter if it was a lie or the truth. Sonja had gained his sympathy and at the same time she had insured his silence because of the roles that she said Bianca and Laszlo had played, roles that would probably get them executed if anyone found out. He had underestimated the Cylon. She was smarter and more manipulative than he had given her credit for being.

The street opened into the center of the city. John looked around and had to admit that he was impressed. The square was beautiful. At the center was another marble fountain that dwarfed the one in the park. Its base was probably thirty feet in diameter. Multiple jets of water sent sparkling streams into the air. At the top of the fountain was the centerpiece, a huge armillary sphere made of brass. He could see various ancient Kobolian symbols on the sphere. He wondered if Hugh Connelly would recognize any of them.

Young trees had been planted at intervals along the edge of wide sidewalks. Centurions were filling large concrete planters with flowers…red and dark purple and white. He saw several human women walking with Fours and Twos. An Eight who looked just like Sharon sat on the edge of the fountain with a dark-haired young man. They were dressed in jeans and t-shirts. They were smiling at each other and holding hands and looked like a young couple in love. He thought of Sharon and Karl and wondered if they had survived the fighting.

There were other Sixes with various shades of blond hair from dark honey to platinum. Several Threes strolled with human men. One pair had their arms around each other. The only Cylons missing were Ones and Fives, but that wasn't surprising given what Sonja had just told him about their disdain for interacting with humans.

John glanced at Sonja. There was amusement in her voice. "None of those Threes is your D'Anna. I told you she won't be back until day after tomorrow. You don't think she would cheat on you, do you?"

"I haven't got the slightest idea. You apparently don't restrict yourself to one man."

Her voice was husky. "Does that bother you?"

"I could care less. Okay, Sonja. What the hell is going on?"

"The copy of D'Anna who brought you from the prison is no longer your handler. At the current time she's been deemed too unstable. The Council decided to remove you from her control."

"The Council?"

"There is a Council in the city which consists of one copy of each of us elected by the other copies of the model. We call it the Council of Eight even though there are only seven models. For those on the basestars, it's easier to get a consensus on all issues at any time. They just put their hands in the datastream and communicate their thoughts and votes. Down here on the planet that's proven impractical. We've had to modify the way we govern ourselves. We all still vote on major issues, but we abide by the Council's decisions on minor ones. They oversee the running of the city. They approve the requests to bring humans here and what happens to them afterward."

"Are you on the Council?"

"No. But I did ask them to give you to me. They agreed."

"So what does that mean? Spell it out for me."

"D'Anna can still visit you and spend as much time with you as she likes, or you can visit her apartment, but she can't take you outside the building or make any other decisions about you. The Council is concerned that in her current state she might be…susceptible to suggestions from you that would be unwise."

"They think I would talk her into helping me escape?"

"Their concern is for her protection. Escape is impossible as I hope you've seen, but a failed attempt in which she played a part would result in her copy being boxed. We certainly don't want that to happen."

"Even if I promised not to ask her to do anything stupid?"

"I'm afraid that until we know you better, such a promise from you would be meaningless. If D'Anna stabilizes and remains that way for several months, the Council will look at returning you to her control. Until then all decisions concerning you will be made by me, such as the ones I just made to remove the centurions from your door and to turn off the surveillance of your apartment. So before you say anything too disparaging or refuse to cooperate, think about how much worse your situation was…and could be again. I would never choose to send you back to the prison, but the Council might. They've done it before when a human was uncooperative."

Sonja gave him time to think about what she had just said as they continued walking around the square to a sidewalk café that wasn't yet open for business. The interior of the building was dark and looked like it was still under construction although nothing was going on at the moment.

There were a dozen outside tables and chairs made of black wrought iron. Sonja chose a table well away from a copy of Leoben and a young, blond woman with short layered hair. John glanced at them and saw that unlike the rest of the women he had seen in the square, the woman sitting with Leoben was visibly pregnant. The bottom of her knit shirt revealed a rounded abdomen. She caught John's eye for only a few seconds, long enough that it made him think of Kara, and then she looked away but not before he could see that she was miserable. He wondered if Sonja had told him the truth about the family units formed by the human women and the Twos and Fours. Maybe all of them weren't as happy as she thought they were.

Sonja sat and put the woven bag on the table. John sat across from her and watched while she took out a bottle of wine, then a corkscrew and two plastic wineglasses. She handed him the corkscrew and the bottle. He uncorked it and handed it back to her.

She sat the bottle on the table between them. "I'm sure you have some questions."

"The humans we see here…are they prisoners like me or are they allowed to come and go as they please?"

"Some are like you, able to go out only with their handlers. Others have earned a degree of trust and therefore some freedom. That might be possible for you one day…if you cooperate and cause no problems."

"What about the woman with Leoben over there? Is she his _pregnant_ prisoner?"

"I don't know. I don't keep up with everyone in all of the buildings."

"If she's his unwilling prisoner, then there's an ugly word for what he did to her."

"Don't concern yourself with it, John. There are a few copies of Leoben who tend to get a little obsessive. They might resort to…coercion, but not the majority of them."

"_Coercion_. Is that what you Cylons call forcing a woman to have sex? I call it _rape._"

Sonja looked away from him out over the square. She obviously didn't intend to continue discussing Leoben and the young pregnant woman.

Finally John asked, "Will I be expected to sleep with you and D'Anna both?"

She looked back at him. "The Council only expects you to sleep with D'Anna. That's your purpose here. She may not be stable emotionally, but there's nothing wrong with her reproductive system. You're still her partner for breeding purposes. You'll still be expected to get her pregnant or try to."

"Why put her through that if she's just going to lose the baby…or worse?"

"It's what she wants. Should we deny her the chance?"

John picked up the bottle of wine and poured both glasses half full. "So let me make sure I understand you. By cooperating and sleeping with D'Anna, I earn points, but you're the one who will take me out for walks."

"That's a very good way of putting it. I would say that after a month or six weeks of cooperating with her whenever she wants your services, you will have earned enough points for another trip outside like this."

He picked up the glass and looked at the late afternoon sunlight for a long time through the pale amber-green liquid before he looked back at her. He barely managed to keep the anger out of his voice. "And what would an hour of _cooperating_ with you earn me?"

She smiled. "You're very quick to catch on, John. I think we understand each other perfectly on this issue."

He turned up the glass. The wine was dry, almost bitter. He drank all of it and poured another glass. "Don't you like the wine, Sonja?"

"I don't drink alcoholic beverages."

"What's to eat?"

Sonja got sandwiches out of the bag. John unwrapped one of them and took a bite. "This is good. What is it?"

"I told Mr. Doolittle to make something you would like. It's freshwater crab salad. It's a delicacy."

"You just went all out, didn't you?"

"There's no way I can make up for what they did to you at the prison, but I'd like to make your current experience as pleasant as possible under the circumstances."

"Then I should enjoy today and tomorrow since it will be a month or six weeks before I'll get another chance to go outside."

He saw surprise in her eyes and something else, too. He saw a flicker of hurt and then it was gone. The amused, seductive look returned. "Was this afternoon _that_ unpleasant for you?"

"Unpleasant? No. Demeaning? Yes. It wasn't even about the sex for you, was it? It was about the control. Showing me who's the boss."

She smiled. "You're wrong. Did you not think that I would want to finish what we started several mornings ago? I enjoyed what we did _very much,_ and you know it. I don't understand why you're having such a problem with what we shared or why you wouldn't want to do it again."

"Reminding you that I'm married and love my wife didn't seem to matter to you so let's just say that I don't want to be your whore…or D'Anna's either for that matter. But you've just told me that if I don't do her, I'll be drugged or sent back to the prison. Why can't you understand that it's not supposed to be like that? It's supposed to be something _both_ people want to share. I can't understand why you'd want to have sex with a man who doesn't want to have sex with you."

"Oh, but you did want to have sex with me," Sonja said softly, "just as much as I wanted to have it with you. I didn't threaten you with anything. I never even walked across the room. You got out of your chair voluntarily and came to me. I merely made you an offer. _You_ chose to accept it. Your _enthusiasm_ was most impressive." She smiled. "That's not something _a man_ can fake."

She was right. He took another sip of wine. She'd zeroed in on several of his weaknesses and taken advantage of them. But he'd let her. He could have remained sitting in his chair and foregone any chance of getting outside. He could be sitting there right now throwing a kid's ball against the wall. Already he could feel the wine numbing the worst of his anger at her. He sat with the late afternoon sun on his face and tried to blank his mind to his situation and allow himself to feel the illusion of freedom for a short while. He'd paid dearly for it, and it would be over soon.

"Tell me about your wife."

"I'm not going to talk to you about her."

"Does she know where you are?"

"How could she possibly know where I am? I went missing in Caprica's atmosphere over four months ago. I'm sure she thinks I'm dead."

"How long do you humans mourn your dead?"

He shrugged. "Some people mourn for the rest of their lives. Others move on fairly quickly. It's an individual thing."

"How long do you think she'll mourn you? Will she remain true to your memory or will she move on to another?"

John felt the pain of knowing that Laura might already have moved on to Bill Adama. He took a deep breath and blew it out.

"I don't know. She's a beautiful woman. I'm sure she's got plenty of admirers."

"Would you blame her if she's already taken a lover?"

He took another deep breath. "No."

"Would you forgive her and take her back if she had?"

"I'm not going to talk about that with you."

"I saw the picture of her with your son that D'Anna had. She didn't recognize Laura because her copy was just unboxed a year ago. But I recognized her. I have a magazine, a scholarly journal that was taken from one of the ships five years ago. Laura Roslin's picture is on the cover. There's another picture inside with an article about her views on the need for educating and hiring more teachers. You held something back from us, John. You failed to mention that you're married to the Secretary of Education for the Colonial government."

John hoped he managed to cover his surprise. "I didn't mention it because she resigned from that position last November. She's not the Secretary of Education anymore."

"You moved in a lot higher circles than you led us to believe. Do you know President Adar?"

"I met him. We don't hang out together."

"Who do you hang out with, John?"

"I spend my free time with my wife and my kids…_spent_ my free time with them."

He took another sip of wine. He wondered where Sonja was going with these questions. He wondered how much she already knew. There was no way they could know Laura was now President of the Colonies. These Cylons had broken off communication with those on Caprica over four years ago.

He picked up Sonja's untouched glass of wine and drank it. He put the cork back into the bottle. "I'd like to go back to my apartment now."

"So soon? Do my questions make you _that_ uncomfortable?"

"I didn't realize that getting outside would mean another interrogation session for me. I'd rather go back and sit on my balcony and watch the birds…alone."

"I'm just trying to learn something about you, about the kind of man you are."

"Why?"

"Because of the way you arrived here. You're here for a reason. I'm trying to understand what it is."

"You're reading way too much into an accident. That's all it was, Sonja, an _accident_."

"No one else knows about your wife. I didn't even tell D'Anna."

"Why not?"

"Because I want you to know I can keep confidences. I want you to trust me with your secrets. I trusted you with one of mine."

He smiled. "So you can report all my secrets to the Council?"

"There are certain things I must report such as where I take you, but other things are at my discretion. Today and tomorrow are part of your orientation. Normally D'Anna would do it, but since you're now my responsibility, I'm doing it. As long as you don't try to escape and as long as you continue to provide D'Anna with what she expects from you, then I'll have nothing else to tell them."

"Who's going to tell her she's been fired as my handler?"

Sonja seemed amused. "She hasn't been _fired_. She's been temporarily replaced. Whichever copy of Simon goes to pick her up will tell her."

"Are you going to tell her about this afternoon…or do I?"

"Why don't you tell her? It will be a good test of how well she's maturing and learning to share. And I think she'll take it better from you. If she accepts my new role in your life, that's an indication that she's making progress."

"I met a copy of D'Anna on Caprica when she interviewed Laura. She's a reporter. She wasn't trying to kill herself all the time. I don't remember her mentioning religion at all. She was sophisticated and smart. She actually enjoyed a good glass of wine so all of you aren't teetotalers."

"We have a copy similar to that here, several of them in fact. I thought I had explained it to you. There are many copies of each model. Just because we look alike doesn't mean we all act or think alike. We've been evolving on this planet for over ten years. We've been interacting with the humans here for over five. There's a great deal of diversity now. Some of us have begun to cherish our individuality, those little quirks that make us different from each other."

"Then how do you justify what they're doing to D'Anna at the lab? Frakking with her programming, changing her personality and her beliefs to suit somebody else's idea of what she should be like?"

"It's for her own good."

"Who are the rest of you to decide that for _her_?"

"Do you think she was better off when she was killing herself because of her fanatic desire to see God? Do you believe that's what God wants her to do? Do you think we should just write her off, box her and be done with it or should we continue trying to help her find another path, a less radical one?"

John uncorked the bottle and poured another glass of wine. "I don't know what the hell to think. This whole downloading concept is beyond bizarre to me. If a human kills herself…that's it. There are no second chances."

"And yet humans do it."

"I know. My mother did it."

Sonja was surprised. "Why? Did she also want to see God?"

"God had nothing to do with it. My dad and my brothers died in a storm when I was fourteen. His fishing trawler went down. He took my mom's heart with him. She killed herself less than a year later. She didn't want to live without him."

He saw Sonja's expression change and soften.

"The Ones believe that love is a weakness. They've even turned their backs on friendship."

"Is that what you believe?"

She dropped her eyes. "The Ones are wrong about other things. I think they're wrong about that, too."

They sat in silence for a long time. Four glasses of wine had mellowed him. He watched the setting sun turn the fountain to gold and the spray of water to diamonds.

Finally she said, "Finish your sandwich. Mr. Doolittle made us some apple tarts for desert. I won't ask you any more questions today. If we sit here until twilight, we should be able to see a meteor shower. I think of our ancient prophet every time I see those bits of heavenly fire. Azurra said that God sent her a sign in a _rain of blazing stars_."

"When I was a kid we used to watch meteor showers over the ocean. We called them _falling stars_. My mother would always make a wish on them. She would say, _Fair winds and following seas, _and then she'd turn to my dad and say, _Come home safely to me._ That's all he wanted, too. He wanted to come home to her. When I was a kid, I thought I'd follow in my dad's footsteps. I never dreamed that I'd sail a different kind of ocean. I never dreamed I'd sail millions of miles on an ocean filled with stars."

"But you still want to go home to the woman you love."

"Some things never change, Sonja. I still want to go home to the woman I love."

_..._

As Hunter's grandfather and Celia slowly made their way back toward their dwelling, Narcho walked up the path to Kara. Targa and Beck followed him. She had never seen him look so relieved.

"I thought we were history. When that skinjob came up to me, I thought I was a few seconds away from being a Cylon prisoner…or dead."

"Me too. I just knew Leoben was going to recognize me. I think if he'd looked at me any longer, he would have."

"Maybe not," Targa said. "The canister frakked up his brain. It ain't like a centurion brain, but Markham says it ain't like a human brain, either."

Beck added. "Markham should know. We brought him a dead skinjob a few years back. He dissected it."

"Leoben remembered there were two of us and that we were wearing Colonial flight suits. He remembered my hair is blond. Your canister didn't erase all of his memories."

"But he didn't remember enough to say for sure, either."

Narcho grinned. "You really do look like a valley woman in that outfit. And holding that baby…you almost had _me_ convinced…_mom_."

Kara snorted. "Keep talking and I'm going to hurt you." She took a clothespin out of the apron pocket and handed it to Beck. "Seléne needs some more of these. I know you carve stuff out of wood. She's too proud to ask you so I'm asking you if you'll make some for her."

Beck took the clothespin, looked it over and nodded. He and Targa looked at each other and then toward Seléne's dwelling. Beck said to Targa, "I dare you to call him _Daddy_."

Emmalyn grabbed his arm and shook him. "Don't you _dare_ tease him about his child. You'll never eat at my table again if you say one word to him. Think about _that_ before you open your big mouth."

"Sorry, Em," he mumbled. Jostling each other and laughing the two men headed toward their dwelling and after shrugging and giving Kara another grin, Narcho followed them.

"They're my brothers," Emmalyn said to Kara, "but sometimes I want to slap both of them. Maybe a break from the forest will be good for them. I guess when you live on the edge of death for weeks at a time, you learn to joke about everything. Come back to the dwelling. I'll make us some tea. I'm sure you could use a cup."

"I've got to finish putting diapers on the line first."

Kara slowly walked to Seléne's dwelling and finished hanging the diapers. The rush of adrenalin was gone. She felt shaky and nauseous. She'd come here to find her father and now she was stuck in this valley until the gods only knew when. She took off the apron and put it in the empty basket and took it back to the door. Hunter was sitting in the rocking chair with both Dessa and Seléne hovering over him. Esmari was no longer wailing. Kara put the basket inside the door and left. She would thank Seléne later for standing up to Leoben for her.

Back at Emmalyn's she sat down at the table. Emmalyn put a cup of the strange tea in front of her and stirred a spoonful of honey into it. Kara drank. She began to feel better.

"It's not fair…them being able to come here in their ships and threaten everybody like they did."

"I know, child. It's never been fair, but there's nothing we can do about it. We accept it and keep on with our lives. At least we're not their slaves like the people in the settlements."

"Maybe one day nobody will be their slaves and you won't have to worry about them any longer."

Emmalyn's smile was sad. "That's a nice thought, but we've always known they could destroy us if they wanted. I try not to think about it."

"Why didn't someone give me and Narcho up? Why did everybody protect us?"

"Every single person in this valley has lost loved ones to the Cylons. They wouldn't give Cavil a drink of water if he was dying of thirst. And we all know he was lying about not harming anyone. If someone had given you away, he would have taken you and killed the rest of us for harboring you. Our chances were better if we said nothing."

"Narch and I owe everyone for what they did."

"You'll get a chance to thank them. We're going to have a meeting tomorrow evening for everyone in the valley who wants to attend. You'll get to properly meet our people."

"Even Markham?"

"No, not him. He lives in the remains of the _Hyperion._ He never comes to our meetings. I'm sure he'd like to talk to you and your copilot and see that fancy little computer you brought with you, but I wouldn't advise going to look for him without Hunter. Markham is very eccentric and very paranoid."

"What does he do down there?"

"He invents things like the canister our men use on the centurions. He's a genius, but he's more than a little odd. His parents were original mission members, brilliant but strange. They never moved out of the ship. They're dead now, his dad over twenty years, his mum, ten or more. Markham is a few years older than me. His inventions have saved the lives of our men countless times. As far as I know, Hunter's father and grandfather and now Hunter are the only ones he's talked to in years."

The thought finally emerged that had been buzzing around the edge of Kara's consciousness. "I didn't see Daniel while Cavil was here. How did he get missed in the roundup?"

"He was probably down along the creek. The bloodroot is blooming this time of year. There's a meadow on the other side of the creek where false indigo grows. It's blooming now, too, like a lot of other wildflowers he uses to make his colors. Or he may be out painting somewhere. Daniel doesn't spend much time indoors on nice days."

"How do I get to the creek? I'd like to talk to him."

"Go up the path to the bottom of the wooden steps and turn left. Follow that path. It's at least half a mile, maybe farther down to the creek. He could be anywhere along it. The biggest patch of bloodroot is upstream nearly a mile. Half a mile beyond that is a footbridge. You can cross the creek there to get to the meadow."

Kara stood. "Where does Daniel live?"

"Just beyond Hunter's grandfather and Celia. Daniel helps her with cleaning. In return he eats with them. It's a good thing he wasn't here when the Cylons came. It upsets him to even talk about them. I can't imagine what seeing them and their centurions would have done to him."

"Maybe it would have jogged his memory."

"Or sent him over the edge. Celia told me that he still has nightmares."

"Maybe that means his memory is coming back. Maybe I'll ask him a couple of questions."

"Don't push him. He's been through so much."

"I'm sure the last four months haven't been a picnic for my father either. If Daniel has been at the prison, I want to talk to him about it."

"He couldn't have escaped from the prison. No one could have made it that distance. The prison is hundreds of miles from here on top of a high plateau."

"I know. I saw it when I flew my recon missions. Daniel probably escaped from the city, but he might have been at the prison before that. Hunter told me some men are taken to the city and why. I think that's where my dad is now. Daniel might know something about the layout of the city."

"It makes no difference now, child. You can't leave the valley. No one can."

At the door Kara turned. "Everything I can learn might help someday. And while I'm stuck here, I want to earn my keep."

Emmalyn smiled. "I'm sure we can find something for you to do."

"I'm not very domestic, but I know a little bit about gardening."

"And shooting rabbits with a slingshot?"

"That, too. And fishing."

"We can use all of those skills. I'll even teach you how to knit. The evenings go faster with something in your hands."

Kara rolled her eyes. "Does Hunter knit? Or Targa or Beck?"

"They don't knit, but all of them know how to use a drop spindle and create yarn from goat's hair or sheep's wool. I'll let one of them show you how if that's more to your liking. The sheep are being sheared now. Once the wool is washed and carded, it'll be time to start spinning. It takes a long time to spin enough yarn to knit one sweater."

As she walked up the path to the base of the wooden steps, Kara smiled at the thought of the three men spinning yarn. That was something she wanted to see. She looked up. The entrance to the mostly-buried and vegetation-covered _Hyperion _was well concealed. The top of the wooden steps looked like nothing but an observation platform set against the rock.

She hesitated only a few seconds and then turned left. She followed the path down a steep incline and into the woods. The cool deep shade of evergreens and newly-leafed deciduous trees engulfed her. There were rhododendrons blooming beside the path, their pinkish-white flowers glowed against their dark green foliage. She was reminded of what a beautiful and peaceful place the valley was. If only the inhabitants didn't have to deal with the Cylons. As she walked along, she wondered how long Cavil would keep Hunter and his men out of the forest. She wondered how long it would be before she could get back to her ship.

She reached the creek. It was running high, swelled with snowmelt from the higher elevations, the water churning and swirling close to the top of the bank. Many miles beyond this creek a river cascaded down from the mountains and eventually powered the Cylon electrical plant at the base of their dam near where Daniel had been found.

The path split and went upstream and down. Emmalyn had said the bloodroot was upstream. Kara turned left and began walking. She met Daniel before she got to the footbridge. He was carrying a large cloth sack over his shoulder.

"Hi," Kara said.

He studied her. "You look different dressed like that."

She grinned. "You think?"

He reached over and took her chin and gently tilted her face at various angles while he studied her. "You're really quite beautiful. I'd like to paint you."

She thought of the print of _Posiden's Daughter_ that she had given Lee for his birthday the previous year. The sea nymph was naked in the waves.

"Paint me…like how?"

"Your portrait. In your flight suit or in something more…feminine such as you're wearing now. You could choose."

"I've already got enough pictures of me in my flight suit and in my uniform, too."

"You've had your portrait done multiple times?"

"Pictures…photographs?"

Daniel looked puzzled for a moment and then brightened. "Like the pictures in a book?"

"The kind you take with a camera. What's in the sack?"

"Herbs and flowers for my paints. A bit of clay I'm going to try to extract pigment from. What are you doing down here?"

They began walking back the way she had come. "Trying to find you. Some Cylons came to the valley this morning. They were looking for me and my copilot. The one Targa killed the other day didn't recognize us. He said the canister thing messed up its brain, but maybe we were just lucky."

"Cylons came here? How?"

"In Heavy Raiders. But they're gone now. I don't think they'll be back."

They walked in silence for a while. "You're sure they're gone?"

"I saw their ships leave. They told Hunter that no one could leave the valley until they're through searching the forest for us and our ship so my copilot and I are stuck here for a while."

They walked in silence again until Daniel said, "I remember a dark place, dim lights, dampness on concrete walls, the dank smell of mildew. I was running…for miles and miles. There was someone close behind me."

"With you or chasing you?"

"With me for a long time and then we were being chased by centurions." His eyes glazed. He stopped and began to hyperventilate.

Kara grabbed his arms and shook him. "You're not back there in that tunnel. You're out here in the woods. Nobody is chasing you."

Daniel sat down on a tree trunk that lay beside the path. He had begun sweating profusely and blotted his forehead with his sleeve. "Her name was Lucy. I was their prisoner and she helped me escape. They killed her…shot her. I was holding her. She touched my face…and then she died. There was so much blood. I was covered in her blood."

"The centurions shot her?"

"Someone gave them the order to shoot us. I remember voices. Centurions don't speak."

"Men's or women's voices?"

"A man's, but he wasn't alone. There were other voices. They were arguing and then a centurion pulled Lucy from my arms and threw her into the water. I think another one threw me into the water. Maybe he shot me first."

"The water at the base of the dam?"

"Yes. I don't remember anything after that until I woke up at Emmalyn's with my head bandaged." He pushed the brown curls back and showed Kara the circular scar at the end of the thin white line across his forehead. "A bullet had lodged in my skull. Emmalyn cut it out. She saved my life."

"Where were you before you were in the tunnel?"

He shook his head.

"Daniel, please," Kara said. "It's really important for you to try to remember. Were you ever at the prison?"

"I don't know."

"Were you in the city? How did you get to the tunnel?"

"Lucy was there. From the beginning Lucy was there with me. She helped me. I think I was in her room."

"Were you on one of the ships that was taken five years ago?"

"I don't remember being on a ship. I remember a white room with windows and trees outside. That's all I remember before being with Lucy."

The Leoben on Caprica had also eventually remembered a room with windows and trees outside. "What happened in that room?"

Daniel shook his head again. "It hurts. It hurts to try to remember that room. I've tried. The more I try, the worse the pain gets."

Kara knew it wouldn't do any good to keep pushing Daniel to remember anything about his beginnings. Whoever had created the humanoid Cylons had done a good job of blocking those memories. The question in her mind now was whether or not Daniel had realized what he was. Leoben hadn't remembered at first and neither had Boomer, but eventually they had.

"Come on," Kara said. "Let's go back to the camp. I'll make some tea and you can show me your paintings. I have a book of poetry with me if you'd like to borrow it. Kataris. He's a…"

"Colonial poet. His most famous poem is _Whisper the Rainbow_. I'm not sure how I know that. I must have studied him. I'm not sure how I know a lot of things. I just know them."

They began walking up the path. "Where did you go to school?" Kara asked.

"Lucy told me that I was home schooled."

"How old are you?"

"I'm thirty-two, I think."

"Do you remember where you were born… what planet?"

"No." They were almost to the place where the paths joined when Daniel stopped and put his hand on her arm. "You think I'm one of them, don't you?"

Kara held the gaze of his gentle brown eyes, more golden in the sunlight, darker down here in the deep shade. His eyes were now filled with anguish.

"Yes," she finally answered.

He dropped his hand and his eyes at the same time. "I think so, too."

"How long have you known?"

"Months. Maybe a year. Everything started coming back to me in dreams."

"I know two of you back on Caprica. One was my roommate at the Academy. She started remembering in dreams. The other one remembered a white room with windows and trees just like you do."

"Are you going to tell the people in this valley about me?"

"No. You've lived as one of them for a couple of years. I think you're the only one left like you. I think you're their Number Seven, the one nobody knows anything about. If the centurions were chasing you and tried to kill you, then we should protect you."

"You're the only one who feels that way. I know how the others in base camp feel about those like me. _Skinjobs_. That's what they call us. They'd kill me if they knew."

"Probably," Kara admitted.

"All I want to do is paint and compose music and write. I don't want to hurt anyone. I just want to live in peace with the people who saved my life."

"I understand. I have two fathers. It's a long story and I'll tell you sometime, but one of my fathers is a musician and a composer. I have some of his songs on a handheld computer I brought with me. Would you like to hear them?"

"I've love to."

Kara smiled. "I think you'll appreciate them. There's one called _Diaspora_. He wrote it when I was eight years old, right after he left my mom and me. It's sad but it's one of my favorites. It means…"

"Scattering. People who have left their homeland. Like the people in this valley."

"Like the humans from Kobol. When I hear it, I always think about leaves falling in the autumn…about winter coming."

"I think you're a bit of a romantic, Kara. You know your name is a variation of _Kore_ which is how some people refer to _Persephone_. You've come to us as spring is returning to the valley. It's hard not to see the romanticism or the symbolism of that."

Kara grinned. "I'm a pilot, Daniel, a total tomboy. I'm not romantic or the goddess of spring or _anything_ like that."

He brightened. "But that's how I see you and that's how I'll paint you. We'll take down your hair from the braid. I'll weave a garland of flowers. I know how I'm going to pose you, with a classic drape, your shoulders bare."

"Slow down. I haven't said I'll pose for you yet."

"What woman doesn't want to be immortalized on canvas?"

"Maybe I'll say _yes_ if you can remember something about the city. If you came through the tunnel at the dam, then you came from the city. I think my father might be there. I want to know about the city."

"I'll try, Kara. I'll really try, but I don't think Lucy and I were in the city for very long."

"You try to remember and I'll think about letting you paint my picture."

They began walking up the steep part of the path. Daniel was a gentle dreamer, an artist and a composer. He wanted to create, not destroy. He would never have agreed to the destruction of humanity. Maybe that's why the other Cylons had tried to kill him, to eradicate him before his ideas could infect them.

Already Kara felt a kinship with this odd Cylon. Maybe it was because he reminded her of Dreilide or maybe because he knew of the poet Kataris or maybe because he understood something about her that she didn't even understand about herself. Maybe he understood the crazy part of her that would put all her faith in an Oracle's words and a physicist's guess and commit a crime to find the father she loved.

_..._

"Nothing happened," Kendra said as she and Lee were on their way to the mess hall for breakfast.

"I didn't say it did. In fact, I haven't said anything at all."

"It was more the way you looked at me."

"How was that?"

"Never mind. Dwight Saunders is a nice guy. I like him."

"Kendra," Lee said with irritation clearly evident in his voice, "what you and Saunders do is your business. It's not my concern."

They walked in silence the rest of the way. As they started through the line with their trays, Kendra said, "Crashdown is going with us today as our ECO."

"What?"

"That's what he said last night. He said he couldn't believe you thought Commander Cain would let you take one of her Raptors down to the surface of the planet without an ECO, especially since we don't know exactly where we're going."

"That's great."

"You've got something against Crashdown going with us?"

"No. I just…never mind. Commander Cain is right. We should have an ECO. He's the backup pilot, too, since you can't fly a Raptor."

"I didn't go to flight school like your girlfriend so quit comparing me to her."

"What the hell is _that_ supposed to mean?"

"I just think you compare every woman to her and naturally most of us are going to come up short in some areas and…"

"I think we need to start this day over and quit sniping at each other. We've got a job to do. Let's do it and keep the personal stuff out of it."

"That's fine with me, Lee."

He didn't even look around when he exited the serving line. He went to the first available table and sat. Kendra followed him.

"Don't you want to sit with the others?"

"You go ahead. I'm not much in the mood to talk right now."

She turned and went to the table where Saunders and Quartararo were sitting. Five minutes later Maggie Edmondson sat down across from him.

His surprise must have shown because she said, "If it comes down to a choice between eating breakfast with you or Karl, I'll take you. Besides, you look so lonely over here all by yourself."

"I really appreciate you taking pity on me," he said.

"Problems with your…whatever she is?"

"I introduced you a couple of days ago. Her name is Kendra. She and I are the liaison officers for this mission."

"Half the pilots are making bets on how long it will take Flat Top to get your fellow liaison officer in his bunk. I'd ask if you want in on the bet, but you might have inside information."

"Frak," Lee said angrily. "Don't you have anything better to do with your time?"

"Like sit around and talk about the total destruction of Picon by Karl's in-laws?"

"Give it a rest, Maggie."

"He's married to a frakking Cylon. What do you expect, Lee?"

"You know what I expect," he said angrily, "what I expect is to be able to sit here and eat my breakfast in peace before it gets cold."

"Karl and Sharon have got you just as snowed as they do your girlfriend. It's too bad you're not more like Zak and your father. At least they understand who the enemy is."

Without another word she got up, picked up her tray and walked to the other side of the mess hall where she sat down with Felix Gaeta and several of the communication officers.

Lee popped open a small container of cream and stirred it into his coffee before he took the folded maps of Tauron's northern provinces out of his pocket. He smoothed the top one out and studied it. The first province they were going to visit was also the smallest with a population of roughly three thousand people. The provincial seat, the town of Lindeford, listed a population of four hundred sixty-three people. Kendra had printed this information in neat lettering on the side of the map. Lee wasn't sure where the voter registration lists would be kept, but he was sure there would be a police station or a sheriff's department. They would start there. He looked at the map again. Kendra had written the coordinates in very neat numbers beneath the dot on the map. She had done a good job researching the information. He had acted like a jerk that morning and he knew it.

He was silently berating himself when Quartararo got up from the table with the rest of the pilots and brought his cup of coffee over. He sat down.

"Kendra says you got a list of the places we're going."

Lee handed him the maps. "Kendra got the information. She did a good job."

"She's smart. Mind if I take these? I need to verify the coordinates and get them in the Raptor's computer. I'll see you on the flight deck in half an hour."

"Bring a heavy jacket if you've got one."

Crashdown grinned as he stood. "I won't need it. I'm going to sit in the ship with the heater running while you and Kendra do your thing."

"It's called emergency preparedness."

"Yeah, yeah, okay. I'm sure I can dig one up somewhere."

Less than an hour later Lee and Kendra had delivered the radiation reports from the drones to Captain Pontos and Dr. Nylund and were back on board the Raptor. Crashdown had put the coordinates of the first little town into the computer and once they had cleared the _Penelope's_ landing bay, Lee let the ship's autopilot handle their descent through the atmosphere. He had warned Kendra about the heat that would be generated and the way it would look in the cockpit, but the explanation was as much for his own benefit as it was for hers. Lee hadn't been on a ship entering a planet's atmosphere since the night of the fighting and his Viper had been hit. His descent that night had been a harrowing trip that could have proved fatal. Today's descent should be routine.

He found that at the beginning, though, he was holding his breath. He got himself under control. They weren't coming down nearly as rapidly or as steeply as he had the night he'd had to eject almost eleven miles up.

He heard Crashdown's voice in his helmet radio. "Looking good. We're almost through the worst part. Get ready to resume control of the ship. Counting down. Three. Two. One. It's all yours."

Their atmospheric entry point brought them in far above the clouds that shrouded the planet's northern surface. The two main cities, the capital of Hypatia and Tauron City, both destroyed by Cylon nukes, were far to the south. Lee kept vigilantly to their northern trajectory as they descended.

"You're too far north," Crashdown said. "Turn southwest to heading two two eight."

Lee looked at the screens and gauges in front of him. Quartarato was right. He banked the Raptor and matched the glide path with the computer reading. They entered a dense cloud cover.

Crashdown said, "We got mountains coming up. Stay above ten thousand feet until you're right on top of our coordinates."

Lee decreased the Raptor's speed and watched his gauges until they reached the designated numbers. He began a slow vertical descent. They didn't break through the cloud cover until they were barely a thousand feet above the surface. Below him was a dense evergreen forest that was still patchily covered with snow.

"Check those coordinates," Lee almost barked. "There's no town here."

"I verified everything. We should be right on top of it."

Lee banked in a tight circle. As he was halfway through the turn, the forest opened into a wide expanse of flat, snow-covered ground and a number of small buildings. Even from their altitude, Lee could tell that something didn't look right. The roads were covered with drifted snow. No smoke issued from the chimneys. There wasn't a single vehicle in sight. He flew over the buildings.

"Check the infrared," he said to Crashdown.

"Already on it. Nothing. We should be picking up heat from those chimneys. I'm getting nothing, no temperature gradients"

"What does that mean?" Kendra asked.

"It looks like the town is deserted," Lee answered as he circled again.

"So on to the next one." Quartararo said. "I'll put the coordinates in."

"Not yet," Lee said.

Kendra echoed, "Yeah, Crash, not so fast."

"You're going to try to land here anyway? Why?"

Lee tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice. "Just because there aren't any people here doesn't mean the information we're looking for is gone."

"What's the big deal to get a frakking list with a couple hundred peoples' names on it?"

"A couple thousand for this province," Kendra said. "I agree with Lee. We're here. We should at least land and make the effort."

"I don't frakking believe you two. What are you going to do…search every building?"

Kendra said, "Voter registration records should be kept at the courthouse or a government building or a sheriff's office. Even a town this small should have a sheriff's office."

"We take an hour," Lee said. "If we don't find anything, we move on to the next town."

"You're crazy. Just because the people are gone doesn't mean they didn't lock the doors. I think what you're considering is called _breaking and entering _not to mention _stealing_."

"Hey, Crashdown, chill out," Kendra said. "You can sit here in the nice warm Raptor. Lee and I are the ones who were given orders to get the lists. We need to be able to say we honestly tried. And we're not going to steal the lists. We're going to scan them into Lee's computer. We'll put them back when we're through."

"The snow is probably ass-deep down there."

"Then help me find a place to put this ship down that's close to the center of town."

They settled on a vacant lot between two buildings that might have served as a parking lot but was now empty. Lee brought the Raptor straight down. Quartararo was half right about the depth of the snow. Lee could see as the Raptor's heat melted through it that it was at least knee deep, but the surface had frozen and thawed enough times that it was ice in most places. He held the Raptor steady until the hot prop wash had cleared an area several feet wide around the ship before he finally touched down on the ground. The parking lot hadn't even been paved. It was dirt and gravel or now mud and gravel.

They removed their helmets. Lee pressed the control to raise the door. The cold air quickly invaded the cabin. They grabbed their warm jackets.

"Hurry up," Quartararo said. "I'll be waiting."

"One hour," Lee said. "If we're not back, come looking for us."

The Raptor door descended. He and Kendra put on the heavy jackets and pulled up the hoods. They gingerly crossed the icy snow until they got to the street. The crust held. They both looked up the street and then down.

"Which way?" He asked.

Kendra pointed to the right. "That looks like the center of town."

Most of the buildings had wide porches or awnings that protected the doorways from an accumulation of snow, but several of the awnings had collapsed under the weight of several seasons of snow.

"I don't think anybody has lived here for a long time," Lee said. "I wonder why the government clerk you talked to in Quanniq didn't know."

"That's a good question. Maybe it would be better if we walked down the middle of the street instead of under those collapsing awnings."

"I agree."

They slipped and slid their way across the icy snow and began making their way up the street. They passed a café, a general store, a bar and grill and a small gun shop that was empty of all its weapons. The partially collapsed awning of the general store had broken the front window. The inside looked ransacked.

"I don't like the looks of that," Lee said.

"Hungry people looking for food." Kendra ventured.

"You think these people starved to death?"

"I don't know. That's not a pretty thought. I don't see any vehicles, though. Maybe they packed up and went to one of the larger towns."

"Let's hope," Lee said. "Hey, look. The sheriff's department."

The building was gray concrete as were many of the other structures, but instead of being one story tall, it was two. The top floor must have housed the jail because several of the snow-crusted windows had heavy bars on them. The protective awning was steep enough that the snow had slid off and accumulated in a pile that reached almost to the edge of the metal. Lee and Kendra inched their way carefully behind the snow. The front door stood half open, frozen in a track of ice. The interior was as cold as the outside, but it was also dark except for the small area just inside the door.

They squeezed inside. "Something stinks," Kendra said.

"I don't smell anything. It's just the cold. Why? What do you smell?"

"Like a toilet overflowed or somebody peed on the floor."

"The jail is above us. Maybe the pipes froze and broke."

"Oh, gross."

Kendra took a flashlight out of her jacket pocket and shone it on the ceiling. Lee had not thought to bring one. There was no evidence of water stains or anything else above them. She shone it around the walls. There was a reception desk on one side of the area with a closed door beside it. On the other side stairs went up and also down. A large woodstove sat on a brick base in the center of the room. Wooden benches sat against the front wall.

"This is creepy," Kendra said. "Let's do a quick look and then get out of here."

"That gets my vote."

The door behind the reception desk was locked. Kendra began pulling open desk drawers and produced a key. "Try this."

Lee turned the key and the door swung open. Kendra shone the light around what had been the sheriff's office. There was a small desk, a coffee maker and a copy machine. Behind the desk was a huge topographical wall map of the province. A small pot-bellied stove sat in one corner. There was no file cabinet.

"I'll bet the files were kept either upstairs or downstairs in the basement."

"After you," Kendra said. She pulled the door shut behind them and shone the light toward the stairs.

Halfway there Lee tripped on something and almost fell. "Shine the light at my feet." The beam revealed a tubular lump in the powdery snow that had drifted over the floor. He squatted and brushed the snow away. "Oh, frak."

"What?"

"It's a long piece of bone like a thigh bone or something."

Kendra shone the light around the snowy floor. "Animal tracks. Big ones. Dogs or wolves. A lot of them."

"I think we need to forget the lists and get the hell out of here."

"You're right. Let's go."

They both heard the sound at the same time, a low guttural growl that made the hair on the back of Lee's neck stand up. Kendra swung the light in the direction of the door leading outside. There were six of them, big and shaggy and gaunt.

"Holy mother of the gods!" Kendra gasped.

"Back to the sheriff's office," Lee said. "Slow. Keep the light on them."

He could tell Kendra was shaking by the way the beam of light danced around. The big alpha wolf crept forward, its teeth bared, its eyes reflecting the light in an eerie, ghostly glow.

Behind him he heard the doorknob rattle and then Kendra's half sob. "Oh, frak, Lee. It locked when I shut it."

TBC…


	16. The Wolf at the Door

Chapter 16

The Wolf at the Door

_Eons have passed on Kobol. Mankind has multiplied and spread across__  
__All the lands and seas to the far reaches of the planet. Some have turned__  
__Their eyes to the stars and dream of future worlds to inhabit or conquer._

_Some have turned away from Olympus and the old gods and have__  
__Begun to worship a Creator who has no face and no form, no jealousies,__  
__And no mortal appetites. Who is omniscient and all powerful.__  
__Who always was and always will be. The Infinite and Immeasurable.__  
__The Alpha and Omega. Mother and Father. Demanding and Forgiving. _

_These followers of God have become the outcast, the persecuted__  
__And have banded together from across Kobol, from all walks of life.__  
__They call themselves the Thirteenth Tribe in homage to the Twelve__  
__Who have rejected them. They persist in the worship of their Holy One._

_And when travel among the stars becomes a reality, they leave Kobol__  
__In search of a distant planet where they may worship in peace,__  
__They leave Kobol to the Twelve and go in search of a place to call home,__  
__A green and fertile world that a prophet of their tribe has foretold._

Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

_._

"The key's in my right jacket pocket," Lee said to Kendra. "Give me the flashlight."

He felt Kendra groping in his pocket. "Got it," she said.

He reached back and she put the flashlight into his hand. He kept the beam pointed at the big alpha wolf. It had crept over halfway across the room now. The others had spread out waiting for their leader to make his move. Lee knew what would happen if either he or Kendra went down. The whole pack would be on them in seconds.

He could hear Kendra trying to fit the key into the lock. "Be careful," he said. "Don't drop it."

"Got it."

He heard the door swing open. He pushed Kendra inside the sheriff's office and slammed the door behind him. The big wolf hit the door a second later, but the lock held. Lee could tell that they were all pawing at the door. He heard snarling and whining. The door rattled.

"Help me," he said to Kendra. He put the flashlight on the sheriff's desk and grabbed one side. Kendra grabbed the other. Together they managed to manhandle the heavy desk across the carpet and against the door.

There was more scratching and pawing on the other side of the door and then a brief yelp as one of the wolves turned on another.

"What are we going to do?" Kendra panted.

"Let's let's think about this logically."

Lee realized that he was out of breath, too. It was futile to think of trying to get through the pack of wolves and reach the outside. There was no doubt in his mind about what would happen to them if they tried.

"This was so stupid," Kendra said angrily. "I can't believe either one of us thought a voter registration list could have been worth it. Crash was right. We should have gone on to the next town and forgotten about this one."

"We should have brought some communication devices so we could have told Quartararo what was going on, but we didn't do that either. And we left our weapons back in the Raptor. Commander Cain is going to chew our butts out for this."

"You mean if the wolves leave anything for her to chew."

"We're going to get out of here and back to the ship," Lee said with conviction.

"How? The sheriff didn't happen to leave a couple of shotguns hanging on the wall for us."

Lee took a deep breath and looked around. The room had two narrow horizontal windows about five feet off the floor that overlooked the alley between the government building and the empty gun shop next door. Almost no light filtered through the windows because they were covered with a thick layer of frozen snow.

"Here's what I think. We break the windows and crawl out and make a run for the ship."

"We'll never make it," Kendra said. "Wolves are like dogs. Didn't you have a dog when you were growing up?"

"We never had any pets…unless you count the fish in my mother's koi pond."

"My mother had a whole string of little frou-frou dogs so I know. I could open a pack of chips in my bedroom and the little beggars would be there in two seconds. Their senses of smell and hearing are phenomenal. Those wolves will be on us before we get out of the alley."

Lee began to shine the flashlight around the walls. "We need something to use as a weapon. Help me look around."

"There're some thumbtacks on the bulletin board."

"That's funny, Kendra. Try again."

"We should have brought our sidearms."

"Who was it told me that we don't want to go armed into towns that hate the military?"

"Okay," Kendra said angrily, "I made a mistake. So throw me to the wolves."

Lee took a deep breath. "Let's check the desk drawers. I doubt the sheriff left any kind of weapon behind, but it won't hurt to look."

The only possible weapons they found in any of the drawers were a pair of scissors and a screwdriver. Kendra put them on the desk.

"What do you think that bone was you tripped over? Human?"

"I think it was too big to be human. Maybe a moose or an elk or something. I don't know anything about the wildlife on Tauron."

Lee began to move the beam of the flashlight around the room.

"Whoa," Kendra said. "Back up." Lee reversed the direction of the beam. It revealed a wooden coat rack standing in the corner. "That's got some possibilities."

"Definite possibilities." They walked over and examined the coat rack. It was a square wooden post six-feet tall that had four coat hooks on each side near the top. A heavy plaid wool shirt hung from one of them, a bright yellow rain slicker from another. Kendra removed the shirt and slicker and put them on the desk. She knelt and looked at the bottom of the rack.

"Shine the light down here."

Lee knelt beside her. Together they examined the bottom of the coat rack. The wooden post was fastened to a large heavy square of wood.

"It would be better if we could get if off the base," Lee said. "It would be easier to swing it around."

"We need fire. Wild animals are afraid of fire."

"So what are you suggesting?" Lee asked. "We set the coat rack on fire?"

Kendra began to pace. "I'm thinking. We've got the little woodstove in here. I saw matches in one of the desk drawers. There's split wood in that box in the corner. We need wire to fasten a couple pieces of wood to the top of the coat rack. It'll make the mother of all torches."

Lee went back to the desk and pulled open the drawers again. "No wire."

"What about the cord to that coffeemaker?"

"The wire inside is too thin. The fire will burn through the insulation and then the wire, but it'll help. Get the one from the copy machine, too. It's thicker."

Kendra unplugged the cords and cut them with the scissors while Lee began unscrewing the L-shaped brackets that fastened the coat rack to its base.

Kendra laid the severed cords on the desk and lifted a large picture of former President Richard Adar off the wall. The picture beside it was Perah Enyeto, Tauron's elected delegate to the Quorum of Twelve who had been home in Hypatia and had presumably died when the Cylons nuked the city.

"More wire," she said, looking at the backs of the pictures. She began untwisting it.

"When you're done, start building a fire in the wood stove. Pull that map down. It'll burn. I think I saw some copy paper in one of those drawers."

Lee continued unscrewing the L-brackets. Kendra tore the map down from the bulletin board. She opened the woodstove door, crumpled the map and shoved it inside. Then she started on the copy paper.

Lee turned the coat rack on its side to finish removing the base. "Kindling on top of the paper," he said.

"I've built a fire before, Lee."

He snorted. "At your fancy boarding school?"

"In one of our fancy fireplaces at home. My mother's fancy fireplaces. Same principle…paper, kindling, heavier stuff."

"Make sure the flue is open. The handle on the stovepipe. Turn it straight up."

Kendra did what he said then took matches out of the desk drawer. The paper caught immediately. The kindling began to crackle. Lee got the second piece of wire from the picture frame and twisted it together with the other one. He selected two medium pieces of firewood. All the wood was very dry. It shouldn't take long to catch fire and start burning.

"Help me with this," Lee said. Kendra held the wood while Lee wrapped the wire around it. Then he wrapped and tied the two electrical cords in knots. "This won't hold forever. We need to get out of here the minute it starts burning good." Lee put the end of the coat rack into the mouth of the stove. He moved the coffee maker to the floor and got Kendra to help him drag the small table over under the window.

"So who goes out the window first?" Kendra asked.

"I do. You hand me the coat rack and then you follow me out. We go up the alley and down the street as fast as we can."

"We're coming up on forty-five minutes," Kendra said as she looked at her watch. "If Crashdown is on time, he'll leave the Raptor to come look for us in fifteen minutes."

"Not good. We need to be out of here before then."

Lee stuck the screwdriver in his pocket, knelt and turned the coat rack in the stove. "Just a few more minutes. Look, Kendra, before we go out there, I just want to say I'm sorry I was in such a bad mood earlier this morning."

"Forget it. All we need to do right now is get out of here. We can talk later."

Lee picked up the heavy wooden block that had served as the base of the coat rack and used it to break out the narrow windows and push the glass out onto the ice and snow in the alley.

"Be careful crawling over the window sill. Don't get cut."

"I can handle it."

"The coat rack is heavy, especially with the logs wired on it. I'm going to put it across the window sill. All you need to do is hold this end to keep it from falling until I get outside."

Kendra stepped back. Lee put on his gloves and pulled the coat rack from the woodstove. He poked it through a broken window and Kendra held the end while Lee boosted himself over the other sill. He was only about four feet off the snow, but as he dropped, he broke through the crust and was almost hip deep in drift.

"Damn, hold on a minute. This is not good."

"Don't stop. Take the coat rack and keep going."

Lee grabbed the middle of the post, pulled it the rest of the way through the window and plowed ahead into the snow. It was harder than trying to walk in waist-deep water because the frozen snow didn't give much. By the time he was near the end of the alley, he was out of breath and sweating profusely. Carrying the heavy coat rack made it more difficult. He glanced back. Kendra was out the window and almost to him. She was carrying the heavy wooden base.

"It'll be easier when we get to the street," she said. "We should be able to get on top of the crust."

Lee stopped to catch his breath. "Don't run. If we fall, we're in trouble."

Kendra pushed around Lee and used the wooden square to break the surface of the snow. It wasn't long until she was breathing heavily, too. He knew swinging the heavy piece of wood was getting more difficult, but she kept at it until they were on the sidewalk. She managed to get on top of the crust. She helped him hold the coat rack as he joined her. She put her finger to her lips and then whispered. "Let's go."

The wolves were nowhere in sight. As they got to the entrance of the parking lot, they saw why. Quartararo had apparently decided to look for them before the hour was up. The pack had him down on the ground. He was curled in a fetal position using his arms to protect his face and neck.

Kendra didn't hesitate. Swinging the big block of wood, she waded into the middle of the pack and slammed a corner into the big wolf's head. Lee rushed forward with the coat rack and pushed it between two of the wolves. Snapping and snarling they backed away from the fire. Kendra swung again and caught one in the jaw. It yelped and also backed away. The wolf she had hit on the head was down, either unconscious or dead. Lee jabbed again and the last wolf backed off.

There was blood on the snow around Crashdown. "Try to get up." Lee said to him. "We've got to get to the ship."

He struggled to his knees and Kendra began dragging him toward the Raptor by the back of his flight suit. Lee kept swinging the coat rack at the wolves as he backed after Kendra. The wire broke and one of the flaming pieces flew off. Lee dropped it and helped Kendra get Crashdown into the ship. He activated the lever to shut the door and knelt beside Kendra.

"First aid kit," he said. Kendra pulled it off the wall. Blood was seeping out of multiple punctures in Quartararo's flight suit. Lee could tell he was in pain.

"Get us out of here and back to the _G_," he moaned.

"Do it," Kendra said. "I'll take care of him."

Lee didn't bother to put on his helmet or take off his heavy jacket. He jumped into the pilot's seat and took them straight up. The last sight he had of the ground showed the big wolf that Kendra had hit getting unsteadily to its feet and shaking its head.

As he blasted through the atmosphere in the Raptor, Lee contacted the _Galactica_. "This is Raptor six-three-six requesting emergency landing. Request medics standing by for an injured man."

He got confirmation for the emergency landing. "State nature of injury," the comm officer said.

"Wolf bites."

There was a moment of hesitation on the other end. "Say again, Raptor six-three-six."

"Wolf…bites," Lee repeated slowly.

There was another moment of silence. "Confirmed. Wolf bites."

Lee turned around. "How is he?"

Kendra had managed to get the top of Crashdown's flight suit off his arms. Blood was still oozing from puncture wounds over his arms. Kendra was pressing a large gauze pad to his upper right arm.

"This one's bad, but he's going to be okay."

"I'm really sorry about this," Lee said to Quartararo.

"Just get me to the _G_," he moaned again. "I think that big son of a bitch broke my wrist."

Kendra looked up at Lee. She didn't have to say anything. Lee knew they would both have to answer to Commander Cain for what had happened. She would probably chew off more than those wolves would have.

_..._

John didn't know if it was the wine he had drunk or seeing the meteorites that had burned their way through Nereid's atmosphere or everything else that had happened the day before, but the nightmare was vivid and felt real. He was back at the prison and the two big humans were dragging him down the hall toward that little gray room. He was awake before they made it to the door.

He lay in the dark sweating and telling himself that he wasn't at the prison any longer. But Sonja had threatened him with it if he didn't do what they wanted. He sat up and put his feet on the floor and his face in his hands. For a few moments he wished he had died in the explosion of the basestar like everyone on Caprica thought he had. He thought about Laura, about how much he wanted to put his arms around her and tell her he was sorry for what he had done.

He got up and went to the bathroom and washed his face with cold water. He didn't turn on the lights because he didn't want to see himself. He knew his eyes were bloodshot. He hadn't shaved for the last two days. As much as he had wanted to get outside, he found that he was dreading the trip to the temple because he didn't want to answer any more of Sonja's questions. He didn't even want to see her again. But getting outside was important in order to see what kind of transportation she had arranged for them. He would try to find out where the Cylons kept their vehicles. He hadn't seen any trucks or anything else as he and Sonja had walked to the city center the day before. But some of the buildings might have underground garages with entrances on other streets or there may be a central location where everything was parked. The only way he would find out would be to do a lot of walking around the city, and his ticket for getting out for walks was cooperating with Sonja.

Feeling sick he stood in the dark bathroom with his hands on the edge of the sink. Was getting out even worth it? He thought about getting dressed and riding the elevator down to the ground floor and walking out of the building. He wondered how long it would take a centurion to shoot him. Maybe they wouldn't shoot him but would stop him at the door and bring him back upstairs…and then Sonja would put two of them outside his apartment door again. He would lose the tiny bit of freedom to move around inside the building that he had gained.

He wondered how many centurions there were in the city. The only ones he had seen the day before had been the few patrolling around the buildings and in the park and at the center of the city. There was evidence of unfinished construction in all directions. The interior of the café where he and Sonja had sat was unfinished. Centurions usually did all the heavy work, but there were no centurions working on buildings yesterday. He wondered if the centurions had been pulled off the construction to do something else.

Sonja had kept her word the evening before. She hadn't continued interrogating him. Instead she had talked about the eight settlements on the planet, about what crops were grown in each one, from the tropical fruits and produce grown in the two southernmost settlements to the seasonal vegetables in the settlements closest to the city. She had mentioned the sheep and cattle farms.

John had asked her if she had visited all the settlements. She had smiled and said that she had on numerous occasions. She hadn't admitted that she had gone to each one looking for human men who were to her liking, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that had been at least one of her motives.

The only question she had asked him was if he wanted to go visit the two doctors who had saved his life. Of course he wanted to visit them. Sonja had said she would try to arrange it. He knew there had to be a catch. _No strings attached_ might have meant that she wouldn't expect him to sleep with her, but she had some other reason for doing it. She would expect something in return. He was certain of it.

John walked into the kitchen and looked at the clock on the microwave…3:47. He went back into the bedroom, and navigating only by moonlight, he found a t-shirt and sweatpants. He walked out onto the balcony and sat. The night was silent for a short time and then he heard the metallic clanking of footsteps twelve stories below as the two centurion sentinels made their circuit around the building. He sat until he got so cold that he began to shiver and finally went back inside. Shivering reminded him too much of the prison.

He didn't want to go back to the bedroom. He didn't want to get into bed and close his eyes because he was afraid that if he did, the two men would drag him into that little gray room and tie him to that chair and the real nightmare would begin. He lay down on the couch and thought about the bottle of whiskey. He thought about it for a long time, wondering what he would have to do to earn the next one, and finally decided not to open it yet. The moonlight moved across the floor and disappeared and still he didn't close his eyes.

There had been three separate meteor showers that night. The first two were fifteen minutes apart, the last one thirty minutes afterward. It had been the most impressive. At least a hundred chunks of space rock had entered the atmosphere, debris from some cosmic collision millions of years earlier. The smallest of the rocks had burned up in seconds, in less time than fireworks in the night sky, but three of the meteorites had been large enough that they had lasted longer, hurtling toward the surface of the planet in small bright arcs of fire. Whether they had ever reached the ground or had vaporized before impact had remained a mystery. They had disappeared behind the northern mountains.

Sonja had been quiet, distracted and deep in thought as they had walked back to their building afterward. As she got off the elevator, she hadn't even told him goodnight.

John shifted on the couch until he got comfortable. There was no sound in the dark apartment except the barely audible hum of the building's air handling system. He let his thoughts drift to the island and his family. He saw Laura running to meet him and then she was in his arms. He remembered everything about her, the way she felt against him, her soft skin, the citrus scent of her hair. Kara was smiling and holding his beautiful son. John put one arm around Laura and the other one around his daughter, and they began walking down the beach. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows on the sand. The waves washed over the shore. John let himself slip into the past, to the happiest time he had ever known, while he waited for the dawn of another day on Nereid.

_..._

Kara was as quiet during the evening meal as she had been during breakfast. After helping Dessa and Emmalyn clean up, she walked back to Seléne's dwelling to thank her for standing up to Leoben. Esmari was already asleep in her cradle. Seléne was sitting in the rocking chair in front of the fire. At first Kara thought she was asleep, but Seléne looked up and beckoned Kara inside. She pulled the straight-backed chair around until it was facing Seléne and sat.

"That was a brave thing you did…standing up to Leoben for me. Thank you."

Seléne nodded. "Mending," she said and gestured to a basket beside the chair. Kara could hear the weariness in her voice. "There's always something needs to be mended. Do you sew?"

Kara snickered softly. "No."

"How did a girl get to be your age without learning how to sew?"

"Things are a lot different on Caprica. All I can do is sew on buttons. At the Academy we had to keep our uniforms perfect. They had to have all the buttons sewn on nice and tight. I had to show my roommate how to do it."

She started to tell Seléne about inspections and how Lieutenant Shelley Sydell would have loved to have found a loose or missing button on her uniform, but Kara realized the Seléne would have no way of relating to a military inspection.

Seléne pointed to the table. "There's a few of Juliana's things. No point in me holding on to them. She was a mite shorter than you and a bit heavier, but…take them. Someone should get some use from them. It might as well be you since you're stuck here for a while. When you leave, you can give them to Dessa."

"Thank you. I can help you with your garden. I'm going rabbit hunting soon, too. I'll bring you one."

"You don't know how to sew, but you hunt rabbits?"

"I can skin and cook them, too."

"Then how is Caprica so different from here if you have to hunt rabbits?"

"I lived on a farm for a while. There was a garden full of vegetables...and rabbits. It was like it is here except…." Kara started to say _except we had electricity_ but once again realized that Seléne would have nothing to relate to it. The only ones in the valley who understood what it meant to have electricity were the few remaining original mission members.

"Never mind," Kara said. "You need to get some rest. I'll come back tomorrow. Thank you for the clothes."

"I hope you find your father," Seléne said.

By the time Kara got back to Emmalyn's, it was twilight. She put the clothes on the table. She and Emmalyn looked through them. Everything was clean but well worn. There were two pairs of pants, a skirt, a blouse, three pairs of knickers that had a draw string at the waist and something that looked like overalls. They were made of a thicker cloth. "For working in the garden," Emmalyn told her. "See the knees. They're reinforced with extra fabric."

Kara looked at the blouse. Unlike most of the blouses that she had seen in the valley, this one had a collar that was embroidered with small pink and yellow flowers and pale green leaves.

Emmalyn touched it gently. "Juliana liked to decorate her blouses. She was very skilled with a needle."

"Was she pretty?"

"Not so much as you, but pretty enough."

Kara carefully refolded everything, took them into the sleeping area and put them on her shelf. When she returned, she said, "I'm going to sit outside for a while. This was a crazy day. I need some time to be alone and think."

"I understand, child. It gets chilly fast after the sun goes down. Take my shawl." Emmalyn pointed to the row of wooden pegs behind the door.

Kara wrapped the wool shawl around her shoulders and went outside. There was a big tree stump near the path. She sat down on it, pulled her knees up and put her arms around them. For the first time since taking the Raider, she thought that she had made a mistake, a grave error of judgment that had now stranded her with no access to her ship. She could no longer imagine how she had ever thought she could find her father on this planet. She was lucky right now just to be alive.

She thought about Lee, about how disappointed he no doubt was with her. She wouldn't blame him if he broke up with her. She couldn't imagine him telling people, _My girlfriend is in jail. _If she made it back to Caprica, she would have to face Admiral Adama and Laura. How could she explain to them how miserably she had failed? Yet she wouldn't let go of the hope that somewhere on this planet her father was alive. Leoben had told her and Narcho that her father had been turned over to a Three. The thought of her father and D'Anna grossed her out so completely that she had to stop thinking about it.

For the second time that day she fought back tears. She had screwed up everything…her life, her career, her relationship with Lee. She tried to imagine being court-martialed and never being able to fly a Viper again. She wondered how much time she would have to spend in a military prison for stealing the Raider. She wondered what she would do afterward. Maybe Jack Fisk would hire her to do motorcycle deliveries again if she wasn't too old by the time she got out of jail. Maybe Narcho had the right idea. Maybe returning to Caprica was a stupid thing to do. Maybe she should stay in this valley and wait for whatever the Colonials did to Nereid.

The light had almost completely faded from the sky when she saw Hunter turn from the main path down toward the dwelling.

"Hi," she said.

He stopped. "What are you doing sitting out here alone?"

"Thinking about how bad I've frakked everything up."

"Move over."

Kara put her feet down and made room for him to sit on the stump. Their hips and legs and shoulders were touching but she didn't move. He was warm and even with the shawl she had begun to feel the chill of the evening.

"Thanks for pulling Leoben away from me today. He might have recognized me if he'd stared at me any longer. You saved my life again."

Hunter snorted. "Like you didn't save mine? I've never wanted to kill anybody so bad in my life."

"I owed you."

"You'd already paid that debt when you talked to Seléne."

"Let's just say we're even. Is she going to let you start seeing Esmari?"

"She said I could come by whenever I wanted."

"I'm going to help her with her garden. She doesn't look like she feels good."

"Emmalyn doesn't know if she's just tired from taking care of a baby and all the other things she has to do or if something else is wrong with her."

"Something else…like what?"

"Emmalyn doesn't know. She's not a doctor."

"Seléne gave me some of Juliana's clothes. Is it going to bother you if I wear them?"

"Why would it bother me?"

"I don't know. Maybe it would make you think about her."

Hunter took a deep breath. "I think about her anyway. Don't worry about it."

"I don't need to see anything to make me think about Lee. He's probably going to break up with me because of what I did."

"Why?"

"He won't understand why I did it. He would never break the law for any reason. He's an admiral's son. I betrayed his trust. Do I need to keep going?"

Hunter took a small flask from the pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. "You sound like you could use some of this. Markham's best stuff. It's a lot stronger than mead. He wants to meet you. I told him about your little computer. His eyes lit up like a torch."

Kara took the flask and turned it up. It reminded her of the drink her father mixed, Siren's Kiss, but without the peach aftertaste. She took a deep breath after she swallowed. She handed the flask back to him.

"Wow. You're not kidding. It is stronger than mead."

Hunter drank from the flask before he screwed the cap back on and put it back in his pocket. "I'm sorry you're stuck here, Wildcat. I know this wasn't in your plan."

"I didn't have much of a plan. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I believed that my father was with you. I guess I believed I'd find him, and I'd take him back with me. I realize now how stupid that was."

Hunter didn't say anything for a long time and then he said, "The best we can probably do is find out if your father is in the city. Maybe we can find out where he is. We might even be able to get a message to him once Cavil lets us back into the forest, but there's no way we can rescue him. It's not that I wouldn't like to try, but we don't have the men or the firepower. It would get us all killed or captured and still not get your father out."

"I know. If I could just find out that he's all right…even if he's one of their breeders." She almost choked on the word.

"It's better than being in the prison. Breeders are fed and taken care of. They aren't abused."

"What do you call being forced to have sex with one of them? I call that being abused."

"Take my word for it. Anything is better than being in their prison. The fact that your dad survived a couple of months there says a lot about how tough he is."

They sat without speaking for a while as Kara thought about the last time she had seen her father out at the airbase that night.

Finally Hunter said, "Emmalyn told me you talked to Daniel today."

She dragged her thoughts back to the present. "He escaped from the city. There was a woman with him named Lucy. She helped him get away. They came through the tunnel at the dam just like you thought they did. A centurion shot them and Lucy died in his arms. Then a couple of centurions threw them into the water because one of the skinjobs ordered them to. It traumatized Daniel so that's why he probably didn't remember at first."

"He told you all that?" Hunter asked in surprise.

"I asked him. Everybody here has been too afraid to ask him anything because they don't want to upset him."

"Who was Lucy…his wife?"

"He didn't say. I'm going to see him tomorrow afternoon and take my handheld computer so I can play some of my other father's songs for him. I'm going to take him my book of Kataris' poems, too. I'm going to ask him some more questions. He said he remembered being in Lucy's room so you're probably right. She was probably his wife or his girlfriend."

Kara didn't really think Lucy and Daniel had been married. She thought briefly of Commander Cain's sister. Her name was Lucy. The story that had gone around the _Galactica_ was that Lucy had been taken from Tauron by some centurions during the war twenty-five years earlier. She was only eight or nine at the time. The rumor was that the commander had run off and left Lucy. When she had gone back, all she had found was Lucy's doll. Lucy had possibly been brought to the Cylon homeworld. Kara wondered if she had been the subject of some of their experiments or if she had been nothing more than a servant, a slave like the humans now in the settlements. Then again, Lucy was a common name. It was probably just a coincidence.

Hunter took out the flask again and drank before he handed it to her. "We'll go visit Markham soon. He won't come to the meeting tomorrow night, so I told him I'd bring you to him."

"That's fine. I want to see the _Hyperion_…or what's left of it."

"Markham says there's going to be a meteor shower tonight. He'll be up at the top of the steps watching. Do you want to sit out here and wait for it?"

"Falling stars." Kara smiled before she drank from the flask. "You make wishes on them. If you say the wish out loud, it won't come true, but I'll give you a hint about my wish. It has to do with my dad. All I want to know is that he's okay right now. Then as soon as Cavil lets you back in the forest, I'm out of here. The sooner I get home, the sooner I get everything over with."

"Are you sure you want to go back?"

"I thought about staying here, but I've got to go back and let Admiral Adama know about the humans on this planet. I've got to face my stepmother, too. And Lee. None of it will be easy, but I've got to do it. It's what my dad would want me to do."

"I'm going with you."

"When did you decide that?" She asked in surprise.

"When you told me your Oracle had called you _Posiden's green-eyed daughter_. My destiny is to tell our story on another world. I don't know what that could mean if it's not supposed to mean I go back with you. You came here for a reason. You thought it was to get your father, but I think it was to get me. Everything about this planet is in my head. And your leaders need to see me to know you didn't make up the whole thing. Maybe they'll listen and it will stop them from nuking our planet. If the gods are willing, I'll get to come back and fight with my people."

What he had just said made perfect sense. "Did you put the idea into Narcho's head to stay here so you could go with me?"

"No, Kara, I swear. He came up with it. Don't you see? Even that fits the Oracle's prophecy because there's only room for two of us in your ship."

"Who's going to be the leader while you're gone?"

"Targa and Beck can handle it. They know everything I know about fighting Cylons. They've been at it longer than I have."

"Have you told Emmalyn?"

"Not yet. I'm going to tell her soon."

Kara turned up the flask one more time before she handed it back to him. She shivered as the drink burned its way down her throat. For the first time in days she began to feel better. Maybe Hunter was right. Maybe she was here to take him and not her father back to Caprica. If Hunter could help stop Admiral Adama from nuking the planet, then whatever happened to her would be worth it. If she could just get a message to her father and let him know she loved him, let him know that the admiral would be bringing his battlestars to Nereid but not to nuke it, that's all she would ask. Even if Lee broke up with her, he would help rescue her father. She was certain of it. He and John had been close friends for over five years.

"Look," Hunter said and pointed to the sky as a sprinkling of meteorites burned briefly across the inky black. "Markham said there will be two more within an hour of the first one. Do you want to sit out here and wait for them?"

Kara silently made her wish…that her father was all right and that she would see him again one day.

"I want to wait. I want to make my wish two more times. It's the least I can do for my dad."

She choked and the tears that had threatened since that morning finally rolled down her cheeks as she let go of her plan to rescue her father. She finally sniffed and wiped them away. She told herself to suck it up and get tough. That's what he would want her to do…get back to her ship as soon as she could, get back to Caprica and face the consequences of what she had done.

Hunter put his arm around her.

"I loved my father, too," he said softly. "He wasn't a born fighter, not like his father was, but he was a leader. When the Cylons came and gave us the conditions for letting us stay in this valley, my dad learned to fight. He told me over and over that you've got to do whatever it takes to survive. If your father survived a couple of months in their prison and now he's in the city, then he'll survive until we can come back for him."

Kara wiped her eyes. "He used to say he had more lives than a cat."

Hunter squeezed her shoulder and then dropped his arm. "There you go, Wildcat. He'll make it."

_..._

The transportation waiting for John and Sonja in front of the building was an odd-looking vehicle that seemed like a cross between a jeep and a golf cart. The top was as rigid as the hood and both looked like large photo-electric cells. The sides were open.

"Solar powered," she said. "With four hours of drive time if the sun isn't out."

"There's not much room. A driver and one passenger. Where's your centurion going to sit?"

"Centurions run faster than these vehicles. Do you drive?"

He walked around the vehicle. He saw two small pedals on the floor. "Accelerator and brakes?"

"Yes."

He got into the driver's seat. She took the passenger side and put the woven bag with their lunch on the floor between her feet. John looked for the seat adjustment to slide it back. There was none. The vehicle had obviously been designed with a shorter driver in mind. He almost laughed out loud. Custom made for a One.

He looked at the small gearshift. It had three settings…P, D, and R. He guessed those were for Park, Drive and Reverse. He moved it to D and pressed the accelerator. The vehicle moved slowly forward.

"I need some sunglasses," he said as he squinted into the glare on the windshield.

Sonja smiled and said teasingly. "Why do you need sunglasses if you won't be going outside for a month or six weeks?"

"It gets bright on my balcony in the afternoon. Where to?"

"Follow this street for eight blocks. When we come to a fork, take the left one."

"How far is the temple?"

"Thirteen miles."

"That's an odd number. Is there any significance to it?"

"The Thirteenth Tribe placed a lot of significance in it. It's written in our scriptures that God commanded his followers to build His house on a high hill so that all could see. According to the armillary sphere the site for this temple was chosen first and the builders measured exactly thirteen miles in a direct line and that's where they placed the big fountain in the center of the city. The arrow through the top of the sphere points to the temple to remind us to always turn our eyes to God."

"I noticed the symbols on the sphere. They're ancient Kobol."

"You're very observant. They are ancient Kobol."

"Are all of you born knowing how to read ancient languages?"

"No. We know only the languages and history our creators gave us. Ancient Kobol wasn't one of them."

"Then how do you plan to translate the sphere?"

"There's a human who is working with us. He and his family were taken from Libran five years ago."

"Before you nuked the planet?"

"Right after. He agreed to work with us in exchange for the safety of his family. They live in a settlement. He's allowed frequent visits."

The road leveled out and John pressed the accelerator as far down as it would go. They slowly gained momentum. He guessed that the vehicle's top speed was about thirty to thirty-five miles an hour. It felt good to be sitting behind the wheel of a vehicle again being buffeted by a warm breeze. He smiled.

"Not a good escape vehicle," Sonja said. "It's much too slow."

"You really know how to bring down my mood. I was not thinking about escaping."

She put her hand on his leg and squeezed. "I'm sorry, John. I certainly don't want to bring down your mood. You don't look like you slept very well last night."

"I drank too much wine."

She squeezed his leg again. "I could have made you sleep better."

"Knock it off, Sonja or I'll turn this thing around and we'll go back."

"I thought you wanted to see the temple," she said in a pouty tone.

"I do, but I don't want to play this silly cat and mouse game with you. Turn off the charm. It's having the opposite effect from what you think it is."

Her voice sounded pouty and yet contrite. "Did you have a bad night, John?"

"I dreamed about your friends at the prison. We humans call it a nightmare. You Cylons just switch everything off when you go to sleep, don't you?"

She took her hand off of his leg and sat back in her seat. "Some of us are programmed to dream. It's a _very_ complicated subroutine."

"What do you dream about…or should I ask?"

"There are a number of standard dream patterns that are customized to each model. They're selected by a randomizer. But all of us who have died and downloaded have dreams that don't fit the standard patterns so that's another way we've evolved. There's a copy of Leoben who has died violently several times, most recently in the forest at the hands of some humans. He and I have had some interesting conversations about dreams. I'll have to introduce you to him."

"We humans don't have any control over our dreams. Do you?"

"No. Are your dreams ever good?"

"Not lately."

They reached a fork in the road and John went left. While the road looked newly paved, the buildings on either side were ruins. Then the ruins were left behind and they entered an area of dense vegetation on the left and cleared fields on the right. In the distance someone wearing a ball cap was on a tractor but John couldn't tell if it was a human or a skinjob.

"Who's plowing?" He asked.

"Probably a Two. Possibly a Five, but they whine and complain when Cavil sends them to do anything physical. They're fond of their suits and ties. They don't like to get sweaty...for any reason."

"Don't humans ever drive the farm equipment?"

"I really don't know. I don't have anything to do with running our farms. Should I try to find out for you?"

"Don't bother. I was just curious."

"Even if it happens to be a human on that tractor, you won't get any help from them if you try to escape. They're taken back to a settlement at night. This field is monitored by centurions."

John finally snapped at her, "Enough about escaping. You've made your point. I'll be shot if I try…which might be preferable to hearing you keep yammering about it."

"Oh, my. You _are_ in a terrible mood today. I thought you would enjoy this outing."

"I will if you shut up and let me enjoy it."

She looked away from him for a few moments. "Do you use that tone of voice when you talk to your wife?"

"You're not my wife. You're my jailer. Big difference."

She didn't speak again until they reached the bottom of the hill at the temple. "Stop here. We'll walk the rest of the way."

John stopped the vehicle, put it in _Park_ and got out of it. They walked up the gently sloping path to the stone steps at the base of the temple. Some of the same symbols were carved into the stone that were on the armillary sphere in the fountain. He looked around for the centurion guards. There were none.

"Where are your watchdogs?"

"If you run, you'll find out."

"Speaking of centurions, what happened to all those doing construction in the city?"

"They're temporarily assigned to other duties. They'll be back soon."

"What other duties?"

Sonja smiled. "Do you believe in prophecy?"

John walked around one of the huge stone columns. "Like Oracles?"

"Your religion calls them Oracles. We call them prophets."

"What does prophecy have to do with where the centurions have been sent?"

"What do you think happened to the Thirteenth Tribe?"

"I haven't got a clue. What do you think happened to them?"

"They left this planet."

"You found proof of that?"

"Not yet, but we will. They're no longer here. They must have left."

"Maybe they all died."

"We've found no evidence of that. But we do have proof that several expeditions came to this planet from the Colonies sixty years ago. Did you know that?"

"The _Hyperion_ expeditions. The second one never returned to Libran. Most people think something happened to the ship in transit."

Sonja smiled again. "They're wrong. It's still here."

"You found the ship?"

"No, but we found a few living original crew members and many of their descendents. Around six hundred total."

"Where?"

"In a valley a hundred miles west of here. It was one of their humans who killed the copy of Leoben I spoke of. We have an agreement with them concerning the forest. Would you like to visit them?"

"Yes."

"Maybe I can arrange it."

"No strings attached?"

"Answer some more questions for me."

"I can't tell you anything else about how I got here, and I don't want to talk about my wife."

"But I still have some questions about her. How long have you been married?"

"Why are you so interested in my personal life?"

"I told you that humans fascinate me. I've asked these same questions to dozens of humans. They had no problems answering them."

"Human men, you mean?"

She nodded. "And a few women I met in the settlements. Bianca and I have had lengthy conversations about her family. Now, tell me about you and Laura."

John took a deep breath and decided that if he answered a couple of her questions, it might satisfy her curiosity. "We've been married two years."

"Then she's not your daughter's mother."

"No."

"What happened to your daughter's mother? Did you divorce her as you humans are so prone to do?"

"We were never married."

"How does she feel about your current relationship?"

"She died when you nuked Picon."

"Ah. Did you love her?"

John took another deep breath. He hated the personal nature of Sonja's questions, but he couldn't see how the answers would compromise anything. He forced himself to answer. "Yes, I loved her."

"And yet now you love someone else. What happened to your love for her?"

John shook his head. "That's enough."

"Then tell me about your daughter. What's her name?"

John shook his head again.

"Most humans can't stop talking about their families, especially their children. The fact that you don't want to talk about yours makes me think you have something to hide."

"I don't have anything to hide," he snapped. "You don't care about my family. This is just some kind of sick mind game for you."

"Is her name Kara?"

John turned and walked away from Sonja toward the vehicle. How could Sonja have come up with Kara's name? He was certain he'd never mentioned it to her or D'Anna. He didn't think he'd mentioned it to anyone on this planet.

Sonja walked after him. "How old is she?"

"I'm going back to the apartment. Are you riding or do you want to walk?"

Sonja caught up with him and grabbed his arm. "I don't think you understand what's at stake here."

He angrily turned on her. "Then why don't you tell me because I can't see how talking about my family makes a difference except it's just another way of you trying to exert your control over me."

"You said Kara's name, John, during your interrogations at the prison."

"I thought you said you didn't look at the tapes."

"I didn't. I read the transcripts. I read them a number of times."

"I don't remember mentioning my daughter."

"You mentioned her once. According to the transcript you were heavily drugged and almost incoherent. Your interrogators were trying to convince you that they were holding your family hostage. You said they didn't have Kara because you'd lost her. When I read it, I thought you meant that she was dead, perhaps in the attacks, perhaps from something else, but then when you and I were talking about D'Anna, you mentioned your daughter being impatient so she's not dead. What did you mean when you said you'd _lost her_?"

"I brought her to Caprica after Picon was nuked. We got separated for a while."

"But you found her."

"Eventually."

"What is she doing now?"

"I don't know. I've been gone for over four months."

Sonja had not let go of his arm. "Why won't you trust me?"

John laughed. "That's the first really _stupid_ question you've asked me. Certainly a smart _Cylon_ like you can figure it out."

"Is she a Daddy's girl?"

"I like to think so."

"Does she want to follow in your footsteps?"

"I hope not. I'm a damned poor example for anybody to follow."

"What does she want to do when she gets out of school? Or is she already out of school?"

He took a relieved breath as he remembered mentioning Kara being impatient about going to the Academy early. Only he hadn't said the Academy. He'd said school.

"She hasn't decided yet. She's only eighteen. Can we go back now?"

"So soon? I want you to enjoy the morning."

"Then stop interrogating me!"

Sonja's eyes met his. She studied him for a while and then dropped her arm. "Just one last question and then we'll walk around and talk about something else."

"Just not my family."

"If I could grant you a wish, what would it be? Besides going back to Caprica because that's something I can't arrange. What would it be, John? Going to visit Bianca and Laszlo? Going to visit the descendents of the _Hyperion_? Babysitting for Sofia and Cassandra?"

John didn't hesitate with his answer. "I'd like to fly a ship…maybe one of those Heavy Raiders."

Sonja laughed for a few moments and then still smiling broadly looked at him. "Are you serious?"

He didn't smile back. "You asked. I told you. I know it's beyond your ability to arrange something like that. After all, you're not Cavil."

She put her arm through his and pulled him back up the steps of the temple. "Isn't this a beautiful planet? It's hard to believe people would have left here to go somewhere else."

"What does your favorite prophet say about her vanished Thirteenth Tribe?"

They reached the top of the wide stone steps. The sun was warm and the breeze coming from the west was cool. The sky was cloudless. He shaded his eyes as he looked west across the open fields, toward the forest and the mountains beyond. A hundred miles to the valley and the free humans. He knew he'd never make it on his own.

"Our scripture speaks of the exodus from Kobol over two thousand years ago. The Thirteenth Tribe was persecuted for their belief in the one true God. Azurra said that God would provide a new home for them, a green and fertile world. She never set foot on this planet and yet God showed her its beauty in a vision."

"She didn't have any visions of her people leaving this place?"

"There are a number of other prophecies. Some are harder to interpret. The number three appears often in them. Because of it D'Anna believes that she is to be instrumental in them."

"Do you remember any of them?"

"I remember all of them_. _One says,_ God will choose three to bring a message to His people in their time of strife. _Another one says, _The three will bear His tidings of the peacemaker."_

John frowned. "Those prophecies sound like they could be referring to three different people, not one person."

Sonja smiled again. "There are many prophecies, and we know that they are all open to different interpretations. God spoke to Azurra several times in a rain of fire. She says, _Three shall come in a rain of fire and will herald the coming of the peacemaker._ Last night three stars fell to the planet in a rain of fire. One star followed by two others. I believe Azurra's prophecy has begun. You were the first to come to us. Now there have been two more."

John's heart began to hammer. He took a deep breath. "What do you mean?"

"The centurions have temporarily been withdrawn from working in the city because they're searching the forest. Five days ago the copy of Leoben I told you about found two pilots in the forest, a man and a woman. They were wearing flight suits like yours."

"There's no frakking way. You're lying."

"The valley where the _Hyperion's_ descendents are living was searched yesterday. The pilots weren't there or they were well hidden. More importantly, though, their ship wasn't there. There's nowhere in that valley any kind of ship could be hidden...even a small one like a Raider."

"Then how do you know there even _was_ a ship?"

"It was tracked into the atmosphere and over the forest and then it dropped beneath our dradis. It was broadcasting a Cylon signal but an old one. We know it didn't crash and we know it hasn't left the planet. We'll find it eventually and the pilots, too."

John shook his head. "I don't believe you." But even as he was saying the words, he remembered a piece of the dream he'd had the night he had almost died of pneumonia. Kara had told him she was thinking of stealing the Raider and coming to get him. He closed his eyes. Had she done something that insane? No. Stealing the Raider wasn't insane. It was beyond insane. She wouldn't do it. He opened his eyes.

Sonja was watching him closely. "You know something, don't you?"

"The Cylons on Caprica disabled the FTL drives of all Colonial ships…military and civilian. What you're telling me couldn't have happened. You're just lying to me and frakking with my head the same way your buddies at the prison did."

"The _Hyperion_ made it to our planet."

"That was over sixty years ago and it took half a dozen jumps through mostly uncharted space…in a ship with a _functioning_ FTL drive. I told you…"

"Yes, I know what you told me," Sonja cut him off. "This morning I had breakfast with the copy of Leoben who caught the pilots. Before he could bring them in, he was killed by a team of forest fighters. One of them shot him through the neck with an arrow. His death was very painful and very traumatic. He choked to death on his own blood. The fighters also used a device to disable his centurions. It has a paralyzing effect on their brains, but it also affects us to a lesser degree. Leoben doesn't have a clear memory of everything that transpired, but he does remember two things about the woman even though he can't recall her face or her age. He remembers that she was blond and he remembers that the man with her called her _Kara_."

John walked away from Sonja and sat down on the top step of the temple. Sonja could be lying. She could easily be making all of it up. And yet…could he afford to call her bluff?

Sonja came over and sat beside him. She caressed the top of his leg. He didn't try to stop her. "You love your daughter, don't you?"

John couldn't look at her. He stared off across the forest toward the mountains. "That's your _second_ stupid question. She's owned my heart since the day I first saw her."

"I haven't told anyone what I know. I'm sure the Leoben who was killed in the forest never saw your interrogation tapes from the prison. I'm certain he never read the transcripts. There's no way he will connect Kara to you. I'm the only one so far who has put it together. Your daughter is a pilot, isn't she? She's a pilot just like her father."

"What do you want, Sonja?"

"I want you to trust me. I want you to tell me what part you played in their plan."

He took a deep breath. "There is no plan. I wasn't sent here on a mission. I'm here because of an accident with an FTL drive that I thought had been disabled."

"Your daughter isn't here because of an accident. How did she know to come here? What do the Colonials know about this planet? Are they planning to attack us? Do they want to destroy us for what our brothers and sisters did?"

"The Colonials can't do anything to you. I don't even know if you're telling me the truth about any of this."

"Why would I lie to you?"

"I can think of a dozen reasons."

"Even if that young woman is not your daughter, she's a human pilot from Caprica just like you. You know what they did to you at the prison. A woman would suffer additional indignities. I can't protect her if she's caught."

The anguish was clear in John's voice. "I know."

"There's a slim chance she's with the humans in the valley. Leoben said there was a young blond woman holding an infant. She was dressed like the other women, in a long skirt with her hair in a braid. An older woman said it was her daughter and the baby was her grandchild. She called her Juliana. Their leader claimed the child was his. Leoben said the girl was very timid, very frightened. She wouldn't even look at him yet something about her reminded him of the pilot."

"That doesn't sound a bit like Kara. For one thing she's always hated dresses. And _timid_ does not describe my daughter. She's a very in-your-face type of person."

Sonja smiled. "Like her father."

"She's always been a tomboy," John added as much to assure himself as Sonja. "And I can promise you my daughter doesn't have a baby. That girl in the valley couldn't possibly be her."

"There's one way to find out. We go there."

"When?"

"It will take a while for me to arrange it unless, of course, I mention my thoughts to Cavil. Then we couldn't get there fast enough...with him, of course."

"I'd appreciate it if we could leave him out of this."

"We have an agreement with the humans in the valley. We don't hunt them there and they don't hunt us here. Technically Cavil broke the agreement when he took Heavy Raiders there yesterday. There's not much chance he will approve my request to give one of our breeders a tour of the settlements _and_ the valley."

"Could we land somewhere else and hike in?"

"We'd be killed by the humans if they caught us outside the valley, although Cavil has stopped them from hunting in the forest until we find those pilots and their ship. But I'll find a way to get us into the valley."

"Why are you doing this for me, Sonja?"

"I'm not doing it just for you. I believe that God has a plan and we're part of it. In one of Azurra's prophesies she says that _the six shall protect the three_. For a long time I've thought it meant one thing. Now I'm not so sure."

"You would put your religion above your loyalty to your…the other Cylons?"

"God's will is for all of us, John, no matter what we are."

He smiled. "So you're saying that God's will trumps Cavil's orders."

"That's a strange way of putting it, but yes. If your daughter's in the valley…"

"She's not," John said quickly. "She's back on Caprica."

"…and I agree not to turn her over to Cavil…"

Their eyes met. "If she's there and you forget you saw her, then you can name your price."

"And you'll willingly pay it?"

"I'll do anything to save my daughter."

"You wouldn't refuse me or try to negotiate with me?"

"No."

Sonja smiled. "If I give you a copy of our scriptures, would you read them with an open mind?"

"Yes."

There was a warm glow of triumph in her eyes. She stood and held out her hand. He took it and also stood.

"Azurra saw all of this two thousand years ago. How can that be possible unless God was working through her? I'm to protect the three and you're one of the three. So is your daughter."

"Who's the other one?"

"Maybe D'Anna. She's coming home today, John. She'll be waiting for you when you get back."

TBC…


	17. Pygmalion

Chapter 17

Pygmalion

_Pygmalion, lonely sculptor on Kobol, creates beauty for others__  
__And yearns for the love that has repeatedly passed him by._

_In secret he takes the finest block of unblemished marble__  
__And slowly and with great care begins to carve his masterpiece.__  
__As the months pass, the statue gradually takes shape, the sandaled feet,__  
__The carefully chiseled ankles, the translucent fold in the hem of her gown,__  
__A feast for only his eyes to behold, her beauty exquisite and perfect._

_Her eyes gaze downward at her creator, at the man who__  
__Lovingly and with infinite patience turns a cold block of stone__  
__Into a statue who lacks only the breath of life and a beating heart__  
__To make her real. When he is finally finished, he gazes upon__  
__His creation and names her Galatea and falls in love with her. _

_Pygmalion goes to Athena's temple to dedicate his creation to her.__  
__The goddess, touched by the sincerity of the humble sculptor,__  
__Sends Eros to the statue. The young boy touches her hand.__  
__Galatea breathes and waits lovingly for her creator to come home._

Kataris, from _A Poet's Dream, The Torches of Other Worlds_

_._

Lee and Kendra stood at attention in Commander Cain's quarters. Almost five minutes had passed and she had not yet said _At Ease_. She paced behind her chairless desk as she read their report on the incident in Lindeford. It had been short and to the point.

Finally she looked up. "At ease."

Lee and Kendra complied without looking at each other. They had both gazed straight ahead the entire time that they had stood there. Lee had spent his time trying to imagine what kind of trouble they were in.

Cain put the report down on her desk and then picked it up. "I don't know whether to pin medals on you for saving a man's life or throw you in the brig for sheer stupidity. Whose idea was it to prowl around a deserted town?"

"Mine, sir," Lee said quickly.

"It was both of ours," Kendra said. "Once we realized that the town was deserted, Lieutenant Quartararo wanted to go on to the next location. We talked him out of it."

"At least one of you showed some good sense…and I'm not referring to either of you."

"Meaning no disrespect, sir," Lee said, "if I might remind the commander, the admiral's _orders_ were to get the voter registration lists. There was no mention made of skipping a town because it was deserted. As our report states, there was no apparent danger when we landed."

Cain stopped pacing and looked at him. He held her gaze for a few moments before he shifted his to the wall behind her.

"You have a point that I can't argue with," she finally said. "We can't spend years drilling it into your heads that orders are to be obeyed and then tell you it's a judgment call as to whether you follow them or not. Your mission was not successful however."

"No, sir," Lee said. "We were on our way to check another location in the building when we encountered the wolves."

"How is Lieutenant Quartararo?" Kendra asked. "Dr. Cottle kicked us out of Sick Bay."

"He's stable. He has a number of nasty bites, one which tore his upper arm badly, but those will heal. The worst injury is to his right wrist. Do either one of you know how much force a wolf's jaws exert?"

"No, sir," they answered together.

"I had one of my technician's look it up…fifteen hundred pounds _per square inch_. Lieutenant Quartararo got his wrist in the wolf's mouth to protect his throat. His wrist is crushed. There's every probability his career as a pilot and ECO is over."

Kendra's quick breath was almost a gasp.

Commander Cain went on. "The injury is beyond what Dr. Cottle wants to try to repair. He said a specialist should do the surgery. There's not only bone damage but muscle, tendon and nerve damage as well. Cottle is stabilizing the injury. I've requested a medical transport. Lieutenant Quartararo will be taken back to Caprica as soon as it arrives."

"I'm so sorry, sir," Kendra said and then repeated, "I'm so sorry."

"I spoke with him briefly while Dr. Cottle was cleaning the bites. The lieutenant was under the influence of a painkiller, but he was very complimentary of both of you. He said you saved his life. It seems you impressed him, Lieutenant Shaw, with the way you took out several of the wolves with a block of wood. He used the phrase _risked her own life _several times."

"It's our fault it happened in the first place, sir," Lee said.

"Agreed. But I can't reprimand you for attempting to follow orders since the situation did not appear dangerous when you landed in Lindeford. My report is going to say that Lieutenant Quartararo's injuries were sustained in the line of duty and were unavoidable under the circumstances. _However_, if you find another deserted town, you will bypass it and go on to the next one. If Admiral Adama has a problem with that decision, it will be on me, not you. I'd rather answer to the admiral than risk injury to another one of my crew over a voter registration list. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," they said in unison.

The way Cain had said _voter registration list _told Lee she didn't think the retrieval of the lists was as important as his father did. Lee knew that the lists had originally been requested by Caprica's Attorney General, Romo Lampkin, which meant the person behind the request had been Laura Roslin. She was on a fishing expedition and Lee knew why. She wanted to know whether or not the names and signatures that Tom Zarek had presented on his petition were really registered voters of Tauron's northern provinces. If she could prove he falsified the petition, the Quorum would have grounds to demand his resignation.

If that happened, the former prisoner whom many still considered a terrorist would probably scream that he was being set up and framed. Tom Zarek had become a very visible figure in the last six months. He had garnered a following among many of the fringe groups, especially the monotheist religious movement and also among a zealous group of Cylon-haters who wanted a quick trial and execution for the skinjobs now in the bunker prison. So far Laura had resisted all efforts by Zarek and several others to force a hasty trial. She and Lampkin and many others including his father seemed content to keep the Cylons locked away. Lee felt certain at the moment that the President knew a trial would polarize Caprica. With the deteriorating situation in Sovana and unrest spreading to the city of Kinsdale, the government didn't need another headache to deal with at the moment.

"Dismissed," Cain finally said absently as she dropped the report on her desk and picked up another one.

When they were out in the corridor, Lee asked Kendra, "Are you all right?"

"How can I be all right? A nice guy might lose the use of his hand because of our stupidity."

"Wait a minute. Commander Cain never said anything about Crashdown loosing the use of his hand. She just said his career as a pilot…"

"How would you feel if it was you?" Kendra snapped. "How would you feel if you were never going to fly again because two idiots…"

"Kendra, sometimes things happen that we don't anticipate. We were trying to do what we had been ordered to do. Your idea about the coat rack was a good one. What you did wading into that pack of wolves took a lot of guts. You saved Crash's life and probably kept him from losing his hand completely. Quit beating yourself up."

"That might be easy for you to do, but not me."

Lee took a deep breath. "Look, if you want to sit tomorrow out, I'll understand. I'll ask Commander Cain for a replacement. Today was tough. It shook me up, too, but I've got no choice. I've got to go back down there tomorrow."

"No, I'm not a quitter. What you want to bet we don't get any volunteers for an ECO?"

"Then the commander will have to appoint someone. We can't go alone. If Karl hadn't gone back to Caprica today, he'd do it."

"I heard about what happened to his and Sharon's apartment."

"Bad news sure travels fast," Lee snapped. "And watch what you say about Karl. He's a good guy and a friend."

"I thought he was Kara's friend."

"What's that supposed to mean? Just because he's Kara's friend he can't be my friend, too?"

"Never mind. I'm going to take a shower. I'll see you later. Ask whoever you want to fly as our ECO. We'll see if anyone bites or Commander Cain has to appoint someone."

Lee tried to lighten the mood. "Maybe _bites_ isn't such a good word to use."

Kendra didn't look back. His lame attempt at humor had fallen flat.

Lee got to the mess hall just minutes before the line was shut down. The food was dry from sitting in the heated serving pans for so long. There were just a handful of crew members at the tables. He had no trouble finding one to himself. He managed to get down only about half of what was on his plate before he realized that what he really wanted was a drink.

The question that Kendra had asked him kept echoing. How _would_ he feel if he couldn't fly again? How would he feel if his broken leg had been worse and he couldn't have passed his Viper qualification flight afterward? He remembered his anger when his doctor had refused to release him to flight ready status until he was fully healed. He remembered his impatience. He felt ashamed now to admit he'd taken a lot of it out on Kara, not in a physical way, but verbally. He'd snapped at her often. He'd argued with her over insignificant things. Of course she'd been in his face, too…a lot. He now realized that he hadn't known how to deal with the pain and loss of fellow pilots and friends any better than she had. He'd watched John Gallagher die, or at least he thought he had, in a white-hot blosom of fire just like Kara had.

Lee took his tray to the conveyor belt that carried it into the dishwashing area and then went to the officer's rec room. He didn't sit down until he had a beer in his hand. He saw several pilots glance in his direction and lower their voices. There was little doubt they were talking about what had happened in Lindeford. Even on a mission as charged with emotion as this one had been so far, news of a wolf attack on the planet's surface would have raced like wildfire through the pilots and crew. Maggie glanced in his direction and then turned her back.

Saul Tigh was sitting alone at a table with an open bottle of whiskey and a glass. He had just dealt a hand of Solitaire. He caught Lee's eye.

"Lieutenant Adama. Have a seat."

The last thing Lee wanted was to carry on a conversation with Colonel Tigh, but he didn't see any way out of it. He sat, certain that it would do nothing but enhance his pariah status with the other pilots.

"Seems like nobody wants to take my cubits in a triad game tonight. How about you?"

"I'm going to pass, sir. I'm afraid I couldn't concentrate."

Tigh didn't sound drunk, but his cheeks had a ruddiness that came from several glasses of straight whiskey. Tigh could hold his liquor…up to a point. After that the colonel tended to slip into either morose silence or belligerent sarcasm. Lee had seen both and hoped Tigh hadn't gotten there yet.

Tigh stared at the empty glass in his hand. "How's your old man?"

"Fine when I left, sir."

"Still escorting the President to dinners and embassy parties and such?"

"I think so."

Tigh poured more whiskey into the glass. "How is the President? Still wearing black?"

"I haven't seen Laura in quite a while, sir."

"Laura Roslin. She and your father go way back. Way back. He was carrying a torch for her when I first met him."

Not wanting to get into a discussion of his father and Laura, Lee turned up his beer to avoid having to comment.

"I hear you're up for captain," Tigh said.

"Yes, sir."

"Let's hope it's gone through by now. It won't look too good in your record that you let wolves chew up your ECO."

Lee clenched his jaw. Any reply he could think of would sound disrespectful. Tigh finished his drink and poured another one from the bottle.

"If you'll excuse me, sir, I'm going to call it a night," Lee said. "We've got to go out again tomorrow and I need to get some sleep. I think I'll drop by the small arms locker and requisition some silver bullets, too."

"Silver bullets. That's a good one." Tigh began to laugh, surprising Lee. He hadn't thought the colonel would get his werewolf reference. "I've known you since you were in diapers. I never knew you had a sense of humor." Still chuckling Tigh raised his glass. "Good luck in the snow tomorrow."

"Thank you, sir."

Lee left the officer's rec room and trudged to his quarters. A restless night and the stress of the day had caught up with him. All he wanted at the moment was a hot shower and his bunk. When he opened the hatch, Kendra and Flat Top were sitting at the small table in the center of the room. Kendra's eyes were red. Flat Top sat beside her with one hand massaging her neck and shoulders.

"You okay?" Lee asked.

She nodded.

"We just saw Crash put on board the medical transport," Flat Top said.

"How's he doing?"

"Loaded up on morpha and feeling no pain. He's tough. Doc Cottle said it might not be as bad as he first thought."

"I'm going to take a shower. Would you stay with Kendra until I get back?"

Saunders smiled. "Sure. I'll stay with her for as long as she'll let me."

"I don't need a babysitter," she snapped. "I'm fine."

"Sure you are," Saunders said in a soothing tone of voice as he continued massaging the back of her neck. She made no move to stop him. He looked at Lee. "I'm going with you tomorrow as your ECO. I've already cleared it with the commander. You two need somebody with some sense to keep you straight."

Lee looked at Kendra. "You went to Commander Cain without talking to me?"

"You've got a problem with Flat Top going with us?"

"No, not at all. I just thought we were a team. We should have gone to the commander together."

"Don't jump her," Saunders said in his good-natured way. "It was my idea. You're right. We should have talked to you first."

"It's okay," Lee said with resignation in his voice. All he wanted was to finish this mission and get back to Caprica so he could help Major Parker and his father with the Nereid plans...and be there when Kara got back.

Kendra smirked. "It looks like it's going to take _two_ Academy valedictorians to get a couple of voter registration lists."

Saunders grinned. "As long as we've got you and your block of wood watching our backs, we'll do fine."

"I thought you pilots wanted someone watching your _six_," she said.

He pulled her over and whispered something to her that Lee didn't catch, but it caused her to playfully punch him.

"I'm going to the shower now," Lee said as he left and closed the hatch behind him although he realized it was a stupid thing to say. Where else would he be going with his towel and toothbrush? He was sure that the curtains to Kendra's bunk would be drawn and the lights turned down when he got back.

He was right, but as he got into his bunk, her voice came from behind the curtains. "Wipe that smug grin off your face, Lee. I'm alone."

He stretched out and pulled the blanket over him. "I'll bet Saunders is disappointed."

"He'll live," she said. "Now go to sleep. We've got another fun day in the snow tomorrow."

_..._

Laura sat at her desk in Marble House and looked at the thick report on Tauron that Bill had just handed her.

"Are there any surprises in here?"

He walked behind her chair to stand in front of the big bay window that overlooked the manicured east garden and the wide expanse of lawn beyond. The spring day was gray and windy and threatening rain.

"One big one. The drones detected no human life in or around Hypatia or Tauron City but no radiation either. The Cylons apparently destroyed those cities with conventional weapons and let their centurions mop up anyone who survived."

"Are there any centurions there now or any other signs of Cylon activity?"

"Nothing. I still imagine that Dr. Nylund will allow his scientists to visit the cities and surrounding countryside briefly. I'm sure he'll want water and soil samples and a record of any animal life that survived."

"So there was no evidence of radiation on the planet at all?"

"The figures are in the report. Major Parker and I talked about it for several hours yesterday afternoon after Lieutenant Agathon got back with the data. The Cylons destroyed the two main population centers on Tauron to kill the humans just like they probably did on the rest of the Colonies. Tauron had a strategic interest for them because of the rich tylium mines. That's all they were interested in. They didn't try to clean up the destroyed cities afterward. Parker and I both think they were more interested in Picon is because fleet headquarters was located there. Picon was the key to finding out everything they could find out about our military and other civilian operations, especially any black ops or highly classified material. They may have been looking for proof to justify what they did."

"How could they possibly justify what they did to us?"

"The minute it became evident that Adar was going to surrender, all classified paper documentation here on Caprica was shredded and then burned. All electronic data was put through magnetic pulse units and wiped clean. As soon as they landed centurions on the planet, the same thing was done at fleet headquarters."

"Could it have been possible that all along they planned to destroy only eleven of the colonies?"

"One colony would have been far easier to manage than twelve." Bill left the window, returned to the front of Laura's desk and sat in a chair facing her.

Laura mulled the idea. "Caprica has always been the most densely populated of the colonies. If they wanted humans, we have them in abundance. Not to mention all the genetic and medical and AI research that was being conducted here. We were always years ahead of the work being done in those areas on the other colonies."

Bill was deep in thought. He finally looked up at her and continued. "There's a chance the Cylons knew about a secondary site in Picon City, a bunker where _all_ classified information was kept. The building on top of it was partially collapsed, but we've every reason to believe the lower levels were undamaged. The Cylons may have been looking for it when the radiation levels got too high to sustain even the centurions. Parker has carefully studied the photographs and film taken by the drones. He determined that the highest concentration of centurion activity was at the location of that building. That's the area they chose to clean up first."

"What type of intelligence was being kept there?"

"Everything."

For the first time since Bill had entered her office, Laura felt that he had known something all along that he had kept from her. "Give me an example."

"It wasn't just military operations. Part of the bunker was a repository for other government documentation."

"I take it by your hesitation that this documentation was from clandestine operations?"

"Yes."

"Like what?"

Bill took a deep breath. "That's information I was never privy to. The group Agent Darren works for…"

"I'm sure you have some idea," Laura almost snapped.

"Surveillance of certain corporations, certain religious groups, certain charitable organizations that were fronts for extremist operations. Terrorist groups aren't a new phenomenon. We've always monitored certain kinds of activity."

"Was Richard Adar aware of what was going on?"

"Most of it."

"Most of it? Do you mean to tell me that there were government agencies that were operating outside the Articles of Colonization and unbeknownst to even the President?"

"Possibly."

Laura tried to control her anger. "And the military? Finish telling me what you don't want to say. What made you think the Cylons might find a way to justify their attack on the Colonies?"

Bill was clearly uncomfortable. He got up, walked to the window again and looked out. "Until the attack we'd always monitored the Armistice zone. Certainly you know that."

"Why would I have had reason to know that? I was the Secretary of Education. Military operations were out of my jurisdiction." When he didn't respond, she said, "Are you telling me that we crossed that line?"

"We knew they would come back one day. We knew…"

Goaded beyond her ability to control her temper Laura snapped, "Damn it, Bill, what did you do? What did the military do?"

"There were several planned covert missions. Originally they were Admiral Corman's idea. We can't ask him to explain it now because he died on Picon. I do know that he didn't trust the old centurions. None of us did. Not after the First War."

"So you violated a treaty and crossed an Armistice line in a move that could have been interpreted by the Cylons as an act of aggression, an act of war. Were you involved?"

"I was commander of the _Valkerie_, the battlestar chosen to undertake the first mission. It ended badly. We were barely across the line when a pilot and his ship were lost. A friend of mine, Daniel Novacek. He was flying a prototype ship, a new design called a Stealthstar. We're not sure exactly what happened. With the loss of that ship the other missions were scrapped. We increased our surveillance of the zone and Armistice Station, but we didn't cross the line again."

"Dear gods. When did this happen?"

"Over ten years ago."

She turned her chair around and waited until he looked at her. "So you're telling me that several years before the Cylons attacked us, we were spying on them? We gave them reason to believe we were a danger to them?"

"They tried to destroy us twenty-five years ago. Just because they left our solar system didn't mean we could forget about them. They're our enemy! They proved we didn't do enough with our intelligence. We can't afford the make that mistake again. We won't get another chance if we do. Just because they're in another solar system doesn't mean they aren't planning another attack on humanity. As long as they're out there, we're in danger. If they ever find out that their fellow Cylons are no longer in control of Caprica, I have no doubt what they'll do. Do you _really_ want to sit back and wait until they attack us again?"

"You still want to nuke their homeworld, don't you?"

"That would be my first choice, but I've agreed to rescue the humans there first. I plan to keep my word."

"We've already settled this. You will not nuke that planet even after the humans are rescued. If we destroy their basestars which are their only means of reaching us and their basestar shipyard, then there will be no need to destroy their planet."

"I'm thinking about the future of humanity. I'm thinking about our children and grandchildren."

Laura's eyes met his. "So am I."

_..._

Mid afternoon and Kara sat in the tub at Emmalyn's. She couldn't remember the last time she had been so tired. She had spent the morning and several hours after lunch with a crude hoe digging weeds out of Seléne's garden…or on her hands and knees pulling the weeds she couldn't get with the hoe. And the garden wasn't that large, certainly not much larger than the garden she and Karl had tended at the little stone cottage.

She thought of Karl and Sharon and wondered how they were doing. The last time she had seen Sharon several weeks earlier, her baby bump was clearly visible.

Kara finally got out of the tub and wondered as she was combing her wet hair, what she was going to do when she ran out of conditioner. She'd brought only a small bottle and it was already half gone just like the shampoo. She looked longingly at her jeans and Academy sweatshirt, clean and folded on the shelf, and thought about putting them on, but changed her mind. If the Cylons came back, the jeans and sweatshirt would give her away even if Leoben didn't recognize her face. She put on a pair of pants that Seléne had given her and a blouse that Dessa had given her. The pants felt better than a skirt, but not as good as her jeans. They were several inches too short, although right now she was too tired to care.

Narcho had gone hunting with Targa and Beck that morning. They had gotten several rabbits, one of which Beck had given to Seléne and the other to Emmalyn. A simmering pot of stew now sat on the wood stove. It smelled so good that Kara's mouth began to water. She cut a slice of bread that was leftover from lunch and went outside.

Emmalyn was sitting outside, a basket filled with balls of yarn in various colors on the ground beside her. She had started knitting something. Kara watched as she reached the end of a row, turned the long needles and began another row.

Emmalyn looked up and smiled. "As old sweaters and other knitted things wear out, we unravel them and reuse what we can of the yarn. This will be a winter undershirt for Hunter."

"But you'll soon have some new yarn."

"I will when you and Hunter and my brothers spin some for me. The sheep shearing is finished. Dessa's gone right now to get some baskets of wool."

"Show me how tonight and I'll get started. I'll help out until Cavil lets the guys back into the forest. Then I'm leaving. I guess Hunter told you."

"Aye, he told me."

"He told you I'm not going to try to rescue my father."

She nodded. "He talked to me this morning after you left to go to Seléne's. He also told me he's going back with you."

"I didn't ask him to go."

"I know you didn't. He's talked to his grandfather several times about his decision. They both believe it's part of the old Oracle's prophecy."

"But you don't."

"It makes no difference what I believe. The sun will come up tomorrow and the next day and the next regardless of whether Hunter is here or not. If the Cylons decide to destroy this valley, there's nothing we can do to stop them. The two of you being here would only mean two more for them to kill."

"The Colonials will come here one day, probably in a few months with their battlestars. I don't know if I'll be with them, but I'll make sure they know to protect this valley."

Emmalyn smiled gently. "You'll take care of my nephew in your city on Caprica, won't you? He's like me and most of the rest of us. We've only seen pictures of a city in books. He's only seen the Cylon city from the edge of the forest. He knows nothing of what you grew up with."

"I'll take care of him if I'm not in jail. If I am, Lee will take care of him. Hunter is going to be a really valuable asset to the military."

Emmalyn stopped knitting temporarily. Her eyes had taken on a far-away look. "When he was a little boy, he'd ask his grandfather to tell him stories about Libran. Perry came from there, from the city of Themis. To hear him tell it, Themis was a very orderly place, filled with courthouses both Libran and Inter-Colonial. After the Articles of Colonization were ratified, all legal disputes between the various Colonies were decided on Libran. Hunter could listen to his grandfather talk for hours."

"What about his other grandfather?"

"He died before Hunter was born. He was a mercenary with the second _Hyperion_ mission. I remember him from my childhood. He was a handsome man. He died from cancer. Melonoma. Hunter looks much like I remember his paternal grandfather. Please take care of my nephew. He'll be far out of his element in your city."

"You have my word. I'm going to see Daniel this afternoon. I'm going to take him my book of Kataris' poems and let him listen to my other father's songs."

"Don't stay too long. We'll be eating our supper in an hour or so. The meeting at our communal gathering place will start soon after the evening meal."

"Is everybody going to expect Narch and me to make a speech?"

"A few words. Nothing fancy. No need to mention any of your plans. Everyone knows you're stuck here for now."

"I'll talk to Narch. We'll come up with something. Should I thank everyone for keeping quiet when Cavil was here yesterday? I don't want to say something wrong or insult anyone?"

"A few words of thanks would be nice. We're humble people, Kara, and not well educated. We aren't even sure what you do other than pilot a ship, but to us you and Narcho have a skill we hold in awe. For you to thank everyone would mean a lot."

"Narch will want me to do all the talking."

Emmalyn smiled. "Something you're quite good at, child."

"We'll I'm off. You know where to find me if you need me."

Emmalyn had already resumed her knitting. "Tell Daniel not to be such a stranger. I know he's busy, but we haven't seen him in several days."

Holding the book of poetry and with the handheld computer tucked in her pocket, Kara followed the main path to the side path that led to Hunter's grandfather and Celia's dwelling. She turned and followed it into another group of dwellings. A woman gathering laundry from a clothesline pointed her to Daniel's place. The door was open. He had unframed paintings everywhere. Some of them were on paper and some looked like crudely stretched canvas. There were even some small wood panels. A homemade easel sat facing the door. The inside of the dwelling smelled like linseed oil and turpentine.

"Wow," Kara said.

Daniel was seated at the table and was rubbing a smooth stone into the concave surface of another larger stone. "I don't have a really good rich blue," he almost moaned. "The deepest, most beautiful blue comes from lapis lazuli. This doesn't even come close."

"What's lapis lazuli?"

"A semi-precious mineral. I've searched everywhere around here. I can't find any."

"How do you make paint out of rock?"

"He pointed to the stones. Grind it very fine and mix it with oil."

"Were you _born_ knowing how to do all this stuff?"

"Lucy loaded it into my brain. I was her creation."

Kara took out the handheld computer and paged until she found the music app. She scrolled through the songs she had put on it and selected the one titled _Diaspora_. She increased the volume and held up the small device.

"My other dad. That's him playing the piano. It sounds a lot better in person, but…"

Daniel listened with rapt attention and when the song finished, he took a reed flute from a shelf and played the melody back to her with no mistakes.

"Wow," Kara said again.

"Your other father is very talented."

"He's sick. He has emphysema. It's a lung disease. He smoked cigarettes all his life. Now he coughs a lot and has a hard time getting his breath."

"Is it a fatal disease?"

"Eventually."

Daniel put down the flute and resumed grinding the small blue-gray rocks that he was using instead of the lapis lazuli he wanted. Kara sat on one of the stools at the table and told Daniel the story of her childhood and how she had come home from school one day when she was eight years old to find the man she thought was her father gone. She told him about how she had found Dreilide Thrace again through sheer chance and how she had slowly begun to let him back into her life. She took the handheld computer and found her pictures. She scrolled through them until she came to one of her and Dreilide taken at her Academy graduation.

"That's him."

"A nice looking man. You look enough alike that you could be father and daughter."

Kara scrolled through the pictures until she found a good one of her and John. It had been taken beside his ship a few days before Kara had left for the _Galactica_. Just looking at the picture made her ache to see him. She showed it to Daniel.

As he studied the photograph, Kara said, "That's my real father…my biological father. He's a pilot. He taught me how to fly."

"Celia told me that he's a Cylon prisoner now. That's why you came here…to try to find him."

"I think they took him to the city to be one of their breeders. I think they gave him to a Three. That's what the Leoben said who caught me and Narcho."

"I can see why they would take him for that. He's a very handsome man. They always choose the best-looking ones for breeders."

"I don't even want to think about it." She scrolled to the next picture and showed it to Daniel. It was of her and Lee taken at her dad and Laura's wedding. "That's me with my boyfriend Lee. At least he was my boyfriend when I left. I'm not sure what he'll be when I get back. He might be my ex-boyfriend. I…failed to mention this little trip to him."

"How long ago was this taken? You look younger."

"Two years ago." She scrolled again. "And this is my little brother. He looks like my dad. And he's smart. My dad loves him so much. That's one of the reasons I came here…so I could take my dad back to Brae."

Daniel's eyes were sad. "Lucy loved children. She wanted…_we_ wanted…we tried but…maybe if we'd had more time."

He stopped grinding the stones together and began to look through a stack of watercolor paintings. He pulled one out and handed it to Kara.

"Lucy."

The woman had brown hair and eyes. The resemblance to Commander Cain was unmistakable yet Lucy's features were softer. Helena Cain was very attractive, but her younger sister was beautiful…or at least she was in Daniel's memory and that's the way he had painted her. Kara debated about telling Daniel her thoughts on Lucy's origin and then decided to wait.

"She was really pretty," Kara said. "You're sure she was a human?"

"Yes. She was brought here as a child and worked for the creators. Eventually she became one of them."

"It sounds like you've remembered more stuff."

Daniel looked away from her. "I remembered everything nearly two years ago. I knew I could never tell anyone in the valley because they would kill me."

"So you pretended to have amnesia."

"It was the truth at first. I couldn't remember anything except brief flashes. Then it started coming back in dreams, bits and pieces, and finally I could remember all of it."

"Tell me about Lucy."

"She saved my life. She overheard some of the others planning to kill me."

"Your creators wanted to kill you?"

"Not the creators. Several of the Ones and Fives. They wanted to extinguish my whole line, not just box me like they would sometimes do to a troublesome copy of a model."

"Why?"

He shook his head. "I'm not sure. Cavil had his centurions do it. They got to me first and shot me. I downloaded and Lucy managed to get me out of the resurrection tank before another one of the Cavils poisoned all of the fluid. She hid me in her room and then went back to try to save more copies, but she was too late. The lab was in chaos. The other creators had discovered what Cavil had done and were going to box him. He had them killed, gunned down as they were questioning him about why he had destroyed my entire model."

Kara looked at Daniel in shock. "Your creators are _dead_?"

He nodded, the anguish clear on his face. "Lucy barely escaped. She came back to her room for me and we ran through the tunnels under the lab. She knew every square inch of the buildings, every level. She had been there when they were all built. She had developed a special relationship with a few of the new model centurions. She had modified their programming to make them loyal to her. We hid in the cargo hold of a Heavy Raider and they took us to the city. One of them showed us the maintenance tunnel that led to the generator plant at the base of the dam. We almost made it, but Cavil and his centurions caught up with us. They destroyed Lucy's centurions as they tried to protect us. I told you what happened next."

"You were trying to get to the humans in this valley?"

"Yes. Lucy knew about them. Lucy knew everything and they killed her."

"And the other Cylons were okay with what Cavil did…killing the creators?"

"I don't know. When Lucy and I were in the cargo hold of the Raider, she told me that she was sure Cavil would try to cover up his crime."

"How many creators were there?"

"Besides Lucy there were five others. Originally there were seven, but Lucy said two of them were old when they got here. They died but not before they managed to download their knowledge into the system. They discovered how to interface with their creations through a datastream of liquid. It became the amniotic fluid for all of us. It fills the resurrection tanks. It's how all the memories are transmitted."

"How could Cavil cover up killing your creators? How could he explain them just disappearing?"

Again Daniel shook his head. "By that time the creators rarely interacted with us. Like parents who raise their children and turn them loose to live their own lives. They only got involved if there was a problem with a particular copy of a model although Lucy said that they were planning to create some more models when Cavil had them killed. They wanted twelve models. So far they had created only eight."

"You think all the other Cylons would be okay with Cavil killing your creators?"

"No. The creators are revered by the others as the instruments of God. Most would be horrified to find out that Cavil had killed them. It would probably cause internal strife, maybe even set them at war with each other."

"Who were these creators? Where did they come from?"

"According to Lucy, they came from the Colonies. When the old style centurions came here twenty-five years ago at the end of the First War, they brought some scientists and several doctors with them. They brought human prisoners, too. Lucy was one of them."

"She couldn't have been more than a little kid," Kara said.

"She was seven. She was one of dozens of children. She's the only one the creators kept with them. The rest were sent to a settlement to be raised by humans who were already on the planet. The old centurions had taken five or six ships full of humans. They had to leave one behind on an ice planet at the edge of the Colonial solar system. They brought the rest of them here and continued their experiments. The creators were able to finish the work that the old centurions had started on the humanoids. Then they created a newer version of the centurions."

"Was Lucy…did they experiment on her?"

"No. A husband and wife team of the scientists adopted her and treated her like a daughter. As she grew older, they gave her access to their research. The old centurions had brought hundreds of data bases with them, all the history and culture of mankind. Lucy spent years studying those data bases and learning. She suggested that one of the humanoid models should be an artist and a musician, a poet and a writer, a bastion of culture. The others agreed. She was my creator. Lucy made me."

"And she fell in love with you," Kara said gently.

"I fell in love with her, too, or maybe I was born loving her. She wanted to _humanize_ me, and now I'm like you in another way. If I die, there won't be any downloading for me. My death would be permanent just like a human's."

"That's all the more reason for me not to say anything to the people in this valley." Kara put the small computer in her pocket and handed him the book. "Kataris. He loved a woman who died. His love poems are sad. You might want to read the other poems instead."

Daniel took the book from Kara. "I'll return this when I finish reading it."

"It's a gift."

"Books are precious. I shouldn't take this from you."

"Yes, you should. A copy of Leoben gave it to me. He runs a bookstore in Caprica City. He said he missed out on the poetry appreciation gene. You didn't, so you should have it."

"You're friends with a Two?" Daniel asked incredulously.

"It's a long story. I wish you could meet him. A copy of Cavil had him killed when he disagreed about destroying humanity. Then he wiped out Leoben's memories and sent him to live among us to learn how bad humans are. It didn't work out that way. Leoben helped us and betrayed Cavil. He's not at all like the one I met in the forest a few days ago."

"I'd like to hear the story," Daniel said. "Would you sit and let me make a few sketches of you while you tell it to me?"

"I guess. But none of that goddess of spring stuff. Okay?"

Daniel smiled warmly for the first time since she'd arrived. The smile lit his face and Kara caught a glimpse of the beautiful man that Lucy had created and loved.

"Who's the artist, Kara, you or me?"

_..._

The elevator door opened on the twelfth floor and John got off. He turned. Sonja held the door but made no attempt to step into the hall.

"I'll bring you a copy of our scriptures tomorrow." She smiled knowingly. "Right now D'Anna will be waiting for you. I'm sure she has plans for the rest of today. I'm very envious. Do you plan to show her our little trick?"

"You just don't know when to quit, do you?"

She was still smiling. "Quitting rarely gets us what we want."

"Let's just leave it at that."

"Let me know when you want to go out again. My door is always open to you, John."

"About that trip to the valley…"

"I'll let you know. I can't make any promises that it will be this week, but it will happen…maybe next week or the week after." She smiled again. "I usually figure out a way to get what I want."

After the elevator door closed, he turned and walked down the hall to his apartment. Sonja had told him the truth. D'Anna was inside waiting for him. She looked exactly the same although she was wearing a different outfit than the one she had been wearing the morning Simon had taken her away. Today she was dressed in white slacks and a short white jacket. Her look when she saw him was one of relief.

He closed the door. "How are you?"

She smiled at him. "I thought they'd taken you back to the prison, but Simon told me to wait. He said you'd explain."

John studied her face. He couldn't tell if she knew about the change in her status or not.

"What else did Simon tell you?"

"Nothing. Is something going on? Where have you been?"

John headed toward the kitchen. "I'm thirsty. Would you like something to drink?"

"No. Tell me what's wrong."

"Have a seat on the couch. I'll be back in a minute and we'll talk."

He went into the kitchen and opened the bottle of whiskey. He poured a little into the bottom of a glass and added water. He took a deep breath and drained the glass. He wanted to go out on the balcony, sit in the chair and go to asleep. But he had something he had to do before he could take a nap. He had to tell D'Anna how everything had changed. He owed her that much.

He walked back into the living room and sat down beside her. He took her hand.

"Tell me what they did to you at the lab."

"Nothing."

"They kept you three days and didn't do _anything_?"

"A Simon copy checked me out."

"A physical exam?"

"Yes. Then I put my hand in the datastream and talked to the creators."

"For three days?"

"Not the whole time. They directed Simon and he ran some diagnostic tests while I slept. It didn't hurt. I didn't feel anything."

"What did the creators talk to you about?"

"They asked me questions, the same questions they always ask me. What I'm thinking, what I'm feeling."

"What do your creators look like? Young? Old? How many are there?"

"I don't see them. Nobody sees the creators. We communicate through the datastream. It's not like you and I are talking right now. I hear their voices but in my head, not with my ears. Sometimes I even hear the voice of one of us who is gone."

"Gone?" John asked. "Dead? Missing? What do you mean by _gone_?"

"Dead. While I was boxed, there was an accident in the lab. Something happened to our Number Seven. Cavil told us that the creators were working on him and something happened to the fluid in the resurrection tanks. It was accidentally contaminated by a lethal virus and all the copies of him died. The creators never tried to make another one like him. He was our artistic brother. He was gentle and beautiful. Cavil hated him from the beginning. He thought Daniel was weak and unworthy."

"And you hear the voice of this dead Cylon in the datastream? Do any of the rest of you hear him?"

"I don't know. Maybe once our voices are in the datastream they stay there forever and maybe it's just me. Some of the others think I'm crazy. One of the creators had Cavil to ask me about you."

"Me? How do your creators know about _me_?"

"They know everything, John."

"What did they want to know about me?"

"They wanted to know what we talked about and if we had sex."

A wave of anger washed over him. "That's just damned sick and creepy. Why is _that_ any of their business?"

"They need to know if you're doing what you were brought here to do. Some of our models know how to lie. Some do it very well, but we can't lie when we communicate through the datastream. What comes out of the datastream is always the truth."

"So for you Cylons the datastream is the mother of all lie detectors."

She smiled. "I guess you could call it that."

John studied her eyes. "Do you know how to lie…when your hand isn't in the datastream?"

"Sonja does. Cavil does…especially Cavil. Some of the others lie, too."

"That's good to know, but it's not what I asked you."

"I have no reason to lie to you. Now tell me where you were and what's going on."

John felt like there was something she hadn't said to him, but he let it go. The sooner he told her about Sonja, the better. He thought about how to lead into it. Finally he said, "You know about the Council of Eight, don't you?"

"We all know about the Council of Eight. We elected them and they govern us. How did you find out about them?"

"Sonja told me about them. It seems that right now they've got a problem with you being my handler. They're afraid I'll talk you into helping me try to escape which would be bad for both of us. They want Sonja to take over those duties for a while so you and I can just hang out together…no pressure. You can't take me outside or make any other decisions about me, but everything else will stay the same between you and me."

D'Anna didn't blow up, but she let go of his hand, stood and walked over to the sliding glass doors. With her back to him she asked, "The centurions are gone from your door. Did Sonja send them away?"

"Most of the centurions are in the forest right now. The two outside my door were needed for other duties. She said they weren't necessary since I can't leave the building."

"Did you sleep with her while I was gone?"

John took a deep breath. "I had sex with her. I wouldn't say I _slept_ with her."

D'Anna's voice took on a tone that was both hurt and angry. "How many times?"

John stood and walked over to her. She turned her back to him. He gently put his hands on her shoulders. She stiffened but left them there.

"Just once. I wanted to go outside. That's where I was today. She took me to the temple. There's no need to blame her. I didn't have to take her up on her offer, but I did."

"I knew she would try to seduce you. I knew she would find a way. Was it good?"

If he told her the truth, he would tell her that sex with both her and Sonja had been just that…sex, a physical act that meant nothing more to him, an act in which his heart played no role. But what he could easily have said to Sonja, he couldn't bring himself to say to D'Anna. He felt sorry for this Cylon who had been the subject of experiments by her creators as they tried to tone down her religious fanaticism and who was clearly emotionally damaged by what she had gone through.

He gently squeezed her shoulders. "Let's not go there. I'm sorry for what I did with Sonja. Let's leave it at that."

She turned finally and looked at him. "Did you do it in your bed?"

He shook his head. She smiled and put her hand on the back of his neck like she had done on the day she had brought him to the city. Blanking his mind he let her pull his head down until their lips touched. He knew the consequences of refusing her like he had done that first day. She would get the drug from Simon only this time she would give him the correct dose. In the end she would get what she wanted. It was better to skip the neurological damage and let her take him to bed. He would give her what she expected and afterward he would sleep and forget about the Cylons for a few hours. He would think of Kara safely back on Caprica and not in a valley a hundred miles west of the city like Sonja thought she was. He hoped he would dream about anything except the little gray room at the prison or the life he was now being forced to live.

_..._

Kara looked in the mirror that hung in the sleeping area at Emmalyn's, a mirror that had obviously come from the _Hyperion_. She didn't know why she was suddenly nervous about her appearance. She was wearing the blouse that Juliana had decorated with the small embroidered flowers and the skirt that belonged to Dessa. She had even remembered the petticoat. Cavil couldn't let the fighters back into the forest soon enough to suit her. Even a prison jump suit would be preferable to looking like an Aerilon farm wife from two centuries ago.

Dessa came to the door. In the light from the oil lamp her eyes were sparkling. She was excited. She took Kara's hand and pulled her into the larger room.

"Let me braid your hair. Hunter and Aunt Emmie are waiting. We've got to go."

"What's the big deal? Has somebody got a stopwatch on us or something?"

Kara sat on the low stool and Dessa began brushing her hair. "What's a stopwatch?" Dessa asked as she pulled at a tangle.

"Ow. That hair's still attached to my head."

Dessa stopped brushing. "I didn't mean to hurt you."

"It's okay. Go ahead. Finish braiding." Kara felt the nimble fingers working. "You're excited about the meeting, aren't you?"

"I like meetings. Daniel and Targa and some of the others might play some music and we can dance. I like to dance."

"Nobody said anything about dancing tonight."

"Don't you like to dance?"

"Not really…except with Lee. His brother Zak is a good dancer. And my friend Karl. I almost forgot about him. He's a good dancer. And Narcho's friend Flat Top. He's okay, too. I danced with him a couple of times at the Shark Rider."

"What's the Shark Rider?"

"It's a place where a lot of pilots hang out."

Dessa giggled. "I think Narcho is cute."

"Narcho is a good guy. But you'd better not mess with him or Hunter and your uncles might get the wrong idea and kick his butt."

"What does that mean…like kissing? I'm not supposed to kiss boys on the mouth. That's what Aunt Emmie always tells me. I'm not supposed to touch boys or let them touch me either."

"Kissing and touching can lead to all kinds of trouble."

"Do you think Narcho will dance with me?"

"I don't know. If Hunter says it's okay, he might."

Dessa wrapped a piece of ribbon around the end of Kara's braid and tied it. "Hunter likes you. Will you ask him for me?"

"Sure, Dessa. I'll ask him for you."

"You're nice. I like you, too. Will you stay here with us and be Hunter's girlfriend?"

Kara turned around and smiled. "Hunter's a good guy and I like him a lot, but I've already got a boyfriend. Now let's go to the meeting so I can make my speech and get it over with. Then you can dance."

Hunter was holding a lantern and standing outside with Emmalyn. He put his arm around Dessa and they started up the path. Kara fell in beside Emmalyn who pulled the shawl around her shoulders.

"Have you and Narcho decided what you're going to say?"

"Mostly."

"You look very pretty tonight."

"Thank you. I'm nervous…like I felt every time I had to stand up in class at the Academy. I never get nervous when I'm in a cockpit, but make me stand up in front of a bunch of people and...it's just not my thing."

"You'll do fine. Remember we're very simple people."

Narcho was waiting outside the communal building with Targa and Beck. In the twilight he looked just like one of them.

"Look at you," he said. "No wonder that Cylon didn't recognize you."

"Back at you, valley boy."

"Ready to do this?"

"As ready as I'll ever be."

They followed Hunter inside and down to the front of the room. Someone had already lined the chairs against the wall. With the exception of a few elderly people, everyone was standing. Lanterns had been hung on chains at intervals around the room which gave more light than Kara had thought. Hunter stepped up on a wooden platform and got everyone's attention. He then introduced Kara and Narcho and told them that Kara would tell them briefly what had happened in the Colonies since the Cylon attack five and a half years earlier. He stepped down and Kara stepped up.

"Speak up so everybody can hear you," Hunter whispered.

"Get up here," Kara hissed at Narcho. He stepped up beside her. She swallowed and took a deep breath. "First we'd like to thank everybody for not giving us away yesterday when Cavil was here. We owe you our lives."

Narcho said. "All of you put it on the line for us and that means a lot to both of us. We hope to be able to repay the favor one day."

A man's voice came from the back of the room. "Kill some of those bastards for us. That's all we ask."

"That's the plan," Narcho grinned.

"We heard the Cylons destroyed all the Colonies but one. Is that true?" A woman near the front asked.

"It's true. All but Caprica. That's where we're from."

"We hear your father's their prisoner."

Kara took a deep breath. "That's right. I didn't know he was their prisoner when I came here. I thought I'd find him with you and I would be able to take him back with me, but they've got him. I can't rescue him now, but maybe one day…"

"Things aren't going to change here," a man said. "No way can we ever take on the Cylons. What makes you think you'll be able to rescue him?"

Narcho put his arm around Kara and said, "We don't know anything for sure. We just don't want to give up hope. Hope is a good thing to have."

Kara glanced at him and was reminded again what a nice guy Noel Allison was. He'd kept them from asking her anymore questions about her father, and he'd done it very diplomatically. Everyone in that room understood him. What he was really saying to them was, _Don't take away Kara's hope that she'll see her father again. _

Then to Kara's surprise, Narcho briefly told them about five years of Cylon rule and how they had won their freedom. When he finished, he said, "We want to thank you again for your hospitality. Now I think it's time for everybody to break out the mead and listen to some music. We're glad we could give everybody a good excuse to have a party."

He stepped down off the box and helped her down. She hugged him. "Thanks. I didn't know you had it in you to make a speech like that."

"I owe it to Mr. Connelly and Mrs. Nagala for all those times I had to stand up in class and talk."

She grinned. "I do my best talking in a Viper."

"I don't know about that. You were pretty persuasive talking me into helping you steal the Raider."

"Why'd you do it?"

"You had me at _nuke a planet with humans still on it_, even before you told me your father was here. I think things worked out the way they were supposed to." Narcho took a deep breath and looked away for a moment. "I know Hunter's going back to Caprica with you."

"You're okay with that?"

"I'd already decided to stay here."

"You're my wingman, Narch. You stuck by me. I just want to be sure."

Daniel walked to the front with a guitar. He was joined by Targa and two other men. Targa had a fiddle. One of the other men had a reed flute. The fourth had a bodhrán drum with an animal skin stretched over it. They began playing a lively Colonial folk song. Daniel caught her eye and smiled. There was something about him that reminded her a little of Dreilide Thrace. She nodded in time to the music and returned his smile.

Hunter walked over to them just as the people in the middle of the floor moved back. Dessa and some young people began dancing. Kara looked at Hunter. "Dessa wants to dance with Narch. I told her I'd ask you."

"I'm not much of a dancer," Narcho said. "You remember I sat out most dances at the Shark Rider."

"Come on, it would mean a lot to Dessa." She looked at Hunter again. "What do you say? Narch will behave himself."

Hunter smiled. "Sure. Make my little sister happy."

Dessa and the other young people looked like they were having a great time. Nobody was really dancing with a partner. They were all in a group moving and twirling to the music…and laughing. They looked so happy. She glanced at Hunter again. He seemed to read her mind.

"Sometimes you wish you could be a kid and leave everything else behind, don't you? You just want to be young and have a good time and forget all the grief and pain."

Kara thought about lazy summer evenings back on Picon when she and Karl had chased fireflies through a field near the creek behind the base. She was eleven and he was twelve, and summer nights were still filled with magic. They would finally fall on their backs in the grass, out of breath and laughing, and look at the stars, those torches of other worlds. She would hold up her hands and pretend the stars were the fireflies of the heavens. _I'm going to go there one day in a Viper, _she would say to Karl. She couldn't remember a time when she hadn't wanted to take a ship into the stars. From the time she had been a small child, she'd wanted to fly. When she'd met her real father, she'd finally understood why. It was in her blood like her love of riding the motorcycle and her love of speed. And then she and Karl would be up again and running, chasing each other through the starry night, their arms outstretched like the wings of ships, chasing fireflies, chasing dreams.

Hunter was right. She had left her childhood behind very abruptly the night her father had taken her and Karl off Picon yet sometimes she did want to be a kid again and leave everything else behind for a little while.

"So what do you say we join them?" Kara said.

"You mean get out there and dance like those kids?"

"Why not? Pretend for half an hour."

Kara looked at Narcho. He grinned and shrugged. "Okay. I'm in. Let's go dance with the kids."

Kara smiled at Hunter. "Admit it. You want to do this as much as I do. Forget about the Cylons. I give you permission to have fun. For the rest of the evening you're officially a kid again."

Kara grabbed Hunter's and Narcho's hands and pulled them into the group of young people. The music caught her and drew her under its spell. The lanterns looked like stars on a summer night. In her mind she was already skimming across a field on Picon with her arms outstretched like wings. The dream of finding her father was like the firefly she was chasing. She would catch it one day.

She knew she would.

TBC…


	18. The Unofficial Dead

Chapter 18

The Unofficial Dead

_1 Now it came to pass that the Tribes of Man split into Twelve and One and the Twelve prayed to the old gods, to Zeus and his kin, and the Thirteenth prayed to the One True God._

_2 And the Twelve Tribes rose up against the Thirteenth Tribe and enslaved them and put them to work building their cities unto the far reaches of Kobol._

_3 The people of the Thirteenth cried to their God. Send us a sign in our tribulation._

_4 And God promised them a prophet to reveal His word._

_5 In the third age of their enslavement a young priestess of the temple found favor with God and He spoke to her. _

_6 God said to Azurra, Speak thy vision to all the people that they may hear and understand the days of their torment are numbered._

_7 But Azurra trembled before the word of God and hid herself so that none would know she had been chosen for she was young and afraid._

_8 Then God sent her a dream of a green and fertile planet and He said to her, This world that orbits a distant star shall be the new home of My people. _

_9 And her fear vanished and she went into the temple and spoke her vision to the people and became His prophet._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Azurra, _Chapter 1:1-9

.

"What's the name of the next town?" Lee asked as he, Saunders and Kendra completed their descent through Tauron's atmosphere.

Kendra was sitting in the copilot's seat and Saunders was behind them at the ECO's console.

"Ember Pass," Saunders said, "where my weather info indicates a beautiful and sunny but cold day. Come around to heading nine-zero-nine northeast."

They covered the remaining distance in ten minutes. Following Flat Top's directions, Lee descended over a broad valley. "That's it up ahead," he said.

"The landing strip is on the other side of town."

"It looks a lot like Lindeford," Kendra said. "Except smaller."

"I'm going to do a flyover. I don't see any smoke from chimneys. What have you got on infrared?" He asked Flat Top.

"Nada. Nothing. Everything is cold down below."

"Put the ship down at the airfield and let's talk," Kendra said.

"I'd rather not put the ship down unless we plan to stay," Lee replied.

Lee tilted the Raptor so they could get a better view through the front canopy. Unlike Lindeford where they had found no vehicles, the little town of Ember Pass had dozens of them. But like the streets and buildings, the vehicles appeared empty and abandoned. The snow on the roads was fresh and smooth. There were no tracks to indicate that anything had driven there recently. In several places dead power lines were down across the streets.

Lee followed the main road out of town as it passed between stands of tall evergreens. Other than the cut-out area in between the trees, there was nothing else to indicate he was following a road. In the morning sun the snow spread out brilliantly white and even in all directions. Almost thirty miles from the edge of the town he saw a partially snow-covered van on the road. The windshield and windows were frosted on the outside. He did a low flyover and let the Raptor's propulsion wash blow much of the snow off the vehicle. He turned and made another pass.

Even as he worked at holding the Raptor in a steady hover, Lee could see that there were people inside the van.

"They're dead, aren't they?" Kendra asked.

Flat Top had come up and now knelt between the two seats. "For a long time. They're frozen solid."

"I wonder where they were trying to go?"

"They were leaving town," Lee said. "I think we can assume this town is abandoned like Lindeford. Are you filming this?" He asked Flat Top.

"I started the cameras rolling at three thousand feet. I haven't stopped them."

"I'm going to follow the road for a while. Where does it lead?"

Flat Top went back to his maps. "It'll turn north in about ten miles. The next town is Quanniq near the tylium mines."

"How far?"

"Roughly two hundred miles. The weather isn't quite as nice up there as it is here. It's snowing this morning."

After twenty miles and two more snow-covered vehicles, Lee said, "I'm burning too much fuel at this altitude. I think we've seen all we need to see. Some of the inhabitants of Ember Pass died trying to leave the town. There will probably be vehicles all along this road.

"I'm switching off the cameras," Flat Top said.

"I wonder if any of them made it," Kendra said so softly that Lee barely heard her through the helmet communicator.

"Maybe," Flat Top said. "If they left in warmer weather before the food and fuel ran out."

"So there's nothing between here and Quanniq?" Lee asked.

"Not any towns, at least not on my map. Quanniq is the capitol of the northern provinces and only about fifteen miles from the first of the tylium mines. There's bound to be people there, even if it's only the miners who came here a couple of years ago to restart the mining operation. Do either of you know if they've still got centurions working with them?"

Kendra roused herself from deep thought. "The centurions are still there. Unless somebody told them, they don't know anything has changed. They think the Cylons still control Caprica."

"They won't think that if they see us," Lee said. "We need to stay away from the mines."

"The centurions are kept at work underground," Kendra said. "They'll never see us. We're safe. So it's just like it used to be. The centurions are being used as slaves."

"Better them than us," Flat Top said. "Isn't that what they were created for in the first place…to work in mines and build space stations and do the work that was too tough or too dangerous for humans to do?"

"If we could have resisted the urge to make soldiers out of them so they could do our fighting for us, we'd have been okay."

"Not necessarily," Lee said. "Each upgrade increased their artificial intelligence. They still might have rebelled."

"But if we hadn't armed them they wouldn't have been able to turn their weapons on us, would they?"

Flat Top cleared his throat. "So what's our plan?" He asked diplomatically.

Lee answered, "See if you can raise anyone at the landing site for the tylium shuttles. Get us clearance to put the Raptor down and see if someone can help us with transportation into town."

"They're expecting us this morning," Kendra said. "Mr. Gaeta had somebody get a message to them. We're to ask for a Mr. August Bernard, also known as Auggie B. Mr. Bernard was one of the prisoners that Tom Zarek got pardons for in exchange for working the mines while we were still under Cylon rule."

"That's great," Flat Top said. "They've got an inmate in charge of the tylium mines."

Kendra said, "He's not in charge of the mining process, just the site where the shuttles land and get loaded with oar. Mr. Gaeta looked him up for me. It seems August Bernard worked in the Scorpia Shipyards where he and another man started diverting some of the cargo for their own gain. Eventually he got greedy and killed his partner in crime. Although he claimed it was self defense, he was tried for first-degree murder and found guilty. That's why he was in prison for life. But if he works on Tauron for another year, then all his sins are forgiven, wiped clean by a Presidential pardon."

Her last remark was tinged with disgust. It was obvious that Kendra did not approve of former President Adar granting blanket pardons to all of Tom Zarek's men just because they agreed to work for a few years on Tauron. Lee wasn't sure how he felt about it. He knew that without the tylium ore, the Colonials would never have been able to defeat the Cylons. Some trade-offs were repulsive but necessary.

Thirty minutes later they were on the ground. The Raptor looked like a gnat beside the tylium shuttle that was being loaded and Lee knew that the shuttles were dwarfed by the big tylium barges that waited in orbit to receive the oar. Only when the big barges were filled would they make their way back to Caprica where the process would be repeated in reverse. The huge barges stayed in orbit while the oar was off-loaded onto shuttles that took it to the tylium refinery four hundred miles north of Delphi.

After Lee powered down the Raptor, he said, "I think somebody should stay with the ship. It's not that I don't trust these guys, but…"

Flat Top volunteered. "You take the other radio. If you run into trouble, I'll come get you."

"There's four P-90s in the firearms locker. All have full clips of ammo."

As Lee was opening the door and lowering the ramp, Flat Top turned to Kendra. He touched the side of her face. "Keep your hood up. It might not do to advertise that you're a woman. It's probably been a long time since these guys have seen anybody who looks like you."

Kendra rolled her eyes. "I'm sure there are women in town," she said.

"But none as beautiful…"

"Okay. I get your drift." Kendra patted the sidearm that was strapped on the outside of her flight suit. She smiled as Saunders helped her into the heavy jacket. "If we get set upon by a pack of wild men, I'll save the last bullet for myself."

"That's not funny."

"Knock it off, you two," Lee said. Nobody is going to need to do any shooting, but after what happened yesterday, we can't take the chance on going unarmed."

Flat Top grinned. "Just because they walk on two legs doesn't mean they're not wolves."

"That's truly not funny," Lee said. He slung the bag with his laptop computer and the small portable scanner over his shoulder. "We'll do a radio check every ten minutes."

He pulled up the hood of his jacket and Kendra did the same. The wind was blowing and a light snow was falling as he and Kendra headed for the terminal building. Inside they stomped the snow off their boots on a worn rubber mat just inside the door. A large pot-bellied stove sat in the corner of the room. August Bernard was a big, slightly overweight man with a heavy graying beard and short graying hair. He was sloppily dressed and was smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine with his booted feet propped on the room's only desk. The room smelled of wood smoke and stale food and body odor. Kendra wrinkled her nose.

"Are you August Bernard?" Lee said.

"Who's asking?"

"Lieutenants Adama and Shaw. We need to see about getting transportation into town. We were given your name and told you could help us."

"Auggie B," the man said as he finally put his feet on the floor and the magazine on the desk. He looked Lee over and then his eyes went to Kendra. "Transports from town don't run out here. This landing facility is off-limits to the locals. Still a little animosity with some of them, especially those that consider this _their land_. That's what the barbed wire and gate are all about."

Kendra spoke up. "Commander Cain was under the impression you would provide us with a vehicle."

Auggie B scratched his chin through his beard. "I didn't get the message."

"Fine," she snapped and looked at Lee. "Let's go back to the ship. We'll find a parking lot in town to land in." She turned back to Auggie B. "I'm sure Tom Zarek will be impressed with our treatment here. I'll make sure my mother mentions it to him during the next Quorum meeting. He assured her we'd have your full cooperation."

Auggie B grinned. "Simmer down, little lady. You should have said right away that you were acquainted with the boss." He took some keys from his pocket and tossed them to Lee. "My truck's outside. If you put it in a ditch, I'll expect the government to buy me a new one. The other key is for the gate. Make sure you lock it behind you." He pointed to the door on the opposite side of the room. "Truck's just outside. What you need to go into town for anyway?"

Kendra started to speak but Lee cut her off. "We're picking up something at the courthouse. We won't be gone long. Can you tell us where it is?"

"It's in the only big building in town. On Main Street. Just follow the road. You can't miss it."

"Thanks." In the truck Lee said to Kendra, "The less said to the miners about why we're here, the better. Zarek doesn't even know we're on Tauron much less that we're trying to get voter registration lists. That was a nice bluff, though. It got Auggie B's attention and got us transportation."

"You're right. I should have kept my mouth shut."

"Don't worry about it. Let's just get that list and get out of here. Check in with Saunders and let him know what our status is."

Kendra took the radio out of her pocket and verified that everything was quiet at the ship. Flat Top asked them to bring him a ham and cheese on rye for lunch. Kendra rolled her eyes.

"A moose burger on a stale bun is more like it."

Lee drove slowly and carefully. It took nearly twenty minutes before he pulled up in front of a large four-story concrete building. There were very few people around. Many of the buildings were dark and deserted. Inside the government building, the office of the Registrar of Deeds was dark as was a courtroom across the hall. They finally found a woman bundled in several thick sweaters at a reception desk in the district attorney's office on the second floor. Her face had only a few lines but her hair was almost completely gray. Her skin was very pale and she wore no makeup. Kendra told her what they were looking for.

"Voter registration lists are filed in the basement with birth and death certificates, but nothing's been updated in almost five years."

"That's all right."

"There's no lights down there. Something shorted out a long time ago and nobody can fix it because we can't get the parts. You'll need a flashlight. I've got one if you'll promise to bring it back."

Kendra glanced at Lee and smiled. "Thank you, but we've got a flashlight. I'm Kendra and this is Lee. Your accent is Virgonian. How did you wind up here on Tauron?"

The woman smiled. "You have a very good ear. I was born on Virgon. My father brought our family here years ago when he came to work the mines. I was twelve years old. Later I married a local boy so I stayed. Take the stairs. The elevator doesn't work either."

"Where is everybody?" Kendra asked. "We didn't see many people."

"A lot of the people who lived here are dead. If those miners hadn't gotten here when they did two years ago with food and supplies and medicine, a lot more would have died. They were damned stingy with it at first, but they needed some help with the equipment so they were persuaded to share. There wasn't a man among them who knew anything about the mines."

Kendra said. "The two towns we just visited, Lindeford and Ember Pass, were deserted. Do you know anything about what happened to the people?"

"A few families from Ember Pass got here early in the fall of that first year, before the winter snows started, but none after that. Nobody from Lindeford made it. They would probably have gone south toward Hypatia. It was closer to them and the roads were better."

"Hypatia was destroyed along with Tauron City."

"We heard."

"Thank you for the information," Lee said. "We won't take the lists. We'll make copies."

"Take them," the woman said. "Two-thirds of the names on them belong to dead people. They won't care. If the government ever holds another election, we'll have to start all over anyway."

Lee and Kendra looked at each other. Lee knew she was thinking what he was. If most of the people had died of starvation or disease before the mining operation got started again, how had they signed Tom Zarek's petition?

"I don't suppose there's a list of the…deceased anywhere, is there? You said death certificates hadn't been updated in five years? Is there anywhere else we could get the names? Maybe a local funeral home or something."

She shook her head. "There's nothing official."

"Unofficial?" Kendra asked.

The woman finally said, "You'll need to go to the only café in town that's open. Cross the street in front of this building and walk two blocks north. The man who runs it, Mateo Oraibi, keeps an unofficial list of sorts. His family has lived on this land for hundreds of years, long before geologists discovered we were sitting on mountains of tylium. Now let me ask you something. Does this have anything to do with the person who is supposed to be representing our interests in the government and who has ignored us since he went back to Caprica?"

Lee and Kendra glanced at each other again. Kendra nodded.

"We never asked him to represent us. He made promises. He hasn't kept a single one. His convict miners get anything they want in the way of equipment and supplies. We get nothing except the barest necessities."

"So you never signed a petition asking the government of Caprica to recognize Tom Zarek as Tauron's representative."

"One of Zarek's men came around asking, a man named Meier. Zarek didn't want to get his hands dirty so all he did was make promises. Most people refused to sign the petition until Meier made it clear we wouldn't get to share their supplies at all unless we cooperated. I think he got a few hundred signatures. Sick and starving people will do almost anything for medicine and food…even sign a petition for a man like him. I'd like to see a real election held."

"I'm sure that will be arranged soon," Lee said.

They were almost out the door when Kendra stopped. "Does anyone at the mine know about Mr. Oraibi's unofficial list of the dead?"

"The government of Tauron gave away lands that Mateo's people had held sacred for years, land that his ancestors were buried on. Mateo has nothing to do with the miners other than serve them meals and take their cubits when they come into town."

"You're sure?" Lee said.

The woman smiled again. "Very sure. Mateo is my husband. Go get a cup of coffee. Tell him Malina sent you."

"Thank you," Kendra said.

Out in the hall, Lee unzipped a side pocket on the laptop case and took out a flashlight. He looked at Kendra. "You, too?"

She patted her pocket. "Of course. And an extra set of batteries."

Before they descended the stairs to the basement, she checked in with Flat Top. At the bottom of the stairs they went through the door to the file room. It was much colder on this level than the ones above. Kendra shined the light. There were rows of file cabinets. They split up and quickly began checking the outside labels. Most of them looked like court cases that were indexed by number. In the far corner they found a cabinet that should have contained the voter registration lists. The folders for each province were empty…all of them. Lee and Kendra looked through the entire cabinet. No lists. They looked through two neighboring cabinets. The lists weren't there, either.

Slowly they climbed the stairs back to the ground floor. "What do you make of that?" Lee asked.

"I think somebody took those lists so they could selectively pull off names and put them on a petition."

"I think you're right," Lee said. "Romo Lampkin will, too. Do you by any chance know how many signatures were on that petition Zarek presented to Adar?"

Kendra smiled. "Over eleven hundred. I looked it up. Malina said he only got a couple hundred signatures. I'd say that's a big discrepancy. Now let's go get that cup of coffee."

The little café was half filled with rough-looking men in dirty clothes. The only woman in the room sat at the counter with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. She inhaled and blew out the smoke without removing it. Except for the woman, who barely glanced at them, all eyes in the room turned in their direction. There was no one behind the counter until a medium-height, dark-haired man with his long hair tied back came through a swinging door. He had a tray of plates and served one of the tables of men. Lee and Kendra waited until he was through and had started back toward the kitchen.

The miners had already lost interest in them and were digging into the food.

"Could we have a word," Lee said softly. "Malina told us to talk to you."

Mateo took in their clean, well-made heavy jackets and made a slight motion of his head that Lee took to be a nod. They followed him into the kitchen where another man was scrambling eggs on a grill.

"Your wife told us you have a list of the people who have died in the last five years."

He studied them. "You from the government?"

"Military," Kendra answered. "We'd appreciate it if we could make a copy of it."

"We got no copy machine. There's not one working in the whole town."

"We have something just as good," Lee said. "It will only take a few minutes. You can watch us if you'd like."

"Supposing I had such a list, why would someone from the military want it?"

"The request comes from Caprica's Attorney General," Kendra said. "He asked for the voter registration lists, but we've been to the courthouse and they're missing. I think you know why. We're on your side in this issue. Getting your list will help us get a real election for the people of Tauron."

Mateo made the slight motion of his head again. They followed him into a storage room where he took a thick sheaf of folded pages from behind a crate of dishwashing detergent.

"I got to get back to my customers. Put it back when you're through. I'm still adding to it."

"When did you start keeping this list, Mr. Oraibi?" Kendra asked.

"A few months after the supply ships stopped coming."

"So over five years ago?"

He nodded and went out closing the door behind him.

Lee was already unzipping the laptop case. Kendra unfolded the pages. Most of the entries were written in pencil. Many were nothing but a name and a date, occasionally where the person had died and how were notated. Scanning the pages into the computer took them almost twenty minutes because the small scanner was slow. The images were good, though, and Lee was pleased.

"How many names do you think there are?" He asked Kendra.

"He's averaging forty names per page. There's thirty-eight pages. That's over fifteen hundred people…over a third of the population of Quanniq."

"I'll bet a lot of those names will be on Zarek's petition."

"I think we did good today. This might be better than a voter registration list."

Kendra grinned. "And we didn't have to fight any wolves for it."

Lee scanned the last page, disconnected the scanner and shut down the laptop. Kendra stashed the list behind the case of dishwashing detergent where Mateo had gotten it. They returned to the dining room and sat in a booth. Lee could tell Kendra was in a good mood. She used the hand-held radio and checked in with Flat Top.

"We're ordering lunch. How do you want your moose burger cooked?"

_..._

The weather that had threatened all day moved through Caprica City in the early evening accompanied by lighting and torrential sheets of wind-driven rain. At the first distant rumble of thunder Laura closed the report on Tauron that she was reading and stood. Her son, so fearless of everything else, was frightened of thunderstorms. From the time he was a baby, she and John had both sat holding him to try to soothe his terror of the thunder. She knew Maya was with him, but she wanted to be there, too.

She was almost to the door of her office when her phone buzzed. She hesitated and then reluctantly went back to answer it, noticing that it was her private number, the one that didn't go through the switchboard.

Bill Adama was on the other end. "I hoped you'd left your office by now."

"Half a minute and you'd have missed me. Is something wrong?"

"It can wait."

"No, go ahead."

"Earlier this afternoon I was notified that a medical transport had been dispatched to the _Galactica_. I broke our communication silence and contacted Commander Cain. It seems the ECO who accompanied Lee and Kendra to the surface of Tauron this morning to obtain the first voter registration list was mauled by wolves."

"Did you saw _mauled by wolves_?" Laura asked incredulously.

"Yes."

"Are Lee and Kendra all right?"

"They're fine. Cain had just read their report and talked to them. The lieutenant who was injured, a Lieutenant Alex Quartararo, is the roommate of the one who helped Kara steal the Raider. Lieutenant Allison borrowed his car to take Kara out to the boneyard."

Laura let the information sink in. "Small world, isn't it? And please, Bill, refrain from using the word _steal_ in regards to Kara and the Raider. I prefer to say _borrowed_. I have faith that she's going to bring it back. How did the wolf attack happen?"

She listened with horror as he related the events that had led up to Alex Quartararo being attacked by a pack of hungry wolves and his subsequent injury that would require some delicate surgery. When Bill finished, he said, "I know you want those lists, but I concur with the commander. She told them to bypass any towns that appear to be deserted."

"Of course. I had no idea…I would never want anyone put in danger to prove a theory. If we have to wait several years for a new election, we will. I hate to think of putting up with Tom Zarek for that long, but I don't want anyone hurt trying to get him out of office."

"You're not the only one who doubts the veracity of the petition Zarek presented to President Adar last year. Getting those voter registration lists is the only way to prove it."

"I agree but no heroics. A list is not worth anyone's life. I hope you made that clear."

"I did."

A rumble of thunder reminded Laura of where she had been headed when her phone had rung. "I need to go. My son is afraid of thunderstorms."

"He'll grow out of it. When Zak was little, he'd hide under the bed during thunderstorms and scream if Carolanne tried to coax him out. Even Lee couldn't get him to come out. Lee was just the opposite. He wanted to stand in the doorway and watch the lightning. He didn't care if he got wet or not."

"How is Zak doing in Sovana?"

"Surviving. There was a shootout involving rival warlords this morning, some sort of turf war. The police were standing back waiting to see what happened when one of our patrols happened by. They traded rounds with the criminals…the ones who were still alive by then. The rest got away. There were five dead and four wounded, none of them ours."

"And tomorrow those nine will have been replaced by nine others and the killings will continue."

"Yes," Bill said wearily. "Sovana is not the place to be right now. I'll have a complete report for you about the incident in the Armistice Zone in a couple of days. Now go to your son."

Laura hung up and wondered, not for the first time, if she had made a mistake in running for President. Even with the Cylons in the bunker prison, there were so many problems facing Caprica. At the moment, however, Braedon needed her and that was more important than anything else. She wanted to hold her son and kiss his soft hair, to calm his fears and think about her husband and offer another prayer for his safety.

_..._

The sun was setting and D'Anna was gone when John woke up. He sat on the side of the bed for a few minutes with his head in his hands. After he had done what she wanted, he had slept deep and dreamless for a few hours. He considered that the best part of his afternoon. He stood and went to the shower.

Doolittle had just brought his dinner tray when he emerged from the bedroom dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt.

"Did you enjoy getting out the last two days, sir?"

"I enjoyed the _getting out_ part, but that's it. I could have done without the rest."

"Sonja never took none of her men to the temple before."

John looked longingly at the bottle of whiskey and decided against it before he sat down at the table.

"I paid for it," he said glumly, "in more ways than one."

"She didn't have me fix no picnic for them others like she did for you either."

"All she wants to do is question me. She's asking me the same questions they asked me at the prison plus other personal questions."

"I think she likes you, sir," Doolittle said with a little grin. "Her and the Three both…just like them two blond Raptor pilots on the _Solaria_."

John smiled. "If you weren't such a nice guy, I'd tell you to go frak yourself."

"I'm just saying, sir…"

"I know what you're saying and I don't buy it. Sonja has motives that have nothing to do with my…charming personality."

"I hear the other one's come back."

"She was waiting on me when Sonja and I got back from the temple after lunch. I still have to do what she wants, but she's not my handler any longer. Sonja is. Their council thinks D'Anna is too unstable right now to _manage_ me. They didn't even tell her. I'm the one who had to tell her."

"I think I saw her going into the cafeteria downstairs as I was coming out of the kitchen. Of course a lot of them copies look alike to me so I can't be sure."

"What was she wearing?"

"All white. The Threes favor black or white. The Sixes, they like red and black. The Eights, they might be wearing any color. They look and act younger than them other two models."

"Was D'Anna alone?"

"She was when I seen her. That don't mean she won't sit down and eat with some of the others."

"Who does she normally eat with?"

"Mostly one of the Twos or Sonja, sometimes both of them. I don't know about now that she and Sonja got into it."

"You heard about that?"

"There's a Five what monitors the surveillance equipment. He saw it and showed the Six who beat up D'Anna. They're tight. They eat together all the time. They thought it was funny. Like I said, sir, they's just like them two Raptor pilots in the shower."

"There's a young human female, maybe twenty years old, blond hair, very pregnant. She's with a Two. Is she in this building?"

Doolittle hesitated and then clamped his hand over his metal collar. "Yes, sir."

"What do you know about her?"

"One of my kitchen staff delivers her meals. I seen her going out for walks a couple of times. If the baby lives, she and the Two will be moved to another building. If the baby dies, they'll keep her here if the Two still wants her. Otherwise they'll send her back where she come from. It's what they always do. That's all I know. Now I'd best be going, sir."

"I asked Sonja, but she wouldn't tell me. Is the girl here against her will? Did that Two rape her?"

"I don't know, sir. Some things you'd best stay out of. I think you got enough to be concerned with right now. You'll only make your life harder."

John took the cover off his plate. It was one of the eight or ten standard meals he was always served. "You're right. Thanks, Doolittle. It's just the idea of them…"

"I know, sir, but you can't do nothing about it." Doolittle took a book out of his pocket. "I run into Sonja getting off the elevator. She asked me to give this to you."

He put the book on the table. John picked it up. It was the Cylon book of scriptures.

"She said she was going to bring this to me tomorrow."

"She had a bag with her, an overnight bag. She said she had to make a trip and to tell you she'd be back in a couple of days."

"She say where she was going?"

"No, sir. Just asked me to give the book to you. Is she working on converting you to their religion already? I hear she tried to convert some of them other men she's been with. A real evangelical she is. Not fanatic like them Threes, but she still tries."

"We talked about prophecy when we were at the temple earlier today. I told her I'd read what the Cylon prophet Azurra had to say. Something to read is better than sitting here day after day with nothing to do."

"I'll say _good evening_ then, sir. Enjoy your meal."

John began thumbing through the book. It was not a new copy of their scriptures. It was well worn, certain passages marked with small penciled stars. He didn't know if it was her personal copy or just an old copy that she or someone else had marked in an attempt to lead him to certain conclusions. He didn't trust any of them and certainly not Sonja because he had a strong feeling that she was concealing her real agenda from him.

He no longer believed that her interest in him was purely sexual as he'd once thought. If he had been younger or less suspicious of her, he might have been flattered enough to buy her story and her actions. Even her questions about his personal life might not have tripped any alarms, but her revelation about two Colonial pilots being captured in the forest didn't fit into any scenario he could come up with except one. The Cylons still believed he had held something back about why he was here. She wanted to see if her story got a reaction from him, especially the part about the possibility of one of the pilots being his daughter. Sonja had probably made the whole thing up.

Sometime while he'd slept that afternoon, an idea had gelled in his mind. Becoming D'Anna's breeder was nothing but a cover for the real reason they had brought him to the city. D'Anna might be innocent in the scheme or she might be complicit. He wasn't sure. His gut feeling was that she was being used by Sonja to help divert his attention and keep him off balance. It could all be part of an elaborate ruse to break down his defenses. If they'd left him at the prison he would have died and dead men couldn't answer questions. Brute force and drugs hadn't worked. Maybe they thought a velvet touch would.

He knew only one thing right now with absolute certainty. He was glad Sonja was going to be gone for a few days and he was going to be free to relax with no fear of another interrogation. She'd managed to trip him up earlier today. She had exposed his one and only weakness…his love for his family. They couldn't use that as leverage against him as long as his family was back on Caprica, but if Kara was on this planet…he didn't even want to think about the implications.

_..._

Kara and Hunter stood at the top of the wooden steps that overlooked the beginning of the path. The sun had sunk behind the mountains over an hour earlier and twilight now colored the sky a darker blue.

"Is Markham his first or his last name?" Kara asked Hunter.

"Last. His first name is Leonard, but my father always called him Markham so that's what I call him. And try not to get offended by him. He doesn't have a lot of social skills? Do you have your little computer?"

"In my pocket. So you're saying he's more interested in the computer than meeting me?"

Hunter shrugged. "I never try to second guess Markham. Stay close to me. The floor is bumpy in places."

Kara half expected him to take her hand like he had done the night before while he and Narcho were walking her and Dessa back to Emmalyn's, but he didn't. Of course he hadn't grabbed her hand until after she had tripped on the dark path and had almost fallen, and he'd let go quickly when they had gotten to the door of the dwelling. When she had glanced around at Dessa and Narcho behind them, even in the dim light of Hunter's lantern, she could tell that Dessa was holding Narcho's hand. Hunter hadn't said a word to Narcho. He hadn't said anything to her either except to tell her and Dessa both _goodnight_.

Now she and Hunter walked around the big rock that concealed the entrance to the ship. Instead of walking straight like they had done the day they had entered the camp, Hunter turned left down a dark corridor. In the glow of his lantern, Kara noticed a dim luminescence.

"What's with the walls? They're glowing."

"Some kind of phosphorescing algae or bacteria or something. It's slowly eating the infrastructure of the ship."

"How slowly?"

Hunter chuckled. "Markham says he'll be long dead before the ship starts collapsing."

They found Markham several levels down near the center of what had once been a state-of-the-art scientific ship. He had created a living quarters and working area in one of the bigger labs. Kara was surprised that he had lights and electricity and heat.

Markham was sitting on a stool, his long, thin body hunched over a large magnifying glass on a flexible metal arm that was attached to the lab table. Kara smelled the pungent aroma of hot metal from soldering. Markham's thinning gray hair was halfway down his back, tied like a ponytail just below his neck and then tied several more times at various intervals down the length. She glanced at Hunter. He smiled.

Without looking at them, Markham said, "The ship's reactor is still working."

"He's explaining why he's still got electricity," Hunter said.

As if reading her mind, Markham added, "It's not working at full capacity, barely a tenth capacity. That's why we can't use it to power anything in the camp."

Kara walked closer and saw that he was working on a small circuit board. He was clean shaven, his angular face mostly unlined. He had high cheekbones and very pale skin.

Markham continued soldering, and they waited patiently until he put down his tools. He looked her up and down. "Hunter said you were pretty. Smart, too. He didn't say you were just a kid."

Kara bristled. "I'm almost nineteen."

"He said you had a computer that would fit in your hand."

Kara took it out of her pocket and turned it on. "What do you want to see…or hear?"

He took it from her like it was a holy relic. "How do you move around on it?"

Kara showed him the basic screen navigation. He caught on instantly. Hunter had told her that Markham was a genius. It took him only a minute to find the maps.

"My father drew some of those after reading a journal from the first _Hyperion_ mission. The rest came from the three recon missions Lee and I flew over the planet."

"What's the red mark northeast of the city?"

"That's their basestar shipyard."

Kara saw Markham and Hunter look at each other.

"You didn't mention a shipyard," Hunter said.

"I thought you knew about it."

"No."

"How far from the city?" Markham asked.

"About four hundred miles. I found it on the second mission. It's in huge hole in the ground that the Cylons enlarged, maybe a mile across, probably a thousand feet deep. The only way you can tell what's going on in there is if you're in the air above it."

"That area had some old extinct volcanic craters," Markham said. "They probably started with one of those and enlarged it."

"How old and how extinct?" Kara asked.

"A quarter million years, give or take twenty or thirty thousand."

"So no danger of…" Kara made a gesture like a volcano erupting.

"No," Markham mouthed while he continued paging through the maps.

Hunter said, "I told him you're coming back to the planet in six months or so to take out the Cylons."

"That shipyard will be the first thing we destroy…after we destroy the three ships above the planet."

"Big mistake," Markham said, "destroying the shipyard."

"You're suggesting we leave it operational so they can keep hatching those things?"

"Cylon technology is very advanced. I know. I've taken a few of them apart, both their centurions and skinjobs. What would be wrong with having a place to study how they build their ships? You might learn something."

"I'm sure all those centurions and skinjobs will agree with you. I'm sure they'll just stand back and let us dissect their latest creation and then study it."

"You remember the canister Hunter used to _calm down_ those centurions in the forest? I could give the technology to you. I'm sure your scientific boys could take it and duplicate it on a larger scale."

"I'm sure they could. Maybe even enough to knock out all the centurions on the planet, but making enough canisters to do that might delay us getting back here by months, maybe even years."

"You'd be handing them the keys to the kingdom."

"I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying they might not want to wait until they can develop it on the scale we'd need it."

"Suit yourself."

"What Markham's saying…" Hunter started.

"I know exactly what he's saying," Kara said. "What I'm saying is that I don't control the Colonial fleet. I'm not exactly on the best of terms with Admiral Adama right now. I wasn't even before I stole his prize Raider. I'll be lucky if anybody even listens to me."

"Maybe they'll listen to me," Hunter said.

"So you think your admiral still plans to nuke us into oblivion?" Markham asked.

"I don't know what the admiral's plans are. I understand why he wants to do it. The Cylons destroyed eleven of the Twelve Colonies. They bombed cities on Caprica and killed over a million people. Those cities are still being rebuilt. They came that close to wiping out humanity. Admiral Adama believes if he doesn't destroy them then they'll come back one day and finish the job, especially if they find out their buddies aren't still in control of Caprica."

"He wouldn't wait for you to come back and report?"

"I've been gone over a week. They've probably written me off as dead by now just like they did my dad."

Any word from the city?" Markham asked Hunter.

"Not yet. I'm beginning to wonder if something happened to my men still out in the forest. They're four days overdue."

"Don't give up on them," Markham said. "If there are a lot of centurions scouring the area for two missing Colonial pilots, your guys are probably taking a long way back to camp to avoid any traps. Have faith in them. And if you're having trouble with the faith part, look at Kara. What kind of faith do you think it took to travel thirty light years to the Cylon homeworld to find a man everybody else had written off as dead. She did it on nothing but her faith in the words of an Oracle?"

"It wasn't just the Oracle," Kara said. "A physicist gave me some odds of him surviving."

"I figured the odds, too. Three percent."

"Dr. Rafferty told me ten."

"Your Dr. Rafferty was wrong."

Kara almost smiled. "But my dad beat the odds…again."

"That's all the more reason to keep believing each of us has a part to play in what's coming. He survived for a reason. I hear there are some journals from the first _Hyperion_ mission on here. I'd like to read them. Can I keep your computer for a few days?"

Kara shrugged. "Sure. The battery probably won't last but six or eight more hours though."

"Don't worry about the battery. I've got electricity, remember? I'll put the schematics for my canister on here…just in case anyone is interested."

Markham turned around and started working on the circuit board again. Kara glanced at Hunter. They had been dismissed.

As she and Hunter left the _Hyperion_, she said, "It's not easy to keep believing. I thought our Oracle meant I'd find my father here when all she really told me was that he'd survived. I took a few words that Yolanda Brenn said right before she died and made them into what I wanted them to mean. I didn't even understand them at first. I thought she was talking about Lee. Now I think maybe I was just half crazy because I'd lost my dad and couldn't accept it and…"

"You need to stop questioning her words so much," Hunter said with conviction in his voice. "My grandfather knew our Oracle really well. He and I have spent a lot of time talking about the prophecies she made. As soon as I told him about your Oracle calling you _Posiden's green-eyed daughter_, he said you being here was the beginning of a big change for all of us. If you look at our situation, nothing's really different. The Cylons are watching us closer than ever now, and yet my grandfather still has faith. He still believes in a better future for us."

They emerged from the _Hyperion_ onto the platform at the top of the wooden steps. The sky was a huge bowl of black velvet pierced only by the twinkling of millions of stars. Kara stopped and looked up.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Hunter asked.

"Yeah."

"One of those is Caprica's sun."

"I know."

"You came here to get me, Wildcat, and take me back with you so we can save this planet and my people and all the other humans. Don't lose faith. Not now when you've come this far. Your father will be all right."

Kara took a deep breath. "You're a nice guy, Hunter."

He snorted. "Don't tell Targa and Beck. I'll never live it down. Now let's go spin some more wool into yarn for Emmalyn or I won't have a new sweater to take to Caprica with me."

_..._

Lee and Kendra found Auggie B where they had left him, feet propped up on the desk, only now he was taking a nap. His hands were folded across his stomach, his mouth slightly open as he snored. Kendra slammed the door and Auggie jerked awake.

"Sorry, the wind caught it," Kendra said as she stomped her snowy boots on the mat.

Lee tossed the truck keys to him. "I kept it out of the ditches. I locked the gate, too. Thanks."

"You pick up your package at the courthouse?"

"We got it."

Kendra asked, "Do you know anything about the towns of Katarin or Haida?"

"Never heard of them."

"They're southeast of here a few hundred miles."

"I don't leave this complex except to go into town a couple of times a week. Somebody's got to mind the store and keep the centurions working."

"I thought the centurions were in the mines," Kendra said.

"They are."

"Then how do you keep them working if you're sitting on your butt in this room reading a magazine or taking a nap?"

"If the ore trucks are late coming in, I pick up the phone."

"And that motivates them how?"

"Drop it, Kendra," Lee said. "We've got to go. We need to be on our way back to the _Galactica_ before dark." He turned to Auggie B. "Thanks again for letting us use your truck."

When they were inside the Raptor, Kendra said, "He's a lazy slacker who killed a man and I don't like him so don't you say a word to me."

"I need to get you and Kara together. You two can have a big Cylon love fest…her and the skinjobs and you and the poor enslaved centurions."

"What?" asked Flat Top.

"Nothing," they both snapped.

"One barely warm moose burger and one cold cup of coffee," Kendra smiled as she handed Saunders a bag and a cup with a lid. "The coffee would have been warm if Lee had driven faster than five miles an hour getting back from town. He was afraid he'd put a ding in Auggie B's filthy, beat-up old truck."

Saunders grinned as he took the cup and bag from her. "Did you have any luck getting the lists?"

"Not the voter registration lists but we got something better."

Lee dropped his jacket behind the seat and put the computer case on top of it before he put on his helmet. "Let's just finish this mission. Where to first, Katarin or Haida?"

Saunders put the bag on the floor and looked at the map. "They're about the same distance. Haida is almost due east. Katarin is southeast. Weather is closing in over Haida. Let's try there first. Maybe get in ahead of the storm."

The wind had increased and the snow was falling harder by the time they reached Haida. Lee could feel the drafts buffeting the Raptor as he hovered over the town, dark and cold in the early afternoon gloom.

"Nothing on infrared," Saunders said. "I'd say it's deserted."

"The Cylons might not have bombed these places," Kendra said, "but they killed the people just the same. Let's get out of here. One town to go and then a nice hot shower on the _G_."

Lee took the Raptor up to ten thousand feet in an attempt to get above the snow storm. Saunders gave him the heading and the coordinates. They had covered only a hundred of the two hundred miles to Katarin when Saunders said, "I'm picking up something on dradis, another ship headed this way…coming from the northwest…closing fast."

Lee glanced at his screen. Flat Top was right. "What the hell? There's not supposed to be anything in the area. We're way south of the tylium shuttle glide path. Are you getting a signal?"

"It's not Colonial. I don't like what I'm seeing. They're on an intercept course."

"What's going on?" Kendra asked, the first edge of fear in her voice.

"I don't know. I'm going to twenty thousand feet." They climbed out of the clouds into the sunlight.

"The bogey is climbing, too."

"Try to get them on the comm. How long until intercept?"

"Five minutes. Maybe six." Flat Top tried to raise someone in the other craft on various frequencies. His hails was met with silence.

"I'm getting a reading on the bogey," he finally said. "It's a godsdamned Cylon Heavy Raider."

"No way!" Lee shouted.

"Where did it come from?" Kendra asked.

"Who cares?" Saunders said. "If they want to take us out, we're toast."

Lee knew the Heavy Raider had to have come from the planet, probably from near one of the mines. He remembered his father telling him that Heavy Raiders had accompanied the mining teams to Tauron.

"Get back down in the clouds," Saunders said. "We'll never make it to the _G_ and we don't stand a chance where they can get a visual."

Lee had already put the Raptor into a steep dive. Flat Top was right. The Heavy Raider was not only faster than the Raptor, it was armed. They entered the cloud cover and Lee was soon flying blind again, navigating only by his instruments.

"Broadcast a distress…" Lee said.

"Already done it," Flat Top answered.

"And get me some jump coordinates."

"The computer's working on it. Where are we headed right now?"

"Toward the mountains. Maybe we can lose them."

"Set heading at six-two-two. Stay above ten thousand feet or one of those peaks will do the Cylon's job for them."

"Why are they chasing us?" Kendra asked.

Lee was concentrating on flying the Raptor by his instruments and didn't try to answer.

"Because they're Cylons," Saunders finally said. "Damn. They're still coming. They'll be in missile range in two minutes. _Galactica_ has launched Vipers but they're twenty-six minutes away."

"We'll be dead before they're through the atmosphere," Lee said.

"Why can't we shoot them first?" Kendra asked.

"We aren't armed," Saunders said. "Raptors are generally not combat ships."

"We've got countermeasures," Lee said.

"We'll jump as soon as I get the coordinates_,_" Saunders said. "The _G's_ Vipers will…"

An alarm began sounding in the ship. "They've got a missile lock on us. Launch two decoy drones."

"Countermeasures away," Saunders said. "Lock acquired…missile destroyed. They're still coming…gaining…another missile…launching two more countermeasures."

"Get me those jump coordinates!" Lee said. The words were barely out of his mouth before an explosion rocked them. The Cylon missile had hit the countermeasures not far from the back of the ship. A chunk of debris hit the starboard engine and took it out. The Raptor immediately went into a steep dive. Lee fought to control the ship as they hurtled downward, dropping out of the clouds. He knew other damage had been done because the ship's response was sluggish. He also knew he had to get the Raptor on the ground or they were all going to die.

Alarms were blaring in the cabin. "We got fire," Saunders called out. "Starboard engine."

"I'm putting the ship down," Lee shouted. "Brace for a rough landing."

They spiraled downward through the wind-whipped snow at dizzying speed. Below was nothing but white. Lee managed to slow their descent, but knew that they needed to get on the ground and out of the burning ship before the fire spread into the cabin. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the flash as something shorted out on Flat Top's control panel.

"Damn!" Saunders said.

Lee saw treetops and a small clearing. He angled the Raptor into it. They slammed sideways into the snow and began to slide. The back of the ship caught on a tree trunk. They spun around and impacted another tree. It was the last thing he remembered until he became aware that Kendra was shaking him and screaming.

"Get up, Lee! Get up! We're on fire! We've got to get out!"

Lee groggily pushed himself out of the seat. He felt dizzy and sick. The Raptor's front canopy was a spider web of cracks. He pulled the emergency release on the door. Kendra was on her hands and knees beside Saunders who lay sprawled face down and motionless on the floor. She managed to turn him over. There was blood on the inside of the helmet's face plate.

"Help me," she said. Together they dragged Saunders down the ramp and into the snow. It was knee-deep, but they were able to get him away from the ship.

"The laptop," Lee gasped.

"Forget the frakking laptop," Kendra cried.

Lee plowed back through the snow to the ship and crawled inside. His jacket was still behind the seat but he didn't see the computer bag. He grabbed their jackets and threw them out the door into the snow. Gauges on the ECO's console where shorting out and beginning to smolder. Smoke was filling the cabin as he crawled around looking for the laptop. He finally groped under the pilot's seat and felt the strap of the bag. He pulled and managed to dislodge it. The cabin was now filled with smoke. He could hear his harsh breathing inside the helmet, but he forced himself to stay until he found the gun locker and retrieved two of the P-90 assault rifles. He threw them out the door into the snow beside the jackets and got the other two before he crawled down the ramp and collapsed.

He got his breath and looked up. Kendra was inching Saunders deeper under the branches of a huge evergreen tree and away from the ship. The communication devices in their helmets were still working.

"Where's your hand radio?" Lee called to her.

"Jacket pocket," she panted.

The radio had fallen out and lay in the snow. He grabbed his jacket and put it on before he picked up the radio. The small red light on the front was still blinking. That was a good sign.

"Help me with these rifles," Lee called again.

Reluctantly Kendra left Saunders and pushed back through the knee-deep snow. She got her jacket and put it on. "First aid kit?"

"No. I didn't get it."

They looked at the Raptor. The inside was engulfed in flames. The snow around the ship had begun hissing and melting. Kendra grabbed Flat Top's jacket and one of the rifles. Lee took the other three and they pushed through the snow to where she had left Saunders. He was still unconscious although Lee could now hear him breathing through the communicator.

"Let's get him under that big tree. We need to get his helmet off and find out where that blood is coming from."

"Help me get my helmet off," Kendra suddenly gasped. "I'm going to be sick."

They barely made it before she bent over and vomited into the snow.

Lee removed his own helmet.

She walked a couple of steps and scooped up a handful of clean snow. She rubbed it over her mouth. "I knew I shouldn't have eaten that moose burger."

"I don't think it's the food."

Kendra made her way over to Saunders. Lee helped her get his helmet off and his jacket on. Kendra examined his head.

"I think the blood came from his nose. It might be broken." She wiped a cold, wet hand across his forehead and bloody cheeks. Saunders moaned and coughed. Kendra managed to roll him on his side. "I don't want him to choke. How long until those Vipers get here?"

"Vipers aren't going to rescue us. We'll have to wait for a Raptor."

"What about the Heavy Raider?"

"If it's still up there somewhere, then the Vipers will take it out as soon as they get here."

"You don't think it will land and make sure the job is finished?"

"I don't know. Heavy Raiders need more space to land than a Raptor. Besides, they've got to find us."

Kendra pointed to the smoke of the burning Raptor. "Like we're not sending them a signal?"

"You're right. Those ships are usually piloted by centurions. Once they shot us down, they would probably go back to wherever they came from. They'd consider the threat eliminated."

"You hope."

"Look, Kendra, all we've got to do is hang on until the Vipers get here. They'll get a Raptor down here to get us."

Saunders moaned again and tried to sit up. "What…happened?" He rasped.

"A Cylon missile hit the countermeasures too close to the ship," Lee said.

"We crashed," Kendra summed it up.

"Damn, my head hurts." Saunders brought a hand toward his face.

Kendra grabbed his wrist. "Don't. I think your nose is broken. You're bleeding, too. Take it easy."

He cleared his throat, leaned over and spit into the snow. The saliva was bloody. "Man, this sucks."

"Don't worry. Your nose will heal. You'll still be pretty enough to attract plenty of women."

Saunders coughed and spit blood again, but he put his hand on Kendra's leg and squeezed.

"Where's the Heavy Raider?" Saunders asked.

"I think it's gone but I'm not sure. You two stay here. I'm going out into the clearing to take a look."

"Where are our Vipers?"

"Still about ten minutes out. I'm leaving the radio with you. Kendra, start trying to contact them, let them know what's happened. I'll be back in five minutes."

Lee took a P-90 and pulled up the hood of his jacket. He ducked out from under the branches of the evergreen, taking care not to bump one and bring a pile of snow down on himself. The fire in the interior of the Raptor was burning itself out. The ship was a blackened, smoking ruin. The snow around it had melted to the bare ground.

Lee looked skyward, wondering what he thought he would be able to see. The snow was barely falling now but the sky was a flat gray. The Heavy Raider could be on top of them and he would probably not be able to see it. Several small snowflakes fell onto his face and caught on his eyelashes. He strained to hear any sound from above. All he could hear was the wind and the popping of the fire in the Raptor. He walked partway around the edge of the small clearing to see if he could hear any better. Still nothing but the wind.

The two snow-dusted centurions walked out of the trees so quickly that he saw them at the same time he heard the faint hum of their red eyes. Their weapons were already locked in place and leveled at him across the twenty-five feet that separated them. Lee didn't move. Several seconds ticked by. He couldn't understand why they hadn't opened fire. They stood that way for nearly half a minute as Lee considered his options. He basically had none. He was too far from the trees to make it to cover, and before he would be able to get the P-90 up and pull the trigger, he would be dead.

He finally understood why the centurions were waiting. A red-faced Auggie B came huffing up beside them. He was carrying a Skorpion assault pistol that he had raised and pointed at Lee. He took a few steps into the clearing.

"That was a stupid thing you did," Lee said, "shooting down a Colonial ship. There's no frakking way you'll get away with it."

"Where's the little lady and your copilot?"

"They didn't make it out of the ship."

"What about that package you picked up at the courthouse?"

Lee looked toward the smoldering Raptor. "You're looking at all that got out of that ship. Everything else burned including the package."

"What was in it?"

"Nothing of any value to you."

"Gods damnit. I had to leave my nice warm office and come out in this blizzard with a couple of tin cans. Tell me what you got at the courthouse."

All Lee could think of to do was stall and hope those Vipers arrived. "Who told you to do that…leave your nice warm office?"

"As soon as you and the girl left this morning to go into town, I sent word to Mr. Zarek on Caprica. I finally heard from him. He didn't tell anybody to help you because he didn't know you were on the planet. The girl lied. What was in the package?"

"Census information."

"You're lying."

"No, I'm not."

"Nobody would send two military officers after census information."

"Those were our orders."

Auggie B flipped the safety off the assault pistol. "Last chance to tell me the truth."

"You were never going to leave me alive anyway."

"You're right about that."

Lee heard the sharp crack of a rifle but he felt nothing. For a split second he thought Auggie had missed and would fire again. Instead he saw the man crumple sideways into the snow. Lee didn't think. He threw himself down and began firing at the centurions. He knew that the most vulnerable places on them were their heads and their red eye slots. Bullets chewed up the trees behind him, but also behind the centurions. He wasn't the only one firing at them. It was over in fifteen seconds, but those were probably the longest fifteen seconds of his life.

Even after the centurions were down, he continued firing until he had emptied the clip of the P-90. In the abrupt silence that followed, he could hear nothing except a loud ringing in his ears. Slowly he pushed himself to his knees and then got to his feet. He wasn't aware of Kendra until she put her hand on his arm. He turned away from her and threw up on the snow.

"Told you we shouldn't have eaten those moose burgers," she said.

He did like she had done and wiped his mouth with a handful of clean snow. "I won't tell if you won't."

"Did I kill him?"

Even at twenty feet, Lee could tell that Kendra's shot had hit Auggie B in the head. "You killed him." A swirl of snow danced in the clearing. "That was a damned good shot."

"I took first place on the firing range."

"Are you all right?"

"I don't know."

"You saved my life. I don't know how to thank you."

"You saved ours when you landed the Raptor." Her voice was soft and she had begun to tremble. "Maybe we'll all get medals."

"Let's get back to Saunders."

"I think he's hurt worse than a broken nose. He tried to stand up and almost passed out."

Lee took Kendra's arm and steered her toward the Raptor. "He's probably got a concussion. A couple of days in Sick Bay and he'll be good as new."

"Should I go check on Auggie B?"

"He's dead, Kendra. Somebody else will take care of him."

"How do we put that in our report?"

"Don't worry about the report right now."

Saunders was sitting propped against the tree trunk when they got back to him. Both the other assault rifles were beside him.

"I can't stand up, yet, but I was going to go down fighting. What happened?"

Lee said, "We took out the two centurions that piloted the Heavy Raider."

Kendra sat down beside Saunders. "I killed a man."

"Who was going to shoot me," Lee quickly added.

Saunders put his arm around her. "Vipers are here. I told them to get a Raptor and follow the smoke signal. In another thirty minutes we should be on our way back to the _G_."

Lee dropped to the snow near the other two and sat. "Commander Cain isn't going to be happy one of her Raptors is toast."

Kendra was staring into space.

Saunders said, "That was some fancy flying. I couldn't have done it better myself. You saved our lives getting the Raptor down without killing us."

"It was a team effort," Lee said. "If you hadn't gotten those countermeasures out when you did, that missile would have hit us. We'd be in little pieces scattered over the forest right now. They might never have figured out what happened to us."

"All over a stupid voter registration list."

"Zarek must have told Auggie B to get whatever it was that he thought we picked up at the courthouse."

"Zarek will deny even knowing about it," Kendra said.

"I know. It'll be our word against his."

Saunders pulled Kendra closer to him. "Isn't that what you two have famous parents for? To get you out of jams with crooked politicians?"

"Oh, ha ha."

"Do you think Kara and Narcho are having this much fun on their mission?"

Lee looked up at the flat gray sky and the swirling snow as they waited for the Raptor that would take them back to the _Galactica_. Thirty light years away in another solar system Kara and Noel Allison were on the Cylon homeworld. Nereid's seasons closely paralleled those on Caprica. Spring was underway on the planet. Hopefully Kara and Noel dealing with snow _or_ Heavy Raiders.

"I hope they're not having this kind of fun," Lee said, "but you can bet as soon as she gets home, I'm going to ask her."

TBC…


	19. The Absolute Truth

Chapter 19

The Absolute Truth

_16 God sent to Azurra a dream of great galleons that would traverse the heavens._

_17 And Azurra said to her people, When the time is right we must build many ships and stock them with food and supplies that we may survive the journey to our new home._

_18 And the people asked their prophet when their tribulation should end and they should go._

_19 God sent to Azurra another dream and in it she saw three stars rain fire upon Kobol._

_20 And she told her people. God will send you a sign of three burning stars and you will know that the prophecy is beginning and you must build the great ships and leave this world behind._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Azurra, _Chapter 2:16-20

.

Clean from a hot shower and wearing sweat pants and his tank tops, Lee Adama lay in his bunk on the _Galactica_. It was late in the evening and he had just spent the better part of four hours answering questions for Commander Cain, Colonel Tigh and another investigator.

There wouldn't have been nearly as much red tape if the incident had involved only the destruction of two centurions because they were still considered enemy combatants. Even the downing of the Raptor would have been handled with a detailed but routine report. The death of a civilian, however, had complicated matters beyond what Lee could have imagined. It made no difference that the civilian had tried to kill him. A full investigation would have to be made to confirm their stories.

Lee, Kendra and Saunders had agreed while sitting in the snow waiting for the SAR Raptor that they should all tell the truth. Lee and Flat Top's first impulse had been to protect Kendra by saying that August Bernard had gotten caught in the crossfire as the two of them had fought the centurions, but Kendra had said _no_. She was willing to take whatever the consequences were for her actions. _The absolute truth from all of us, _she had said to them. The truth. They couldn't go wrong with the truth.

Lee and Kendra had both gone to Sick Bay with Saunders, but Doc Cottle had once again kicked them out so he could do a thorough examination. By that time a Marine had been waiting to escort them to Cain's quarters. When they had arrived, another Marine standing outside had told Lee to enter. Kendra had been asked to wait in the corridor. Once inside Lee had found himself facing both Commander Cain and Colonel Tigh. He had been introduced to a Sergeant Erin Mathias of the Colonial Fleet Investigative Service assigned to the _Galactica_.

Cain had asked Lee to start with his landing at the tylium transport facility and tell them everything that had happened afterward. Lee had started with what they had found at Ember Pass. He had also told them what they _hadn't_ found in Quanniq…the voter registration lists. He had told them about Mateo's unofficial list of the dead that he and Kendra had scanned into the laptop which he had already placed on Cain's desk. He had tried to boot it, but as Lee had feared, nothing happened. He had told them that he thought the laptop should be taken to Kevin Abinell on Caprica. Lee felt that if anyone could get any data from it, Kevin could and he had a top security clearance. Cain had simply nodded and had told him to leave the laptop with her. He had finished by telling them what had occurred after they had left the tylium landing site.

Then he had been sent out and Kendra had gone in. Lee hadn't looked at his watch, but he had been almost certain she had been in there longer.

During his own questioning Cain had told him almost nothing except that a team of Marines was already on the planet guarding both the burned-out Raptor and the Heavy Raider. She had Vipers patrolling in case other Heavy Raiders showed up.

Lee had waited in the corridor as he'd been told to do. When Kendra had finally exited Cain's quarters, Sergeant Mathias had taken them both to a room down the hall and questioned them again, making them cover the same territory several times.

Finally Kendra had lost patience. "Why are you treating us like criminals? That Heavy Raider shot us down. That man was going to kill Lee. We all almost died."

"Just doing my job, sir. Multiple debriefings are standard procedure in cases like this."

"Look, Gunny," Lee had said calmly, "Could we continue this in the morning? It's not like Kendra and I are going anywhere. Saunders either."

Mathias had relented and let them leave. Kendra had gone to check on Saunders. Lee had gone to the shower to scrub away the sweat along with the aftertaste of the entire day. He had never seen a man die right in front of him before. Every time he shut his eyes, he saw the right side of August Bernard's head disintegrate and him crumple into the snow.

Lee thought about John and his joking comment of having more lives than a cat. Lee was beginning to feel the same way. He was also beginning to understand why John joked about it. How many times did someone cheat death without beginning to wonder when and how his luck would finally run out? Then he remembered his grandfather's cigarette lighter that was still zipped in the sleeve pocket of his flight suit. That lighter had been with him the last three times he had faced death. Was that small good luck charm the reason he had escaped yet again?

The hatch opened and Kendra came in. She was still in her flight suit although she had unzipped the top part. She came over and wearily sat on the side of his bunk.

"How's Saunders?" Lee asked.

"Cracking jokes. Acting like it's all no big deal. He's the hurt one, and he's trying to cheer me up and make me feel better."

"Is he going to be all right?"

"Doc Cottle told him he had a broken nose and a concussion just like you said. He's going to keep him overnight for observation. Cottle's pulling him from flight ready status for a week to make sure he takes it easy. Dwight was joking and asking the doc if he was sure there really was a brain in his head since he'd agreed to fly with us. When I was leaving, Cottle stopped me and told me he wants to check out both of us. I told him we were okay. He said to report to Sick Bay in the morning so he could make sure."

Lee gently put his hand on Kendra's back. "_Are_ you okay?"

Her shoulders slumped. "I never dreamed when we went down to the surface today that I…" her voice trailed off. "After qualifying on the firing range, I never thought I'd ever pull…" she took a deep breath… "pull a trigger and kill somebody. I work with computers and databases. I don't…shoot people." She sat for a minute again and then she said, "I didn't sign up for anything like this."

"I know, and we didn't sign up. We got volunteered."

Lee tried to imagine how Kara would have reacted. Outwardly she was a lot tougher than Kendra. She had been through so much more, but underneath Lee sometimes wondered just how tough she really was. He had seen what was perhaps her only real vulnerability, her willingness to do anything for those she loved…her father and her brother and Karl…and him, too. Kara would have done the same thing today that Kendra had done. She would have pulled that trigger without hesitation.

Kendra's words interrupted his reverie. "I'm going to break up with Gordon."

"Because of Saunders?"

"I don't know, but standing there in Sick Bay tonight I realized that I want to go out with Dwight and see where it goes. Whatever it is that I feel for Dwight, I can't just ignore it. Do you understand what I'm talking about?"

"I think I do."

"Maybe it's not what I think it is, but I've got to find out. I'm going to take a shower. Thanks for listening to me."

"Tomorrow I'm going to volunteer to go back down to the planet and get that Heavy Raider. I'm sure Cain will want to claim it rather than leave it in the snow."

"You know how to fly a Heavy Raider?"

"I can probably figure it out. I had some experience with another Cylon ship."

"I'll sit out this little adventure of yours."

"I understand, Kendra. Stay here and keep Saunders company."

"I know we haven't always gotten along and I know we disagree about a lot of things, but I still think you're a nice guy. After this mission is over maybe you and Kara and Dwight and I can go out for a beer or dinner or something."

"That sounds good. And Kendra, you're not so bad yourself."

She snorted softly. "You're just saying that because I saved your life."

_..._

Five days passed before Sonja returned from her trip, and just like the other times she had visited John, she walked in without knocking. He wondered if the creators had missed the _social skills_ subroutine or had omitted it on purpose or Sonja chose to ignore it when it suited her. Maybe it was just another subtle way of showing him who controlled his life.

His days had fallen into a routine. In the morning he worked out and practiced throwing and catching the red rubber ball. Then just before Doolittle was due to bring his lunch tray, John showered. After lunch he read the Cylon book of scriptures until D'Anna arrived. She had very little to say to him since her return from the lab, even when he tried to engage her in conversation. She just took his hand and led him to the bedroom. Afterward he always slept for a few hours, the best sleep he got because for all the routine of his days, he had come to dread the nights. They were filled with nightmares of the prison and the little gray room, of Simon and a needle and of the Three who had used a cattle prod on him. The Six at the prison hadn't minded using her fists and her boots. The Three didn't like to get her hands dirty.

But the D'Anna who shared his bed for a few hours each afternoon was as different from the one at the prison as Sonja was from Prison Six. Maybe that's what was stirring up the nightmares, trying to reconcile what was happening to him now compared to what had happened to him there. He just knew that the nights were no longer safe for him when he closed his eyes. And now he was concerned about the possibility of Kara being on the planet.

He had asked D'Anna once about the two Colonial pilots who had been found in the forest and who had escaped. She had said that she didn't know what he was talking about. She was either a very good liar or she was not in that loop.

The day before she had asked him why he was reading the book of Cylon scripture. He had told her that it was the only thing he had been given to read. She had asked him if he believed in their God and he had told her _no_. He had expected some sort of rebuke from her, but all he had gotten was a mysterious smile. Since returning from the lab she was definitely less emotional and less talkative.

Sonja now looked him over with eyes that once again reminded him of a cat eyeing a bowl of cream. She was dressed in black slacks and a black sleeveless sweater and was wearing the black, low-heeled boots that she had worn the day they had walked in the city.

She smiled. "You look very good today. Waiting for D'Anna?"

"It's about time for her to show up so you might want to leave. She took it fairly well when I told her how things had changed, but I'm not sure what seeing you here might do to her."

"You told her about our amorous adventure against the wall?"

"Not in detail. She asked and I didn't lie to her. Haven't you seen her in the cafeteria?"

"Last night but she didn't sit down to eat with me. I see you're reading the scriptures that I sent you."

"I've made it through the first couple of books. It seems like fairly standard creation of the universe stuff to me. If you change a few names and events, your story of the beginning of life on Kobol could have come from the _Sacred Scrolls of Pythia_."

"Have you read the Book of Azurra yet?"

"I read the first chapter and then realized that I should start at the beginning of the scriptures. I didn't want to miss anything leading up to her story. I should get there soon."

"What do you think so far?"

"Reading anything beats sitting here staring at the wall."

"Would you like to go to the park?"

"I'd better wait for D'Anna…and you'd better leave. I know you remember what happened last time she caught you here. I'd really rather not go through _that_ again."

"She won't be visiting you this afternoon. She's with several of the new mothers."

"Doing what?"

"Learning from them so she'll be prepared…just in case all that activity between the sheets produces the desired results."

"She didn't say anything to me yesterday about not showing up today."

"D'Anna isn't very socially astute. You're basically one thing to her and that is a breeder. She has very little interest in you otherwise. I don't think she appreciates your quick wit and intelligence the way I do."

"Knock it off, Sonja. Flattery will get you nowhere with me."

"Do you want to go outside? It's a beautiful day."

"I'll pass."

She smiled. "I've decided I was wrong to put conditions on our outings last week. I can only hope one day you'll change your mind, but I'm attaching no strings to a walk today."

"No interrogation, either?"

"We'll just talk. I saw Gianne and Petra heading for the park with their little girls."

John put the book of scriptures aside and stood. "Let's go."

They rode the elevator down to the lobby. Sonja looked at him. "Will you give me your word of honor as a Colonial officer and a gentleman that you won't try to escape?"

John had already decided that the kind of escape he had once thought about was impossible and would only get him killed. He could only hope and pray that another venue presented itself. And he knew he wasn't going to even think about escaping until Sonja had taken him to the valley and he proved to himself that Kara wasn't there.

"I give you my word. I won't try to run."

Sonja stopped and told the centurions in the lobby and at the door that John was to be allowed to leave the building whenever he wanted. He felt almost light-headed as they walked out into the kind of day that made him glad he was still alive. The air was cool but the sun was shining in a beautiful blue sky.

"How was your trip?" He asked.

"Very nice."

"Where did you go?"

"To a settlement to visit one of my sisters, the First Six. Her name is Natalie."

"Why did you go to see her?"

"I wanted her advice. I've always valued her opinion."

"Advice about what?"

"Perhaps one day I'll tell you but not today."

"Why did you call her the First Six?"

"Because she was the first one of my model that the creators made. Her hair is darker than mine and longer."

"Why is she living in a settlement?"

"That's her choice. I've never asked her to explain it to me. You know, this is beginning to sound like an interrogation."

He smiled. "You Cylons fascinate me. I'm just trying to learn something about you."

She smiled back at him. "You turn my own words on me. Are you mocking me?"

"Of course not."

"Oh, John, if only I could believe you."

They reached the end of the block and crossed the street to the park. Sonja told the centurion at the entrance that John was allowed to come and go as he pleased.

"Thank you," he said when they were walking down the path toward the fountain.

He was still waiting for her to start interrogating him or make some other kind of demand. He decided that her abrupt change in tactics was yet another way of trying to keep him off balance and yet at the same time gain his trust.

There was no one at the fountain and they kept walking. She finally said, "Natalie lives in the same settlement as your doctor friends. Bianca and Laszlo send their greetings. When I told Bianca you were doing well, she got tears in her eyes. You humans can be very emotional about each other. She barely knows you."

"I remind her and her husband of the son they lost on Aerilon when you nuked it."

Sonja's voice took on an angry edge. "Perhaps I didn't make myself clear to you earlier. _I_ didn't nuke anything. Just like I don't approve of what they do at the prison, I did not vote to destroy the colonies. That's why there is a group of us on this planet and another group on Caprica. They're the ones who decided that humanity was a flawed creation and should perish. We decided otherwise. We saved as many humans as we could."

"You saved them to make slaves out of them."

"Slavery is far too harsh a term for what goes on in the settlements."

"What about the city?"

"Do you feel like a slave? Have you been treated badly since you've been here? Haven't I just told the centurions to allow you your freedom?"

"Sonja, don't you understand that…never mind. We're never going to see eye to eye on this issue. Are Bianca and Laszlo well?"

"They're fine. I told them I would bring you to see them soon."

"I'd like that."

"I want you to see for yourself what the settlements are like. I'd also like for you to meet Natalie."

"Is she going to ask me a lot of questions?"

Sonja smiled. "Relax, John."

He snorted. "That's not easy to do with you around. I keep waiting for…something. I'm not sure what."

"I told you we would just talk today."

"How goes the search in the forest? Find those pilots, yet?"

"Of course not because they're not in the forest. Cavil still believes they are even though he and his centurions have combed most of it with no luck. I heard last night that if he doesn't flush them out soon, he's going to move the search north into the mountains. He's already searched the settlements to the south."

"I'm still not sure that you didn't make the whole thing up just to see how I would react."

"I didn't make it up. The pilots are there, just not in the forest. Despite what Cavil believes, I'm sure they're with the humans in the valley. What threw Cavil is the fact that their ship isn't in the valley. They've hidden it somewhere else…hidden it very well I might add. I've come up with a plan to get us there, but it will involve some work on my part. It was actually Natalie's idea. It's a good one."

"How soon?"

She smiled again. "A few weeks. In the meantime you're free to go out for walks whenever you want. Visit with Gianne and Petra if you'd like. Tend their children for them. Enjoy your freedom."

"No strings attached?"

Sonja smiled. "No strings attached."

_..._

Bill and Romo Lampkin were already in the conference room when Laura arrived. Bill looked tired. She could see his report on August Bernard's death on the table in front of Lampkin.

"I'm sorry I'm late," she began. "My meeting with the Secretary of Health and Welfare ran long. She and Scott Mickelson are in charge of getting a supply ship outfitted for the people of Quanniq. We obviously can't depend on Zarek's men to keep the town provisioned like they were supposed to do." She pulled out a chair and sat before looking at Bill. "How are Lee and Kendra?"

"Fine. Lieutenant Agathon got the laptop back here late yesterday and I had two MPs take it to Kevin Abinell. Kevin was going to start work on it first thing this morning. I'll be sure to let you know what he finds."

"And the other pilot, Lieutenant Saunders?"

"Doc Cottle kept him overnight in Sick Bay. The concussion wasn't severe. With rest, he'll be fine."

"What about the Heavy Raider?"

"Lee and another pilot got it aboard the _Galactica_. We're trying to decide what to do with it now. I want to turn it over to Rafferty's team to study. I'll let the _Galactica_ bring it when the mission is over. Rafferty and Abinell are busy now outfitting that second Raider. They don't have time to work with it."

Lampkin asked, "What about Mr. Bernard?"

"His body was brought back to Caprica for an autopsy. Zarek still hasn't gotten back to us on any next of kin."

"Has anyone briefed Marta Shaw about her daughter?" Laura asked.

Bill said, "I called her two days ago as soon as I hung up from telling you about their Raptor being shot down. She said she had made a mistake in asking me to include Kendra in this mission. She wants Kendra brought home, but I told her the assignment won't be complete until the mission is over."

"How did she take it?"

"Not well, but I'm not going to let her jerk me around again. Besides, Cain told me that Lieutenant Shaw wants to complete the mission. Cain was very impressed with how Kendra handled herself. She saved Lee's life, no doubt about it."

Laura smiled. "Just like he saved her life and their ECO's as well when he got that damaged Raptor down."

Lampkin said, "I'm sure they all performed heroically, and if you're through singing their praises, you should be aware that we may have to bring them back to Caprica anyway. Tom Zarek wants a formal inquiry opened into the death of his man. He's not inclined to drop the issue. I've talked to him twice as persuasively as I could. He's not backing down. He's threatened to go public if he doesn't get what he wants."

"An investigation has already been opened," Laura said, "and closed. They were cleared of all blame."

"A military investigation, yes," Lampkin said. "Zarek wants a civilian investigation…an independent inquiry. He doesn't trust the military's objectivity in the matter. I think we should bring them back to Caprica and let Zarek talk to them…with me present of course."

"Not a chance," Bill said angrily.

"Hear me out. Tom Zarek has no idea what Lee and Kendra found. Even if Kevin Abinell is unable to obtain information from that laptop's hard drive, the original source is still available. Someone could be quietly sent to Quanniq to make another copy of Mateo Oraibi's list. I say we make Lee, Kendra and Saunders available and let Mr. Zarek ask his questions. Then later if we prove conclusively that Zarek's petition was falsified or even partially falsified, he can't say we tried to cover anything up or keep him out of the loop."

"Zarek is going to yell _foul play_ no matter what happens," Bill said. "Why bother?"

Laura looked at him. "I don't see anything wrong with Romo's plan. In fact I like it."

"I don't. It will make Zarek think he can throw his weight around any time he wants. That Heavy Raider attacked a military ship. His man was with centurions who are still considered enemy combatants. In my book that makes him the enemy, too. Zarek has no right meddling in this."

"Agreed. But a civilian died," Laura reminded him.

"We have zero proof that Zarek had anything to do with ordering the attack," Lampkin added. "The only man who could tell us is dead."

"_That man_ was with Cylon centurions. _That man_ was going to shoot my son," Bill said hotly. "We know _that man_ was doing Zarek's bidding. How much plainer does the evidence have to be. We know _that man_ communicated with Zarek before he tried to kill three Colonial officers."

"True, but we don't know what was said between the two men," Lampkin said. "Zarek can say it was a routine communication and we have _nothing_ that says otherwise. Right now it's all circumstantial. We can connect all the dots we want, but it means nothing from a legal point of view. We have no proof."

Laura said, "Bring the three of them back to Caprica. Since Lieutenant Saunders is under medical care and won't be able to travel for a week, it will buy us some time to either get those names off the computer's hard drive or obtain another copy. Romo, inform Zarek that the Attorney General's office is moving forward with an independent investigation and that he will be allowed to speak to the three involved as soon as Lieutenant Saunders is well enough to travel. That should satisfy him."

"Marta Shaw isn't going to like letting Zarek have a go at her daughter," Bill said. "She was furious about the attack."

"Let me deal with Marta," Laura replied. "We speak the same language."

_..._

Lee and Kendra resumed their duties as liaison officers between the _Penelope_ and the _Galactica_. The military inquiry cleared them in the death of August Bernard. Five days later Commander Cain told them that Kevin Abinell had been able to extract Mateo's list from the hard drive of the laptop. That was the good news. The bad news was that they were being called back to Caprica for an independent investigation into the incident.

"Why, sir?" Kendra asked.

"Your investigation cleared us of any wrongdoing," Lee added.

"Not only cleared you, but I've recommended the three of you for commendations. You all showed resourcefulness and courage under fire. This order comes from the admiral. I'm sure he'll fill you in. Lieutenant Saunders will also be going."

"Will we be coming back to this mission?" Lee asked.

"That depends on how long you're required to stay on Caprica. You leave tomorrow. Your replacements are arriving in the morning. You'll brief them aboard the _Penelope _and turn over all pertinent documents. I've already informed Captain Pontos and Dr. Nylund. As soon as we conduct the memorial service and release the wreath, you'll leave with Lieutenant Agathon on his run back to Caprica. We will then break orbit and head to Gemenon. It's been my pleasure having you on board. Dismissed."

"Yes, sir," they said in unison.

Out in the corridor Kendra said, "How do _you_ feel about going back to Caprica?"

"I don't like the idea of some independent investigation into something that's already been settled."

"Tom Zarek's behind it. He's trying to figure out what we got in Quanniq. I'll put my next paycheck on it. He's on a fishing expedition."

"My dad knows what's going on. I'm sure Laura does, too. We'll just have to trust them. No way they're going to throw us to the wolves."

"Oh, ha ha, Lee. That's really funny."

"Look on the bright side. Saunders is going back with us."

"And I get to tell Gordon things are over a lot sooner than I thought I would."

As they walked down the corridor toward the hangar deck, Lee thought about Kara. Maybe there was a reason he was being called back to Caprica. Maybe the Fates wanted him there when Kara came home.

_..._

Kara opened the door of Emmalyn's dwelling just far enough to see that a light rain was still falling. She had been in the valley for nearly three weeks now and this was the first day it had begun raining before dawn and had continued unabated into the afternoon.

There was no working in anyone's garden today…no fishing either. Several afternoons a week she and Narcho and Hunter went fishing in one of the valley's streams or the lake that was over an hour's walk away. Sometimes Dessa tagged along, but she didn't have the patience to make a good fisherman. She was too full of energy and she wanted to talk too much. Kara and the guys could sit still and remain quiet for as long as it took to catch something. Dessa couldn't.

This morning Kara had hung diapers on a line stretched in front of Seléne's fireplace instead of outside. For two hours since lunch she had been back at Emmalyn's spinning wool into yarn using a drop spindle. She was ready to climb the walls. It wasn't that she didn't want to help, but there was only so much of the tedious chore that she could take. Every ten or fifteen minutes she walked to the door and looked outside.

Emmalyn finally glanced up from her knitting and said, "Why don't you go down to the communal building for a while or go visit Daniel. This rain is going to last the rest of the day and probably into the night. We've moved into our rainy month now."

"You don't mind?"

"No, child. I don't mind. You've been a great help to me and to Seléne. Take my heavy cloak, the one with the hood. It's felted wool. It's as waterproof as we can make something."

"I won't be gone too long."

Outside Kara hesitated only briefly and then turned towards Daniel's dwelling. He was sitting by the fire with a piece of handmade paper tacked to a drawing board. There was a piece of charcoal in his hand, but the paper was blank. Kara shook out the cloak and hung it on one of the pegs beside the door.

Daniel looked up at her as she sat down in the chair opposite him. There was sadness in his voice when he said, "Rainy days always make me think of Lucy. We'd sleep late and then we'd lie in bed talking about her ideas. Lucy had so many ideas. She envisioned many models of Cylons from all races and all ethnic groups. She told me about what had happened to her when she was a child. Fighting was raging in Hypatia and she and her sister were hiding from the old centurions. Lucy was frightened and ran. Her sister tried to stop her. There was an explosion nearby. The next thing Lucy remembered was being carried to a ship by a centurion. She was crying because she had dropped her doll, the doll her sister had given her."

Kara took a deep breath. "What else did she tell you about her sister?"

"She was older by twelve years. She was tall, brunette, very smart. Lucy idolized her."

"Did Lucy ever tell you her sister's name?"

"Helena."

"Helena Cain. Her sister is still alive. At least she was when I left Caprica. She's the commander of a battlestar. I served under her for three months. I heard rumors about Lucy while I was there."

Daniel was stunned. "Helena is alive? Lucy always believed that she had died during the fighting on Tauron."

"Nope. Right after they took Lucy, the old centurions withdrew everywhere. A peace was negotiated and an Armistice Zone set up. The centurions left our solar system and came here."

Daniel looked at Kara and tears formed in his eyes. "I'd like to meet Helena. I'd like to tell her about Lucy."

"Commander Cain hates the Cylons as much as anybody I know."

Daniel didn't say anything. He looked down at the blank sheet of paper and began to sketch. Kara leaned back in her chair, put her wet feet near the fire and closed her eyes. Hunter's missing men had finally made it back to the valley almost a week late. They'd had to do like Markham had said…take a much longer route home to avoid the centurions combing the forest. The leader of the five had only a little news from their observation of the city. They had been unable to make contact with their source there, which Hunter said meant the contact deemed it too dangerous to try to get a message out. The men had observed increased activity at the airfield with more Heavy Raiders crisscrossing the air over the forest. They'd had no idea until they got back to the valley that a search was underway for two Colonial pilots and their ship.

Kara slipped a bit deeper into her thoughts as the warmth of the room lulled her. The scratch of charcoal on paper faded. She thought of Lee and wondered what he was doing. She thought of Sadie now sitting safely in a cave behind a waterfall. One day soon, Kara hoped, she and Hunter would take Sadie home.

She would jump into the atmosphere over the ocean like she always did and head straight for the boneyard. She knew that by the time she got there, MPs would be waiting for them. She and Hunter would be taken to the base, probably to the brig. After that she didn't know what would happen, but sooner or later she would get to see Lee again. She would find out if he could forgive her or if he couldn't.

Daniel's voice intruded into her reverie. "What do you think?"

Kara opened her eyes. He held up the sketch. It looked like a much younger Helena Cain.

Kara finally said. "That might be her twenty-five years ago."

"This is the way Lucy remembered her."

"She's colder looking now. Her eyes are harder. I can't remember seeing her smile…not like you've shown her. Of course I wasn't around her that much. She's the commander. I was just a nugget pilot. We didn't hang out together."

"Is she tall?"

"A few inches taller than me."

"Lucy said she was tall, but I wasn't sure. All adults seem tall to children."

Kara looked into Daniel's sad brown eyes. "I'm sorry Lucy was killed."

"If you see Helena Cain after you go back, will you tell her…just tell her that her sister loved her very much."

_..._

John had been in the city for thirty-three days when Sonja showed up one morning just as he was beginning his workout. He had seen her once or twice a week for the last few weeks. She had ceased to interrogate him, something for which he was grateful but curious. Occasionally she went with him when he walked in the park or to the city square. Most days he went out by himself. He walked all over the city learning its layout, learning where the occupied buildings were, noting where most of the centurions were. Some mornings he saw Gianne and Petra and their little girls in the park. Sometimes there were other mothers with them. Cassie had learned his name. She called him Chon and wanted him to carry her around. Every time he saw her smile, he ached to see his son, yet the time he spent in the park with the children and their mothers was the happiest part of the day for him.

D'Anna visits were becoming less frequent. He had asked her several days earlier if something was wrong. All he had gotten was one of her mysterious smiles and a soft _no_.

Sonja smiled at him. "Get dressed. We're taking a trip today."

John's heart began to beat faster and not due to the exercise. "We're going to the valley?"

"We are."

Twenty minutes later they were on their way down in the elevator. They exited onto the street where one of the solar-powered vehicles was waiting for them. This time Sonja got into the driver's seat, but before she pulled away from the curb, she handed him a pair of sunglasses. They fit perfectly.

She smiled. "You look very good today. You got a haircut."

"Two days ago. One of the guys who works for Doolittle is a barber. I sat on a crate on the loading dock behind the building. Apparently you let him have scissors."

She smiled. "Aren't you glad?"

She drove around the square and turned right, following the street out of the city in the opposite direction than the ancient temple. At an intersection several miles past the end of the ruins she turned left. He could tell by the direction of the sun that they were traveling north. Over the tops of the trees John saw a large cargo ship climb into the sky and bank in a wide turn until it headed south. He felt an excitement that he hadn't felt in a long time. It was the same way he always felt when he was going to fly. Today he knew he was only going to be a passenger, but he felt it just the same. And today was the day he would find out for sure that Sonja was wrong. Today John was sure he would find out that Kara was not in the valley and he could quit worrying about her.

Sonja took a road that skirted the main part of the airfield and finally pulled their vehicle up beside a row of Heavy Raiders parked on a remote section of the tarmac. She got out and he followed her. As they walked in front of the first ship, he looked up at the cockpit expecting to see centurions. It was empty.

"Where are your pilots?" He asked her.

"I told you I would find a way to get us to the valley. Natalie suggested it. I'm learning how to fly one of these ships."

John stopped walking. "Learning from who?"

"Whom. Learning from _whom_."

"Who…whom. Who's teaching you to fly?"

"I accessed our database. I think I've about got it."

"I'm not sure this is such a good idea…I mean going up without the centurion pilots."

Sonja laughed. "Oh, John, if you could see your face right now. The centurions have been teaching me to fly. That's what I've been doing every day for the last three weeks. Cavil thought it a bit odd at first, but he's grown accustomed to it and no longer questions my motives. The council approved it. Some of the Sixes are pilots. That's what they do. I told them my desire to learn was purely recreational."

"Are you seriously going to take this ship up without a copilot?"

"I've got a copilot. I've got you."

"I don't know the first thing about flying a ship like this."

"A ship is a ship. It can't be all that different from other ships you've flown."

"It's Cylon technology."

"Take a look at it before I get a centurion."

John walked around the side of the ship, entered and climbed into the cockpit. He sat in the copilot's seat and looked at the controls. They didn't look all that different from some of the mid-size transport ships he had flown for the cargo company. In one regard Sonja was correct. Every ship that flew in a planet's atmosphere had to generate enough lift and thrust to overcome the effects of gravity and drag. Sonja climbed in beside him and pointed out the instruments, gauges and controls.

"Where's your FTL drive?"

She smiled. "The Heavy Raiders on this end of the airfield are used only for transport on the planet or between the surface and a baseship. They don't have functioning FTL drives. The computer that controls the drive has been taken off line so you can forget about jumping this ship back to Caprica. It won't happen, John. Now do I get a centurion to fly with us or not?"

"What the hell. I'd rather not deal with a centurion. Go over the controls with me one more time."

Sonja complied. Finally she glanced at him and smiled. "Before we leave, I'd like to offer you my congratulations."

"Why?"

She seemed momentarily confused and then her smile deepened. "When was the last time you saw D'Anna?"

"A few days ago. The honeymoon didn't last very long. Her enthusiasm for my company has decreased during the past week or so."

"Perhaps that's because you fulfilled your purpose." Sonja began strapping herself into the pilot's seat.

He grabbed her wrist. "What are you saying?"

"D'Anna's pregnant, John. Simon told me yesterday. You're going to be a father again."

_..._

Several days after the rain stopped falling, the sun shone on a beautiful spring day. Kara got to Seléne's to find Hunter already there feeding Esmari. The basket of clean, wet diapers sat by the door. Seléne sat dozing in the chair by the fire. Kara took the apron with the clothespins off the peg and carried the basket outside. When she finished hanging the diapers on the line and got back inside, Hunter had Esmari at his shoulder. Kara smiled. Sometimes it was still hard for her to reconcile the fighter she had met a month earlier in the forest with the man who rocked his baby daughter.

He put the sleeping child in her cradle and they walked outside. "It's still too wet to work in the garden," Kara said, "and I don't think I can spin any more wool. Let's go fishing."

He was looking at the sky over her shoulder. "We've got company again."

Kara turned. A Heavy Raider was approaching from the west.

"Just one," she said.

"That's all it takes."

"Why do you think he's coming back?"

"Who knows. They haven't found you and Narcho. Maybe Cavil wants to have another go at us."

"So what do we do?"

"We wait. What else can we do?"

Kara wasn't impressed with the Heavy Raider's first approach to the meadow. The pilot was too high and had to circle a second time. She snickered. "Looks like they've got a centurion nugget at the controls. I didn't know there was such a thing."

The second approach was much better. The pilot put the ship down almost perfectly. The sun shone on the metal. Two people got out. The first one was a platinum blond dressed in black…a Six like Natasi. A brown-haired man got out behind her, tall, slim, wearing a light blue shirt, khaki pants and sunglasses.

A wave of dizziness swept her. She grabbed Hunter's arm and managed to gasp only three words. "_That's my father_."

Hunter shaded his eyes. "Are you sure?"

Kara's voice trembled. "It's him. I'd know him anywhere. He's with a Cylon. What am I going to do?"

"Stay put. We wait and see what they want. I don't see any centurions or weapons."

John had looked at the valley from the air on their approach. There were fields and orchards, a lake, several streams and mounded dwellings, most with lightly smoking chimneys. He saw flocks of sheep and goats and wondered if the Cylon settlements were like this. It was as beautiful a place as he had ever seen in the Twelve Colonies and he'd flown to them all.

"Where are you going to land?" He asked Sonya.

"Leoben told me they landed at the edge of the meadow close to the dwellings."

"You're coming in too high and too fast to put it down in the meadow. Circle and try it again."

"You do it," Sonya said. "Landings aren't my thing."

He took the controls and made a wide circle as he got a feel for the ship. As he brought it in over the meadow, he caught a glimpse of a road and several people and then his attention returned to getting the ship on the ground.

He grinned at Sonya while trying not to seem too interested in the people now gathering along the road. "Power it down. I did the hard part for you."

"I might warn you that these people are not like the ones in the settlements. They're armed."

"Then don't do anything to provoke them. I won't."

"We ask to see Juliana, the young blond woman. We can leave if she's not your daughter."

"She won't be," John said.

They exited the ship and walked out of the meadow onto the road. Sonya asked the first person she came to, "Which one is your leader?" The man pointed.

A dark-haired young man stepped out onto the road. He was holding the hand of a blond young woman wearing a long skirt and blouse. Her hair was pulled back and braided but even at a distance there was no doubt in John's mind that it was Kara. His worst fear, his worst nightmare had suddenly come true. He looked off to the side and managed not to make a sound, but his heart had begun to pound. He had to pull this off and not betray her. He left his sunglasses on. It would be easier if Sonja couldn't look at his eyes.

Sonya stopped ten feet away from the dark-haired man. "Are you the leader?"

"I am. What do you want?"

"Your name."

"Hunter."

"And this young woman with you would be…?"

"My wife."

"And her name is…?"

Kara was looking at her feet. She didn't dare raise her eyes because she knew she would give everything away. Hunter's tight grip on her hand was the only thing that was keeping her from visibly shaking.

"My name is Juliana," she said softly, her eyes still downcast.

"Don't be shy, Juliana," Sonja said. "Look at me. There's nothing to be afraid of. We're not armed. We're not going to hurt you. We just want to talk."

Slowly and defiantly Kara raised her eyes and stared at the Cylon who looked like Natasi, the Cylon who had brought her father here for what could only be one reason, to identify her.

"That's not her," John said evenly. "That's not my daughter. We can go now and leave these people in peace."

Sonja stared at Kara without moving, and then she quickly stepped in front of John and took off his sunglasses. A moment later she hit him hard and open-handed across the face.

"After all I've done for you," she said angrily, "you still won't tell me the truth. Do you think I'm _blind_?"

Even as his ear began ringing and his eye started to water from the blow, John knew what Kara was going to do. He barely managed to get between her and Sonja as Kara charged at her and then Kara was in his arms. His beautiful daughter was in his arms and they were both overcome with the emotion of it.

"You crazy girl," John choked. "What are you doing here?"

"I came to get you," she said between sobs. "Yolanda said you were here. She told me and then she died."

John pulled back and took Kara's tear-streaked face between his hands. "Yolanda Brenn is dead?"

Kara nodded. "Pneumonia."

He already knew how she had gotten there, but he asked the question anyway. "How did you…?"

"I stole the Raider."

"Stole it?"

"Yeah, I stole it."

"Lee…"

"Didn't have a clue. Nobody did."

"How did you learn to…?"

"Lee broke his leg."

"How?"

"He punched out over the ocean one night about five or six months ago not long after you…disappeared."

"Laura and Brae?"

"Fine when I left."

"How long…?"

"I've been here a month." She touched the scar over his right eyebrow. "That's a new one. They hurt you, didn't they?"

John had gotten himself under control. He smoothed back the hair that had escaped from her braid. "Is there somewhere a little more private we can go and talk? We've attracted quite a crowd."

Hunter said, "The communal building."

Sonja said, "We can't stay long."

John ignored her. He put his arm around his daughter. "Which way, baby?"

They started down the path. Sonja followed and grabbed his other arm. "Did you not hear me?"

He turned on her. "Back off, Sonja. I want thirty minutes alone with my daughter. Then if you keep your end of our bargain, I'll keep mine."

Targa, Beck and Narcho had walked up. Hunter said to them, "Take Sonja back to your place and give her a cup of tea. She's our guest. Treat her with respect." He looked at Narcho. "You, come with us."

Kara could tell that Sonya went with Targa and Beck very reluctantly. Twice she glanced back over her shoulder. "Treat her nice," Kara called after them.

"I'll teach her how to whittle," Beck laughed.

When they were out of sight, John clapped Narcho on the shoulder and pointed to his beard. "I like the camouflage."

"Thank you, sir. I never could get up the nerve to shave with a knife."

John grinned at Kara. "So introduce me to your _husband_."

"This is Hunter," Kara said and the two men shook hands. "He saved my life, Narcho's, too."

"You living with him?"

"No. I live with his aunt and his sister."

"I hear you had his baby."

"Man, word sure gets around. When did you get so tight with the Cylons? I thought you were in prison."

"I was for a while. Now I'm in the city."

"Living with that Six? I thought they gave you to D'Anna."

"Talk about word getting around. I don't live with anybody. I've got my own apartment."

"They just let you out of prison and gave you your own apartment," Kara said incredulously.

"Long story."

"What did you mean by keeping your end of the bargain with that Six?"

"Her name is Sonja, and let's not go there. What we've got to talk about is getting you and Lieutenant Allison off this planet…today."

They reached the communal building and went inside. There were only a few people there. Hunter led them to a small table in one corner in front of the bookshelves. They sat.

"I'm not going back with Kara, sir," Narcho said. "Hunter is. The only thing waiting for me back on Caprica is prison. I'd rather stay here with the people in the valley. I'll fight beside them when the time comes."

Kara said, "Hunter knows where all the settlements are and how many centurions they have. He's my proof that there are humans on this planet."

"Where's the Raider?" John asked. "Sonja said Cavil is scouring the forest for you and the ship."

Kara smiled. "The Raider is in a cave behind a waterfall."

"How'd you get…never mind. I probably don't want to know. How far?"

Hunter said, "Roughly twenty-five miles south of here."

"How close could I get to it in that Heavy Raider?"

"Half a mile from the base of the cliff there's a clearing in the forest. You could put the ship down there."

John turned to Kara. "You got your flight suit?"

"Of course."

"Go put it on. Get anything else you need. I'm taking you to that clearing now. You're getting off this planet today. Sonja and I had a bargain. It involves her keeping quiet if I…do something for her, but I don't trust her to keep her end of it. I won't take that kind of chance with your life."

"You can't stay behind."

"That's the way it's got to be, baby. Now go, get ready. You, too, Hunter. Get whatever you want to take with you."

"Dad, listen…"

"Don't argue with me, Kara. Just this once, please do what I tell you."

Kara ran to Emmalyn's. She was standing outside. "You're leaving."

"My father…" Kara started to say and then choked up. Struggling to keep her tears in check, she ran inside and stripped off the blouse and skirt. She took her flight suit from the shelf and put it on. After just a month of wearing the soft skirts and blouses, the flight suit felt strange to her. She looked around and decided to leave the backpack. She wouldn't need it. She rummaged inside and got her little computer and her mother's pistol, the one she'd had since the night her father had taken her off Picon. The sudden urgency to leave a place felt like it had then.

Emmalyn was standing in the large room. "I'm going to miss you, child. Take care of yourself and my nephew, too."

Kara's tears spilled over. "I will. I'm going to miss you, too, and Dessa and everybody. You took me in and were good to me."

Emmalyn hugged Kara. "I hope we see you again one day very soon."

"Me too."

With tears running down her face Kara turned and walked out of the dwelling. Everything was happening so fast…too fast. She ran back to the communal building. Hunter and Narcho were comforting Dessa who was crying. Kara put her hand on Dessa's shoulder and looked at Narcho.

"Don't go," Dessa sobbed.

"I've got to. And you've got to be brave. You've got to help Seléne take care of Esmari until we get back. That's a _really_ important job. Can you do that?"

Narcho finally understood Kara's look. He put his arm around Dessa. "I'll help."

"Will you take me fishing?"

"Sure."

Kara looked at Narcho again. "I owe you…big time, wingman."

He nodded and didn't try to speak. The scene was getting to him, too.

"Let's go," John said. He turned to Narcho. "Tell Sonja that I'll be back for her."

John kept his arm around Kara's shoulders all the way to the ship. When they got there, he took off his dog tags and slid them over her head. She was swept by another feeling of déjà vu. Her mother had done the same thing on Picon.

"To prove you saw me," he said. "Give them to Laura. They're for Brae when he gets a little older. And tell Laura that I love her. Tell her…just tell her that I love her. I'm sure she thinks I'm dead."

Kara nodded. "I'm the only one who never believed it."

"Are she and Bill…?"

"Not when I left. She was still wearing her wedding ring."

John smiled and held up his hand. "For what it's worth, so am I."

She couldn't look at him. "Hunter told me why the Cylons take people to the city."

He looked out over the valley. "It's my place to tell Laura what I've done and why…if I ever make it back to Caprica."

Kara gave him her mother's pistol. "Hang on to this. I'm coming back for you. As soon as I let Hunter off, I'll be back. I can land the Raider right here…"

"No. You can't do it, baby. You can't. I've got to stay on Nereid. There's a couple of reasons, but the main one is that if I disappear, Cavil will destroy this valley. He'll kill all these people. You don't want that to happen. I know you don't. I'll be all right."

"When the admiral brings the fleet here…"

"I'll be waiting. I told Hunter which building I'm in. Now let's go."

John climbed into the pilot's seat. Kara started to get into the copilot's seat. "When did you learn to fly a Heavy Raider?"

He grinned. "About an hour ago. It handles a lot like a Raptor. And you need to let Hunter sit up here. He knows where we're going."

Kara sat in the passenger compartment. It seemed like they had hardly gotten airborne before they were descending and had touched down. They got out of the ship. Half a mile away she saw the steep incline that she and Hunter had come down on the switchback trail. The mouth of the small tunnel that led into the cave looked like a shadow on the rock.

"How long will it take you to get to the ship and get away?" John asked.

"An hour and a half if we push it and nothing goes wrong," Hunter said. "We've got a couple of…obstacles to get past."

Kara said, "When I exit the cave, I'm going to stay low over the river, below the tree line. The Cylons will never pick us up on dradis. I'll jump from there. We'll be okay. Now you need to go. You don't want to be anywhere around here in case…something goes wrong."

"I'll keep Sonja in the valley for a few hours."

Kara turned to Hunter. "I need a couple of minutes with my dad." He nodded and walked toward the rocks. Kara threw her arms around her father. "I love you. I'll be back for you one day. I promise."

"I know you will, baby. I love you, too. Now go with Hunter."

"There's a couple of things I've got to tell you. First, there's a copy of the seventh Cylon model in the valley, the _only_ copy of him. His name is Daniel and Cavil and all the rest including Sonja think he's dead. If they find him, they'll kill him and he won't download. Nobody in the valley knows what he is. If they did, they would kill him, too. They rescued him mostly dead near the river. They think he's human. I'm the only one who knows."

"D'Anna mentioned hearing the voice of one of them who was dead. She had to go back to the creators for a checkup. She put her hands in some kind of datastream and…"

"She couldn't have gone back to their creators. They're dead."

"What?"

"Daniel told me. The creators caught Cavil killing all the Sevens and tried to stop him. He had his centurions kill them."

"That can't be right. Sonja, D'Anna…they think their creators are still alive."

"Well, they're not."

"Sonja said they revere the creators as instruments of their God."

"Cavil didn't revere them very much. Lucy Cain was one of the creators. She helped Daniel escape. Cavil killed her, too. Had his centurions shoot her and Daniel and throw them in the river."

"Cain?"

"Commander Cain's sister."

"Damn. Anything else?"

She shook her head. "I can't even think right now."

"You need to go, baby. Hunter's waiting for you."

She choked. "It's not fair, Daddy. It's just not fair."

John felt tears come to his eyes again. He crushed her to him. "No, it's not. I love you so much. I have since the minute I saw you. Now suck it up, baby. Be tough. Get back to Caprica and report to the admiral."

"I'm probably going to jail."

"Laura won't let that happen. I know she won't. Tell her I love her. Tell her I'll always love her. And kiss Brae for me. Tell my son I love him, too. Now go."

Kara turned and ran after Hunter. By the time she caught up with him the tears were streaming down her face again.

John watched until Kara and Hunter had climbed the steep trail to the opening in the rock and disappeared. Then he got back into the Heavy Raider, lifted off and headed northwest toward the valley. The little girl who had owned his heart since the moment he had seen her would be all right. She was tough and strong. His own fate was a much bigger question. It was entirely up to Sonja now whether he went back to the city and lived or went back to the prison and died.

...

By the time Kara crawled out of the little tunnel into the cavern, Hunter was taking his clothes off at the edge of the water. Kara turned her back and unzipped her flight suit. She was sweaty from running and the strenuous climb to the tunnel mouth. The minute the cold air of the cavern hit her, she shivered. She heard a slight splash as Hunter entered the water.

"You need any help?" He called.

"No, go ahead. I can manage."

She started to leave on her underwear and changed her mind. She stripped everything off and rolled it up in her flight suit. Hunter was already across. He put his bundled clothes on the side and boosted himself out of the water. Kara sat on the edge and slid in. The icy cold took her breath, and she grabbed her suit and began swimming backwards, holding her clothes above her head. Hunter had gone some distance away and sat on a rock with his back turned. He was putting on his boots. Kara dressed quickly and finally stopped shivering. She sat down and pulled on her socks and boots. She felt numb, both physically and emotionally. What was happening to her now didn't even seem real. It was almost like the night she had left Picon. She thought she would wake up at Emmalyn's and find that she had been dreaming.

She caught up with Hunter and they crossed the cavern. She saw the entrance to the tunnel that contained the spiders. She felt her heart start pounding.

"Hold on to me," Hunter said. "We're going to walk fast and not stop until we're through the narrow part. I'm going to use the flashlight. It'll be better if you look straight ahead and not down or to the side."

She grasped the back of his jacket. "Just go. The sooner we're off this planet, the better for my dad."

He walked into the darkness and she blanked her mind. She could do it. She kept her eyes on the back of his head. They walked fast. Several times she caught movement on the tunnel walls but didn't look. The little bones crunched under her boots and she fought the urge to gag.

"You're doing great, Wildcat," Hunter said. "We're almost through."

Five minutes later he stopped and made her turn around. They were past the webs. He shined the light on her. Miraculously she was spider-free. He brushed one off the side of his leg. The tunnel had widened and they could walk side by side. Hunter kept the beam of light at their feet. Soon she began to hear the distant rumble of the waterfall. They walked faster. The humidity increased. The sound grew louder. They finally emerged into the cave. Kara went to Sadie and opened the hatch. She took the flashlight from him and looked at the underside of the ship. The gouges were still visible, but they didn't look as deep as she remembered. She went back to the hatch. She knew how claustrophobic Hunter was. She knew he was dreading what came next.

"You can wait out here until I've got everything booted and ready."

She started to climb inside when he gently took her arm. "Your father's a damned brave man to stay behind like that. We owe him."

"I don't want to start crying again. Let's just do this."

He still held her arm. In the dim light that filtered through the water she could tell he was looking at her.

"I know you're going back to Lee, so if I don't do this now, I'll never get another chance."

She knew immediately what he was going to do. She could have stopped him. She could have turned her face away and he wouldn't have kissed her, but she didn't. She knew they would never do this again, but at the moment she also knew it was right. It was part of everything they had come to mean to each other, but a part that would never be. She didn't belong in his world any more than he belonged in hers.

But at the moment it was right. She let it happen. The kiss was gentle and brief and filled with raw emotion. It was over in seconds, and then she was in the ship and flipping switches and booting the computers.

"Let's go," she called.

He climbed inside and took a couple of deep breaths before he closed the hatch and spun the wheel sealing them in. She carefully applied enough vertical thrust to get them near the top of the cave before she used the horizontal thrusters to send them out the opening and through the plummeting water. She dipped over the upper basin of the falls and staying below the treetops, banked over the river. The coordinates were already in the navigation computer. Knowing she would be back one day and knowing she would see her father again, Kara silently said goodbye to Nereid as she touched the key. Space folded. The world blinked around them as they jumped. Then they were high in the atmosphere over Caprica's ocean.

"We'll be there soon," she said softly to Hunter as she turned the Raider toward the boneyard and home.

TBC…


	20. Just Friends

Chapter 20

Just Friends

_12 It came to pass that the leaders of the Twelve Tribes heard of a simple priest who worshipped at the Temple of the Thirteenth and who spoke words of prophecy to her people._

_13 And they came for her and arrested her and threw her into prison._

_14 And she was questioned night and day by the learned scribes and Elders of the Twelve as to whence came her visions._

_15 Azurra said, My sight comes from God who sees all and knows all and for whom the future is known as well as the past. _

_16 I am His instrument and I do His bidding. All that I see comes from Him._

_17 The learned men rebuked her and said among themselves that she had been misled, and they sought to educate her in the ways of their old gods, but Azurra held steadfast to her belief in her God._

_18 And God sent to her a vision of the Exodus of the Thirteenth Tribe and of the diaspora of all the peoples of Kobol._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Azurra, _Chapter 3:12-18

.

Late in the afternoon of his seventh day back on Caprica, Lee sat at his desk staring at his computer screen in his new office. He was no longer at the airbase. He was now on the second floor in one wing of the huge U-shaped building that housed the military branch of the government. His new office definitely qualified as small but with an upgrade in furniture from mismatched and old to matching and new. The desk chair was much better, too, and certainly more stable. If he leaned back, he didn't have to worry about tipping over. This office also had a window but not a view. The desk was arranged so that he faced the door. To gaze out the window and across the street to the next building required that he turn around. He had done it frequently during the first few days but the novelty had now worn off.

Kendra also worked in the same location. Getting to the Ministry of Defense in the parallel wing of the building however involved taking the elevator up one floor and walking the equivalent of several city blocks. There was zero chance that they would ever run into each other. The two wings didn't even share a cafeteria. Each wing was so large it had its own. He had made the walk to see her once this week during lunch, but she hadn't been at her desk. She worked in a cubicle that was like a hundred others in the large room that housed the ministry's data analysts. She hadn't been there although her computer was on, the screensaver blinking through the standard images. He had sat down in her chair and waited for almost fifteen minutes, but she hadn't returned. He had decided that he would call first before he made the long walk again.

Lee was three doors down from his CO Major Parker, about the same distance he had been at the airbase. His father had an office a floor above. Admiral Adama's office was larger and considerably better furnished with items collected throughout his stellar career. As top-ranking offices went, though, it was still modest, but Bill did have a view that was second to none in the building. When his father looked out his windows, he saw a courtyard surrounded by tree-shaded pedestrian walkways. There were statues of past Colonial heroes lining the edge of a reflecting pool. At the far end, nearly half a mile away was Marble House, office and residence of the President of the Colonies.

Standing in his father's office during the ceremony promoting him from lieutenant to captain, Lee had wondered if one day there would be a statue of Admiral William Adama with the rest of the Colonial heroes. His plan had freed the last remaining Colony of Cylon control. He certainly deserved one, yet knowing how his father disdained both fame and the media, he wouldn't want one.

On his father's floor, the offices had polished brass nameplates attached to the heavy mahogany doors. On Lee's floor, names were little plastic letters stuck into holders beside each door. When Lee had moved in the previous week, his name holder had said _Lt L Adama._ As of two days ago it said _Capt L Adama._

His promotion ceremony had been short and private at Lee's request. Bill had done the honors, pinning the captain's bars on each side of Lee's collar while Lee looked out the window and across the reflecting pool. Major Parker had read the form authorizing the promotion although he had managed to make it sound personal. He had also related several anecdotes about Lee's days as an interrogator that brought chuckles from those gathered. When he and his father were alone, Lee had returned the cigarette lighter that had belonged to his grandfather, Josepha Adama. Bill had held the lighter briefly in his hand and had then given it back to Lee with instructions simply to _keep it_. Apparently Bill thought that Lee needed the token of luck more than he did.

That same day his father had taken him and Major Parker to lunch at a nearby restaurant frequented by the movers and shakers of Caprica's government. They had been free of Cylon control not quite six months and already it was business as usual in the capitol.

The highlight of the meal had occurred when Marta Shaw had entered the main dining room with her daughter. They had stopped at the table and Kendra had offered her congratulations on his promotion. Lee had casually mentioned that he had dropped by to see her the day before and had missed her. She had told him she would call him soon and that they would get together. Lee had known that meant Saunders would be included, but her mother apparently had not. Marta Shaw had perked up at the turn in the conversation. So had his father, but Bill had the good judgment not to ask any questions after Marta and Kendra had moved on. That was two days ago and Lee hadn't heard from Kendra yet.

He glanced up as Major Parker came into his office, closed the door and sat in the one extra chair. In the two and a half years that Lee had worked for Parker, he had come to respect him a great deal. Parker was a good leader.

"It hardly seems like this week is almost over," Parker said. "I know you're glad it's Thursday. One more day and then the weekend. Any big plans?"

"No, sir. I might call Karl and see if he and Sharon want to go to Zeno's or something."

"Have you heard from Lieutenant Shaw?"

"Not yet, sir."

"Problems?"

"No, sir. She's dealing with some personal issues right now."

"You mean aside from what happened to the two of you on the surface of Tauron?"

"Yes, sir."

"Is there something going on between you and Lieutenant Shaw that might cause problems?"

"If I might ask, sir, did my father send you in here to ask me that question? Because if he did, I'll have to say that it's none of his business."

Parker smiled. "We aren't being nosy just for the sake of nosiness. Sooner or later you're both going to have to answer some questions for the independent inquiry. A personal relationship between you and Lieutenant Shaw might cloud the real issue."

"Kendra and I found a way to work together despite some differences of opinion. Our relationship never crossed the line into anything romantic. We're just friends."

"You understand where Tom Zarek might try to go if he thought there was anything personal, don't you?"

"No, sir."

"He might try to insinuate that she was quicker to pull the trigger if she was protecting a boyfriend…or that she didn't need to pull it at all."

"He's going to say that anyway, sir."

"Probably so. But the cleaner this is, the better for you and the lieutenant."

"Do you think we're in some kind of trouble, sir? Do you think this independent inquiry is going to find us guilty of something?"

"Not a chance. Are you doing okay, Lee? Are you sleeping? You look tired."

"I've slept better the last couple of nights. A certain scene has finally quit repeating itself every time I shut my eyes."

"If you need to take a couple of days off, that's fine."

"I'd rather be at work. I need to be doing something. Otherwise I sit around worrying about…things."

"Kara?"

"Yes, sir. I don't know why, but I had the crazy feeling that I was being called back to Caprica because she was coming home."

"It's been a month," Parker said gently. "You do realize the odds of her returning decrease with every day she's gone."

Lee clenched his jaw. "What do you think will happen to her when she does get back?"

"I don't know, Lee. I guess we'll cross that bridge if we get to it."

"Do you think she'll be court-martialed?"

"I don't know that either. It won't be our decision."

"You're saying it will be my father's decision."

"He's the one who authorized the use of the Raider for reconnaissance. So yes, I would say it would be his decision whether charges would be brought against her or not."

"Early this week I went by to see Kara's little brother Braedon. I talked to Maya, his nanny. She said that Laura…President Roslin…isn't going to let my father put Kara in jail. Laura told her that Kara was on a special recon mission that she had personally authorized."

"Do you believe that?"

"No, sir. I was there the night my father told Laura about Kara stealing the Raider. She was stunned. There's no doubt in my mind that she was as surprised as the rest of us."

"Your father respects President Roslin as the civic leader of the Colonies, but he doesn't think she should meddle in military operations. It's already a bur under his saddle that the President won't let him nuke the Cylon homeworld."

"Whether or not John survived like Kara thinks he did isn't even the point, but I think it's one of the reasons for Laura taking the stance she's taken on nuking the Cylon homeworld. It might have more to do with John than it does with Kara. She and her brother are all Laura had left of him."

"True. I hadn't thought about it from that angle. I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens…if Kara makes it back."

"She's coming back. I know she is."

"I hope you're right, Lee. Don't worry about that independent inquiry. I'm sure both you and Lieutenant Shaw will be cleared."

"Thank you, sir."

Parker stood. "I understand you still want to fly your Viper on Mondays."

"Yes, sir."

"I'll make sure we don't schedule any important meetings while you're gone each week. Carry on, then."

Lee would still fly his Viper every Monday, but the rest of the week he would work on mission plans in preparation for the destruction of the Cylons on Nereid. Two nights earlier Lee had met Kevin Abinell for a beer at Zeno's. They had managed to talk for over an hour on a number of topics, mostly sports related, without mentioning Kara. Lee sensed that Kevin still blamed himself for having a part in Kara's theft of the Raider.

He turned around and stared out the window for a long time before he turned back to his computer screen and resumed looking at the big map of Nereid. His mind wandered again. He probably should have mentioned his problem concentrating to Major Parker but he hadn't. The last thing he wanted was Parker telling him he had to go for some kind of counseling. There was one person who understood, though, one person who had been through the same experiences he had, someone who had faced wolves and centurions and death with him. He finally picked up the phone, dialed an extension and got an answer.

"Hi, Kendra. What's new with you?"

_..._

John put the Heavy Raider down in the meadow in almost the same spot he had landed before. He got out and looked around. The valley people were going about their daily chores. Life had returned to normal. They knew who he was now and didn't consider him a threat. Other than a few stares he got no reaction as he walked down the road to where he had seen Sonja disappear with the two men. Noel Allison was waiting for him. They continued walking down the path.

"Are Kara and Hunter gone, sir?"

"If not, they will be soon. Sonja and I are going to stay here for a couple of hours to make sure they've had time to reach the ship and get away."

"I'm glad you're all right, sir."

"That might change when we get back to the city. Where did those two men take Sonja?"

"This way. Their names are Targa and Beck. They're Hunter's uncles. Hunter's father got killed two years ago fighting the Cylons. Hunter's been the leader of the fighters since then. His grandfather is the leader of this whole valley. I've been staying with Hunter and his uncles."

"The dark-haired girl who was crying is Hunter's sister?"

"Yes, sir. Dessa. After you and Kara left with Hunter, I took her to her aunt's. Dessa's a little bit slow mentally. Kara told me it happened when she was born."

"So why were you here with Kara instead of Lee? Never mind. I know the answer to that question. You helped her steal the Raider. How'd she con you into it?"

"She told me that Admiral Adama was going to nuke this planet to kill the Cylons even though there are humans on it. I realized I couldn't be a part of killing humans just to wipe out the Cylon homeworld. That night when we stole the Raider, we tripped a silent alarm. My choice was to get in the Raider with her or wait for the MPs to arrest me."

John didn't say anything for a few moments. "Did she tell you that she thought I was here?"

Narcho hesitated and finally said, "Not right away, but eventually."

"And you didn't tell her she was crazy?"

"She told me what the Oracle had said to her."

"Which was?"

"She never said exactly. Just that an Oracle told her you had survived the explosion. Kara somehow figured out you were here. One of the guys who worked on the Raider told her it was possible…theoretically."

"You believe in the prophecies of Oracles like she does?"

He shrugged. "Kara was very convincing."

"Are the Cylons on Caprica dead?"

"The centurions are but not the skinjobs. They're in prison somewhere…except Sharon. They let her go. There was talk the government was going to put them on trial, but when Kara and I left, it still hadn't happened."

"What about Karl?"

"He's okay. He and Sharon got married. Saunders and I went to their wedding. Besides Kara we were the only ones there. Sharon's pregnant."

John was shocked. "Sharon Valerii is pregnant? How far along?"

Narcho looked puzzled. "I don't know. They got married a couple of months ago. Kara told me she was already knocked up. President Roslin helped them since they couldn't get a marriage license because of what Sharon is."

"Sharon hasn't lost the baby?"

"Not when Kara and I left. Karl took a lot of grief over being with a Cylon. Most of the pilots won't have anything to do with him even though Sharon helped us."

"None of you got sent back to the _Galactica _after the fighting was over?"

"Some of us were kept on Caprica. We flew out of the airbase there."

"Tell me about Lee's broken leg."

Narcho quickly related what had happened that night over Caprica.

"Did Kara move in with him or with Laura?"

"I…I'm not sure, sir."

"Never mind. I shouldn't have asked you that question. I know what she did."

"There was a nice memorial for you, sir…a couple of weeks after that night."

John smiled. "A lot of people there?"

"Yes, sir. The temple was full and people were standing. Captain Jessups gave a nice speech."

"If I ever get back to Caprica, I'll have to buy him a drink. So Kara learned to fly the Raider after Lee broke his leg?"

"Yes, sir. She told me she'd brought it here twice before the night we stole it." Narcho turned off the main path and down a smaller one. "We're almost there. Targa and Beck's place is down this way."

"Before we get there, tell me what happened the day you got here. Tell me about getting caught by Leoben. How did it happen?"

They stopped walking and John listened as Noel Allison related a detailed account of his and Kara's capture and rescue on the morning they had arrived on Nereid. Then he told how Hunter had split them up, going with Kara to hide the Raider and leaving Narcho for Targa and Beck to bring back to the valley.

"Kara and Hunter…they have something going on?"

"They're tight, but not like that. They're just friends. More like a mutual admiration thing. Him and Kara…in some ways they're a lot alike. They've…we've spent a lot of time together during the last month. Kara helped take care of Hunter's kid, too."

"Where's the mother?"

"Dead."

"Her name was Juliana?"

"Yes, sir."

A piece of the puzzle fell into place for John. He glanced up at the main path and saw a woman walking toward them.

"That's Hunter's aunt," Narcho said.

They waited for her. The woman walked up to him. "So you're Kara's father."

"I am. John Gallagher."

"I'm Emmalyn Farris. Hunter is my nephew." Emmalyn smiled. "I see now where Kara got those green eyes of hers."

"Thank you for taking my daughter in. I owe you. I owe all of you."

"You've already paid that debt. And Kara was a great help to me and to another one of us. We had some long conversations sitting by the fire at night. I know much of what she's been through in her relatively few years. She's a very adaptable and resourceful young woman."

John felt emotion welling in him again. He managed to say, "Yes, she is when she isn't doing crazy things like stealing recon ships."

Emmalyn said. "Well, you've had quite a morning. Would you like something to drink?"

"I'd love something to drink."

"We'll go to my house. My table is bigger and Hunter's grandfather is waiting there for us. He wants to meet you." She turned to Narcho. "You can go get the woman. Tell Targa and Beck they're welcome to come, too, if they think they can behave themselves."

They started up toward the main path while Narcho continued on to Targa and Beck's.

"That's nice of you to include her," John said. "I know how you all must feel about the Cylons."

Emmalyn made a harrumphing sound. "I never thought I'd have a Cylon at my table, but I never thought my nephew would travel to another world in a Cylon ship, either."

John smiled. "Sonja's okay."

"She wasn't too pleased with you."

"I should have known better than to lie to her this time. She was right. She's not blind. All she had to do was look at Kara's eyes and she knew. Sonja might forgive me. Then again, she might not. She's got a thing about me lying to her."

"You were trying to protect your child. We would all have done the same thing. I can tell she hit you hard. I'm afraid you're going to have a bruise on your cheek, maybe even a black eye."

He snorted. "It sure won't be the first one."

"Are you her breeder?"

"No. She's my handler. The Three who brought me to the city to is a little unstable. The council put Sonja in charge of me."

"So Sonja brought you here to identify your daughter. What's going to happen now?"

"I don't know. Sonja doesn't know who Narcho is so I think he'll be all right here. Hunter and Kara were both careful not to say anything in front of her that gave him away. It doesn't matter what she does to me now. Kara's safe. I'm going to do my best to see that nothing happens to anyone in this valley."

They turned down another side path. A man with curly brown hair stood outside the dwelling.

"Daniel," Emmalyn said. "This is Kara's father, John."

Daniel was very nervous. "I heard you were here. I wanted to meet you. Kara…I'm sorry she had to go. I knew she would someday, but…did she mention me?"

"She told me you were a Cylon prisoner just like me except that you had escaped."

Daniel's relief was visible. "They thought I was dead when they threw me in the river."

Emmalyn said, "Let's go inside and get something to drink. Daniel, you come, too."

"I can't. I've got to go before…" he looked past them and John saw panic come into Daniel's eyes. He turned. Narcho, Targa and Beck were accompanying Sonja down the path.

Sonja stopped abruptly. The shock and disbelief in her voice were clear. "_Daniel_?"

Daniel's face drained of all color and he swayed like he was going to pass out. John grabbed his arm. "Easy…we need to get him inside." He turned to Sonja. "We know he was your _prisoner_." To Daniel he said, "Sonja doesn't believe in what they do at the prison. She's not going to take you back."

Emmalyn slipped an arm around Daniel's waist and together they got him inside. She helped him sit in one of the padded chairs. He was hyperventilating.

Emmalyn said, "Dessa, get some tea right now. Daniel, listen to me. Take slow deep breaths."

Leaving Daniel in Emmalyn's capable hands, John walked back outside. Sonja hadn't moved. Her face was almost as white as Daniel's had been. "I thought he was dead," she said. "We were told he had died. Cavil said…"

"Cavil lied," John interrupted her. "Daniel _escaped_."

Targa said, "He doesn't remember much, but it seems he remembers you."

"Who wouldn't remember her?" Beck asked.

"Sonja knew Daniel _at the prison._" John said.

Sonja finally seemed to comprehend what John was trying to say to her. "Yes, at the prison. I talked to him many times. I like him very much. He's a very talented man. I was very sorry when…he died."

Emmalyn came to the doorway of the dwelling. "Come inside and get some tea…all of you."

"After you," John said to Sonja. He caught her gaze and held it for a few moments. _They don't know. Please don't give Daniel away. _

Sonja went inside and looked around. All eyes were on her. She walked over and knelt by the side of Daniel's chair. She took his hand and looked into his eyes. "I'm glad you escaped. I'm glad you're not dead."

"You aren't going to take me back?"

"No. These are your people now. You belong with them."

John smiled and sat down at the table across from an elderly man whose eyes were clouded. "I'm John Gallagher, Kara's father. You must be Hunter's grandfather."

"Perry Jaffee." He held his hand across the table and John shook it. "My wife, Celia."

John nodded at her. Emmalyn put a cup of tea in front of him. It was slightly bitter but it was wet. He drank half of it before he put the cup down.

"So they're gone," Jaffee said.

"They're gone," John answered.

The old man smiled. "Our Oracle saw it many years ago. She told me that three strangers would come to our valley, two and then one. Her prophecy has come to pass. A great change is coming for us all."

_..._

Lee paced outside the entrance to Kings Bay Medical Center and glanced at his watch. Kendra and Saunders were twenty minutes late. When he had talked to her earlier in the afternoon, she had told him that she and Dwight were going to visit Alex Quartararo that evening. She had asked Lee if he wanted to go with them.

Finally Lee saw them approaching.

"Sorry we're late," Kendra said. "I got stuck at work." She smiled. "You'd think I'd been away for nearly a month or something."

"That's okay," Lee said. "How does it feel being back at the Ministry of Defense?"

She shrugged. "After being on the _Penelope_ and the _Galactica_, it seems weird to sit at a desk all day." She smiled. "Dwight doesn't have that problem. He gets to goof off at the base for eight hours while I'm working."

Saunders said in his good natured way. "I was at the base at 05:00 this morning. I had to fly a commander and some political types up to Sovana. Even if we didn't have to worry about some fanatic or warlord with an RPG, landing at that airbase is still considered hazardous duty. I'll be glad to do your job if you want to do mine."

She slipped her hand into his. "I was just kidding and you know it."

The three of them began walking up the steps. Lee hadn't been inside the big medical center since the night Yolanda Brenn had died. They had been there all night because Kara wouldn't leave her friends and Lee wouldn't leave Kara. Just before sunrise Lee had gone down to the cafeteria to get them some coffee. He hadn't been gone more than twenty minutes. When he had returned, Kara had been sitting on the floor holding a collapsed and sobbing Keshia. He hadn't been back to the medical center since.

They found Crashdown feeding himself awkwardly with his left hand.

"Just in time," he said and smiled. "I could use some help…Kendra."

"What a big baby," she said. "How have you managed to live this long without being able to feed yourself?"

"Usually some hot nurse helps me, but they're all busy tonight."

"That's a shame," Dwight said. "How's the wrist doing?"

"Doc says it's not as bad as they first thought. He thinks I'll live. I see you brought the other fearless wolf slayer with you."

Lee said. "So the wrist isn't as bad as Doc Cottle thought?"

"Not quite. The surgeon says if I do all the physical therapy which hurts like a bitch and I eat all my vegetables, I might even fly again."

"That's great. I'm glad to hear it."

"And I don't get rabies."

"Rabies?" Kendra gasped.

"Don't listen to him," Saunders said and laughed. "He's on drugs. The docs are watching his wrist for infection."

"I had some of those drugs after I broke my leg," Lee said. "Good stuff."

"Yeah," Quartararo echoed. "Good stuff. So what are you three up to?"

"We just stopped by to cheer you up," Kendra said. "Then we're going to Zeno's."

"Why don't _you_ stay and cheer me up while Lee and my roommate go to Zeno's?"

Saunders put his hand on Kendra's shoulder. "No can do. She goes with us, roomie."

"When are you being released?" Lee asked to fill the awkward silence.

"Not until after the next full moon. The docs want to make sure I don't turn into a werewolf."

"He is such a comedian," Saunders said. "He's being released in two days. Then he starts outpatient rehab and I have to put up with him back at the apartment."

"I did my share of that, too," Lee said. "Outpatient rehab. More than my share. I agree. It hurts like hell."

"We need to let Crash finish his dinner," Kendra said. "Two days and he can go with us to Zeno's."

"Right," Saunders said. "Eat those vegetables. Those mushy black-eyed peas look especially appetizing."

Quartararo made a face. "Man, when I get out of here, my first meal is going to be the biggest pizza I can buy…with an ice cold beer."

"That pizza and beer will be on me," Lee said. "I owe you."

Later at Zeno's while Saunders threw darts, Kendra said to Lee. "You don't look so good. Trouble sleeping?"

"Maybe this beer will help." He poured some more from the pitcher into his mug and took a sip. "How are you doing?"

"I'm not sleeping great, either. I broke up with Gordon."

"You tell him about Saunders?"

"Not exactly. Gordon's a nice guy. I didn't want to hurt him. I told him I needed some space after everything I'd been through on the mission."

Lee snorted. "And he bought it?"

"No. The first thing he said was, '_What's his name?_'"

"So then you told him?"

"I said that I'd realized that I didn't want to be tied down to one guy."

"Unless that guy is Saunders?"

"I don't know, Lee. I told you we're taking it slow. While I was at the Academy I was involved with a guy who went on to Flight School. I found out he was cheating on me."

"So Gordon wasn't the only reason you were reluctant to hook up with Saunders."

"We're not _hooking up_, Lee. I told you we're taking it slow. Did you and Kara just rush into a relationship?"

He and Kara had made love the first time she'd come to his apartment…and then not again for months since she'd told him that night she was in the resistance and couldn't see him again. But he didn't want to talk to Kendra about his and Kara's relationship. Lee shrugged.

"Taking it slow is obviously the best way for you and Saunders. My CO asked me today if you and I had something going on. He and my father want to make sure this independent inquiry is clean."

"Clean? How could it not be _clean_? We all told the truth."

"They're afraid Zarek might try to make something of it if he thinks you were protecting a boyfriend…like me."

"That's crazy. We're just friends."

"I know, but both Major Parker and my dad thought it was important enough to mention."

"Okay, I'll be extra careful about what I say and do." She smiled. "So do I have to salute you now, Captain?"

He smiled, too. "Absolutely."

She gave him a mocking little salute just as Saunders slid into the booth beside Kendra. He refilled his mug from the pitcher of beer. "Are you two through talking about wolves and snow and old boyfriends or do I need to go throw another game of darts?"

Kendra blushed. "All done," she said. "Did you win?"

"Of course. I always win."

She and Saunders shared a glance that made Lee think of the way he and Kara had often looked at each other. He wouldn't let himself believe that he would never see her again.

_..._

Kara looked at her dradis. In the four minutes it took her to make it to land, she could see six Vipers closing fast from the south.

"We've got company," she said to Hunter. "They must have already been in the air to have gotten this close this fast."

Hunter took a deep breath. "Did we come all this way just to get shot down?"

"No. We'll make it to the boneyard before they make it to us?"

"What the hell is a _boneyard_? A cemetery?"

"For old ships. You'll see. We're probably going to be arrested. I'm sure I'm going to be arrested. Whatever you do, don't resist. Don't fight. They'll shoot you. We're in a Cylon ship."

Hunter took several more deep breaths. "That might be better than being closed up in here much longer."

"A couple of more minutes. Then we'll be there. Do you feel all right?"

"A little dizzy…but don't worry. I'm not going to puke in your ship."

"Sadie appreciates it. So do I. Usually I roll the ship to give Kevin a thrill, but just for you, I'll do it by the book."

"Who's Kevin?"

"He worked on Sadie. Hang on a couple more minutes. We're almost there."

Kara brought the Raider in over the boneyard. The runway was still cleared. Mindful of the gouges on Sadie's underside, she carefully put the Raider down.

"Okay, pop the hatch," she said to Hunter as she began powering down all the systems.

He was already spinning the little wheel. Just like in the cave behind the waterfall, he tumbled through it and onto the ground. She finished the power down and looked around. She didn't know if she would ever be in there again. She fought tears for a moment before she dropped through the hatch. The noon sun reflected white and brilliant off the old ships behind the chain link and barbed wire. The spring day was warm, almost hot. Kara couldn't understand why she was shivering.

Hunter was standing on the tarmac looking around at everything. Kara saw movement at the door. Kevin Abinell appeared followed by Rick Rafferty. She raised her hand and called out to them.

"Hi, guys. I'm back." Several Vipers flew low over the boneyard. She turned to Hunter. "MPs will be here soon. Just remember what I said. Now let's go meet Kev and Dr. Rafferty."

Together they walked across the tarmac to the big hangar. She wasn't sure quite what to say to them. Kevin began closing the distance. Kara started walking faster. When they met, she said, "I know you're mad at me."

He gulped. "You're alive."

"That's obvious. How much trouble am I in?"

He still seemed awestruck. "A lot."

"What's with the green and blue streaks in his hair?" Hunter muttered. "Does it grow that way?"

"No. Kev dyes it. He's a C-Bucks fan."

"Don't tell me you never heard of our C-Bucks?" Kevin asked.

"No," Hunter said. "I never heard of them. What are sea-bucks? Some kind of ocean deer?"

By then Rick Rafferty had walked up to them. "Okay," Kara said, "let me make the introductions. Hunter, this is Kevin Abinell and Dr. Rick Rafferty. They're the brains who fixed up Sadie. Guys, this is Hunter. He doesn't know anything about Caprica because he grew up on Nereid."

Both men appeared shocked. "You mean this is not the pilot who helped you…uh…borrow Sadie?" Kevin asked.

"Nope."

"Did something happen to him…the other pilot?"

"Lieutenant Allison stayed behind so I could bring Hunter back with me. He's the one who knows all about the planet."

"But he's safe?" Rafferty asked. "Lieutenant Allison is safe?"

Hunter answered him. "As safe as any human can be on the Cylon homeworld."

Kara almost laughed. "You both act like you're surprised Hunter can talk. He's not a caveman."

They all heard sirens. "We didn't call them," Kevin said. "I swear."

"I know you didn't. The Viper pilots let them know. You'd better go let them in. No sense in them busting down your gate."

Rafferty hurried back toward the building.

"Two things before they get here," Kara said, "check the underside of Sadie. I put a couple of gouges in her because of where I had to land."

Kevin nodded.

She took the handheld computer from the pocket of her flight suit. "There's critical data on this thing. If the MPs take it, there's no telling where it will end up. Keep it safe."

He took it and dropped it into the pocket of his lab coat.

"How bad was it?" She asked.

"How bad was what?"

"After I left. Did they do anything to you or Dr. Rafferty?"

Kevin shook his head. "There was enough blame to go around. Admiral Adama took most of it for picking you to fly the recon missions. He said he should have known better. He said he already knew you…thought outside of the box."

"That's why I like you so much, Kev. I can always count on you to tell me the truth." Kara felt tears come to her eyes again. "Lee?"

"I think the best description is _devastated_."

Rafferty came back through the doorway of the hangar. Several MPs with drawn weapons were with him.

There were so many questions she wanted to ask Kevin. Instead she knelt and put her hands behind her head. "Do it," she said to Hunter.

He hesitated. "Why? We're not armed."

"Just frakking do it. You want to get shot?"

He knelt beside her. "Something about this seems familiar."

She snickered. "I guess so…except you were holding the gun last time." The MPs advanced on them. She looked at Kevin. "As soon as we're gone, call Lee…please. Tell him I'm back."

Rafferty was talking to the MPs. "They're not armed. We know the pilot. She's not going to cause any problems."

"Down on the ground," one of the MPs shouted. "Face down. Hands behind your heads."

Kara complied. "Do it," she hissed at Hunter. He did and turned his face toward her. One of MPs pulled her wrists down and handcuffed them behind her back before he hauled her roughly to her feet.

"I'm not armed," she said. He searched her anyway. Then they moved on to Hunter and did the same thing.

"I'm sorry," she said softly. "I didn't know it would be _this_ bad."

Rafferty said to the MPs, "You need to notify Admiral William Adama immediately."

"That's already been taken care of," one of them said.

By that time several more jeeps had arrived. With an MP holding each of her arms, she was walked toward the gate which Rafferty had opened for them. She was put into one jeep and Hunter into another. She looked back toward the hangar. Kevin had disappeared. _Please call Lee. Please. _

She looked at the MP seated beside her. "Hunter doesn't have anything to do with me taking that ship," she said. "He's not a criminal."

"Not my business, sir," he said. "We were told to bring you both in. We're bringing you in."

The driver started off with a lurch and the flashing lights and siren going. She lost her balance and almost fell into the door. "Hey," she shouted. "Is that necessary?"

Neither one of them answered her.

They took her to the airbase. She was helped out of the jeep and taken inside one of the large buildings where she was turned over to two female MPs. They took her into a room and shut the door. One of them removed the handcuffs. She handed Kara a bright orange jumpsuit. "Take off the flight suit, sir, and put that on."

Kara looked at the rank and name patch on the MP's uniform. "And if I refuse, Corporal Zimmer?"

"Please, sir, let's not do this the hard way."

"So if I don't take it off, you'll take it off for me?"

Zimmer glanced at the other MP. They were both tall and probably outweighed her by thirty pounds each. "Yes, sir."

Being uncooperative would only lead to more trouble. She had already learned that lesson the hard way once. She didn't need to learn it again. Slowly she unzipped the suit. "My boots, too?"

"Yes, sir." Corporal Zimmer held up a pair of flip-flops.

Kara bent over, untied her boots and pulled them off. She stepped out of the flight suit and handed it to Zimmer. "It's just a standard issue flight suit…only it's dirty and sweaty. There's nothing secret about it."

"Yes, sir," Zimmer said.

"What are you staring at?" Kara snickered. "Haven't you ever see draw-string bloomers before?"

"No, sir."

Kara stepped into the orange jumpsuit, pulled it up and zipped it. It was at least one size too large, maybe two sizes.

"You don't have anything smaller?"

"No, sir."

"What about Hunter…the guy who was brought in with me?"

"I don't know, sir."

"What am I being charged with?"

"I don't know, sir."

"You don't know anything, do you?" When Zimmer didn't answer, Kara said, "Maybe you can tell me what day it is. I lost track."

"It's Friday. This way, sir."

Kara followed her out of the room and down a long hallway. The flip-flops slapped the concrete floor. A door at the end opened into a larger room with five cells on either side of a central walkway. They were all empty. Another corporal opened the door of one of the cells. Kara walked inside.

"Is this the brig?"

"These are temporary holding cells, sir," Zimmer answered as she closed the door.

"The one where you put the most dangerous prisoners?" Corporal Zimmer didn't answer. "How long will I be here?" Again no answer. "Hey, don't I get a phone call? I thought I got a phone call."

Corporal Zimmer went through the solid metal door leading into the hall and closed it. Kara was alone. She looked at the cameras in the ceiling outside each cell. She waved at the one pointed in her direction before she sat down on the edge of the bunk. She scooted back, put her feet up and leaned back against the wall.

Totally alone for the first time in months, a wave of emotion washed over her. She thought of her father and fought tears. She knew the Cylons had hurt him. Leoben had told her they'd tortured him in an effort to get information, but the one small new scar above his eyebrow was the only evidence of it on his face. No, that wasn't entirely true. His eyes were different. The father she had known for the last three years had always looked so happy. The joy was gone from his eyes but not the love. His love for her was still there. She had so many questions that she wanted to ask him, so many questions that would have to wait. She closed her eyes and fought tears again. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair that she was back here on Caprica and he was still a Cylon prisoner.

The door at the end of the room opened and Hunter was dragged in by two big MPs. He was also wearing an orange jumpsuit. They put him on the bunk of the cell across from her and closed the door.

Kara jumped up and grabbed the bars of her cell. She felt sick. "What the hell did you do to him?" She shouted. "He's not a criminal. I stole that ship. Me. Not him."

The MPs ignored her and left, closing the door behind them.

"I'm okay," Hunter said massaging his midsection. "It was my fault. I didn't want to give them my clothes." He got up and went to the cell's small sink. He cupped his hands under the water and rubbed it on his face.

"I'm so sorry. I didn't know it would be like this."

He lay down on the bunk and put one arm across his eyes. "I'm going to rest for a minute. I'd hate to embarrass myself by puking now."

"Hunter, I'm…"

"It's okay, Wildcat. This isn't your fault. I don't blame you. The Cylons would have done a lot worse."

Feeling totally defeated and helpless, Kara sat down on the edge of her bunk, put her feet on the on the edge of the bunk and leaned back against the wall again. All she wanted was this nightmare to be over. She closed her eyes and let her mind drift to the day she and Lee had met. She had thought he was a prince that day and he had thought she was Posiden's green-eyed daughter. Kara smiled. She still thought he was a prince.

...

Lee had decided after just two days that the restaurants around the government buildings were too pricey for his current salary, even with his promotion to captain. Getting his car from the underground parking garage, eating and getting back in an hour was all but impossible. The cafeterias hadn't been that appealing to him, either. Today he had brought his lunch, gotten a drink out of the machine and gone down to one of the tree-shaded benches beside the reflecting pool.

He had also brought a book but couldn't concentrate enough to read it after he finished his sandwich. Instead he got up and walked toward Marble House.

Laura had called him the night before just as he was unlocking the door to his apartment. He had dropped first his keys and then his mobile phone, both of which he had attributed to the four or five large mugs of beer he had drunk.

"I'm sorry," he had slurred ever so slightly. "Sorry, I dropped the phone."

"Lee? You don't sound quite like yourself. Is there something wrong?"

"Laura, no. Nothing is wrong. I just got home."

"Surely not from work."

"I met Kendra and Saunders. We went to see Quartararo and then out to eat."

"How is Lieutenant Quartararo?"

"Getting out day after tomorrow."

"I've asked your father about you many times. How are _you_ doing?"

"Fine. I'm doing fine. I came by a couple of nights ago. I'm sorry I missed you. I saw Maya and Braedon. He's grown in the last month. He's talking…more…plainer."

Laura had laughed softly. "Lee, have you been drinking?"

"I had a couple beers."

"After what you've been through I think consuming a few beers is understandable. I won't keep you. I just wanted to tell you how much we…how much _I_ appreciate everything you and Kendra did for us. We owe you all a great deal."

"We were trying to follow orders. I regret a man died."

"It is my opinion as well as that of your father and Romo that Tom Zarek is responsible for August Bernard's death. We don't blame you or Kendra. I'm certain the independent investigation is going to clear all of you."

"I hope you're right."

"I'm very sure of it. And congratulations on your promotion, Captain Adama. That has a very nice ring to it. It was much deserved."

"Thank you."

"Now go to bed, Lee." Laura had laughed softly. "Consider that a Presidential order."

"Yes, ma'am." It had taken him barely fifteen minutes to follow that order. The beer had given him his first decent night's sleep all week. And his first hangover in a long time.

Lee reached the end of the reflecting pool, turned and started back. Thanks to the hangover headache he had gotten almost nothing done that morning. It was the last day of the work week and he had little to show for five days on his new job. His assignment was clear. He didn't understand why he was having so much trouble following it. In some ways he almost wished he was back on the _Penelope_. Almost.

Reluctantly he left the warm sunshine and went back inside. When he sat down at his desk, he noticed that the message light on his telephone was blinking. He picked it up, keyed in his passcode and listened.

_Hey, Lee. It's Kevin Abinell. I called your mobile but you must have it turned off. Give me a call when you get this. It's important. _

He took out his mobile phone and turned it on. Kevin had left him a message there as well. He found Kevin's number and pressed the dial key.

Kevin answered on the first ring. He didn't even wait for Lee to identify himself. Lee realized that he was holding his breath when Kevin said the two words he had waited a month to hear, thirty days that had seemed like a lifetime.

"Kara's back."

...

Two hours after John had seen his daughter and Hunter disappear into a small opening in the side of a cliff, he and Sonja climbed into the Heavy Raider.

"We were expected back several hours ago."

"So we tell them we've been…occupied."

"Doing what? If they find out we've been to this valley…"

"Damn, Sonja, do I have to spell it out for you? Use your imagination. Do you want to handle the takeoff or do you want me to do it?"

"You can do it. You can take us back to the city. I don't feel like it right now."

When he had gotten the Heavy Raider into the air and had turned it on an easterly heading, he said, "Which part of today has got you so shaken up?"

"All of it. How did you know about Daniel? And please tell me the truth this time."

"Kara figured it out. She told me what he was."

"How?"

"She's friends with a couple of you back on Caprica."

"A couple of _us_?"

"An Eight and a Two. The Eight is named Sharon. She told Kara that there was a missing model. The Leoben Kara knows had trouble remembering what he was at first. Kara helped him recover some memories. He's the one who told her what each model's number was. That's how Kara knew the Seven's were missing."

"Then your daughter doesn't feel like most of you do about us?"

"She's always followed her own path. She's…" John took a deep breath and felt emotion well in him. He got himself under control. "She's just special."

"She loves you."

"Whatever gave you that idea?" He asked a little sarcastically.

"She was willing to attack me because I hit you. But you knew what she was going to do, didn't you? You reacted very quickly. Otherwise you'd never have been able to get between us like you did."

"Kara doesn't always think before she acts."

"A bit like her father, wouldn't you say?"

He shrugged. "Maybe. When I was younger, my first inclination was to handle a lot of issues with my fists. I hope I'm not quite that impulsive now."

"Maybe you don't use your fists like you used to, but what do you call the stunt you pulled to get her off the planet? I'd say that was impulsive."

"You figured that out, huh?"

"I'm not stupid, John. I know you used this ship to get her past the centurions in the forest. I know you or she figured out how to engage her ship's FTL drive without being detected or there would be Raiders all over this area right now."

"I can't take credit for that. She knew what to do."

"And now she's safely beyond our reach. That should make you happy."

"That makes me _very_ happy."

"What else do you know about Daniel?"

"Not much. D'Anna was the one who told me that the creators were working on him and the fluid in his tank got contaminated with a virus that spread to the other tanks for his model. She said all copies of him had died. Kara said it wasn't an accident."

"That's what we were told."

"And none of you ever questioned it?"

"Why should we? We had no reason to believe that the creators had lied to us. I mourned Daniel's loss. He was the next one created after my model. He has an amazing amount of talent. He was the artist among us. I'm glad that a copy of him survived the virus. I don't blame him for attempting to get away, but I don't believe he was shot by centurions like he told me. I think the virus affected his brain. I think he hallucinated being attacked and thrown in the river. I think he fell into the river and almost drowned. I think that's what traumatized him."

"Which one of the creators told you what had happened to Daniel?"

"It was actually a Cavil who told us. The creators deal with him on issues like that because he's their first creation. He's always been their favorite although lately I've begun to wonder why." She was silent for a long time before she said, "You know something, don't you?"

"I do, but now's not the time to talk about it. We'll talk later. Did you mean what you said to Daniel about leaving him alone and letting him stay in the valley?"

"Yes. But I want to talk to Natalie about what has happened."

"Do me a favor and keep this to yourself for a while. Don't drag somebody else into just yet. Will you do that for me? I've got a good reason for asking."

"Should I add it to the list of things you owe me?"

"Sure, Sonja. Add it to the list."

"That list is getting long."

"And you're going to collect, aren't you?"

"That depends on whether or not you continue to tell me the truth."

"I'm telling you the truth. I don't have any reason to lie. My daughter's back on Caprica. She's safe."

"And yet you stayed here when you could have gone with her. Sometimes I don't understand you humans at all."

"What do you think Cavil would have done to the people in the valley if I'd disappeared? What do you think he would have done to you for taking me there? The word _boxed_ keeps coming to mind."

Sonja was silent for a long time. Finally she said, "Perhaps you should have a list of what I owe you."

John thought of his daughter. She was safe now. "Just keep quiet about today and I'll never try to collect on that debt."

...

Lee bolted down the hall to Major Parker's office. There was no one there.

Parker's aide said, "He was just called upstairs to Admiral Adama's office."

Lee ran to the elevators and pushed the _up_ button. He cursed under his breath. These had to be the slowest damned elevators on the whole planet. Unable to wait, he ran down the hall to the stairwell and took the stairs two at a time. His father's office door was closed.

"I'm sorry, sir," the admiral's aide said. "He's busy."

"This can't wait," Lee said. He strode across the room and knocked hard on the door.

The aide stood. "Sir, you can't…"

Lee opened the door. Parker and his father were deep in conversation. From the looks on both their faces, Lee realized they already knew.

"You weren't even going to call me, were you?" He angrily said to her father. "Even after you promised."

"Come in, Lee," Bill said. "And close the door."

Still fuming, Lee complied. "Where is she?"

"She's being taken to the airbase. And yes, I was going to call you. Who beat me to it?"

"Is she all right? Is Kara all right?"

"The initial report indicates so."

"I want to see her."

Bill walked over to the window and looked out. "I'm not sure that's a good idea…until she's been debriefed."

"As long as she's been gone, that'll take days. Please, Dad. I just want to see her."

Parker said to the admiral, "Sir, Kara may be more cooperative if she sees Lee first."

Bill continued to look out the window. "Good point," he finally said. "Have my aide order a car and driver."

"I can drive," Lee said. "It'll be quicker. My car is down in the parking garage."

"Order my car," Bill said to Parker. "And both of you wait for me outside. I've got a call to make first."

"Dad, I can…"

Parker gave Lee a look that said to quit while he was ahead. They walked into the outer office. Parker closed the door behind him. "Patience, Lee," he said before he told the admiral's aide to order a car and driver sent around to the front of the building.

"I just want to see her," Lee said. "I just want to know she's all right."

"You've got to respect your father's decision on this."

"He doesn't understand," Lee said.

"No. I think you're wrong about that. I think he understands only too well."

...

Laura was already in the hall on her way to a late lunch with two of her Cabinet members when her secretary caught her. "Admiral Adama is on line one for you. He says it's urgent."

Laura walked back to her secretary's desk, picked up the phone and pressed the button to take the call off hold.

"Bill? What's wrong?"

"Nothing, I hope. Kara came home a short while ago."

Laura gasped. Her knees felt weak. "Oh, dear gods. Alone? She came home alone?"

"No, there's a young man with her…"

"Not John?"

"No, I'm sorry. The young man wasn't wearing a flight suit, but we assume he's Lieutenant Noel Allison. They haven't been debriefed yet."

"Where is she?"

"Out at the airbase. We'll be questioning her for quite a while."

"Is she in jail?"

"She's in the brig at the moment, but I'm going to assess the situation and see if that's where she'll stay."

"I want her released to me."

"She's a pilot in the military. She stole a military ship. I'll assess the situation after I've talked to her."

"Bill, this is not negotiable. I want my daughter released to my custody. You can question her all you want afterward. I'm certain you'll have her complete cooperation."

"Laura, I don't think you understand. This is a courtesy call because Kara is your _stepdaughter_. For now she stays put."

"Don't make this into a…power struggle. I'm still your commander in chief."

She heard Bill take a breath. She imagined him silently counting to ten. He finally said, "I'll be in touch, Madame President."

The line went dead.

Laura hung up. She looked at her secretary. "Cancel my luncheon engagement. Get Romo Lampkin on the phone and have my car outside in thirty minutes. Tell Edgar that my destination is the military airbase."

"Yes, ma'am."

Laura walked back into her office, sat down and waited for Romo's call. She would give Bill half an hour to assert his authority and then she would claim her daughter."

...

Lee sat in the front seat of the car with Bill Adama's driver. His father and Major Parker were seated in the back. They seemed to be crawling up the I-6 Motorway out of the city.

_Can't this guy go any faster? We're not in a frakking funeral procession. _

They were stopped only briefly at the gate and then waved through. Rank always had its privileges. Their driver took them to a two-story building behind the one where Lee and Parker used to work. The driver pulled up outside an unmarked door and they got out. Lee saw security cameras above the door. Major Parker pressed an intercom button and announced their arrival. They were admitted immediately.

They entered a security room where an MP was waiting for them. He came to attention before he led them into a long hallway with barred doors extending across it at various intervals. As they came to each one, the MP entered a code into a keypad and the bars slid open. At the end they went through another door into another security room. A sergeant behind the desk jumped to his feet and came to attention. A monitor showed brief images from a dozen cameras pointed at the cells. Lee tried to see, but his angle of view wasn't good.

"We're here to see the prisoners in the holding cell," Bill said.

Lee stepped in front of his father. "Give me five minutes alone with her, please."

His father hesitated and then nodded to the sergeant before looking back at him. "Five minutes, Lee."

"Thank you."

The sergeant pressed a switch that unlocked the solid metal door. Lee stepped inside. It quietly clicked shut behind him. He found himself in a windowless room with a double row of holding cells. Kara was in the one to his right. She was sitting on her bunk leaning back against the wall. Her eyes were closed. Lee glanced at the cell across from her. A dark-haired man was lying on the bunk, his arm across his eyes. Even without being able to see the man's face, he could tell it wasn't Noel Allison.

Lee walked over to Kara's cell and stood looking at her. She was wearing an orange jumpsuit that was way too big for her and yet she had never looked more beautiful to him. Her face had a light suntan and her hair was in a messy braid. There were loose strands down around her face. As he stood gazing at her, she opened her eyes.

"Hi," he managed to say even though his heart was pounding so hard he could hear it.

Kara thought she was dreaming. Even when she stood and walked over to the bars, even when Lee put his hand through them and gently cupped the side of her face, she thought she was dreaming. It wasn't until she put her hand on the outside of his and held it against her cheek that he became real to her.

She swallowed hard. He looked tired. She thought he had lost weight. His sculpted cheekbones were more prominent in his classically handsome face.

She reached through the bars, put her hand on the back of his neck and pulled him to her. Their foreheads touched. She struggled with her emotions again. "Miss me?"

Tears came to his eyes. He choked. "You've got no frakking idea. None."

"Yeah, I do," she said quietly. "I missed you, too."

He leaned back slightly and studied her eyes. "Why'd you do it, Kara? Why?"

Her voice trembled slightly. "I told you why in the letter."

"You were willing to throw your whole career away based on something Yolanda Brenn said?"

Kara started to tell him that her father was alive, but she realized that she owed it to Laura to tell her first. That's what her father would want. She dropped her eyes. "I think I also mentioned wanting to stop your father from nuking the planet. There's thousands of humans living in settlements on Nereid."

"Laura told my dad that he wouldn't nuke the planet. We're planning the invasion now."

"That's good. The not nuking part."

"Dad and Major Parker are waiting outside that door to talk to you. I asked him for five minutes alone with you. He was nice enough to give it to me."

"Five whole minutes," Kara said, her voice tinged with sarcasm. "That was generous of him."

"I was damned lucky to get any time alone with you. After the stunt you pulled…"

Kara rolled her eyes. "That really bothers you, doesn't it? That I'm not exactly the poster child for the girlfriend of an admiral's son?"

"Don't start, Kara. I didn't steal a million-cubit ship and go tearing ass to Nereid on some crazy mission…"

A man's voice behind Lee said, "Hey, you two, shut up. I think you've both lost sight of what's important right now."

Lee turned. The dark-haired man in the opposite cell was standing at the bars.

"Who the hell are you to tell us to shut up?" Lee said angrily.

"Stay out of it, Hunter," Kara said. "This is between me and Lee."

"No, Wildcat, I'm going to answer his question. I'm the guy who knows your five minutes are almost up and you haven't told her you love her. That's what she needs to hear from you right now. Not some crap about stealing ships."

Lee turned around and looked at Kara. She shrugged and smiled.

He reached through the bars and pulled her to him. It was awkward, but he managed to kiss her, not the best kiss they'd ever shared, but certainly one of the most memorable.

"I don't care what you did. It doesn't matter. I love you anyway. I always will."

Kara looked into his eyes, as blue as the sky at twilight. There were a hundred things she wanted to tell him but none of them were important right now except one. Her tears spilled over. "I love you," she whispered.

The door beside them opened. Admiral Adama and Major Parker walked in.

Lee stepped back from the bars but before he did, he whispered, "Welcome home, Kara. We'll get through this…together."

TBC…


	21. Safe House

Chapter 21

Safe House

_15 The Elders of the Twelve Tribes held council about the fate of Azurra, prophet of the Thirteenth Tribe._

_16 One said, We should put her in the wilderness where her words will be heard only by the wind and there she will be food for carrion birds._

_17 Another said, Her people will make of her a martyr and it will increase their faith, and so they fell to arguing among themselves._

_18 A priest of the Temple of Zeus silenced them by saying, If she is no longer a virgin priest, then she will lose her gift of prophesy. _

_19 We will give her as bride to a leader of the Twelve Tribes and she will no longer be seer to her people, yet they can find no fault with the honor we pay her._

_20 And Azurra was taken from prison and given to the great general Ulixes to become his third wife._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Azurra, _Chapter 4:15-20

.

Laura's phone buzzed. "Romo Lampkin is on line one," her secretary said.

"I need your help," Laura said as soon as she picked up. "Kara has returned and Bill has locked her up. I want her released."

"The military comes under the jurisdiction of the Admiralty Judge Advocate's Office. She'll be appointed an AJA lawyer."

"I don't want an AJA lawyer. I want you."

Romo was silent for a moment. "What has she been charged with?"

"Bill didn't tell me. Just that she was back and being held in the brig out at the airbase. He said he was going to _assess the situation_."

"Do you really think he's going to keep her in the brig?"

"I'm going to see that he doesn't. I want you to go out there with me."

"Laura, my advice to you at the moment would be to wait and see what, if anything, she's charged with. Then we can formulate a plan. Bill may not charge her at all. I think it might look a bit heavy-handed to the admiral if I show up with you. It might make him take a harsher stance with her than he had planned."

"I'm going to see Kara _today_. My car is being brought around. Are you going with me or not?"

"Only if I can't talk you into waiting until we see what the admiral is going to do."

"I want to see her," Laura's voice broke. "I _will_ see her. She's John's daughter. She's _my_ daughter."

"Then go out there as her mother and not as the President of the Colonies with your Attorney General in tow. Tell Admiral Adama nicely that you want to see your daughter. Appeal to him as a parent. His son recently faced death. I think you'll get further with that approach than by using the power of your office. There's a time and a place to wield that power and this is not it."

Laura thought about what he had just said. "You're right. You're so very right. I let my emotions cloud my judgment in this matter. Thank you, Romo."

Laura hung up the phone, grabbed a tissue and dabbed her eyes. Kara had gone to Nereid with the idea that she was going to find her father and bring him home. It hadn't happened. There was no way of telling what kind of shape she was in, both physically and emotionally. Kara had never accepted her as a mother. She'd had her father and she'd wanted nothing more. Maybe now Kara would open her heart just a bit and let Laura in.

She stood and walked to the windows behind her desk and looked out over the flower garden and the smooth green lawn of Marble House. Everything was in bloom. Spring had come to Caprica City, a time of new beginnings. Today Laura would see her daughter, and she would try one more time.

...

Major Parker stood just inside the door while Bill walked over to Kara's cell and stood beside Lee. Kara tried to read the admiral's face but wasn't able to. His expression gave away nothing of his feelings.

"Hello, sir," she said quietly. She held the blue eyes for only a few moments before she dropped hers.

"How was Nereid?"

"It's spring there just like it is here."

"You look well. You don't look like you suffered any hardships."

"No, sir. I was with the free humans, the ones in the valley a hundred miles west of the city, past the forest. They took me and Narcho in. They were good to us," she paused and grinned at Hunter, "after they figured out we weren't new skinjobs."

She glanced at the admiral. That statement finally got a reaction from him. She saw the surprise in his eyes.

"What made you decide to come home?"

"We were able to get past the Cylon centurions this morning. For the last three weeks we couldn't get out of the valley to where I'd hidden the Raider."

Bill turned around to look at Hunter's cell. "You've got a lot to answer for, both of you. I hope you understand that, Lieutenant Allison."

"That's not Noel Allison," Lee said.

There was another surprised pause and then Bill asked, "Who is it?"

Kara said, "He's the leader of the free humans. His name is Kyle Franklin but everybody calls him Hunter."

"Where's Lieutenant Allison?"

"He stayed behind. He volunteered so I could bring Hunter with me."

"Why?"

Lee said, "The Raider will only hold two people. I'm surprised Kara managed to get someone else in there."

Bill said, "I'm asking why you brought Hunter back with you _instead of_ Lieutenant Allison."

"Because he knows all about Nereid. He knows where everything is on the planet."

Major Parker walked over to Hunter's cell. "You know numbers and positions of the Cylons and their centurions?"

"I know where they were a month ago. We've been cut off from the city and the other settlements since then, but it hasn't changed much in the last couple of years. We haven't seen any increase in the number of Cylons. The skinjobs we kill download. If we damage the centurions, they fix them or replace them, but the numbers are holding steady."

Kara said, "He knows more about the planet than all our recon footage put together. He's the leader of their fighters."

"When did you escape from the Cylons?" Parker asked Hunter.

"We escaped from them a lot of times. If we hadn't, I wouldn't be here."

"I don't think that's what he's asking," Kara said to Hunter. She looked at Major Parker. "He didn't come from one of the ships captured five years ago. Hunter was born on the planet. His grandparents were members of the second _Hyperion_ mission. One of his grandfathers is still alive. He knows Irina Hoshi."

Her announcement was met with stunned silence.

Lee looked at Kara. "The _Hyperion_ made it to the planet?"

"It's a long story. Hunter can tell you…if he feels like it. Being in jail when he hasn't done anything wrong might make him want to keep things to himself. So might being smacked around by two MPs."

Major Parker quickly said, "I apologize if you were treated badly. That's never our intention."

Hunter shrugged. "I wasn't being cooperative. My men would have done the same thing."

"Admiral Adama and I have discussed what we think is a good solution to handling the debriefings for both of you."

Kara glanced at Bill. He said, "I was inclined to keep you in here, but Major Parker had a better idea."

The door to the security room suddenly opened and an MP walked in. He addressed Bill. "The President is here, sir. She wants to see Lieutenant Thrace."

Kara's breath caught. Laura stepped into the room and walked over to her cell. She turned to Bill. "Would you allow me to speak to my daughter…please?"

"We're in the middle of making some decisions."

"All I'm asking is for a few minutes alone with Kara. I'm not asking you to release her. Right now I'm going in with her. You can lock me in if it makes you feel any better. I just want to talk to her. I've _missed_ her."

The MP waited for the admiral. Bill finally nodded curtly.

"Five minutes, sir?" Kara asked. "I need to talk to Laura alone. Please."

Bill turned on his heel. "Take as long as you like. We'll be outside. Signal when you're through."

The MP opened the door and Laura stepped inside the cell. He hesitated and left the door open. Everyone filed out of the room. As Lee crossed the threshold, he turned and gave Kara an encouraging smile. Then the metal door closed behind them.

Laura wasn't sure what she had expected, but other than having lost perhaps a few pounds, Kara looked good. She didn't look like she had suffered on the planet. Tears came to her eyes as she embraced her stepdaughter.

"You don't know how glad I am that you're safely back on Caprica. I've been so worried about you. You look very good."

"I'm fine."

"Are they treating you well in here?" Laura asked.

"I've only been here an hour."

The sight of her stepmother had gotten to her in a way that none of the rest of them had, even Lee, because seeing Laura made her think of her father again. She began to struggle emotionally as she remembered looking back at him standing beside a Cylon Heavy Raider just before she and Hunter began to climb the switchback trail. He had lifted his hand and waved to her. Leaving him behind had broken her heart. Kara began to shiver and finally gave in to her grief.

Laura gently guided her to the bunk and sat down beside her. She put her arm around Kara's shoulders and pushed some of the loose hair behind her ears. It was the same thing her father had done. Kara's tears became full-fledged sobs. Laura took a handful of clean tissues from her jacket pocket and handed them to Kara who blew her nose and tried to stop crying.

Laura dabbed her own tears. "We'll work something out. I don't intend to let them keep you in here for long. I'll work out something with Bill that's agreeable to both of us."

"I knew what was going to happen. I expected it. I don't mind being in jail. It's not that. I failed. I promised Brae I would bring Dad home and I failed. I failed you. I failed him. I failed everybody."

"Oh, Kara, no one expected that of you. I've accepted…that John…" her own tears spilled over again and she fumbled for more tissues. She hugged Kara closer to her. "What you did was so foolish and dangerous and brave, but I've known all along that…John was…"

Kara choked back another sob. She slipped her father's dog tags from around her neck, took Laura's hand and put them in it.

Laura held up her palm. She saw the name, _Gallagher, J_ and his military service serial number.

She gasped. "Oh, gods. Did you find his body?"

"He's not dead. He gave them to me to give to you. He's alive. I saw him this morning. He wouldn't come with me because….because…"

Laura was trying to get her breath. "You saw him? You talked to him?"

Kara nodded again.

The man's voice came from the cell across the aisle. "She's telling the truth. Her father is the reason we're here right now. The only reason."

Laura wiped her eyes. For the first time she became aware of the young man who stood at the bars of the cell across from them. He was dark-haired and handsome, medium height and well-built. She could tell he had spent a lot of time outdoors.

"You're Lieutenant Allison?"

Hunter smiled. "I think I need to write on my forehead, _I'm not Noel Allison. _I'm Hunter. Kara lived with my people for the last month. Her father got us to her ship this morning."

"You saw him? You talked to him and you didn't you bring him home? Why?"

Kara broke down again and sobbed, "The Cylons have him. He's their prisoner."

"And you left him behind?" Laura asked, the pain and incredulity clearly evident in her voice. "You could have brought him home and you left him behind?"

"It wasn't Kara's choice," Hunter said. "It was his. He knew if he disappeared, Cavil would destroy the valley where we live. He would kill my people. Kara's father did a brave thing. Don't blame Kara. It's not her fault."

"I wanted to go back for him. I was going to let Hunter out at the boneyard and jump back to Nereid. Dad told me no because of what Hunter just said. Dad was with a Cylon…a Six. If he'd come with me, she would have told Cavil and Cavil would have killed everybody in the valley in retaliation. I promised Dad we'd be back to get him before we attack the planet. We know where they're keeping him."

Laura let Kara's words sink in as she thought of the bunker prison where the Cylons on Caprica were being held. "Is he…well? Have they…hurt him?"

Kara didn't want to lie, but she didn't want to tell Laura everything she knew, either. Finally she said, "They had him in their prison for a while but he's in their city now."

Laura searched Kara's eyes and knew she had held something back. "I know what they did to the people they took prisoner here on Caprica. They tortured him, didn't they?"

Kara looked down and nodded. "But he's okay now. They're not torturing him anymore. He looked good…really."

Laura took Kara's chin and gently lifted it. "Did they stop torturing him because he told them what they wanted to know?"

"No. He wouldn't have done that."

"Then why did they stop torturing him and take him to their city?"

Kara shook her head. She couldn't say it.

"You don't know or you won't tell me?"

Hunter said, "They take humans to the city to be breeders."

"You shouldn't have told her that," Kara said angrily to Hunter. "Dad told me he was going to tell her when he gets back to Caprica."

"Better she knows the truth than think her husband is a traitor and a collaborator."

"Breeder?" Laura said. "You mean…you mean…he's a…" The idea was so repulsive to her that she couldn't make herself say it. _Sex slave_.

Hunter said, "Our contact in the city told us that some of the human women have half-breed babies. The skinjobs want to do the same thing. It hasn't happened yet, but they keep trying with different men. They gave your husband to a Three. He wouldn't have had a choice. They have a drug…" Hunter shrugged and then repeated, "He really wouldn't have had a choice. The drug is bad. It turns people into vegetables if they give it to them enough times. Most people cooperate and do what the Cylons want. In the city they're treated a lot better than they are at the prison."

"Oh, dear gods." Laura felt sick at the thought of the gentle man she loved being forced to have sex with D'Anna Biers. She shook her head to try to clear it of the image.

"Please don't be mad at him," Kara said. "He loves you. He's still wearing his wedding ring. He told me to tell you he loves you. He'll always love you."

Repeating her father's words brought a fresh round of tears. Kara felt like she had betrayed him, but Hunter was right. Letting Laura think her husband was a traitor and a collaborator would be a lot worse.

Laura closed her eyes. She couldn't imagine what John had been through in the Cylon prison. She couldn't imagine what he was going through now in the city being used as a sex slave. She knew there was so much more to what had happened to him than even Kara and Hunter were aware. And she also knew he would have stayed behind because that's just the sort of man he was. He would have sacrificed himself again to save the daughter he loved so much and to keep Hunter's people from being slaughtered.

Her husband was strong. He would survive until the Colonials got to Nereid. Laura had to have faith. She had to have enough faith for all of them. She had to find the strength to continue believing in John and in their love. She cradled her sobbing daughter against her and murmured softly, soothingly as she might to her son.

"I'm not angry at him, Kara. I love him. We'll find him. We'll bring him home. The most important thing right now is that you're home and you're safe. You've come back alive and well. He will, too."

...

John put the Heavy Raider down at the far end of the Cylon airfield. Sonja was right. They were expected back some time ago because there were half a dozen centurions waiting for them accompanied by a Five wearing a teal-colored sport coat over a bright turquoise shirt.

"What did I tell you?" Sonja said. "We're _very_ late."

"Are you telling me that…peacock is going to tell his centurions to shoot us because we're later getting back than he thinks we should be? They're going to shoot us before they even hear what we've got to say? "

"I don't know what he's going to do. Cavil was suspicious of my motive for wanting to learn how to fly. I'm sure he sent Doral out here and I'm sure he can't wait to go running back and report how long we've been gone to his beloved Number One."

"Then let's give him a good reason for why we were gone. I'm sure if you try, you can convince him." John reached over and messed up her hair. He smudged her lipstick with his thumb.

"This Five has got to be one of the stupidest copies the creators ever made, but do you honestly believe he'll fall for something this…obvious?"

John smiled at her. "How good an actress are you?" He gestured to the door of the cockpit. "After you. They'll be less likely to shoot if you're the first one off the ship and don't look like I kidnapped you."

When Sonja got up, John stood and unbuttoned the second button of his shirt. He pulled his shirttail out of his slacks and stuck the pistol that Kara had given him into the back of his waistband. If the centurions opened fire, he wanted the chance to take Aaron Doral with him. He knew Doral would just download, but it would still be a pleasure to pull the trigger. John had never forgotten how a copy of Doral had put two bullets into his chest while trying to assassinate Laura.

He got out of the ship behind Sonja. Doral looked like he was definitely in a bad mood. His face was beet red and running with sweat. There was no telling how long he had waited out here in the hot sun for them, and yet he hadn't even taken off his jacket. John almost laughed aloud. Sonja was right. This Doral was a really dim bulb. If it had been raining, he would probably have stood out in it getting soaked.

"What's the problem?" John asked.

Sonja's voice was contemptuous. "This _idiot_ can't believe we were…having fun for three hours."

John walked up behind her and put his arms around her. He leaned down and kissed her neck. "I'm just about ready for three more."

Doral asked, "Where have you been?"

John nuzzled Sonja again. The pistol felt hot against the small of his back. "We found a nice meadow south of here. Private. Lots of wildflowers. You must never have taken a beautiful woman out on a spring morning. Three hours can pass before you know it. I didn't know somebody was back here with a stopwatch on us or we would have quit after the second time."

Sonja turned and put her arms around his neck. She was getting into her part. She pressed herself against him and kissed him, slow and with a lot of tongue. Knowing Doral was watching intently, John went along with the kiss. He didn't have any choice. By the time she drew back, his body had responded to her despite his efforts not to.

She smiled as she looked into his eyes. She was clearly enjoying the moment. "Perhaps if we show him how we passed those three hours…" She slipped her hand between them and against the front of his slacks. She grasped him through the fabric and squeezed. John closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

"That's disgusting," Doral said. He turned and got into one of the solar-powered vehicles. The centurions fell into step behind him as he slowly drove off.

"You can stop now," John managed to say. "I think he bought it."

"Hmmm," she said and leaned up to lick his neck. "What if I don't want to stop?"

He grasped her wrist and pulled her hand away.

"Let's go back to my apartment."

"I want to go see D'Anna when we get back to the city."

"Why?" He could hear the hurt in her voice. "You'd rather have _her_ than _me_?"

John took another deep breath. "I want to talk to her for a few minutes about the little bombshell you dropped on me earlier this morning."

Again the wounded tone from her. "You don't believe she's pregnant?"

"I believe you. I'd just like to hear it from her. And I'd like to know what her plans are for me if some miracle occurs and she manages to carry the child to term."

"You really _want_ to be a father to it?" Sonja asked.

"That surprises you? Even after seeing me with my daughter today?"

"I hardly had enough time to form an opinion about your parenting skills. I saw you with your daughter for all of five minutes before those _men_ took me back to their…hovel and tried to amuse me by showing me how to carve little things out of wood. How people can live like that is beyond my understanding."

"I think you're being too harsh on them."

"If they were in one of our settlements, they would be much better off. They live barely better than animals."

"I found them very kind and generous," John said with emotion. "They treated you with respect even though you hunt and kill them in the forest. Hell, Emmalyn even offered you tea and a place at her table. That was damned nice of her. And it was damned rude of you to refuse her offer."

Sonja sniffed. "I was talking to Daniel, and I could tell that none of you really wanted me at the table. You're the one they wanted to talk to."

"I'd like to go back there one day soon and spend some time getting to know the people who took in my daughter."

"You amaze me. I can't believe you'd want to live in such primitive conditions."

"I'd welcome living there if I were free."

"Oh, here we go again. Am I going to have to listen to you complain about how ill-treated you've been?"

"Forget it, Sonja. You just don't understand. The people in that valley are to be commended for how well they've adapted and survived. They didn't have centurions to build a couple of modern apartment buildings loaded with luxuries taken off captured ships for them."

"You're the one to be commended for raising a daughter who was able to live in such squalor for a month. They don't even have electricity."

"I can't take credit for Kara's adaptability. I missed out on most of her childhood. I wanted to be around to help my wife raise our son. Since that's not possible with me here and him on Caprica… Frak. I don't want to talk about this. I don't even want to think about it."

"So you really do want to raise D'Anna's child?"

"If D'Anna has our baby, I want to be a part of its life. End of story."

"Even knowing it's half-Cylon?"

"A baby is a baby!" John said angrily. "That child will be innocent of everything its parents did…on either side. I don't know why you can't seem to understand that."

She slipped her hand behind his neck and attempted to pull him to her. "You don't need to worry about a child with me. There won't be any babies…"

John resisted. "Sonja, don't. Please."

She angrily turned away from him and began walking to their vehicle. He followed her. When they were seated, she said, "I don't understand you. You didn't have any trouble sleeping with D'Anna. You want me. I know you do. Why do you fight it?"

He rubbed his face with both hands and winced. His cheek where Sonja had hit him was sore.

"First, I do have a problem sleeping with D'Anna. I'm married. I love my wife. What I did with D'Anna is wrong. What I did with you is wrong. Doing it again isn't going to make it right. I slept with D'Anna because I don't want her giving me that drug. I don't want to end up a slobbering vegetable. Is _that_ so hard to understand?"

"When I kissed you, you…reacted. You wanted to…"

"I know what happened when you kissed me. You're beautiful. You're sexy. You're desirable. There's not many men who wouldn't react like that if you plastered yourself against them and kissed them like you just kissed me. Men are just…geared that way. We…react."

"I understand _that part_," she said with a pout. "Yet you still tell me _no_."

"You remember the day you and D'Anna got into the fight?"

"How could I forget it?"

"It was the same way then. My body is saying _yes_. My heart and my mind are saying _no_. That's about as simple as I can put it."

"I don't want your heart and your mind."

John took a deep breath and blew it out. Sonja's pride was tied to her seductive and manipulative nature. He changed his tactic and hoped he wasn't making a mistake.

"Okay. If your price for keeping quiet about Kara being in the valley is having sex with you, I'll do it because I owe my daughter's life to you and because I don't want Cavil killing those people for harboring her. I made a bargain with you weeks ago. If your price is sex, we'll go back to your place and have sex."

"But you don't really want to do it."

"No. But I'll service you just like I did D'Anna."

"I don't want you to do anything because you think you _have to_," Sonja snapped. "I don't want it to be the same thing as D'Anna threatening you with the drug. I want you to take me to bed because you _want to_. The other men I've been with have wanted me. I've never had to beg or threaten any of them."

"You want me to say it, okay I'll say it. If I didn't love Laura the way I do, this would be a whole different ball game. You'd get what you want from me and then some, and you wouldn't even have to ask. But I _do_ love her and nothing that you do or say is going to change that. So, please, let's quit having this discussion over and over. Quit trying to seduce me. It's not doing either one of us any good."

Sonja started the vehicle and pulled away from the Heavy Raiders. They rode in silence for half the trip into the city. John finally put his arm behind her seat and massaged the back of her neck. He felt some of the tension leave her. She stopped at the crossroads that led into town and looked at him.

"I don't understand you at all. Humans are so complicated. You don't want me and yet you treat me with kindness."

"I don't want to fight with you, Sonya. I'll never forget what you did today. I know how much I owe you. But right now I'd like to go back to my apartment and eat whatever Doolittle left there for lunch. Then I'm going to see D'Anna and talk to her. I'll come to your apartment after that. Maybe we can go for a walk in the park."

"Do you like me at all, John?"

"I like you. You're can be very nice when you want to be."

"For a Cylon, you mean."

He smiled. "I didn't say that. I wasn't even thinking it."

"I'm sorry I hit you so hard."

"No, you're not."

"I am…not sorry I hit you, just sorry I hit you so hard. I left a bruise."

John laughed and pointed toward the city. "Your sister Six at the prison did a lot worse. Now let's go. I'm hungry. We'll talk later."

"And you'll tell me what you wouldn't say on the trip back from the valley?"

"You probably won't believe me, but I'll tell you."

...

The small security room near the holding cells was crowded with Bill Adama, Major Parker, Lee and two MPs. Lee walked around behind the desk and looked at the screen.

Laura and Kara had just sat down on the bunk. Laura put her arm around Kara and then handed her some tissues. Lee could tell that Kara had begun to cry. It hurt to watch her in that kind of pain. It was a side of herself that she rarely showed to him.

Bill said, "Aren't you interested in hearing what Major Parker has suggested?"

Lee forced his thoughts to their present situation. "Yes, sir, I'm interested."

"Come over here and give Laura and Kara some privacy," Bill said.

Reluctantly Lee walked around the desk.

Parker said, "While you were talking to Lieutenant Thrace, I made a call to Special Agent Darren. His group has several safe houses, actually apartments, located in Caprica City for the use of witnesses and others they want to keep off the grid for a short period of time. Agent Darren has agreed to let us use one of their places to house Lieutenant Thrace and Hunter while we debrief them. His men will also help us provide security."

"Just so you understand, Lee," Bill said, "Kara won't be free to come and go as she pleases. She won't be in the brig, but she's still under house arrest."

Lee hadn't expected that much. He was relieved that Kara wouldn't have to spend her time behind bars. "What about Hunter?"

"We'll discuss his situation after we finish debriefing them."

"I'd like to participate in their questioning."

"I've asked Major Parker to select a few of the best people from his former staff."

Lee looked his father in the eye. "How many of them are aware of…where Kara's been for the last month?"

Parker said to the admiral, "He's got a point, sir. Her mission wasn't sanctioned, but all aspects of it are still at the highest security levels. Lee also has the advantage of being able to relate to the terrain. We'll have to involve him eventually since he's helping us plan the next mission. I think having him on board from the beginning would be to our advantage."

Lee could tell his father didn't like the idea of involving him because of his relationship with Kara, but he also knew Bill would see the wisdom of what Parker had just mentioned.

"I can put aside my personal feelings in the matter, sir," Lee said to his father.

"I doubt that," Adama said, "but I'm going to trust Major Parker's judgment on this one. I'm putting him in charge of the debriefings. He and Agent Darren have worked together many times. I'll expect daily updates."

"Yes, sir. Thank you."

His father said, "You'll check into the office each morning and then you and Major Parker will ride to the safe house together. You'll also return together. Darren's agents will provide the security. You can't stay with her, Lee."

Lee was embarrassed that his father had read him that well.

Parker said, "Agent Darren is sending a couple of SUVs to pick up Kara and Hunter. They should be here shortly. We'll ride back into the city with them."

"I'm going back to the office," Bill said. "Give Laura as much time as she wants with Kara, but make it clear that Kara goes to the safe house. Tell the President I'll call her later this evening to discuss the details."

The MP who had been watching the security monitor said, "Sir, I believe the President is ready. She's left the holding cell."

Bill turned. "All right. I'll tell her myself…alone. Both of you wait here."

Lee glanced at Parker. He didn't need anyone to tell him that his father was not in the best of moods.

...

Laura walked across the narrow aisle between Kara's and Hunter's cells. She put her hand through the bars and shook his. "I'm Laura Roslin. Thank you for the kindness you and your people extended to Kara and Lieutenant Allison. It is much appreciated as was your honesty with me about what my husband is being subjected to."

Hunter nodded and Kara tried to imagine what he was thinking. He finally said, "Leaders have to be tough enough to take bad news as well as good news."

"Did I pass the test?"

"You passed. You're not exactly what I expected the President of the Colonies to look like, but I learned quick with Wildcat that looks can be deceiving."

His gaze shifted to Kara and Laura saw something in his eyes. She glanced around at Kara and acknowledged that there was a bond between the two of them. Something had happened on Nereid that had drawn them together. The term _kindred spirits _came to mind. Perhaps that's what it was…the same thing she had thought about Lee and Kendra Shaw, a commonality of backgrounds and experiences, two people who understood each other.

Laura smiled at Hunter. "Wildcat? Is that how you refer to Kara?"

"It's partly her green eyes but mostly her attitude. She didn't mind getting in my face even when I was holding a weapon on her. She can take care of herself. I respect that."

"You have a family that you left behind to come here?"

"My grandfather, my aunt, two uncles, my sister…and my little girl."

She noticed that he hadn't mentioned a wife, but as he had mentioned the child, his eyes had softened. "How old?" Laura asked gently.

"Four months."

"You must have hated to leave her."

"This is more important. This is her future, too. I would do anything so that she doesn't have to grow up wondering every day if the Cylons are going to destroy us or make her a slave. I don't want you Colonials nuking us either."

"That won't happen," Laura said. "I'm going to make absolutely certain of it."

Kara said, "Years ago an Oracle told Hunter that he would leave his world and travel to another one to tell their story."

Hunter smiled. "With Posiden's green-eyed daughter…if you believe in that sort of thing."

"I believe," Laura said softly.

The door opened and Bill walked in. Laura turned.

Bill said, "We've got a solution I hope you'll approve. We're going to take Kara and Hunter to an apartment in the city. They'll remain there until they're debriefed."

"And then?" Laura asked.

"Then we'll see," Bill said.

"I can live with that," Kara said. "It's better than I expected."

"You won't be free to come and go as you please," Bill said quickly. "You're basically under house arrest."

"What about Hunter, sir? He doesn't deserve house arrest. He didn't steal a ship. He came here to help us."

"He'll be our guest and will be treated as such," Bill said and looked at Laura. "Do you have any objections to our plans for them?"

"No. I think it's fair all things considered. Today is Friday. I'd like your permission to have Kara and Hunter come to Marble House on Sunday for lunch. I'd like for Hunter to see another side of Colonial hospitality. You're invited as well as Lee and Major Parker."

"Will I get to see Brae?" Kara asked as her eyes flooded with tears again.

"Of course. And Maya, too. She's going to be so happy when I tell her you're home."

"I want to tell Brae that his father loves him. I promised Dad I would."

Bill gave her a quizzical glance and then looked at Laura. His eyes asked the question. _Has Kara lost touch with reality like she did six months ago? _

Silently Laura held out her hand with John's dog tags still clutched in the palm. She opened her fingers. Bill lifted her hand and read the name. His face blanched.

"John is alive," she said quietly. "I'll admit Kara did a very foolish thing when she _borrowed _that ship. I know you feel that she betrayed your trust, and I know you want to punish her, but she brought you a man whose knowledge will save the lives of many Colonial Marines and pilots." Laura's voice began to tremble and her tears once again spilled over. "She did it at the expense of bringing her father back with her. I hope you'll consider that as you decide how to mete out her punishment. Now I'm going to leave. I'm going back to Marble House and hold my son and say a prayer for my husband."

...

The first thing John did when he got back to his apartment was pull a chair over to the kitchen counter, stand on it and put the pistol on top of the middle cabinet. He pushed it back against the wall. He'd never seen the small housekeeping centurions try to clean the top of the cabinets. They were too short to reach that high. He walked to the doorway and looked. The gun wasn't visible.

The second thing he did was pour a glass of whiskey and take it out to the balcony.

The last four hours had been a whirlwind of emotion for him. He closed his eyes and pictured is daughter's face. He had never seen her looking better. She had obviously thrived in the valley even to the extent of dressing like the other women and braiding her hair. And yet the moment she had put on her flight suit, she had become the Viper pilot again, a modern woman who didn't belong in the rural setting. Now she was back on Caprica and she would be all right. He couldn't believe Bill would put her in jail. He couldn't believe Laura would let him. He had to believe that he would see his family again. He had to believe. He had to find the strength.

He thought of Azurra's prayer from her prison cell. _Comfort me, oh God, in the hour of my need. Give me strength that I may overcome my doubt and stay strong in my faith._ He couldn't remember a single prayer from the scrolls of Pythia right now, but Azurra's words had stayed with him. In some ways they were his own. _Give me strength._

And now D'Anna was pregnant. Based on what Sonja had told him about the other Cylon women, he didn't believe that D'Anna could possibly carry the child to term. Sonja had told him that her Cylon sisters on Nereid usually miscarried before the fourth month, sometime during the first trimester. Sharon had to have been at least five or six months pregnant when Kara and Noel Allison had left Caprica. Of course Sonja had also said that some Cylons made it longer only to have the children stillborn. Was the difference something in the women themselves or was it the good medical care that Sharon was getting on Caprica?

John carried the empty glass into the kitchen and refilled it. He took the plate of food that Doolittle had left in the refrigerator and put it on the table, eating it cold as he finished the second glass of whiskey. This was about the time of day that D'Anna usually showed up, but she hadn't been to see him for three days. He finally realized that if he stayed there, he would keep drinking until the bottle of whiskey was empty and he was drunk. He didn't think Sonja would bring him another one…not for free anyway.

He went into the bathroom, washed his face in cold water and tucked his shirttail into his slacks before he walked down the hall and knocked on D'Anna's door. A minute later he knocked a second time. He had just turned to leave when the door opened. She was very pale and wearing pajamas.

"Can I come in?"

She stood back and let him pass. He hadn't been here in over a month, not since the night he'd seen her and realized that he hadn't been the one who had beat her up.

She was staring at him. "What happened to your face? Did the Overseer hit you?"

He joked. "You don't remember doing it?"

She didn't rise to the bait. He wondered why he bothered joking with her because she didn't understand humor.

"No, I don't remember doing it," D'Anna said straight-faced. "Should I?"

"No. I had a little accident. I ran into something. You don't look like you feel good. Morning sickness in the afternoon?"

D'Anna went to the couch and lay down. She put a damp washcloth on her forehead. "All day. Sonja told you?"

John sat down in an armchair across from her. "It should have been you. How long have you known?"

"I've suspected for over a week. Simon did the test yesterday. You're right. I should have told you."

"So where do we go from here?"

"You can be with Sonja now. I don't mind."

"Let's leave Sonja out of this discussion. This concerns you and me. You didn't get pregnant by yourself. It's my child, too, or was I nothing but a sperm donor?"

"I know you didn't want to…"

"That's immaterial now. Look, D'Anna. It's like this…my daughter's mother shut me out of most of her childhood and I couldn't do a damned thing about it because we weren't married. I was with Laura through her whole pregnancy. I was there when our son was born. That's the way it should be. I'll be with you the whole way if you'll let me, but I know I can't force you. It's your call."

"Our child is a boy. You're going to have another son."

John was shocked. "You can tell this early?"

"You mean human women don't know what they're carrying?"

"Not at this stage. There's a test, a sonogram but that won't show anything until about the fifth month. That's when Laura and I found out we were going to have a boy."

"Was your wife sick?"

"For the first trimester. It went away."

"Come back tomorrow night. I feel better at night. We'll talk some more."

John stood. "What if I come back late tomorrow afternoon and we go to the park. Get a little fresh air."

"I'm really tired."

He walked over, knelt on one knee by the couch and took her hand. "You don't seem very happy about this. I thought this is what you wanted."

She forced a smile. "I'm happy. I just don't feel good."

"Is something wrong? Did Simon find any problems?"

She squeezed his hand. "No problems. Now I'd like to go to sleep. I'm very tired."

"I'll come back tomorrow evening. We'll talk."

He was almost to the door when she asked, "Have you finished reading our scriptures yet?"

"Not quite."

"Our son will be raised in the Cylon faith. I want him to know the One True God. Is that going to be a problem for you?"

"No."

She smiled and this time it seemed genuine. "Good."

...

Kara was seated between Lee and Major Parker in the backseat of the SUV that was carrying them to the safe house. Hunter had been placed in a second SUV with several of Special Agent Darren's men.

"Will you bring me some clothes?"

"Sure," Lee said. "What do you want?"

"I need some jeans and t-shirts and stuff. A couple of sweatshirts, socks, underwear, my old sneakers. I left my new ones on Nereid."

"I guess that will be all right with my father. He's in control of everything."

Major Parker said, "I don't think the admiral expects you to wear the same prison garb for however many days it will take to debrief you. Lee can bring you some clothes."

"My toothbrush and stuff, too. Shampoo, you know."

Lee slid his hand against hers on the seat. Their little fingers locked. "I think I can figure out what you need."

They shared a look and Kara smiled. "You're good at that…figuring out what I need."

He saw the corners of Parker's mouth turn up before he looked out the window. Lee suddenly realized what kind of torture the next few days were going to be, spending hours with Kara without being able to touch her or kiss her or make love to her.

"Hunter needs some stuff, too." Kara said. "He shouldn't have to wear that crappy orange jumpsuit either."

Parker said, "We'll get him some clothes and toiletries."

"Thank you," Kara said.

She leaned her head back against the seat. When Laura had left, Kara had felt strangely energized, like she had drunk too much coffee or too many energy drinks. Now she felt drained. She tightened her little finger around Lee's.

"I'm not sorry I did it. I want you to know that before you expect me to start apologizing."

"I didn't think you would be. Was it worth it?"

"Yeah, even thought I didn't get to bring my dad home, it was worth it."

"I'm sorry, Kara. I know you wanted to find him. I know you believed…"

Kara found that she could say it now without starting to cry. "My dad is alive, Lee. I saw him this morning."

That remark got Parker's attention as well. "Major Gallagher is alive?"

She took a deep breath. "He's a Cylon prisoner."

"How…" Lee started.

"I'll tell you both the whole story tomorrow. I'll start with when I landed on the planet and tell you everything."

"Do Laura and my father know about John?" Lee asked.

"I told Laura first. That's what Dad wanted me to do."

Lee was still reeling from her words. In the month that Kara had been gone, he had never once imagined that she would really find her father. As much as he had wanted to believe that John had survived the explosion inside the basestar by jumping the Raptor, he had never believed she would find him.

"Can we order a pizza?" Kara asked Major Parker. "Maybe a couple of them?"

Lee asked, "How can you drop this bombshell on us about John and then in the next breath ask about ordering a pizza?"

"Because I'm hungry and I haven't had pizza in over a month and I don't want to talk about my father right now." She looked at Parker. "How's your son? Still playing soccer?"

"Still playing soccer. I've made it to all his games this year, every single one."

"That's good. It's important for a father to go to his kid's games." She looked at Lee. "So how have things been on Caprica for the last month?"

"I don't know. I haven't been on Caprica for the last month."

The SUV pulled into the entrance of an underground parking garage. They wound around until they stopped in front of an elevator. Lee opened the door and helped Kara out. The agent driving the vehicle pulled away and she, Lee and Parker got on the elevator. Parker pushed the button for the fourteenth floor.

"So where have you been?" Kara asked.

"On the _Penelope_ or the _Galactica_."

"Doing what?"

"Liaison officer between the two ships…me and Kendra Shaw. They're visiting the other Colonies to see if anyone is alive. The _Penelope_ is a scientific ship. The crew is measuring radiation levels, stuff like that."

"Is that Marta Shaw's daughter?"

"That's her."

"How did you two wind up together?"

"Her mother wanted her on the mission. My father went along."

"Lee and Kendra had a couple of interesting experiences," Parker said.

"Like what?"

The elevator arrived at their floor and the door opened. They walked to an apartment at the end of the hall and Parker knocked.

"Ask him about the wolves," Parker said with a little grin while they waited.

"Wolves?"

The door was opened by one of Darren's agents. Parker introduced everyone. Kara looked around. The apartment wasn't new but it was large. The furniture was dated but comfortable looking, the colors neutral, the decorations bland. It also smelled musty, like it had been closed up and unoccupied for a while. The agent whom Parker had called Burke pointed out the three bedrooms.

"Since you're here first, you can pick whichever one you want."

"I don't care," Kara said.

"The one at the end of the hall is the nicest one. It has its own bathroom. The other two share one."

"Give that one to Hunter. He's our guest."

Lee looked at Parker as Kara wandered around the apartment. He wanted to ask Parker what he thought was going on with Kara, but he wanted to do it alone. Parker seemed to sense it and motioned Lee into the hall.

"The driver is waiting in the parking garage. Have him take you to get whatever you think Kara will need in the way of clothes and personal items. I assume they're at your apartment."

"Yes, sir."

"Then stop and pick up a couple of pizzas." Parker took out his billfold and extracted a number of paper cubits. "On me. We'll have meal and grocery delivery established by tomorrow."

"What do you think is going on with her? Do you think she and Hunter…?"

"I don't know. I haven't talked to either of them enough to get a feel, but my guess is that she's traumatized by finding her father still alive and not being able to bring him back with her. You need to be patient with her right now. She's been on a hostile world for a month. She'll need some time to adjust."

"She seems...different."

"She is. So are you after what you've been through. Now go get her clothes and the pizza. We'll stay for a while tonight. I'm not going to run you off early, but you heard your father. You can't stay here with her."

The elevator door opened and Hunter got off with two more of Darren's agents, a male and a female. The two agents told Parker that they would be downstairs and gave him business cards with cell phone numbers.

As Hunter went into the apartment, Lee said, "Tell Kara I've gone out for pizza and to get her some clothes."

"What's pizza?" Hunter asked.

"Get her to explain it to you…or you can wait for me to come back and see for yourself."

"I'll explain about pizza," Major Parker said.

Lee turned and walked to the elevator. He caught it just as it was closing. He knew he shouldn't have been so short with Hunter, but he hadn't been able to stop himself. The last thing he had expected when Kevin Abinell told him Kara had come back was that she had brought someone other than Noel Allison with her.

Down in the parking garage Lee got into the SUV and gave the driver his address. They rode in silence as he kept thinking about Kara and Hunter. He was still brooding about it when the agent pulled up at the curb in front of his building.

Inside his apartment, he went to his bedroom and pulled open the dresser drawer where Kara kept most of her things. He took out underwear and several t-shirts. He opened another drawer and got two sweatshirts and some sweatpants. He got several pairs of jeans from the closet and stuffed everything in a small zip-up bag. Hunter was about his size. He pulled an old Academy sweatshirt off the top shelf and added it.

The last thing he did before he zipped up the bag and left was look at the picture over his dresser. It was of a sea nymph and was called _Posiden's Daughter_. Kara had given it to him for his birthday almost two years earlier. In his mind it had become a painting of her. He couldn't imagine losing her to a man from another world.

Downstairs he threw the bag into the back seat of the SUV and told the agent to turn around and stop at Zeno's two blocks down and on the other side of the street. As far as Lee was concerned, their pizza was as good as anybody's.

…

Kara wandered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was empty except for two six-packs of soft drinks…not her favorite, but she was thirsty so she took one. She walked into the living room just as the door opened and Hunter came in followed by Parker. Hunter looked dazed. She reminded herself that the only life he had known was a rural valley on another planet.

"Are you okay?" She asked.

"I guess this is kind of like the Cylon city."

"Except a lot bigger. There's six million people living in Caprica City...seven if you count the suburbs."

"Six _million_?"

"Come on. I'll show you your bedroom and bathroom."

Kara walked down the hall and he followed her. "I had some trouble with the…whatever that room we got in to come up here."

"The elevator?"

"How high are we?"

"Fourteen floors up." She led him into the bedroom at the end of the hall and together they looked out the window. The view was of more buildings. "This will be your room and bathroom."

"I don't have to share it with the people who brought me here?"

"No. Look I know all this is…different and new to you."

"Are we going to have to stay here until we go back to my planet?"

"No. We'll get to go out…at least you'll get to go out. I'm not sure what's going to happen to me. We'll get through the next couple of days. We'll tell them what happened. We'll answer all their questions. They're going to have a lot of questions for you. Just tell them what you know. You're not a prisoner. Maybe you and Lee can go out to eat or something."

"Lee doesn't like me very much."

"Don't worry about Lee. I'm going to talk to him. He probably thinks…you and me…I don't know what he thinks. He and I will talk about it, but I'm not going to do it in front of Major Parker or the others."

"Or me."

"Just me and him." She sat down on the bed. "He's different. Something happened while I was gone, something to do with wolves."

"Wolves? On Caprica?"

"I don't know."

"I thought Lee would be happier to see you. I didn't expect the two of you to start going at each other a minute after he walked in."

Kara didn't want to admit she had thought the same thing. "I guess he was surprised," she said glumly. "Me and Lee…when it's good between us, it's really good. When it's not…it can be bad. I know it's been eating at him that I didn't tell him what I was going to do."

"Didn't you tell me that he would have stopped you?"

"He would have. But that didn't make what I did right."

Hunter smiled. "These rooms have doors."

…

Lee went into Zeno's and walked straight to the bar where he ordered two large pizzas to go and a beer.

He was sitting on the stool drinking the beer when Karl walked up beside him.

"You don't have to sit at the bar by yourself. Come sit with me and Sharon."

"I'm waiting on a couple of pizzas to go."

"You can sit with us and wait. I heard about you and Kendra getting called back for some independent inquiry after Cain's investigation cleared you. That sucks."

"It wasn't such a bad thing…getting called back here, that is. I was ready to come back. Kendra was, too."

"I heard Kendra and Saunders got something going on."

"They're dating. That's about all I know."

Lee took his beer and followed Karl to a booth. "Hi, Sharon. How are you doing?"

"Getting bigger every day."

"How much longer?"

"Nine more weeks."

Lee glanced at Karl. "Are you back at your apartment now?"

"No. I've cleaned everything out and stored what wasn't totally trashed. I'm still staying at the airbase. Sharon is still at the women's shelter. I'm looking for a safer place for after our little girl is born."

Lee debated for only a moment and then said, "Kara's back. She came back about noon today."

He saw the relief flood Karl's face. "Oh, man, you don't know how glad I am to hear that."

Sharon said, "I ask Karl about her every day. Where is she?"

"She's at a safe house right now. She's got to be debriefed."

"What about Narch?" Karl asked.

Lee shook his head.

"Something happened to him?" Sharon asked.

"No, he stayed behind, but he's fine."

"Is she going to be court-martialed?" Karl asked.

"I don't know."

"Tell her we want to see her as soon as we can," Sharon said.

The bartender brought Lee's boxed pizzas to the table. "There's a car waiting outside for me. I guess I'd better go."

Karl grinned. "A car? You're moving up in the world."

Lee chugged the rest of the beer and picked up the pizzas. "I wish."

The ride across town took longer because of the six o'clock traffic. The pizzas smelled so good that by the time they reached the apartment building, his stomach was growling. The agent pulled up outside the elevator.

"Need any help?"

Lee got out, slung Kara's bag over his shoulder and picked up the pizza boxes. "I can manage. Thanks."

He rode the elevator up and tapped the door with his foot. Parker let him in and took the pizzas. Kara was sitting on the couch. Hunter was in a chair beside the couch.

"Finally," Kara said.

"Your things," he held up the bag.

She walked over and took it. "I don't guess prisoners are allowed to have beer."

Lee shook his head. "Not until we've cleared it with my father."

Parker carried the pizza boxes into the kitchen. Hunter and Agent Burke followed him.

"I'd better take the bag to my room. Want to help?"

He followed her down the hall to the second bedroom. She dropped the bag onto the unmade bed and turned. He reached for her and they stood that way for a long time, their arms around each other and then the spark of desire that was never far beneath the surface for them ignited. He kissed her, a gentle kiss that deepened immediately as their lips and tongues met hungrily. He wanted her so much that he almost forgot where they were. Almost.

He pulled back and buried his face against her neck. "We can't."

"We can shut the door. Nobody will come in. They're busy with the pizzas." She unzipped the top part of the orange jumpsuit.

"Kara, we can't." He wasn't sure where he found the strength, but he grasped the top part of her arms and held her away from him.

"What's the matter with you, Lee?"

"My father didn't agree to put you here instead of in the brig so this could become our personal love nest."

Kara jerked her arms away from him, turned around and zipped up the jumpsuit. Too many things had happened to her today and now this.

"Is there somebody else? While I was gone did you and Kendra Shaw get together?"

"Gods, no! This doesn't have anything to do with anybody else. We just can't do this...not here...not now."

"Fine," Kara said. "Take the moral high road. You always do."

"Kara, don't." He reached for her, but she jerked away from him.

"Go eat the pizza before it gets cold. I'm going to take a shower and change clothes."

She was a few seconds away from falling apart again and she wasn't going to let him see her do it. She grabbed the bag from the bed, went into the bathroom and locked the door.

Lee heard the water begin to run. He straightened his uniform and walked down the hall to the kitchen. The three men were sitting at the table, one box of pizza almost gone.

"Kara's getting cleaned up."

Parker said, "Grab a chair. I'll open the second box."

"Kara and Hunter need to get some rest tonight. I'm going to take the subway back to the office and get my car. What time should I meet you in the morning?"

Parker gave him a quizzical look but didn't ask any questions. "Tomorrow is Saturday. We don't need to go to the office first. I told Agent Burke that we would be here by eight o'clock so he can leave."

"Yes, sir. I'll be here." Lee looked at Hunter who was also watching him. "What do you think of pizza?"

Hunter smiled. "Pizza is good. You sure you don't want to stay and have some?"

"I'll pass. I'll see everybody in the morning."

Lee rode the elevator down to the ground floor and walked out onto the street. Dusk had settled on the city and lights were coming on everywhere. The warmth of the spring day had given way to the cool of evening. He wasn't familiar with this part of town, but he knew that if he walked far enough, he would come to a subway stop. He shoved his hands in his pockets and began walking.

He hoped he hadn't made a big mistake in leaving, but he hadn't wanted their first time together after everything they'd been through to be something rushed and furtive. Sometimes Kara used sex to avoid dealing with something that was bothering her. And Parker was right. She was probably traumatized by having to leave her father behind. She was probably in as jumbled an emotional state as he was. They both needed a chance to adjust to being together again.

Lee knew one thing with absolute certainty. He loved Kara. Working through what had happened to both of them in the last month would take time and effort. John had told him once that even the best relationships weren't always easy, but a good one was always worth whatever it took to make it work.

Lee just hoped that Kara felt the same way. He would go back tomorrow and reach out to her again and again and as many times as it took.

TBC…


	22. The Rules of the Game

Chapter 22

The Rules of the Game

_1 The two wives of Ulixes took Azurra into their house and prepared her for marriage._

_2 They bathed her and clothed her in robes of silk and veiled her and adorned her with gold jewelry as was befitting the bride of a great general._

_3 Then they took her to the temple and consecrated her to the goddess Demeter that Azurra might be fertile._

_4 And the priest of Zeus married her to Ulixes and her name became Azurra Tria which in the ancient way of Kobol showed her to be the third wife of a great man._

_5 Azurra submitted to Ulixes and conceived a son and there was great rejoicing at his birth because Ulixes had six daughters from his first two wives and no sons._

_6 And Azurra found favor with her husband, but in her heart she worshipped her God and turned not to the ways of the old religion, and she vowed that her son would know her God as well. _

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Azurra, _Chapter 5:1-6

.

Somewhere between the security room out at the airbase and the end of the hallway where her guards were waiting, Laura slipped her husband's dog tags around her neck. They were still warm from being clutched in her hand and she imagined that the warmth had been transferred from John to her even though she knew that wasn't possible.

Her thoughts and emotions were swirling so rapidly that she could barely think. Her chief of security had already called and her car was waiting just outside the outer door. She got into the back seat and Edgar slid in beside her.

"Back to Marble House?"

"I have one stop I need to make first."

She gave him the address of Elosha's little temple. Normally he would have voiced at least a nominal objection to the unplanned excursion, but in the six months that he had been guarding her, he had learned to read her very well. Instead of commenting or questioning her, he relayed the address to their driver. She clutched the dog tags for the entire ride back into the city.

At the temple he escorted her inside and once he saw they were alone except for Elosha, he stood at the back while she walked down to the front, went to the rail and knelt on the cushion at the altar.

Elosha had been emptying the offering bowls of their cubits, but stopped when she saw Laura. For the last month Laura had attended a worship service at the temple at least once a week, slipping in quietly just after the service began and sitting at the back. Attendance at the little temple had risen since word had gotten out that the President was now showing up regularly.

Elosha walked over to her. "This is a surprise."

"I was on my way back to Marble House from the airbase and felt the need to pray."

"You look troubled. Is anything wrong?"

Laura managed a smile. "On the contrary. Kara returned safely from her mission today."

"She is well?"

"Very. She brought us a great deal of information."

"Then her mission was a success."

"She didn't accomplish everything she wanted, but yes, she did succeed beyond what we expected. And she came home alive. I've come to give thanks, and to pray again for John."

"Then I will leave you to your prayers."

As tears came to her eyes, Laura reached up and touched Elosha's arm. "Thank you for your support over the last month. I can't tell you how much it's meant to me."

"I'm here for you any time you need me."

Laura waited until Elosha had gone through the door beside the altar before she lifted the disk of the dog tags from under her blouse and held it against her lips for a moment. It was the closest she could come to kissing him. Then she slipped the disk under her blouse and against her skin before she bowed her head and clasped her hands. She would not think right now of what John had endured at the hands of his captors. Those thoughts, she knew, would come later as she tried to sleep. Instead she thought of the gentle man who loved her and his children so much that he had been willing to sacrifice himself again for them. She made her prayer to the most powerful of their gods.

_Oh mighty Zeus, protect my husband and bring him home safely to me._

...

Clad in sweatpants and a sweatshirt Kara stood barefoot in the doorway of the kitchen, her damp hair around her shoulders. Major Parker, Agent Burke and Hunter all looked up at her from the table where an empty pizza box sat in the middle. They were the only ones in the kitchen.

"Lee forgot my hair dryer. Where is he?"

Parker said, "He knows we've got a long day ahead of us tomorrow. He wants to make sure you and Hunter get a good night's rest. He's had a long week, too. He decided to call it a night."

She knew it was her fault that he'd left, but pain still pinged through her at his desertion. There was no way she would let the others see it, though.

She looked at the empty box and grinned. "Thanks for saving me some pizza. And after it was my idea to order it."

Agent Burke got up from the table, put the empty box in the garbage can and got the second one from the top of the stove. "We saved a whole pizza just for you. Have a seat. Tonight's the first night of the pyramid tournament. The Sonics are playing the Dominos. The television in this place is old, but I think we can still get the game."

Kara snorted. "I know who's going to win that one. The Sonics haven't done jack all season. I can't believe they made it to the playoffs."

Burke smiled. "Don't talk trash about my team."

He was thirtyish and tall, but not as tall as her father, and had a runner's build, medium-dark skin, dark eyes and shaved head. He wasn't exactly handsome, but his looks were distinctive. She searched her memory in an effort to recall if she had seen him or his picture somewhere.

Parker said, "Pyramid's loss was our gain. Agent Burke played for the Sonics a few years ago."

"A few centuries," Burke laughed, "before I messed up my knees. Bad knees are the kiss of death for a pyramid player."

Kara said, "I remember seeing your picture on the cover of a sports magazine a few years ago. What do you think of the C-Bucs this year?"

"As much as I love my Sonics, I'll have to admit the Buccaneers are good. They should go all the way. Anders was off his game about a month ago, but he's come back with a vengeance. The championship game is next Saturday."

"We all know it'll be the Buccaneers and the Dominos just like last year and the year before that and the year before that. Maybe the Bucs can manage not to screw up this year and actually win. They'd have won last year if they hadn't racked up so many penalties. They gave the game away on penalty shots."

During the whole conversation Hunter had been looking back and forth between Kara and Burke as if they were speaking a foreign language.

Parker said to Burke, "Why don't you and Hunter go into the living room and you can explain how the game is played to him. He's from…a rural area. He grew up without television _or_ pyramid. He's new to it all so start from scratch."

"No kidding," Burke said. "You're in for a treat because I'm just the man to educate you about pyramid."

Hunter held up his empty drink can. "This is good. Could I have another one?"

"You'd better not," Kara said. "They're loaded with caffeine. You're not used to it. You'll be so wired you won't be able to sleep tonight."

"What's caffeine?"

Parker said, "It's a stimulant. It makes you feel more alert. It's found naturally in coffee and tea but the stuff they put in these drinks is artificial. Kara's right. If you're not used to drinking it, you'd better stick to water until tomorrow morning. Then we'll introduce you to coffee."

"You've never had coffee?" Burke asked in amazement.

"I don't even know what it is," Hunter replied.

"Man, you must _really_ be from the sticks."

"Hunter grew up in a farming community a long way from here. He didn't get out much." Parker said before Hunter or Kara could say anything else. He glanced at his watch. "The game just started. Why don't you get the television warmed up? Then you can explain the rules of the game to Hunter."

Burke grabbed another slice of pizza and went into the living room. Kara saw the television flicker to life. She got up and got a glass from one of the cabinets. She put ice in it, filled it with water and handed it to Hunter.

She smiled. "Don't get the idea that I'm going to do this all the time for you. I'm not your Aunt Emmalyn. Now that you know how, you can get it yourself."

He grinned. "I knew I saved your life for something, Wildcat…to keep me humble."

From the living room they heard Burke say loudly, "Oh, man, the game has hardly gotten started and the Dominos just scored."

"I guess I'll go learn about Sonics and Dominos," Hunter said as he walked into the living room.

Kara waited until he was seated and looking at the screen. "Burke doesn't have any idea where Hunter's from, does he?"

Parker shook his head. "That information is strictly need-to-know. Burke is here only to provide basic security for you."

"Who does he think he's guarding?"

"Confidential informants. I've already talked to Hunter about keeping his origins quiet. Burke knows not to ask you any questions. He knows your first names. That's all he needs to know."

"I hope I didn't say too much."

"No. But no mention of the Cylon homeworld or Nereid or any references about your father to any of your guards."

"Why did Agent Darren pick Burke to babysit us tonight? I noticed he's wearing a wedding ring."

"Darren didn't pick him. Agents perform these duties on a rotating basis. It was strictly luck of the draw. Burke's number was up. He's a nice guy. I've worked with him before."

"Will he be with us tomorrow night?"

"No. You'll get somebody else tomorrow night and every night for as long as you're here. I'll have a schedule of agents in the morning."

"He's carrying a 9-mil. Would he shoot me if I tried to leave?"

"He'd stop you" Parker said seriously. "I hope you wouldn't try…"

Kara grinned. "Just kidding. When did Lee get his promotion?"

"There was a ceremony this past Tuesday in his father's office. Lee's request was to keep it small and private."

Hunter came back into the kitchen and refilled his glass of water. "See? I've learned how to do this already. Agent Burke tells me that pyramid is a lot harder than it looks. Is that true?"

"It's true. Maybe you and Lee can go to the championship game next Saturday night. I know somebody who might be able get some tickets. She dates Sam Anders, the captain of the C-Bucs."

"Couldn't you go?"

Kara glanced at Parker. "I'll probably still be under house arrest."

Burke called, "Hey, Hunter, come watch this penalty shot. The Sonics have a chance to tie the score."

Alone with Parker again, Kara said, "Hunter was born and grew up in a valley that's maybe eight miles wide by twenty-five miles long. It's all crops and orchards and goats and sheep and cows. There's a river and a couple of streams and a lake and two big ponds. The people live in houses that are partially underground. They have running water but no electricity. All their furniture is either made by them or was taken from the _Hyperion_. Hunter's seen the Cylon city from a distance but he's never been in it. All of this is totally new to him so he's going to have a lot of questions. He's really smart. He just doesn't have any…I can't think of how to say it exactly."

"Frame of reference?"

"That's it. He doesn't have any frame of reference for being in a city like this."

"He looks young. You said he's the leader of their fighters? How old is he?"

"Twenty-nine, almost thirty. His father was the leader, but when he was killed fighting the Cylons, Hunter inherited the job. One afternoon he took me to their cemetery and showed me his father's and mother's graves. He was only three years old when his mother died in childbirth so he doesn't remember her. He was raised by his father and his father's sister Emmalyn and her husband…and his grandparents. He has a younger sister Dessa who got brain damage at birth from having the cord wrapped around her neck. His older sister was killed by the Cylons a few years ago. Emmalyn's husband got killed at the same time Hunter's father did. The Cylons have killed so many of them. I didn't realize until I saw all those rocks and stones in the cemetery. Fighting for his people is the only life he's ever known. He told me that when the fighters are gone, the Cylons will take the rest of them to a settlement and make slaves of them."

Parker didn't say anything, but Kara could tell that her words had gotten to him.

She went on, "I know we'll cover a lot of this tomorrow, but he may not mention all the personal stuff. I just want you to know something about him." She hesitated. "He's got a little girl, four months old named Esmari. Her mother's dead. We visited her grave, too. His daughter is one of the reasons he's here. He wants her to have a better life if something should happen to him."

Finally Parker said, "Is there anything between you and Hunter? If there is, I'd like for you to be honest with me now. I'm not going to say anything to Lee, but you should tell him. It will probably come out sooner or later anyway."

She shook her head and then said softly, "Not like that. Hunter saved my life. I saved his. We understand each other. We've both killed skinjobs only he's killed a lot more. We spent a lot of time together. We hunted rabbits and fished together. We even spun wool into yarn together for his aunt so she can knit sweaters. I helped take care of his little girl. I even washed diapers."

Kara glanced up and saw that Parker was studying her. She dropped her eyes and resumed eating her pizza, worried that she had said too much. All she knew about Parker was that Lee liked and respected him. Lee had also said that Parker was a good judge of people.

"But no romance?" he finally asked.

Kara thought briefly of the kiss. She had been so emotionally strung out from having to leave her father behind that she barely remembered it. There had been a lot of feeling involved, but it was the most unromantic kiss she'd ever shared with anyone. She now realized that it hadn't been about romance at all. It had been about saying goodbye to the relationship they had shared on Nereid because Hunter knew everything was changing.

She shook her head again and met Parker's eyes. "No romance. I respect him and I like him…a lot. He's a good leader. His people took me and Narcho in without any questions because Hunter said so. They protected us when Cavil showed up. They did it because of him and his grandfather…and because they hate the Cylons so much."

"I'm glad to hear there's no romantic relationship between you and Hunter. Normally I'd never intrude in anything personal, but with Lee involved in your debriefings, I've got to cover all the bases. I don't want this to blow up in my face and have to report to the admiral that I made a mistake involving Lee. I also think you're already aware that Lee has…some concerns in the area of you and Hunter."

"No more than I've got about him and Kendra Shaw."

"I don't think you have anything to worry about. Scuttlebutt has it that Lieutenant Shaw is dating Dwight Saunders."

"Kendra Shaw and Flat Top? How did that happen?"

Parker smiled. "I'm afraid I'm not privy to how it happened. I do know that he was involved in an incident on the surface of Tauron with Lee and Kendra. I'll let Lee tell you the story, but basically she saved Lee's life. She shot and killed a man who was going to shoot Lee."

Kara was so shocked she could barely speak. "You mean Lee almost got killed?"

"Right before it happened he was piloting a Raptor that was shot down by a Cylon missile. Saunders was on board as ECO. It was a close call for all of them. They're all up for commendations for how they handled the incident. Saunders was injured. Concussion, I think."

"When? Where?"

"I'll let Lee explain it to you. In the meantime Lee's back under my command. I'm working for Admiral Adama now. We're planning the invasion…maybe a better term would be _combat mission_ to Nereid."

"So Admiral Adama isn't going to nuke the planet?"

"The President made it clear that was not an option."

"That's good." Kara put down the half-eaten slice of pizza.

"We're all going to be together for a lot of hours over the next few days. You and Lee are both going to need to keep it as professional as possible. I'll see that the two of you get some time alone if you aren't picking each other apart. If you don't think you can handle it or you don't think you can answer our questions honestly and completely with him present, please let me know now. I'll pull him off the investigation and bring in someone else. This is far too important to let personal feelings scuttle it."

"I can handle it. There's nothing I would say to you or anybody else that I won't say in front of Lee."

"Good. I told Lee to be patient with you and with your situation. I'm going to tell you the same thing about him. Take it slow. Think before you say things to each other. I know that hasn't always been the case with you two. I saw it after Lee broke his leg and I saw it again this afternoon. Count to ten if you have to, but give each other the benefit of the doubt. You're both young and you've both been through a lot. You're going to have to go through an adjustment period. Let it pull you together instead of push you apart and you'll come out stronger on the other end of it."

"You remind me of my father. He would have said the same thing to me. He _has_ said the same thing to me before."

Parker smiled. "I have a daughter as well as a son. She's not quite five. Right now she's a real daddy's girl. I hope when she's your age she still feels about me the way you feel about your father. Not that I'd want her to steal a ship and jump thirty light years to a hostile planet for me."

Kara took a deep breath and for a moment tears came to her eyes. "I told my dad we'd be back to get him."

"We're going to do everything we can to make sure that happens. Now, finish that piece of pizza and let's go watch some pyramid. I'm sure Burke has talked Hunter's ears off. He could probably referee a game by now."

Kara smiled. "Yes, sir. And thank you. I won't let you down."

...

Lee had to change subway cars twice before he got back to the stop near the big government building that he now called his place of work. Because it was still evening rush hour, he stood the whole way. It took a lot longer than he had anticipated, and it was fully dark when he emerged onto the street. The temperature also felt like it had dropped another ten degrees. He started to go straight to the parking garage and then changed his mind. He entered the building, went through all the security checkpoints, rode the elevator up to the third floor and walked down the hall to his father's office. As he'd suspected, Bill was still at work. The overhead light was off, his desk illuminated only by a single lamp. Through the windows behind his father Lee could see the shimmer of the street lamps reflecting in the still water of the elongated pool and in the distance, the white, brightly lit façade of Marble House.

He knocked lightly on the open door. Bill took off his reading glasses and looked up. Several other times Lee had been struck by how tired his father looked. He thought the same thing now.

"I thought you'd still be at the safe house," Bill said.

"We're going to get an early start tomorrow." His answer was evasive, but his father was apparently too tired to notice.

"Come in and have a seat. Would you like a drink?" He gestured to an open bottle of whiskey on his desk.

"No thanks. I've got to drive home."

A slight smile curved Bill's mouth. "That's one of the benefits of having a driver when I need one. So what brings you back here?"

"To thank you."

"It wasn't an easy decision but considering the circumstances, it was the right one. And before you ask, I haven't made up my mind what I'm going to do after they're debriefed. Hunter won't be held, of course. We'll find a place for him to stay until we go to the planet. Kara…I don't know yet."

"We're going to need her when we go there."

"I'm aware of that. But I can't set a precedent by letting her steal a ship and get away with it either. What happens to discipline then? I can't brush this off like it never happened. I'm not going to lie and say she was on an authorized mission, either. I placed a lot of trust in her when I let her train to fly that Raider. She betrayed it."

Lee closed his eyes for a moment. Bill Adama's trust wasn't the only one she'd betrayed.

"So she'll be court-martialed."

"Yes. I just haven't decided what to charge her with."

"If you charge her with the theft of a million-cubit aircraft, she'll be dishonorably discharged. She'll face time in prison. She's such a damned good pilot…and she did bring the ship back along with a gold-mine of information in Hunter."

"You're beginning to understand my dilemma. What would you do, son, if you were in my shoes? Try to put your feelings aside and look at it objectively. What would you do? Disregard the theft? Disregard her unauthorized absence for a month? Set a precedence for anyone with a personal agenda to carry out that agenda with impunity no matter what it involves?"

Lee dropped his eyes. "I don't know. Maybe a lesser charge."

"Like what?"

"Mishandling of government property. That's a misdemeanor. She'll possibly lose rank, back to second lieutenant, but she won't go to prison. And drop the UA charge in return for the intel about Nereid that she brought back with her."

Bill said wearily, "She didn't steal that ship and put herself in danger to get us information. She did it because of an irrational belief that her father was alive and on the planet."

"It turns out that belief wasn't so irrational."

"Her actions were still wrong. You can't use her belief as a justification for committing a crime even if that belief turned out to have unexpected favorable consequences."

Lee tried a different approach. "Even though her mission wasn't authorized, she put herself in deadly danger to go…behind enemy lines. She brought the ship back. Her intention was never to keep it or profit from taking it. And no matter what her motive, she brought back valuable information for us, and she did it without endangering our plans because we're still months away from going to the planet."

Bill was silent for a while. "So you're considering this a combat-related incident from a legal point of view."

"We are still technically at war with the Cylons, aren't we? Or did I miss the two sides signing another armistice agreement?"

"There are times that I see your grandfather's resourcefulness in you."

Lee smiled. "_Resourcefulness_? Is that what you're calling it now? I seem to remember you using the word _ruthlessness _when you referred to his legal maneuvering. Mom used to call him a snake when she wasn't calling him something worse."

Bill smiled as well. "He was a complicated man."

"If you charge Kara with a misdemeanor, she won't be in the brig until the court-martial is convened either. You could release her to Laura. Kara won't be able to fly during that time, but she should be able to afterward. And we can make damned sure she doesn't get anywhere near that Raider again. We're going to need her in a Viper when we go to Nereid."

His father didn't say anything for a long time. He picked up his glass of whiskey and took a drink. "How long have you been thinking about this?"

"Since she left. I did some research while I was on the _Penelope_. I had a lot of time on my hands at night. If we go back in Colonial history, there are several legal precedents."

"I'll consider your suggestion."

"If you won't do it for her, do it for John. We owe our lives to him. If he hadn't taken out that basestar, we'd all have died up there that night."

"I said I'd consider it."

Lee realized that he had pushed his father about as far as he could. "Would you like for me to drop you off at your apartment? It's no trouble."

"I've got a few things to finish up before I can leave. I told Laura I'd call her, too. I've still got to do that. You go ahead. Tomorrow will be a long day for you. Get some rest tonight."

"I will. Goodnight, Dad."

"Goodnight, son."

Back at his apartment Lee dropped his keys on the kitchen table, got a bottle of ambrosia out of the cabinet over the refrigerator, took it into the living room and dropped wearily onto the couch. It seemed like a week since he had left for work that morning.

He found the remote control and turned on the television, surfing until he found the pyramid game. It was the middle of the fourth quarter and the Dominos were ahead 12-9 which didn't surprise him in the least. He had thought it would be a bigger margin than that. He muted the sound and took a drink from the bottle. He felt beat, both emotionally and physically as he faced the reality of what might happen to Kara.

He finally took his mobile phone from his waist clip. He'd turned it off on the way to the airbase and never turned it back on. He had four voice messages. Three of them were from Kevin Abinell. One was from Kendra. He returned her call first.

"Hey, what's up?"

"Wait a minute," she said. "Let me get where I can hear you." Lee noticed the background noise diminishing and then Kendra said, "I'm over at Dwight and Alex's apartment. There're a couple of other pilots over here watching the game. I had to go into Dwight's bedroom and shut the door. They're making too much noise."

"I'm looking at the game, too…with the sound off. So what's going on?"

"One of these guys is a Viper pilot at the airbase. He said a Raider jumped into the atmosphere today. They followed it until it landed at the boneyard, but they were told not to engage. They were told MPs had been called and then they were told to back off. Is that true?"

"Yes."

"It was Kara and Noel Allison, wasn't it?"

"I really can't talk about it."

"Lee, it's me you're talking to. I know where they went."

"Kendra Shaw," he said, "hacker extraordinaire."

"I didn't hack into anything. I couldn't. Not that I didn't try. There's no information about the incident anywhere. Nothing…which is odd in of itself. The military reports on _everything_. There only report filed the night they disappeared was a _possible break-in_ at the boneyard. The report concluded with _nothing found missing. _There was no mention of Alex's car being out there where Noel and Kara left it."

"Then how did you know where they went?"

"For frak's sake, Lee. It doesn't take a genius to figure it out. Just tell me they're okay. That's all Dwight and I want to know."

Lee hesitated and finally said. "Kara's fine. Narcho stayed behind so Kara could bring somebody with her who's a walking, talking roadmap of…the place they've been. They both say Narch is fine. He's not in any danger."

There was a long silence on the other end. "So what do I tell Dwight? Noel Allison is one of his best friends."

"Tell him I couldn't talk about it, but that they're okay."

"Where are Kara and this other guy…in the brig?"

"They were. They're in another secure location right now. They've got to be debriefed."

"We should try to get together soon…me and Dwight and you and Kara."

"We'll try to do that once the dust settles. I know she'd like to see everybody. Have you told your mother about Saunders yet?"

"Not yet. I'm having too much fun with her asking me about you."

"What does that mean?"

Kendra snickered. "I told her that I'd broken up with Gordon because I'd gotten close to someone on the mission. She thinks it's you. She's almost got the wedding planned. The Quorum member's daughter and the admiral's son. I'm having fun frakking with her head because she likes to plan my life like she plans her campaigns. She keeps hinting that I've got to invite my new boyfriend to Sunday dinner…and his father, too, if he isn't too busy. She's noticed that Admiral Adama isn't escorting the President to functions as often as he was." Kendra snickered again. "Can you see your father and my mother together?"

Lee smiled at the thought. "No, I honestly can't."

"Of course her motive is probably more political than personal. She doesn't do anything without a political motive involved. After all, she's a…big drum roll…politician." At this remark Kendra started laughing.

"How many beers have you drunk?"

"Just two. My mother…sometimes I have to laugh. She's so transparent."

"You should ask Saunders to dinner. He's an Academy valedictorian. I think he could hold his own with her. Maybe those wedding plans won't go to waste after all," Lee teased.

"Don't hold your breath…on the wedding plans, that is. I'm going to invite Dwight over soon. I'm not ashamed of _him_. I just don't want to subject him to _her_ yet. He might decide I'm not worth the hassle."

"Don't worry about that."

"Keep in touch, Lee. Let me know if you're free for lunch one day."

"I will, Kendra."

He ended the call and pressed Kevin's number.

"Is she okay?" Kevin asked right away. "Man, those MPs were rough with her. Dr. Rafferty and I told them she wasn't a threat, but they handcuffed her and threw her in that jeep like she was some kind of dangerous criminal. Both of them."

"They're both fine."

"What'd they do to her?"

"Nothing, Kev. She wasn't hurt. She's at a safe house in the city. She'll be debriefed. They both will."

"And then what?"

"I don't know. I'll tell her you asked about her."

"Tell her Sadie's okay. The gouges are healing."

"What gouges?"

"She didn't tell you?"

"We didn't get a chance to talk. She'll start telling her story and answering questions in the morning. So what's this about _gouges_?"

"On the underside of the ship. Apparently she had to set it down in less than optimum conditions. The gouges look like they were deeper but they've started filling in just like those bullet holes did. It's taking longer because they were a lot deeper and longer."

"What about the rest of the ship?"

"Not a scratch on it. Everything inside looks fine. The computers are all working. Her oxygen was low but not into the reserves. Dr. Rafferty and I got it towed inside…finally." Kevin snickered. "You should have seen us. The dude has a couple of doctorates in astrophysics and engineering and he can't drive a tow worth shit. It sure gave me a new appreciation for Lou."

"Why'd you let him do it?"

"He's the boss, man. We needed it inside to start checking it out and Dr. R didn't want to wait for Lou to drive all the way from the airbase. Besides, you just don't tell the boss he can't drive the tow. The admiral has asked for a record of all Kara's jump coordinates and we're getting it for him…I'm getting it for him. It was an order. You understand."

"I understand, Kev. I'll tell Kara you asked about her."

"Do that…and Lee…" He heard Kevin take a deep breath. "She gave me a handheld computer. It's got some seriously weird schematics on it. Dr. Rafferty is looking at them now, but you might want to ask her exactly what this device is supposed to do. It looks like a bomb, but it's not. There's some instructions with it on what's what, but nothing that tells us exactly what it does."

Lee was shocked. "Kara brought a handheld computer back from Nereid?"

"No, man, she took it with her. A couple of weeks before she left I helped her set up a couple of apps on it and transfer a load of data off her father's laptop. I didn't have a clue what she was planning to do. I swear. She told me she wanted a backup of all the work he'd done. I didn't think it was important or I would have, you know, mentioned it earlier."

"I believe you, Kev. I'll ask her and get back to you. Are you sure those schematics weren't already on it?"

"I'm sure. The files have an old hexadecimal notation, like years and years old. I finally found an explanation of it on a website devoted to ancient computer technology, like fifty years old or more. Man, that was even before Dr. R was born. But the system log shows the files were added a couple of weeks ago…while she was on the planet."

"Okay, I'll find out and call you back as soon as I find out."

"Yeah, just let me know. Maybe Dr. Rafferty will figure it out. He's got to tell Admiral Adama about it. He doesn't have a choice, especially after he didn't mention…you know what to him."

"I know what you're talking about. Do me a big favor. Ask Dr. Rafferty to wait until tomorrow before he calls my father. Give Kara a chance to tell us about it first. It'll be a lot better for her. You can stall him. I'm counting on you."

"Yeah, man. With everything going on Kara probably just forgot to mention it. Dr. R has got me combing through everything on Kara's handheld right now. So far it looks like those weird schematics are the only new thing on it."

Lee ended the call. He took another drink of ambrosia and found Major Parker's mobile number. Lee didn't know any other way to get in touch with Kara. There was a chance Parker was still at the safe house.

"Hello, sir," Lee said when Parker answered.

"Let me guess." Lee heard the amusement in Parker's voice. "You want to talk to Kara."

"Are you still there?"

"The game just ended. I'm getting ready to leave. You can talk to her for a few minutes."

He heard muffled voices and then Kara came on the line. "Hi…and congratulations on your promotion."

"I don't feel a bit different."

"Let me go into the kitchen. I'm sorry I ran you off."

"You didn't run me off."

"Tell me about the wolves."

"I don't have enough time tonight. Major Parker wants to leave. I'll tell you first chance we get. I promise. I want you to do something. Tomorrow morning first thing tell us about your handheld computer…the one you gave Kevin today."

There was a silence. Kara finally said, "You talked to Kev?"

"He called because he wanted to make sure you were all right. It came up in the conversation. He and Dr. Rafferty want to know about some schematics that are on there. It would be better for you if you tell us about it before Dr. Rafferty has a chance to tell my father. Kev said he'd stall until tomorrow."

"Okay. First thing in the morning."

"I shouldn't have walked out tonight. I'm sorry."

"Are we okay, Lee…you and me. Did you mean it when you said we'd get through this together?"

"I meant it."

"That's all I want to hear you say."

"All?"

"Unless you want to say something else."

"Did you think I'd stop loving you because you stole a ship?"

"No," she said very softly.

"Then why are you asking me if we're okay?"

"I didn't think you'd stop loving me, but I did think you might break up with me."

The pain of her lack of trust washed over him again. He took another drink of the ambrosia. "Major Parker wants to leave. You need to give him back his phone. We don't have enough time to talk about this now. I don't want to do it over the phone either."

"I'm not sorry I went to Nereid, but I am sorry I hurt you."

"Get a good night's sleep, Kara. Tomorrow is going to be a long day."

"I love you, Lee. That's never changed."

"I love you, too, Kara. Now go to bed. I know you're tired."

He ended the call and took another drink of ambrosia. He watched the silent television screen as the victorious Dominos were interviewed in the locker room. He saw a cork pop and champagne fountain up. At least somebody was happy and celebrating tonight.

...

John sat on a park bench near the fountain. His arms were crossed over his chest, his legs extended in front of him. He felt drowsy and knew that if he kept his eyes closed much longer, he would be sleep.

Sonja nudged him with her elbow. "You might be able to stay awake if you hadn't drunk that whiskey."

He forced himself to open his eyes. "I had two drinks. It wasn't that much, but after the morning I just had, I felt like I deserved it."

"I have another bottle when you're ready. All you have to do is knock on the door and ask for it nicely."

"I'll remember that."

"How is D'Anna? Did she confirm what I told you?"

"She's already suffering from morning sickness."

"In the afternoon?"

"Some women are sick all the time. Laura had a rough time for the first three or four months. Some days were better than others. I quit drinking coffee at the apartment for a while. She couldn't take the smell of it. We became a household of tea drinkers."

"I suppose I was lucky. I never got sick. The Sixes have had the most pregnancies, but no children born alive. The Threes haven't gotten pregnant quite as often…but still no live children. Only a few of the Eights have gotten pregnant, but not for want of trying. They tend to miscarry very early."

"Kara's Cylon friend on Caprica, the Eight, is pregnant…about six months along now."

"She's pregnant by a human?" Sonja asked in surprise.

"No, by a cocker spaniel."

"Don't make fun of me," Sonja snipped.

"Of course she's pregnant by a human. How else would she have gotten pregnant?"

"Some Eights here on the homeworld have relationships with Ones. I thought perhaps…but I guess not. We've never had a Cylon female get pregnant by a Cylon male."

"Maybe if you'd quit calling each other brother and sister…that does lend a whole creepy incestuous feeling to Cylon on Cylon relations. Then again, maybe you're all related in some…weird way down at the DNA level. Maybe there's a little bit of Cavil in all of you."

She snapped more angrily, "Stop trying to be funny at our expense, John. I don't appreciate it."

"I wasn't trying to be funny," he snapped back. "I can't help it if you Cylons don't have a sense of humor. The only time I hear real laughter is when I'm with Petra and Gianne and the other moms and their kids. The laughter of children is one of the best sounds in the world. If I didn't have that, I think I'd shoot myself."

"Oh, my, aren't _we_ in a bad mood?"

He tried to bite back the sarcasm but couldn't. "_We_? I don't know about _you_, but I'm in a great mood. Why wouldn't I be considering everything that's happened to me since I got up this morning? I found out my Cylon _girlfriend_ is knocked up with my child. Found out my daughter has been here for a month. Got to talk to her for all of _thirty minutes_ before I had to say goodbye to her…probably forever. Had to play touchy-feely charades with _you_ so that prissy peacock Doral wouldn't shoot us. Why would I be in a _bad mood_?"

Her sarcasm equaled his. "Is this the same man who told me he wants to be a father to the child that he and D'Anna have lovingly created?"

"I've not always been the best person I could have been, far from it, but one thing I've never done is run from responsibility. I'll do the right thing and help raise the child if she carries it to term. He wasn't conceived during an act of love like my son with Laura, but that's not his fault. He's still half mine. Better he learns about his human heritage from me than have you indoctrinate him to think that _genocide_ is the preferred way of handling differences with your neighbors. Disagree with the people inhabiting another planet? Fine. Just nuke them out of existence. It's a great way to promote peace and good will in the galaxy."

Sonja refused to take the bait. Instead she merely said, "_He_?"

"D'Anna says it's a boy. I don't know how she could possibly know this early, but that's what she says."

"After so many little girls, a boy will be a miracle."

"Every child is a miracle. Boy or girl. I've got one of each. I love them both." He was overwhelmed with emotion as he thought of Kara and Braedon. "I…love them both."

"Simon told me why D'Anna was so anxious for you to have sex with her. He performed a test that showed she was at her most fertile in the week after she brought you from the prison. It appears that her plan worked very well."

"I guess with you Cylons there's no such thing as doctor-patient confidentiality."

She had a superior smile. She knew she had gotten to him. "Why should something like that be a secret?"

"Because," he said angrily, "some people might not like the idea of everybody knowing the most intimate details of their lives. Frak, I keep forgetting that you skinjobs don't have any secrets from each other. You all stick your hands in some kind of goo and the whole damned world knows everything about you."

"No, not everything. Only what we want to share."

"So the datastream is not like a super lie detector."

"If our hands are in the stream and we're asked a direct question, it does no good to lie. The others will know it."

"Let's just hope Cavil doesn't stick _your_ hand in the stream and ask you where we went this morning."

She sat without speaking for a minute and finally said, "I wish the datastream worked for you humans since you have a habit of lying to me. It would certainly make my life easier. It's time for you to answer some questions. We made a bargain…remember?"

"I remember."

"Answers instead of sex. That's obviously what you prefer."

He snorted. "You'd have asked your questions and expected answers whether we'd slept together or not so don't hand me that line of bull."

"Touché. How did your daughter know where to find you? You said your being here was an accident. I never believed you. Her coming here proves I was right. So tell me the truth. You can start by telling me who Yolanda is."

"Yolanda Brenn is an Oracle on Caprica…_was_ an Oracle. The last thing she did before she died was tell Kara that I was here."

"And your daughter believed her?" Sonja said scornfully. "Your daughter took the word of a false prophet of the false gods?"

"They're not false gods to us. Kara's known Yolanda for over two years. According to her Yolanda never told her anything that didn't come to pass. Your prophet Azurra wasn't the only person who was gifted with the ability to…tap into the divine…or whatever you want to call it."

"That's blasphemy, John. God doesn't grant the gift of divine sight to a worshipper of idols."

"Yolanda Brenn was a priest who was blinded when you bombed her temple in Delphi. That's when she got her gift of sight."

"A charlatan. A fake. A palm reader. Nothing more. I'm surprised you allowed your daughter to seek out such a woman."

"You want to know who told Kara to go see Yolanda?"

Sonja voice dripped sarcasm. "I don't know anyone on Caprica, John. What difference would it make to me who told her to go see a false prophet?"

"I told you that Kara is friends with a Two and an Eight. It was the Two. Leoben. That's who told her about Yolanda Brenn."

"I don't believe it."

"He runs a bookstore on Caprica. When Kara first started going to the bookstore, he didn't know what he was. She told me they had a discussion one day about fate or destiny. He told her to go see Yolanda. That's the truth."

Sonja's voice held shock and disbelief. "Leoben would never worship false gods. He and D'Anna are our most spiritual models."

"I don't know if the copy Kara knows worships _any_ gods. When Kara first started going to the bookstore, he didn't know he was a Cylon. Your buddy Cavil had killed him and wiped his memory after he downloaded and sent him to the planet to learn about the evils of humanity. He did it because Leoben had objected to Cavil's near genocide of the human race. I don't think Leoben learned what Cavil thought he would."

Sonja was silent for a long time. "How would Yolanda Brenn have known about this planet? How would she have known to tell Kara you were here?"

"The _Hyperion's_ missions are part of our history. There's nothing classified about them including the fact that they found a habitable planet in this solar system. How do you think your creators knew to come here twenty-five years ago with the old centurions? The existence of this planet is not a secret. Check that Colonial history subroutine of yours."

She was silent again for a while and John wondered if she was really accessing the information. He had exaggerated how common the knowledge about Nereid was, but it wasn't classified. Sonja must have found something that confirmed what he had just said, because she went on with her questions.

"What do you think is going to happen when your daughter gets back to Caprica and tells them she found you…when she tells them everything she knows about us?"

He had almost forgotten that Sonja didn't know the Capricans had won their freedom.

"What can anybody do? It's not like the military can send anybody here. Kara stole that ship. I know you heard her say it. I told her to ditch it somewhere remote and get the hell away from it."

"She would have been better off staying here."

John took a deep breath. It appeared that Sonja had bought his explanation…at least so far. "No. If Cavil had found her here…well, you know what he would have done to her. At least on Caprica she has a chance. She has friends and family who will help her."

"Where did she hide the ship while she was here?"

"It's not important anymore. I thought you were interested in the rest of what she told me. It has to do with your creators."

"How could she know something about our creators. They're instruments of God. He gave them the power to create life...to create a new race. The old centurions had tried for years, but they hadn't succeeded. Then God sent our creators to them. They told the centurions that they would help them create the next generation of Cylons if they ended the war. The centurions signed an Armistice agreement with the Colonials and the creators came here with them to begin their work."

"How many creators are there?"

"Seven."

"Are they all at the lab near the prison?"

"Why are you asking me these questions?"

"How long has it been since anyone has seen them?"

"Our Cavil sees them all the time. He's the Second One. The First One is on Caprica." Her tone of voice became more insistent. "Why are you asking me these questions?"

"Your creators might be dead and Cavil…"

"That's blasphemy!" Sonja exploded. "We would know if they were dead."

"How would you know? Why do you think Cavil would tell you if they were dead?"

She turned to face him. "What are you trying to do? Why are you saying these things?"

"Daniel told Kara that the creators caught Cavil attempting to kill all the Sevens so he had his centurions kill them first…all except one of them. Lucy Cain got away with the copy of Daniel you saw today, but Cavil caught up with them. He had his centurions shoot both of them and throw them in the river. Lucy died. _That's_ what traumatized Daniel…that and the bullet that lodged in his skull. Didn't you see the scar?"

"Liar. What you say is lies. Daniel's memory is…not accurate. The virus altered his brain and gave him false memories. The creators are _not dead_."

"There's one way to find out. Go to the lab. Demand to see them."

"It's forbidden."

"That's handy, isn't it? Who made that rule? Cavil?"

Their eyes met and held. John saw the first flicker of doubt in hers.

"Our creators made the rule, but Cavil was the one who told the council about it."

"How would you go about finding out?"

Sonja was obviously shaken. "I…don't know. I can't go to the lab and march in and demand to see them. Their work is important. They've asked not to be disturbed. Their residence and work rooms are guarded all the time by dozens of centurions. I'd be stopped. I'd have to answer to the council for even making an attempt to see them."

"That's convenient…for Cavil."

Her voice hardened. "I've underestimated him. We all have."

"You need to talk to Daniel again. He's your only hope of finding out the whole story about what happened, but you have to be careful not to betray him to Hunter's people. The way I look at it, I'm your ticket back to the valley. I want to spend some time with the people who helped my daughter. I can't go by myself, but you can take me. Emmalyn told me that Daniel had done some sketches of Kara. I'd like to see them since I may never…see her again."

"I want to talk to Natalie before we do that. She's the first Six. She knows the creators. She might be able to figure out a way to prove…or disprove what you've just told me, but we'll have to wait a week or so. If I request the use of a Heavy Raider too soon, the council will start asking questions. Our little _charade_ today with Doral won't work a second time." She was silent again for a few moments. "I still can't believe Cavil would do something so horrible."

"The one on Caprica killed a copy of Leoben when he quit toeing the party line. I don't see why the head honcho here would be any different. What happens if you find out that he killed your creators?"

"We couldn't let it go. We'd have to take action against him."

"Do you think all the others would support you?"

Sonja sat deep in thought for a long time and finally said, "Not all of them. This would divide us. Some would find a way to justify it and support Cavil. The creators are not sacred to all of us. They've been out of our lives for years. Some of my brothers and sisters have forgotten their importance. They think we've evolved beyond needing them."

"Because they were _human_?"

She sighed. "Probably."

"I guess if you can justify killing billions of humans what's seven more? What about Daniel? How would they feel about his murder?"

"The Sevens were loners. They were only interested in their art and their music and their literature. They didn't interact much with the rest of us. They spent a lot of time with our creators. They considered him our finest model, the best work they had done so far."

"So Daniel didn't have many friends among your brothers and sisters."

"No."

"You liked him."

"Yes, I did. I still do. Natalie was especially close to one of the copies. They had a romantic relationship. It was after the death of the Sevens that she chose to live in the settlement with the humans. That's when she turned her back on us."

"Is there any chance that Natalie knows the truth about what happened to Daniel and that's what drove her to live among the weak and inferior humans?"

"Please curb your sarcasm. I'm getting very tired of it. I need to talk to her. I must talk to her. We've got to be very careful what we do. This could lead to war."

John realized that his tone was mocking but he couldn't stop himself, "You skinjobs have only been around for what…twenty-five years…or less…and you might be at each other's throats already."

"You think we should let the Ones get away with murder?" Sonja asked in disbelief. "Not just killing our creators but killing our Number Sevens as well? Killing a brother?"

"No. I didn't say that. Humans have been killing each other for all kinds of insane reasons since we came down out of the trees. I'm just saying this proves that you as a race aren't any better than us. I don't care how perfect your creators tried to make you. It takes the wind out of that moral superiority of yours."

"We didn't _come down out of the trees_," Sonja snarled angrily.

"What difference does it make how you were created? Killing is killing. So put the killer Cavil on trial."

"He's the _Second_ Number One. Since his copy ultimately controls all the centurions, he would never allow that to happen."

"Then I guess he gets away with it."

"No. We have to do something."

"What about the humans here in the city and in the settlements? What about the basestars? What would happen on them if the Cylons on the planet went to war with each other? What about the centurions?"

Sonja had become more agitated. "I don't know. This is too much to process." She stood. "I need to think. I'm going back to my apartment. Are you coming?"

"No, I'm going to stay here and enjoy what's left of the afternoon."

"Don't sit here and go to sleep."

He chuckled. "Why not? Is some centurion going to come along and mug me?"

"I don't understand why you persist in making comments like that. They're not funny."

"I'm sorry to burst your ideal Cylon bubble, but that's life. It must be tough to find out all your moral superiority was for nothing. You're no better than the humans you tried to exterminate. I figured that out when you nuked eleven Colonies and killed billions of innocent people. That's unparalleled in history as a murderous act of violence and brutality. And don't give me that sanctimonious line about God's will. I've read your scriptures. Nowhere in it does your God condone the murder of an entire species, even one who worships false idols, so don't get me started on that."

Sonja's voice trembled. "If I find out you've been lying to me…If I find out you've told me this out of some perverse desire to hurt me…"

"I'm not trying to hurt you, Sonja. You wanted to know what Daniel told Kara so I told you. I don't have any more way of knowing if it's true than you do, but you're in a position to find out. I'm not."

"If we challenge him, we'll have to be prepared."

John stretched his legs and shut his eyes again. "Are you including me in that _we_?"

"You don't think you can tell me something like you just did and walk away from it, do you?"

"No, Sonja. I don't. So you go back to your apartment and think about it. I'm going to stay here and take a nap and try to forget about it."

...

Kara dreamed she was back on Picon, running through the field behind the base with Karl, chasing fireflies on a summer evening. And when she had put dozens of the glowing insects into a glass jar, she took it to the cave and into the tunnel so she could see to get past the spiders. Only she couldn't get past them. There were thousands of them as big as dinner plates and their webs weren't just on the floor of the tunnel, they were strung across it up into the darkness. She turned to run back the way she had come and the spiders were behind her as well. She threw the jar at them and it disappeared and she was in the dark with the spiders. Their sticky, hairy legs began finding her skin, crawling up her arms and under her clothes.

She woke up sweating and gasping, not knowing where she was for a moment and then she remembered. Light from the building next door filtered dimly around the blinds. Something moved under her t-shirt against the bare skin of her back, and she flung herself out of bed, landing on the carpet in a crouch. She peeled off her t-shirt and threw it on the floor before she crawled over to the bedside lamp and turned it on. The sudden brightness blinded her for a few moments.

She picked up the t-shirt and shook it. There was nothing there. No spider large or small. She looked at her back in the dresser mirror. There were no spiders on her bare skin. Carefully she pulled back the sheet and examined the bed. Nothing. She looked underneath it. Nothing but dust bunnies. She stared at the dust for a long time, but it wasn't moving.

She finally pulled the t-shirt over her head and shivered. The red digital numbers of the clock on the bedside table showed 5:38, still more than an hour until sunrise. Yet she couldn't make herself get back into bed even though she now knew the spiders had been nothing but a nightmare. She put on sweatpants and a sweatshirt and sat on the floor with her back against the dresser.

After the fighting and after nearly losing Lee in the ocean and thinking that she had lost her father, she had starting having nightmares. The worst one, the one that had always awakened her just like the spiders had tonight, was of being in her Viper and being surrounded by Raiders, knowing she was going to die, knowing she would never see Lee again. She hadn't told him about the nightmares but he had probably known. He was having them, too. The only thing that had helped her then was snuggling into his warm body and listening to the steady, even sound of his breathing. That wasn't possible now.

She stood and walked to the kitchen to get some water. In the dark living room Agent Burke was asleep on the couch, a blanket pulled around him, the glow of the alarm keypad by the door casting a green glow. She and Hunter had both been told what would happen if they opened the door. An alarm would trigger both in the apartment and at the security console down in the lobby. Not that escaping was on her mind, but apparently no chances were being taken with them.

Hunter, clad only in a pair of sweatpants, was standing at the kitchen window with his back to her. Just after the game had ended the night before, two agents had shown up bringing a duffel bag full of clothes for Hunter and several bags of groceries. After Major Parker had left, she and Hunter had looked over what they had brought him. Everything was new, the barcode price tags still on the pieces of clothing. There was underwear and t-shirts, jeans, several sweaters and shirts, a hoodie and a heavier jacket plus socks and sneakers and some boots. There had been a package with toiletries, too, a nice razor and some shaving cream and deodorant. Hunter had looked like a little kid on his birthday as he'd examined everything. It had almost made her cry.

She caught a glimpse of the white scars from the wildcat's claws on his tanned back just as he turned to face her.

"I couldn't sleep," he said barely above a whisper. "It's too noisy."

"Noisy. What noise?" She asked as she closed the kitchen door so they wouldn't wake Agent Burke. "I think it's really quiet."

"I can see your main path from up here. What are so many people doing out in the middle of the night?"

Kara walked over to the window and looked down. He was right. From the kitchen she could see the street.

"It's not really the middle of the night," she said. "It's early morning. And what you call a path, we call a _street_. Where those people are walking is called a _sidewalk_. In a city as big as this one, people are always up doing something?"

"Doing what? Lookouts?"

Kara realized what a gap there was between anything Hunter could relate to and the reality of life in a big city. Still she tried to explain. "It's early, but some people are on their way to work, some have been working all night and are on their way home, some are just…out…maybe coming home from a party or a nightclub…or something else."

She didn't want to get into an explanation of some of the things that happened on the streets of Caprica after dark. Better to let him keep his innocence for a while.

"They make a lot of noise," Hunter said.

Kara strained to hear. Sounds that were instantly familiar to her, sounds that she simply tuned out were all new to him. She heard the hum of the building's heating system and the distant siren of an emergency vehicle and the low, moaning whistle of a tugboat or ferry out in the harbor. Overhead the rotors of some type of transport thumped and finally faded.

The stillness and quiet of Hunter's valley at night were just a memory to her now.

"You're right. Caprica City is noisy compared to where you live. I hope I get to show you the city. I'd like to show you the park and take you for a ride on the subway…not at rush hour because you wouldn't like being packed in the cars…and…"

"What's the subway?"

"It's like a train. It runs in tunnels underground. You ride in it to get from place to place in the city. If you're going farther out or to another city you can ride the mag lev train. It runs above ground."

He grinned. "Tunnels full of spiders?"

"Not like your spiders. I have seen some really big rats down there, though. I had a nightmare about the spiders in the tunnel. That's what woke me up. I thought they were in the bed with me. I felt like an idiot when I realized I was freaking out over a dream. It's been a long time since I've had a nightmare."

"When I woke up I was thinking about Esmari, about how much she'll grow and change before we go back to my planet. She won't remember me. She might be walking by then."

"You did the right thing coming here."

"I know. I just miss her. She'd started smiling at me when I got there every morning. She would make little sounds. I think she was happy to see me."

Kara thought of how she felt when Braedon smiled at her. "It warms your heart when they do that, doesn't it?"

"Are you and Lee…one day…?"

Kara smiled. "If we make it through this and whatever is coming next."

"I saw you with Esmari. You'll make a good mother."

"Lee and I aren't even married yet. Babies are _way_ down the road. We've got a lot to do first. We've got to rescue my father and free your planet from the Cylons and that's just for starters."

"That little gadget Major Parker had last night…you were really talking to Lee on it?"

"It's a mobile phone. I have one…had one. It was zipped in a pocket of my flight suit. The MPs took it. The battery was dead anyway so I don't guess it matters."

"Can you get another one?"

"It depends on what they do to me. I don't think they let you have mobile phones in prison. Now, do you want to try to get some more sleep or do you want me to make coffee?"

"I'm not going to be able to go to sleep now. You might as well make coffee and I can have another new experience."

"You go take a shower and put on a pair of those new jeans and a t-shirt and you've got a deal. I might even cook breakfast for us. And be careful with that razor. It's really sharp."

He grinned. "I think I know how to shave."

"I'm just warning you. It's not like shaving with your knife."

"You need to let me braid your hair. It's a mess."

"You can braid hair?" Kara asked in surprise.

"Emmalyn taught me years ago. I used to have to do Dessa's for her. There's really not much to it. It's like braiding rope."

Kara realized that in this strange and foreign city where everything familiar had been taken from him, Hunter was trying to hold onto some small part of his valley, some small part of the life he had known for so many years where women wore long skirts and braided their hair, where he had a daughter who might be walking and who wouldn't remember him the next time he saw her. Kara had brought him here. He had come with her to help the Colonials. She could do this one small thing for him, for everything she owed him.

"Sure. You can braid my hair. I like it out of my face anyway."

...

Despite the ambrosia he had drunk, Lee's night was not one of deep and uninterrupted sleep. He woke up several times dreaming of snow and wolves, but the dreams faded quickly and he couldn't remember exactly what had awakened him. The most recent time he had opened his eyes, the clock said 5:27. He lay in the dark, his body taut with desire, wanting Kara, wanting to hear her breathing, wanting the comfort of knowing she was in the bed beside him. Instead she was across town in an apartment with a man from another world, someone she had obviously formed a bond with.

In a few hours he and Major Parker would hear hers and Hunter's stories and begin asking questions. Lee knew that before the end of today he would know the answer to the question that haunted him. He would know which one of them really had Kara's heart.

TBC…


	23. Debriefing Part 1

Chapter 23

Debriefing Part I

_1 General Ulixes took his son to the Temple of Zeus on his twelfth day as was the custom of the Twelve Tribes._

_2 And his name was called Xander and he was dedicated to the gods of the Twelve and an offering of gold was made for his protection._

_3 In secret Azurra took her son to the temple of her God and there she poured water upon his head from the sacred spring which flowed from the font and she asked God to bless her child._

_4 The Lord sent to Azurra a vision of a green and fertile world and said to her, This shall be the home of my people and your son shall lead them there for he is the peacemaker._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Azurra, _Chapter 6:1-4

.

For a while after Sonja's departure, John sat on the park bench and was aware of the late afternoon sunlight dappling around him through the leaves of the trees. The fountain burbled melodically and then both faded as he drifted into a light sleep.

A woman's voice woke him, a plaintive cry, low and moaning of someone in pain and then another voice calling, "John, come help us."

He shook himself awake and looked around, thinking for a moment that he had dreamed the voices, and then he saw them on the path beyond the fountain, Petra and the young pregnant woman who had been with Leoben in the city. It was immediately obvious to John that without Petra's help, the young woman would not be able to stand. She was clutching her belly, bent over in pain.

"Help us," Petra called. "Please."

John was on his feet in an instant and across the short distance around the fountain and to them.

"She's in labor," Petra said very unnecessarily.

The young woman was panting and moaned, "Leave me alone. Just let me die, please. He's going to kill me anyway."

"No, Rika, we can't leave you out here." Petra looked at John. "She was trying to run away."

John carefully slipped his arm around Rika to help support her. "Why?"

"It's not his baby," Rika said through clenched teeth. "As soon as it's born, he'll know."

John glanced at Petra. She didn't deny what Rika had just said but she quickly and subtly shook her head.

"Where are we going?" John asked.

Petra said, "Back to your building. There's a small medical facility on the second floor. We need to get her there."

"I don't want…" Rika's words ended in another long moan of pain and she clamped her hand on John's arm with a grip that felt like a vise.

"Those pains are really close together, aren't they?" John asked.

"Barely three minutes. Her water's already broken."

"Damn," John said as he and Petra walked faster, pulling Rika along. "My wife had been in the hospital for hours by the time her pains were three minutes apart. We need to get Rika inside. I held Laura's hands while she delivered our son, but I didn't do anything else. That's about all the help I'm going to be if she has the baby out here."

"Well, it's a good thing I trained as a nurse midwife, isn't it?" Petra said with a gentle smile. "This little one won't be the first child I've helped into the world."

They made it to the street before Rika had another contraction, and they had to stop until it was over. They continued to the building and into the elevator. Petra shouted for one of the centurions to go get Simon.

"The Four," John called. "Get a Four." He looked at Petra. "They understand numbers instead of names."

The elevator door closed. Rika was panting. "Don't leave me with him. Don't leave me, please."

"We won't leave you," John said.

The elevator door opened.

"Turn right. End of the hall," Petra said.

Like many other doors, this one was not locked. It didn't open automatically, but it yielded when John turned the handle. There were a series of rooms. Petra led the way to one with a birthing bed. There were cabinets and shelves filled with medical and pharmaceutical supplies.

They helped Rika onto the bed.

John felt helpless. "Should I go look for Leoben? I could ask Sonja to help. I'm sure she knows which one…"

"No," Rika moaned. "I don't want him here. I hate him. I…hate…him."

"Hush," Petra said. "Just hush. He's your husband. You'll raise the child together."

"Never," Rika panted. She reached for John. "Hold my hand."

Wondering if he was going to be doing this for D'Anna in about eight months, John took Rika's hand. Petra lowered the foot of the bed and seated herself in front of Rika.

He couldn't tell exactly what Petra was doing, but it took only a moment before she said, "The baby's almost here. Push with the next contraction."

A long wail escaped from Rika and she again grasped John's hand with a vise-like grip. The only time he had ever felt more helpless was when his son was born. Petra finally lifted the child.

"Get a towel," she said to John.

Rika fell back against the pillows just as Laura had done after Braedon's birth. He disengaged his hand from hers and rubbed the feeling back in it before he rooted in the cabinet beside the bed. He produced a clean blue bath-sized towel and held it toward Petra.

"Open it and take the child," Petra said. She laid the baby on the towel and he held it as Petra wrapped each end of the towel around the baby. It had began to cry, weakly at first and then more strongly. He continued to hold the baby while Petra skillfully clamped the cord and cut it.

Rika lay with her eyes closed, tears running down her face. John also felt the sting of tears. The emotion of the day coupled with this baby's birth had gotten to him. Rika wasn't much older than Kara. He gently put the child in her arms.

"You have a beautiful little girl," he said, "blond like you."

Her arms closed around the baby.

The door opened and Simon walked in.

"We had to start without you," Petra said. "The baby was in a hurry to be born."

Simon looked at John. "What's he doing here?"

"He helped me," Rika said. "I asked him to stay."

"Has anyone notified the father?"

"There wasn't time," John said. "We've been busy."

Simon smiled. "Getting some practice in the birthing room?"

Petra gave John a startled look.

"Didn't John tell you he's going to be a father? D'Anna is pregnant."

"I just found out this morning. I haven't had time to get the announcements printed."

"I thought you were Sonja's breeder," Petra said in surprise.

John shook his head. "The situation is complicated. Sonja is my handler."

Simon seemed amused. "From what Doral told me, she's more than your handler. I had to treat him for a badly sunburned face. He got it waiting for you and Sonja to come back from a romantic tryst in a meadow." Simon chuckled. "Three times in three hours? Human men _your age_ have more stamina than I thought. No wonder Sonja wanted to be your _handler_."

"That dumb bastard Doral didn't have enough sense to find a place in the shade to wait," John said to hide his embarrassment.

"Maybe you could go tell Leoben to come see his child while I check Rika."

John glanced at the young woman to gauge her reaction to Simon's suggestion. She looked sad and defeated and gave him a small nod.

"Where would I find him?"

"Try apartment 7-C. If he's not there, he might be in the dining area."

"If I have to go to the cafeteria, how will I know him from the rest of them?"

"Just ask the first one you come to which one is Rika's man. They'll point him out."

Before John left and went to the elevator, he gently touched the cheek of Rika's newborn daughter. "Have you thought about a name for her?"

Rika shook her head.

"Make sure her name is as beautiful as she is."

Petra said, "Thank you for your help, John. I couldn't have gotten her here without it."

Leoben was leaving apartment 7-C just as John got off the elevator.

"What are you doing on this floor?" Leoben asked. "You got no reason to be here."

He wanted to slam Leoben against the wall and ask him if the child had been conceived as a result of rape, but he knew that wouldn't do Rika any good. And something had happened that had made Rika think the child might not be Leoben's, at least until she had seen it. The newborn child with the pale blond fuzz might be the Cylon's or she might not be. John decided to leave it alone for now.

"Rika had the baby," he said. "She's down on the second floor."

Leoben's face changed. "Is she all right?"

"She seems to be, but I'm not qualified to give a medical opinion. Petra's with her. She's a nurse midwife. And Simon."

Leoben got on the elevator and John pressed the button for the second floor.

"A little girl?"

John said aware that his own voice had softened. "She's beautiful."

"You have kids?"

John nodded.

"Girls? Boys?"

"One of each."

The door opened on the second floor and Leoben got off. John pressed the button for the twelfth floor. Doolittle was in the hall with the dinner cart.

"I left your supper in the refrigerator."

"Thanks," John said absently.

"Are you all right, sir? You got some blood on the front of your shirt."

"It's not mine. Rika had her baby…a little girl. I held her for a few minutes right after she was born. I've had a strange day." He managed a smile. "I'll feel better after I've had a drink."

Doolittle's tired face softened. "Mother and baby are all right?"

"Doing fine when I left. I'm going to check on her tomorrow. Rika reminds me of my daughter."

For a few moments John thought Doolittle was going to say something else. Apparently he thought better of it and said, "I'll bid you goodnight then, sir."

John went into the kitchen, poured a drink, took it out to the balcony and watched while dusk deepened and gradually leached the color from the day. _Strange_ hardly did justice to everything that had happened to him that day, but then he couldn't think of a word that did. _Strange _would have to do. He thought again of Rika's little girl. Was she half Cylon or not?

...

If Kara had any doubt about the seriousness of hers and Hunter's debriefings, they were dispelled when Major Parker arrived at the safe house before 07:00 that morning. Kara had expected to see him in his duty blue uniform like he had been wearing the previous day. Instead he was casually but neatly dressed in a navy golf shirt and khaki slacks.

Kara, Hunter and Agent Burke were sitting at the kitchen table, breakfast dishes pushed aside, each drinking a second cup of coffee and talking about pyramid. Parker deactivated the alarm, called a brisk _good morning_ to them and went straight to the room that was across from her bedroom and beside Hunter's. Kara had dubbed it the _secret room _because it had a keypad mechanism beside the door. The door had been closed and locked so far which only made the room's contents more mysterious.

Parker was carrying two medium-sized titanium suitcases. They looked heavy. Kara grinned at Burke and Hunter. "Tools of torture if we don't cooperate."

"That's funny," Burke said.

"What do you think he's got in the cases?"

"Electronic equipment. Your debriefings will be recorded, but I'm sure you already knew that."

Hunter gave her a questioning look but he didn't say anything. She would have to remember to tell him what _recorded_ meant after Agent Burke left.

Kara got up and went to the door of the room_. _It was open now. The room was not large, probably ten by twelve and contained nothing but a rectangular table and five padded comfortable-looking chairs, three on one side and two on the other. There were whiteboards with boxes of markers on 2 walls and a long bulletin board complete with a box of thumbtacks on a third wall. Both suitcases lay open on the floor. Parker had laid out a lot of computer cables. There were also two laptops and cameras, video recorders and some additional audio equipment. There were several tripods so the video cameras could be placed at any angle.

"Can I help?" Kara asked.

"Normally I'd say _yes_ because hooking up all this equipment is not my strong suit, but under the circumstances I'd better say _no_. That way if something malfunctions…"

He didn't have to finish the sentence.

"It's not really my strong suit, either. Could I get you a cup of coffee? I was just getting ready to start a new pot."

"That would be nice. Thank you."

Back in the kitchen she sat down at the table and waited for the coffee to brew. Agent Burke walked back to talk to Parker and when he returned, he put on his jacket. He bid them goodbye, saying that he and his wife had plans for the day. He said he might see them again and if not, he wished them luck and hoped they got tickets to the pyramid championship game the following Saturday.

Hunter and Kara were left sitting at the kitchen table. "Recording our interviews just means they…" she stumbled for words. Hunter truly had no frame of reference. "Okay, you saw the pictures I had on my handheld computer. They had to be recorded first. That's all it is. They'll point a camera at us while we answer questions. It creates an image, a recording that can be played back and looked at multiple times…like last night during the pyramid game when they showed a player making a good shot and then they showed it again. The second time it was a recording. That's how they were able to slow down the action."

Hunter shrugged. "I think I understand. Markham would love to see all this stuff."

"I'll bet he would. So what do you think of coffee?" She asked him.

"I don't like it nearly as much as I like that drink in the can."

"I think coffee is better with cream. My dad knows just how I like my coffee. He can make…" She took a deep breath. "Okay, I promised myself I wasn't going to go all cry-baby every time I talk about my dad. He's going to be fine until we go back for him."

The coffee maker quit dripping. Kara poured some into a mug and carried it to the _interrogation room_. Parker was on his knees at the end of the table puzzling over a connection between some of the equipment.

"Here's your coffee."

"Thanks."

"Problems?"

"Normally we get a tech guy to do this, but it's a Saturday. I hated to call one in on a day off. Hooking all this up isn't nearly as easy as they make it look."

"Call Kevin Abinell. He'll be glad to do it. He's got something you and Lee need to see anyway. I forgot to mention it yesterday, but I gave it to Kev. It's my handheld computer. I didn't want the MPs taking it. I was afraid something would happen to it. It's really important."

Parker got to his feet, walked to the end of the table and picked up the coffee mug. He was about Lee's height, and he now studied her with those blue-gray eyes that she had come to think of as his x-ray vision because she felt like he was reading her mind.

"What's on the handheld that's so important?"

"Schematics for a device that scrambles centurion brains. It works. Narcho and I saw it in action."

"Do you have Abinell's phone number?"

"Lee does."

Parker already had his phone out. He turned around and began speaking low into it. Kara walked back to the kitchen. Hunter was washing the dishes. A canned drink sat beside the sink.

"You don't have to wash the cans," Kara said. "Just rinse them out. They go in that recycle bin."

"I'm not washing it. I'm drinking it. I just got it out of that big cold box you call a _refrigerator_."

"You had two cups of coffee and now this? You'll be bouncing off the walls from all the caffeine."

"I feel just fine."

"I'll bet you do. But that's okay. Today is probably going to be a long one. Tell Lee and Major Parker everything they ask you. I don't care if it's not too flattering to me or Narch. Otherwise Major Parker will think we're trying to hide something. I'm in enough hot water as it is. I don't want to make it any worse."

Hunter shrugged as he dried his hands on a dishtowel. "Okay, the truth and nothing but. It's what I'd planned to do anyway. I'll even admit I'm claustrophobic. Go get your hairbrush. I'll braid your hair before Lee gets here."

Kara walked down the hall. As she passed the door to the room where Major Parker was working, he said, "I got in touch with Lee. He's going to call Kevin. Lee said Abinell would probably already be at the boneyard, but that's good. He can bring your handheld computer."

"Why would Kev be at the boneyard on a Saturday? He told me before I left that they had quit working weekends and late nights."

"He and Dr. Rafferty started working on another project for the admiral."

Kara walked into her bedroom and closed the door. She changed into jeans and an Academy t-shirt and put on socks and her sneakers. As she brushed her teeth, she looked in the bathroom mirror. It was the first time in over a month that she had studied her reflection in a good mirror in bright light. Her hair really was a mess. It looked like cats had been fighting in it. It was dry and bleached by the sun during the time she had spent outdoors. Her face looked good, though. Her skin was a light golden tan. It hadn't looked that way since she and Lee had spent a week on the island after her Academy graduation. She wished they could go there again.

She was standing at the mirror lost in a delicious daydream when Major Parker knocked on the bedroom door and said, "Lee's here."

Kara brushed her hair, getting out the worst of the tangles before she picked up a small circle of elastic. She wasn't sure how Lee would react to what was going to happen next.

...

Lee had expected to see Kara when he walked into the apartment. Instead Hunter was alone standing at the kitchen window and looking down at the street.

Lee opened cabinet doors until he found the mugs and then poured a cup of coffee.

"Good morning, Hunter," he said.

Hunter glanced over his shoulder, said, "Lee," and then turned back to the window. "I think I could stand here all day just watching everything down on the street."

Major Parker walked in and poured another cup of coffee. "We'll take a break this afternoon. Maybe take a walk."

"Outside?"

"Would you like that?"

Hunter turned around. He smiled for the first time since Lee had met him. "I would. I spend a lot of time outdoors. Being inside can get confining even in a place as big as this one."

Parker said, "Your debriefing is extremely important, but we don't want you to feel like you're a prisoner. We're not going to pound you with questions twenty-four hours a day."

Kara walked into the kitchen. She looked shyly at Lee. The combination of that blue sweater with his blue eyes almost melted her on the spot, especially considering where her thoughts had just been.

"Hi," she smiled and briefly touched his hand.

"Hi." Lee hoped he didn't sound as overwhelmed as he felt right now. Just seeing her and knowing she was safe almost caused him to choke up.

Kara sat down in a kitchen chair and handed her hairbrush to Hunter. "Okay, I've got a confession to make. I didn't bring Hunter back with me just because he knows everything about Nereid. I did it because he knows how to braid my hair and Narcho doesn't."

She waited. Several long moments went by. Major Parker was the first one to get the joke. He started laughing and said he was going back to connecting equipment…or trying to.

Kara looked at Lee and smiled again. "What? You didn't think I could braid it myself behind my head like that, did you?"

Hunter parted her hair in sections and began the hand over hand motion with the three strands. "Just think of it like rope," he said to Lee. "I used to do this all the time for my sister…before I started going out into the forest to fight the Cylons with my father."

"When was that?" Lee asked, trying to keep his voice neutral. He had accepted the fact that Kara had a lot more male friends than she had female friends. He had accepted her close relationship with Karl. He knew he was going to have to accept Hunter the same way…if that's all it was.

"When I was fourteen."

Hunter said it so casually, like it was nothing to be out in a forest fighting Cylons at an age when Lee was a freshman in high school, living in a nice house, playing soccer, studying hard and beginning to think about girls a lot. At fourteen Kara had been in a refugee camp with Karl, living in primitive conditions, believing her father had been killed by Tom Zarek's men after his ship had been hijacked.

Hunter finished the braid and put the elastic around the end.

"Thanks," Kara said. "Now my hair doesn't look like a couple of alley cats fought in it."

Hunter put the hairbrush on the table. The awkward moment stretched. "I need to brush my teeth," he said and left the kitchen.

Lee walked over and stood behind Kara's chair. He touched the neat braid and then put his hands on her shoulders. "Where Hunter lives…where you were…is it like the refugee camp?"

Kara put her hands on top of his and squeezed. "A lot nicer. No black market either."

Lee took a deep breath. "Maya told me what she did to try to save her little girl's life when they were in the camp near Sovana."

"The same thing happened to some women in the camp I was in."

"She broke up with Sam."

Kara turned and looked up at Lee in shock. "Why?"

"Sam wanted to get married and start a family. Maya can't have children. She said it wasn't fair to him."

"When did you talk to Maya?"

"Right after you left. I saw her again earlier this week. I went by to see Braedon. It's probably my imagination, but he looks like he's grown."

Kara took a deep breath. "I really want to see him. I hope lunch at Marble House works out for tomorrow."

"I hope so, too."

"What kind of questions are you going to ask me today?"

"Major Parker's in charge of the debriefing. I'll follow his lead. I've never been involved in one exactly like this before."

There was a knock at the door. Lee walked over to it and looked through the peephole. "Kevin," he said and opened the door.

"Hey, Kev," Kara called from the kitchen doorway. "Did you bring Major Parker a present from me?"

Kevin patted the pocket of his windbreaker jacket. "I didn't bring the handheld. Dr. Rafferty wanted to keep it out at the boneyard, but I brought the schematics on a USB drive." He walked over and handed her a styrofoam cup from Jojo's Java. "It's a cappuccino just like you like. I didn't think they had a Jojo's Java where you were."

She and Kevin had a running joke about the strong coffee out at the boneyard. While she had been training to fly the Raider, she has begun stopping at Jojo's Java and getting her own cup. She had always brought him one, too.

"Thanks." She took the cappuccino and smiled at him.

Kevin blushed to the roots of his hair. "Where's Major Parker?"

"This way," Lee said and showed Kevin down the hall. Hunter was standing in the doorway watching Parker. It was apparent to Lee that the major had become frustrated.

"The cavalry has arrived," Lee said.

"Thank the gods," Parker replied. "How can something this simple be so difficult? If the laptop's working, the projector isn't."

Kevin took off his windbreaker and threw it on a chair. He seemed glad to have something to do. Parker stood back and watched as Kevin went to work. The first thing he did was unplug everything and start over.

"It's easier for me to start from scratch," he mumbled.

Lee walked back into the kitchen. Kara was looking out the window. She turned. "It won't be long now. Kev will soon have it all hooked up and you can start grilling us."

"I think that's too harsh a term. We're just going to ask questions and…"

Kara smiled. "I was kidding, Lee. You're too tense and serious. Back it down a notch or two. I know this is important, but give me a break."

"How long has Kevin had a crush on you?"

She sipped from the cappuccino. _Gods, here we go again. _She remembered Parker's words and took a deep breath.

"I like Kev. We played a lot of the same video games when we were kids. I took him coffee from Jojo's Java when I was training to fly the Raider. You could have fueled half the fleet with that stuff Dr. Rafferty brewed out at the boneyard." She held out the cup and echoed part of Jojo's famous advertising jingle. "_Best coffee in the Colonies_. Of course I guess that should now be _Best coffee in the Colony_. Want some Jojo's cappuccino?"

Lee shook his head.

"Why don't you just go ahead and ask me? Let's get it over with right now so we don't have to keep dancing around it."

"What?"

"Just ask me. Say, _Kara, are you sleeping with Hunter or did you sleep with Hunter?_ Go ahead. Ask. You're not going to be happy until you do."

Lee felt his temper begin to rise, but he knew that all it would take was Parker hearing them argue and he would be off the interrogation. Parker had made that very clear to him.

He kept his voice low. "Are you sleeping with Hunter?"

"No. Not on Nereid. And not now. But it's like I told Major Parker. Hunter saved my life. I like him. I respect him. I can't change that. I don't want to." She smiled. "Besides, who would I get to braid my hair?"

"You've already talked to Major Parker about Hunter?"

"Last night. And it's because he talked to me…a fatherly lecture about fighting with you. I can see now why you like working for him. He reminds me of my dad."

Lee walked over to her and cupped the side of her face in his hand. He didn't dare pull her into his arms because that would start other feelings and as sure as he did, Parker would walk in and decide that he was too emotionally involved to participate in the debriefing.

"Do you want to ask me any questions?" He said.

Kara grinned. "No. I don't need to. I trust you. Besides, when Major Parker told me that Kendra Shaw was dating Flat Top, I knew I didn't have anything to worry about."

"Why is that?"

"She had her choice of Academy valedictorians. She picked him."

"Maybe that's because he has the hots for her and I don't."

Their eyes locked and for a few perfect moments nothing that had happened to either of them in the last month mattered. They were together again. Lee and Kara. Starbuck and Apollo.

Major Parker walked to the doorway.

"Let's get started. Kevin brought some schematics with him. I'd like to go over them first so he can take the information back to Dr. Rafferty. Then he can leave and we'll let you start telling your stories."

Lee dropped his hand. Kara smiled at Parker. "You should be proud of us. We both counted to ten."

...

Laura did something that she had only rarely done since she'd moved into Marble House. She went to breakfast in her small private dining room wearing her nightgown and robe. She had slept poorly and her head still felt like it was stuffed with cotton. A thirty-minute phone call at nearly ten p.m. from Bill hadn't helped either. He said he had waited to call her until he had made up his mind about how he was going to handle the situation with Kara.

Maya already had Braedon in his high chair. She had just stuck his bowl of oatmeal down on the tray with the suction cup when Laura walked in. She went over to the high chair, kissed her son on the top of his head and struggled with feelings made more poignant and raw by her lack of sleep.

"Hello, my little man."

"Mamma." He held up his spoon, left-handed like his father.

"How are you this morning?" She asked Maya. "Did you have a nice evening out?"

She knew that Maya had gone out with several of the young women who were in the class that she attended at Caprica University. She had been gone before Laura had made it upstairs the night before. Braedon had been with one of the other women who cared for him in Maya's absence.

Maya shrugged. "They're in their early twenties." She didn't say anything else as if the eight year age difference explained it all. Laura knew it was much more than that.

"I have some good news," Laura said as she poured herself a cup of hot tea. "And some other news that is both good and bad. Kara came home yesterday. That's the good news."

Maya's eyes widened. "She's all right?"

"She's fine. She saw her father. He's alive but he's a prisoner of the Cylons." Maya gasped and Laura continued. "Kara said he was all right now, but…I know that wasn't always the case. I know he was tortured…brutalized. I've read reports about what the Cylons did to humans here on Caprica when they took prisoners."

Maya closed her eyes. "Oh, gods."

"That's not all. Kara brought a young man with her who knows all about the place they were. This is all classified, but I know you'll keep this confidential."

"How did she see her father if he's a prisoner?"

"I didn't get a chance to hear any of the details. The young man with Kara said John had been taken from the prison to the Cylon city and was being forced to…forced to function as a sex slave for a copy of D'Anna Biers. He used the term _breeder_. It seems the female skinjobs want to have children. Natasi told me that unlike their counterparts here on Caprica, the ones on their homeworld don't believe in artificial insemination. John is just one of the men who is being forced to serve that purpose."

"Why would Kara tell you something like that?" Maya asked with an edge of anger in her voice. "What possible reason even if it's true?"

Laura took a deep breath. "So I wouldn't think John was a traitor and a collaborator. It will all come out in their debriefing anyway."

Maya said, "I don't care what they did to him, John would never betray anything to the Cylons about Caprica."

"Every man…every human has a breaking point if he doesn't die first," Laura said gently. "Bill talked to me for a long time last night. He tried to prepare me for the possibility that John had broken."

"No." Maya looked at Braedon. "John would have died before he would have betrayed us to the Cylons. He would never have done anything to put you or Brae or Kara in danger."

"I know," Laura said softly. "But Bill doesn't have that much faith in _anyone_. When we liberated the Cylon prison here on Caprica, a number of…torture instruments were found along with some very powerful drugs that apparently enhance the effect of pain. The few prisoners still alive were interviewed extensively after they had recovered enough from their ordeals to be questioned. I only read a small part of the report. I'm glad now that I didn't read all of it, but Bill did. He knows what the Cylons are capable of. He also knows that every single prisoner who was still alive had been broken. The ones who hadn't broken were dead. He thinks the fact that John survived means he…told them what they wanted to know."

"Do you believe that?" Maya asked, her eyes wide in disbelief.

"No, but Bill is trying to get me to look at the situation realistically and unemotionally."

"How can you look at it unemotionally? John is your husband."

"I know," Laura said softly as she placed her hand against the dog tags. "What Bill can't seem to understand is that it wouldn't matter to me if John _had_ talked. He was willing to give his life for all of us. How could I possibly turn my back on him? I love him."

"Where is Kara now?"

"She's at a secure location somewhere in the city. She and Hunter, the young man, will be debriefed. Bill said it would probably take several days, possibly longer. I told him I wanted them to come to lunch tomorrow. He reluctantly agreed. I had to convince him that a few hours out of their debriefing wasn't going to make any difference in the long run. Besides, Kara wants to see Braedon…and you."

"I want to see her, too."

"Bill is not going to take as hard a stance as I thought he would with her so that means he and I don't have to butt heads over it. Lee convinced him. We're going to need her in a Viper when we..." Laura realized that she shouldn't talk about the Colonial plans for the Cylon homeworld to Maya. She finished the sentence with a vague "…in the future. Bill's first inclination was to charge Kara with the theft of a very expensive ship. Kara betrayed his trust in her. Instead he's charging her with something that will get her a slap on the wrist compared to several years in prison. After she and Hunter are debriefed, she'll be released to me until she faces the charges. I'm sure she won't like being here instead of at Lee's apartment, but she'll have to endure us for a while."

Maya smiled. "I'm glad Admiral Adama came to his senses. And Kara's suite here at Marble House is private."

Laura found herself smiling for the first time since she had gotten the call from Bill the afternoon before. "Whose side are you on…as if I didn't know?"

"Kara and Lee are young and in love. They've been apart for a month. It probably seems to both of them like a year."

"I'm very sorry things didn't work out for you and Sam."

"I made my choice. I don't regret it. Sam will have no trouble finding a nice young woman who will be able to have a family with him. Laura, I'm happy here taking care of Brae. Have you noticed how much better he's doing with the spoon since we stopped trying to make him use his right hand?"

Laura's face crumpled momentarily and then she got herself under control. "He's just a clone of his father, aren't you, my little man?"

As if on cue, Braedon waved the spoon around, throwing oatmeal on the table, and happily said, "Dada."

...

Kara and Hunter sat on one side of the table in the interrogation room while Lee and Major Parker sat on the other. Kevin had loaded the schematics from the USB drive on one of the laptops and had projected the first one of the diagrams onto the whiteboard on the end wall. It looked incredibly complicated to Kara.

Kara said. "Markham showed me the inside of the device, but I can't tell you anything else about what makes it work."

Hunter said, "All I know is that we twist the bottom counterclockwise, press the switch and throw it. It has a five- second delay. Then it generates some kind of electro-magnetic pulse."

"It made me feel like bugs were crawling all over my skin for a few seconds," Kara added.

"Where were you?" Parker asked Kara.

"On the ground near the centurions' feet. Narcho…Lieutenant Allison…pushed me down and covered me with his body when they started shooting. The noise was terrible. I had just gotten my fingers in my ears when the canister landed in the middle of them. I thought it was a bomb in a big soup can. Narch and I both thought we were going to die."

"But the centurions weren't shooting at you?" Lee asked.

"No. They were shooting into the trees toward where they thought Hunter and his men were."

"Back to the centurions," Parker said. "After the device went off, they stopped shooting and then what?"

Hunter said, "Their arms usually jerk a couple of times. The red eyes either dim or go out completely depending on how close they are to the device when it goes off."

"Are they immobilized at that point?"

Hunter said, "They quit firing their weapons although they don't retract them. Sometimes they wander around, but they're harmless. Markham told me the pulse scrambles their brains."

"That's the layman's term for it," Kara added. "I'm sure Kevin understands what really happens to them."

"The centurion brain is a very complex composite of microchips and circuitry and software," Kevin said. "As such they're vulnerable to any type of electro-magnetic pulse. Destroy any part of it and they'll either quit functioning or start malfunctioning."

"Then why haven't we ever come up with a weapon like this?" Parker asked.

Kevin quickly said, "Because this device would take out every other piece of electronic equipment near it. It would take out our communication devices and even our smart weapons. We could disable the centurions, but we'd hurt ourselves just as bad, especially with a weapon that's strong enough to work on a lot of centurions."

"That's not an issue with Hunter's men," Kara said. "Their rifles are old…like over sixty years old. And they don't have any type of communication devices."

Parker made several more notes. "Okay, anything else you can tell us about this device?"

"It can only be used a couple of times before we have to take it back to Markham. He recharges it because he has electricity. The _Hyperion's_ reactor is still functioning but at a reduced capacity. The only other thing I can tell you is that it has a limited effect on the skinjobs."

"It didn't seem to have any effect on Leoben," Kara said.

"None that you could see. He was almost dead when Targa threw the canister."

"Tell me about the effect the device has on the skinjobs," Parker said.

"Confusion," Hunter said. "About a year ago we found a skinjob still alive after we had used the canister on its centurions. It was still functioning fine, but its memory seemed to be screwed up. It acted like it was glad to see us…like it thought we were skinjobs, too."

"Could it have been faking?" Parker asked.

Hunter shrugged. "Maybe."

"Which skinjob?" Kara asked.

"A Five."

"What'd you do to him?" Lee asked.

"Killed him," Hunter answered dispassionately. "That's what we do. Either we kill them or they kill us. Only difference is they download."

Kara said, "We know the copy of Leoben that captured me and Narcho downloaded. A few days later Cavil brought the downloaded copy to the valley hoping he could identify us. He couldn't. I thought maybe it had something to do with dying a violent death…like Boomer did on Troy. Maybe it was the device that screwed up Leoben's memory…or maybe both things together."

Lee quickly asked, "How could Leoben not identify two Colonial pilots?"

Kara answered. "Narch and I had borrowed some clothes from Hunter's people." She hesitated a moment and then said, "Leoben passed right over Narch, but if he'd looked at me any longer, he might have been able to identify me. I had mouthed off at him after he captured us. I think I made more of an impression on him."

Lee struggled to keep his thoughts to himself as he remembered Kara's answers to Sergeant Ackerman during her interrogation several years earlier.

Hunter said, "She's right. Leoben was wavering. I was afraid they were going to take her even though he wasn't sure."

Kara thought of what had happened as Leoben had grasped her chin and forced her to look at him. "Hunter distracted him and Cavil. Everything worked out."

Parker said, "So you don't really know the extent of the…confusion your device causes the skinjobs."

Hunter shook his head. "No. We don't even understand what downloading does to them. We just know they do it. Markham, the genius who invented the canister, created it for the centurions because we could hold our own against the skinjobs. Any effect is has on them is a benefit to us, but it wasn't designed for them."

"So we would be safe in saying that the effect on the skinjobs is limited and not completely understood whereas we're sure it renders the centurions useless as fighters."

"Yes, sir. I think that's a good assessment." Kara looked at Hunter. "Wouldn't you agree?"

Hunter nodded. "I agree. Once we throw that canister, we can concentrate on the skinjobs and forget about the centurions. The Cylons know what the canister does, but they don't seem too motivated to do much about it. They've got plenty of centurions. We knock out what amounts to five or six every month. They retrieve some of them, put in new chips and they're back in business."

Parker looked at Kevin. "Do you think this device could be duplicated and if so, how much effort would it take?"

"The schematics that Markham sent back on Kara's handheld are good. Now that we know what it does, we could probably mock up something in six or eight weeks. We could experiment with various strengths of EM pulses. The problem is going to be testing it. We don't have any centurions to test it on. It's my understanding they were all destroyed."

"We'll worry about testing in a couple of weeks," Parker said. "My recommendation to Admiral Adama is going to be that Kevin and Dr. Rafferty begin work on this ASAP keeping in mind, of course, how it would affect our own equipment."

"What about the project we're already working on for him?" Kevin asked. "It's taking most of our time."

Parker smiled slightly. "That may not be as critical now that we've got the first Raider back undamaged. It is undamaged, isn't it?"

Kevin glanced at Kara before he said, "Basically. Yes."

"Explain."

"I scraped the underside of it during a landing a month ago," Kara said. "It was a blind landing. We had to hide it so I flew it through a waterfall into a cave. The floor of the cave was…uneven. I put a couple of deep gouges in the bottom, but they're healing. Kev said so."

Her words were followed by a stunned silence. Lee finally said, "You did _what_?"

"You heard me," she said.

"She didn't have much choice," Hunter said. "It was either that or let the Cylons find her ship. They would have taken it."

Lee struggled to keep his voice even. "It was _your_ idea to have her put the ship through a waterfall and do a blind landing in a _cave_?"

"It worked," Kara said quickly. "Cavil and his centurions hunted for us and the ship for a month. They never even came close to finding it. Keeping that ship safe is why we're back here. Otherwise I'd be weeding a garden on Nereid right now instead of talking to you."

"We can discuss the particulars of her decision later," Parker said. "I think Kevin has all he needs to know to go back to Dr. Rafferty. I'll walk you out."

Parker got up and he and Kevin left the room.

"See you later, Kev," Kara called. "Go C-Bucs."

Lee was tapping his pen on the table. "You flew the Raider blind through a waterfall…"

"Give it a rest, Lee."

"That was beyond insane. You could have been killed."

Hunter said, "I don't think you're giving her enough credit. She's a good pilot."

Kara poked Hunter on the arm. "I appreciate the compliment, but you're just going to make it worse." She looked across the table at Lee. "Tell me about getting shot down by a Heavy Raider over Tauron, or was that any _less dangerous_?"

Before Lee could answer, Major Parker came back to the doorway of the room. "Here's what we're going to do next. Kara is going to go into the living room and watch television while Hunter talks to me and Lee. Then we'll reverse the process. That will probably take the rest of the day. Any questions?"

"No, sir." Kara got out of the chair. She knew that she and Lee weren't through talking about the Raider or what had happened over Tauron, but she also knew they'd have another chance.

Parker sat down in the chair beside Lee. They were both facing Hunter now.

"Close the door, please," Parker said to her. She complied, glancing at Hunter and giving him a small smile of encouragement before she did. She went into the living room and turned on the television. What she wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall right now.

...

Another glass of whiskey helped John go to sleep, but didn't keep the nightmares at bay. He was once more standing against the wheelhouse of a trawler, the collar of his pea coat turned up against the cold wind, his hand cupped around his cigarette to keep it burning. The mist in front of him began to clear and he saw that he wasn't standing on a ship at all but an enclosed prison yard, his back against the stone wall. It took only seconds for him to realize that he was standing in front of a firing squad…not centurions but Colonial Marines. There was only one offense that would have put him there. He had been found guilty of treason. They were waiting for him to finish his cigarette before they carried out their orders and executed him. He smiled at the irony of having survived so much to now die in a hail of Colonial bullets. Someone stepped from between two of the tall Marines. Laura. Her eyes were on his. She walked slowly toward him even as he shouted at her to go back. Instead she wrapped her arms tightly around him, her face against his shoulder, her voice soft in his ear. _You didn't think I would let you die alone, did you? _He turned his body trying to protect her, knowing that this time he couldn't. He heard the shout. _Rifles at the ready. _

He forced himself to wake up before the hail of bullets ripped into them.

It was the worst nightmare yet, the one he knew he would come to dread the most because it was the embodiment of his worst fear…that his deeds on Nereid would reflect on his wife in her capacity as President. He lay in the dark waiting for his heart to stop pounding trying to distance himself from the encompassing feelings of dread, praying that whatever happened, he could protect Laura and Kara and Brae from the fallout of anything he had done.

He remembered the cry of Rika's newborn baby and wondered how, if D'Anna carried their child to term, he could ever expect Laura's understanding or forgiveness. For the first time since finding out he'd fathered a half-Cylon child, he realized what going home to Caprica would mean, of how it would rip apart the lives of those he loved the most.

...

Major Parker began by asking Hunter to state his full name and place of birth for the record which Hunter did, telling them his name, Kyle Franklin, but that he'd been called Hunter since he was a small boy. He told them he had been born on a planet that Kara referred to as Nereid and that was considered the Cylon homeworld.

Parker then asked Hunter to tell them what he could about how the survivors of the second _Hyperion_ mission had come to live in the valley. Parker let him talk for almost an hour as Hunter related their history. He was thorough and surprised Lee with his knowledge of events that had transpired long before he was born. Lee was forced to re-evaluate his first impression of Hunter as nothing but the uneducated leader of a small band of fighters. When Hunter finally paused to drink some of his canned drink, Lee asked him his grandfather's name.

"Perry Jaffee," Hunter said. "My grandmother was named Marsella. She died six years ago. My grandfather married a widow named Celia Enyetto. She and my grandfather and a woman named Faye Reilly are the only original mission members who are still alive."

While Hunter was speaking, Lee brought up the crew list and science team roster for the _Hyperion _on the laptop that sat in front of him. He found Perry and Marsella Jaffee listed with the scientists. Faye Reilly was a member of the crew, a supply specialist. Elias and Celia Enyetto were also listed among the scientists. Lee pointed out the names to Major Parker who nodded. Everything that Hunter had told them so far was reasonable and credible.

"Tell us about the day you encountered Kara and Noel Allison," Parker said.

"We'd been in the forest for a few weeks…"

"Who is _we_?" Parker interrupted him.

"Me and my two uncles, Targa and Beck, my father's half-brothers."

Parker made a note. "Kara said you're the leader of the fighters. Is that a true assessment?"

Hunter nodded. "My father was the leader. When he was killed two years ago, I got the job. My father was a good strategist. He taught me." He shrugged. "The others wanted me to take over. I did."

"Okay," Parker said, "continue telling us about that day."

"We were out of food and trying to get back to base camp which is what we call the valley where we all live, but there was a group of centurions led by a Two who managed to stay between us and camp with his centurions. It's not that we couldn't hunt for food, but that meant cooking and a fire is a dead giveaway. Centurions use infrared. We think they can also filter air for particles of smoke so we learned a long time ago not to build fires. It was early spring so food in the forest was very limited. We were living on grubs mostly."

"Grubs?" Lee asked.

That got a grin from Hunter. "All inclusive term for various insect larvae…and worms…and other things that crawl."

"Did Kara…"

"No. She never had to eat anything like that…although she probably would have. She's tough." He grinned again. "As long as it doesn't have eight hairy legs."

Parker gently got the interview back on track. "How did you and your uncles find Kara and Noel?"

"We were scouting for the Cylons. Beck saw her ship jump into the atmosphere over the forest a few miles from where we were. He said the ship disappeared below the tree line in a controlled manner, not like it was about to crash. Cylon Raiders don't land in the forest so we went to check it out. The Cylons don't hunt us with their Raiders. It's part of the agreement."

"What agreement?"

"The one they worked out with my father and my grandfather years ago. In return for not making slaves of us, we agreed to hunt each other in the forest. All kills in the forest are considered good kills. They agreed to stay out of the valley and not to use their Raiders on us. We don't go into their city and kill them there."

Parker made several more lines of notes in his notebook. Finally he said, "What can you tell me about the city?"

"I've never been there. We have a contact, a human who used to be in the settlement closest to us. He agreed to help us after he was sent to the city. He passes us information when he can."

"How?"

"He's allowed to visit his wife in the settlement from time to time. One of us makes contact while he's there, but not for the last month. We haven't been allowed to leave the valley while Cavil and his centurions hunted for Kara and Narcho and the ship."

"Your contact's name?"

"We never exchanged names. It's safer for all of us that way. We call him Mr. Fox, but that's not his real name."

"What type of information did he pass to you?"

"Where the occupied buildings are. Approximately how many humans are in each one. How many skinjobs they prepare food for. How many humans. Anytime the Cylons start a new building. Other bits and pieces of information that he overheard. It wasn't information that did us a lot of good since we weren't fighting in the city, but we didn't know what might happen next so we kept tabs on everything we could."

Parker stopped scribbling for a moment. "If we showed you some aerial maps of the city, could you identify the occupied buildings?"

"I think so."

"We'll do that later. Let's get back to the day Kara and Noel Allison arrived. You saw a Raider. You went to check it out. What happened next?"

"By the time we got to where she'd landed the ship, Kara and Narcho had done some recon of the area and were talking. We surprised them and disarmed them. We thought they might be new skinjobs since they were in a Cylon ship. We questioned them. Kara got mouthy. She did the same thing later with the Two. You can't let a prisoner get mouthy. You've got to maintain control." Hunter looked directly at Lee. "So I clipped her across the mouth. Not hard. Just enough to get her attention."

Lee gripped his pen tighter. "How did she react to that?"

"She got in my face. Narcho calmed her down. He said something about not losing sight of why they had come to the planet which I thought was strange. She listened to him so I asked him if the little wildcat was his. That's how she got her nickname. Then Targa, Beck and I talked about whether or not they were skinjobs. I didn't think they were because I'd never seen skinjobs take up for each other like they did, but when you've been hunted the way we have, you don't take any chances. I had Beck tie their wrists and then tie them together with another rope around their waists. They could walk but they couldn't run. We knew the skinjob and his four centurions weren't too far behind us so we marched them toward him."

"You used them as bait?" Parker asked.

Lee gripped his pen tighter and clenched his jaw.

"If they were new skinjobs, he would have recognized them."

Lee felt like his blood was boiling. "But he didn't recognize them, did he?"

"No," Hunter said calmly. "We let him take them and then we took out him and his centurions. Beck shot Leoben through the throat with a crossbow. Targa threw the canister and disabled the centurions. We all got away. Before that happened, though, Leoben ran his mouth. Kara found out that the Cylons had her father in their prison and had tortured him. She also found out that afterward they'd given him to a Three."

Parker stopped writing. "How did this Leoben associate Kara and her father?"

"He didn't. He mentioned another Colonial pilot in a flight suit like theirs being taken and that they couldn't get him to talk no matter what they'd done to him. Kara knew they were talking about her father."

Lee took a deep breath. He felt sick. Parker hesitated in his note taking. "We'll talk about Major Gallagher's situation later. What happened after you killed Leoben and disabled his centurions?"

"We all ran until we were half a mile or so away. Then we stopped to catch our breath and I told them we'd take them back to base camp with us. That's when Kara said she wanted to hide the Raider. I thought of the cave. She said the Raider would only hold two people so I went with her. Targa and Beck took Narcho and headed back toward camp."

Parker said, "So once you decided Kara and Noel weren't skinjobs, you trusted her enough to get in a ship with her? You weren't concerned she'd fly off with you?"

Hunter smiled. "I told her that if we weren't back in base camp by the time the others made it that they would kill Narcho. They wouldn't have done it, but she didn't know that."

"How did she react to your threat?" Parker asked.

"She was okay with it. I could tell she and Narcho are tight."

"Define tight," Lee managed to say.

"The same way my men are tight. We protect each other. Later she told me that he had flown her wing. She called him her wingman. You're a pilot. I'd have thought you would understand."

"I understand," Lee said.

Major Parker said, "Let's take a short break and stretch our legs."

Hunter stood, stretched and opened the door. Lee heard him go into the bathroom.

"Are you doing all right?" Parker asked him.

"Some of this is hard to listen to, but…I'm all right. I keep reminding myself that she's home. She's not hurt. That's what matters."

"The admiral called me last night. He might drop by later today. He's decided how he'll proceed after we finish the debriefings. He wants to be the one to tell Kara, but I think you'll be pleased. I also think you played a big part in his decision."

Lee smiled. "It'll be the first time he's ever listened to me."

He walked into the living room to speak to Kara and saw that she had curled up on the couch and had fallen asleep. Hunter walked through to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Lee followed him.

"She was up early this morning," Hunter said softly. "She had a nightmare about the spiders."

"What spiders?"

"I'll get to that part soon."

Hunter's story of taking the Raider to the cave and his and Kara's journey back to the valley took almost an hour because Major Parker had asked him to include every detail he could remember. Parker then went back and began asking questions about the cave, about the tree where Kara and Hunter had spent the night, and about the ropes they had crossed to get across the gorge. Parker had asked him to draw it on the whiteboard and Hunter had rendered a crude drawing that nevertheless got the point across. Then he told them about the snake.

"I was going to shoot it," Hunter said, "but shots echo. Centurion hearing is very good. Kara had the idea to use her slingshot. We practiced. She proved herself. So we did it."

Parker smiled. "Is proficiency with a slingshot a required part of pilot training now?"

Lee started to answer, but Hunter said, "She learned to use a slingshot while she and her friend Karl were living in a remote house when she was thirteen. She honed her skill shooting rats in the refugee camp."

Parker was still smiling. "I heard she took out Cavil with that slingshot and a big marble on the night we won our freedom."

"Yes, sir. She did." Lee looked back at Hunter. "She talked to you about the refugee camp?"

"A little. I got my nickname because I started spearing rats with a pointed stick in the _Hyperion_ when I was five years old. She told me about killing rats in the refugee camp."

"Tell us about the centurions that hunt the forest at night?" Parker asked.

"The skinjobs hole up at night. The centurions keep hunting. They use infrared. For some reason the Cylons have never thought to look up. We've got a number of shelters hidden in the trees at least twenty feet off the ground."

"And you and Kara spent the first night after her capture in one of these shelters?"

Hunter nodded. "It's a good thing, too. Centurions came through that night right below us. I was listening for them, but I was having a hard time hearing because of the tree frogs. Mating season. They make a lot of noise."

"Okay," Parker said. "You crossed the gorge the next day and reached your valley before lunch."

"Not before lunch. In the tree that night we ate one of those meals that Wildcat…Kara had brought with her and we ate the other one for lunch the next day. We rested for thirty minutes, crossed the gorge and hiked for another couple of hours. Then we got to the valley."

"And when did your uncles arrive with Noel Allison?"

"Maybe an hour later."

"Where were they quartered?"

Hunter looked directly at Lee. "Kara stayed with my aunt and my sister. Narcho stayed with me and my uncles. Cavil showed up a couple of days later and told us we couldn't leave the valley until the pilots were caught and their ship was found. So we were stuck there until yesterday morning when another Cylon brought her father to the valley."

Parker said, "I have a feeling the discussion of both Cavil's visit and Major Gallagher's is going to take a long time. Why don't we break here for lunch."

"Fine with me," Hunter grinned. "I'm hungry."

Lee was glad because he was hungry, too.

They stood and Lee opened the door. Parker glanced at his watch.

"Our lunch should have been delivered by now."

They found Kara awake and looking at a soccer game. She yawned. "My turn?"

"Lunchtime," Parker said. "No food yet?"

"No, sir."

A phone call revealed that lunch deliveries weren't scheduled to begin until Monday.

"I could go get some pizzas," Lee said.

Kara wrinkled her nose. "I don't want pizza again."

"Okay. There's a nice deli about five blocks north of here. I saw it while I was walking to the subway last night. We could all go."

Kara gave Lee a quick look. "Why don't you all go and bring me back something," Kara said. "I want to finish watching this game. I used to play when I was a kid. I like it better than pyramid."

"We can't leave you here by yourself," Parker said. "Sorry, but those are the rules."

"I'll stay," Lee said. "You and Hunter can go eat and then bring us something."

"It will probably be nearly an hour," Parker said. "You don't mind waiting that long for your lunch?"

Lee glanced at his CO. "I'll manage."

"There's some leftover pizza in the fridge," Kara said helpfully.

"Do you remember the name of the deli?" Parker asked Lee.

"Firelli's," I think.

"What do you two want to eat?"

"Cheese steak sub and some fries," Kara said.

"Make that two," Lee added.

"Okay, come on Hunter. I know you want to go out."

Hunter was grinning happily as they left. The door clicked shut behind them.

Lee walked over and sat on the couch beside Kara.

"How's it going?" She asked.

"Hunter told us a lot. You had a busy couple of days after you landed on Nereid."

"Then everything slowed down. I did a lot of gardening and fishing…nothing that got my adrenaline flowing except the day Cavil showed up."

Lee took her hand. "We've got…Major Parker and Hunter won't be back for at least forty-five minutes."

Kara looked at him, a sly smile on her face. "What difference does that make? I thought you told me last night that we couldn't make this into our personal _love nest_."

"The timing was all wrong last night."

"And it's right now?"

"Major Parker is no fool. He left us here together…alone. I'm sure he did that on purpose."

"So what you're saying is that you've got your CO's permission to sleep with me in his safe house."

Lee shrugged. "It's not really _his_ safe house."

"Oh, that makes all the difference in the world. Why didn't you tell me earlier that it wasn't _his_ safe house?"

"Rub it in. I deserve it."

"I'm picking at you. You're so serious. What happened to you on Tauron?"

He shook his head and pulled her into his arms. "Not now. Later."

"I've missed you," she barely managed to get the words out. "I love you and I've really missed you."

He kissed her, the gentle start just the way she loved it, the way their mouths came together, the way he tilted her head. She felt herself melting, melting against him as he hardened against her and the kiss deepened. This was what she wanted, this was what she needed, to be in his arms like this.

"I've missed you, too," he said. "You can't know how much I've missed you."

"Show me," she whispered.

"We'd better go to your bedroom. I don't want to show Hunter and Major Parker, too."

He took her hand and led her down the hall and when they were through the door, he closed it, wishing it had a lock, but fairly certain that if Major Parker and Hunter returned sooner than he thought they would, both would respect the closed door.

By the time he turned around, Kara had already peeled off her t-shirt. She kicked off her tennis shoes and stepped out of her jeans. The sight of her pale, slim body was almost more than he could take. He reached behind his neck, grasped his sweater, pulled it over his head and dropped it on the floor. Kara put her arms around him and pressed herself against him. He found the catch on her bra and released it. She moaned softly, her hands reaching for his zipper. They stumbled toward the bed and fell on it, both of them hot now and eager.

"Kara," he groaned, "Wait a minute. This isn't going to last two minutes if we don't slow down."

"I don't care."

She grasped the back of his head and pulled his mouth down to hers. He felt her other hand guide him into her. The hot feelings of pleasure coursed through him and he struggled, trying to delay the inevitable, wanting her to feel the same kind of pleasure that was so close for him.

He brought his mouth to her ear as he whispered. "I love you, Kara. I'll always love you."

How many nights on the _Penelope_ and the _Galactica_ had he dreamed about this and now she was here and it was happening. Her hands dug into the muscles of his back. Her neck arched. She choked back the cry in her throat so that it was soft as sigh, and then the world dissolved into cascades of fire for him.

He finally rolled down beside her and pulled her against him. "I think we just set some kind of record."

"Nope," Kara said. "Remember the first time after I was restricted to campus for a month for fighting with Maggie?"

"The longest month of my life…except for the last one."

"And the first time after I was on the _Galactica_ for three months?"

"Don't remind me. That was the longest _three months_ of my life."

Kara propped up on her elbow and looked down at him. "I remember something else about both those times, too."

Lee racked his brain, fearful that he wasn't going to know the answer to something he should know. "Give me a hint," he finally said.

Kara grinned. "How quick you were ready for round two. But that was months ago. Maybe that's asking too much now," she teased. "Maybe twice before Hunter and Major Parker get back is asking too much."

Lee relaxed. They were all right. He'd been worried for nothing. He pulled her over him. "Try me," he said before he kissed her. They were definitely going to be all right.

TBC…


	24. Debriefing Part 2

Chapter 24

Debriefing Part II

_1. When her son had reached his third year, the Lord sent a vision to Azurra and warned her of impending danger to her child._

_2. War was again being waged among the Twelve Tribes and General Ulixes was called to bear weapons and lead his army into battle._

_3. Azurra gathered the six sisters and gave them a charge to protect their brother because God had told her that the six shall protect the peacemaker._

_4. And the six swore an oath to protect the son of the third wife for they knew that he was blessed._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Azurra, _Chapter 7:1-4

.

Kara smiled. Some days the gods gave her a break. Like today. When Major Parker and Hunter got back from the deli with their food, she and Lee were both thoroughly satisfied, had showered and were sitting on the couch exactly where they had been an hour earlier. If either Parker or Hunter noticed Lee's slightly damp hair, neither one of them said anything although Hunter gave her a quick conspiratorial smile. He knew. Major Parker knew, too. But what he hadn't seen couldn't go into any type of report.

Parker held up a bag. "Lunch. I know you two must be starving. Who won the soccer match?"

She and Lee had missed the end of the game, but she had seen the score. "My favorite team lost."

"Who's your favorite team?"

"The Rendlesham Rockets. There was a kid who played on one of the teams in the refugee camp. He was good. He made the Rockets team last year. They're a young team, but they've got a lot of potential."

"I see you follow soccer as well as pyramid," Parker observed.

"I played soccer when I was a kid."

Lee took the bag of food into the kitchen and Kara followed. Hunter stood in the doorway while they ate.

"You can sit down with us," Kara said to him. "How did you like your walk?"

Hunter pulled out a chair and sat. "I don't even know how to describe it."

She stuffed a fry into her mouth. "Noisy?"

He grinned. "Smelly, too. Major Parker said it's the exhaust fumes from the vehicles."

"What's worse…exhaust fumes or goat manure?"

"I'll have to think about that one."

"Can we talk about something else while we're eating?" Lee asked.

Kara rolled her eyes. "What about wolves? Let's talk about wolves."

"Are there wolves on Nereid?" Lee asked.

"Hunter says _yes_, but I never saw one."

"Eventually you would have. Why do you think our shepherds carry rifles? We've reduced the wolf population to a manageable size now."

Lee finished chewing a bite of his sub. "Kill or be killed. Right?"

"Just like what we do in the forest with the Cylons."

"How many wolves?" Kara asked Lee.

"I didn't count. At least seven. They messed up Quartararo's wrist before Kendra took one out with a big block of wood and I used a flaming coat rack on a couple of others."

Kara stopped before she bit into her sub. "A flaming coat rack? I've got to hear the whole story."

"What happened to your weapons?" Hunter asked.

"We didn't take them with us. We were looking for voter registration lists in a little town. The wolves were a surprise."

"What happened to Crashdown's wrist?" Kara asked.

"A wolf clamped down on it and messed it up. He had surgery back here on Caprica. He's out of the hospital now and back at the apartment with Saunders. He's doing physical therapy so he can fly again."

"So when did the Heavy Raider get involved?"

"The next day. Saunders was our ECO when it happened. He broke his nose and got a concussion when we crashed. If we'd had to go out a third day, Commander Cain would have had to order someone to fly with us. The whole crew had decided by then that Kendra and I were jinxed. I think Chief Tyrol was ready to paint some hex signs above the door of our Raptor or something."

Kara said, "Will you tell me the whole story?"

"When we get a chance. It's a long one."

Hunter smiled. "Do I get to hear this story or is it private? I'd like to hear about the wolves and the flaming coat rack."

"I'll tell you both when your debriefings are finished…maybe over beer at Zeno's."

"Beer is sort of like mead." Kara said to Hunter. "And Zeno's is a place close to Lee's apartment where we go to eat dinner and drink beer. Lee and I don't cook much. We usually go to Zeno's or order a pizza."

Hunter said, "I've heard about beer. My grandfather speaks fondly of Libran beer."

Major Parker came to the door. "About ready to get started again?"

"Yes, sir. Almost," Lee answered.

Parker looked at Kara. "We may not get to you today."

She shrugged. "I'm sure I can find something on television."

Hunter left the kitchen and walked toward the hallway. Lee stuffed a last fry into his mouth and grabbed his drink.

"Go ahead. I'll clean up," Kara said. "Can I borrow your phone? I'd like to call Dreilide and let him know I'm home."

He unclipped his phone, handed it to her and mouthed. "I love you."

Back in the interrogation room Lee settled into his chair while Major Parker started the cameras recording.

"Let's talk for a few minutes about a typical day for you when you're in the forest."

"We have six teams. Each team is three to five men. Any more than that works against us. Most of the men in the valley older than fifteen and younger than sixty rotate on and off the teams. At any given time we have two to four teams deployed. Each team stays out one or two weeks and comes in for the same amount of time. We do this during most of the year. Neither side hunts in the dead of winter, especially if there's snow on the ground. Tracking is too easy. The skinjobs are tough, but they suffer from the cold just like we do. The centurions have problems in the cold. They're machines. They've got moving parts. Constant freezing and thawing doesn't do them a lot of good."

"On any given mission how often do you usually encounter the Cylons?"

"That's hard to say. Sometimes we go the whole time and never encounter them once. Sometimes we fight them two or three times."

"How often do you lose men?"

"In the last year we lost two. Our teams are good now. When we first started fighting them, we lost a lot more. My father learned their ways and taught all of us. He started using smaller groups of fighters. He saw that the Cylons rely on the brute strength of the centurions. Markham's device helped even the odds. If we take out the centurions, we've got at least a fifty-fifty chance against the skinjobs. I've only made two changes in the way we do things since my father died. If a team gets in trouble, they're on their own. That's what got my father and Emmalyn's husband killed. We went to the rescue of a group who had gotten pinned down. Instead of losing four men, we lost eight in that fight and had thirteen wounded. We can't afford those kinds of losses."

As Hunter had spoken, a hard coldness had come into his voice and his eyes, like one door inside of him had closed and another one had opened. Again Lee was overwhelmed with how different Hunter's life had been from anything he could imagine.

"You keep saying men," Lee said. "Do women ever fight with you?"

"They used to. Not anymore. That's the second change I made."

Lee thought of all the women serving in the military who were good pilots and soldiers. "Why?"

Hunter sat looking down at the table for a moment. Then he raised his eyes. It was obvious when he spoke that he hadn't wanted to answer the question, but he made himself.

"Not long after my father was killed, the Cylons started employing another technique designed to demoralize us. They started making a real effort to capture the women instead of killing them. Then they gave them to a special group of cruel and brutal human men. I don't think I need to tell you what happened to them. A man will do stupid things when his woman or his sister is in danger. The Cylons learned that and started using it against us. I stopped that kind of problem by keeping the women in the valley."

He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to.

Parker cleared his throat. "When you aren't in the forest, what do you do?"

"Whatever is needed. There's always something that needs to be done in the valley. We plow, we plant, we weed and we harvest. We shear sheep. We hunt and fish. We cook and clean and wash and take care of our kids. We do what we have to do to survive."

"Tell me about the day Cavil came to the valley looking for Kara and Lieutenant Allison."

"It was the third day after we got back. He showed up in three Heavy Raiders with his centurions and the downloaded skinjob we'd killed, the one called Leoben. He told us all to come out of our dwellings so we did. Then he had his centurions search to make sure everyone was out. Leoben walked down the road looking at everybody."

"How many centurions?"

"Eighteen. Each ship had six not including the pilots. Eight if you count them."

"Kara said she and Lieutenant Allison had borrowed some clothes."

"That's right. Narcho hadn't shaved. He still hasn't. He was with my uncles. Leoben passed right by him, barely glanced at him. Kara was holding my little girl."

Hunter hesitated and Lee knew that he was trying to decide how much he needed to tell them. After a few moments, he took a deep breath and went on.

"Esmari was three months old at the time. Her mother is dead so her grandmother takes care of her. Kara had gone to see them. When Leoben stopped in front of her and asked her to tell him her name, Esmari's grandmother said her name was Juliana."

"Was that your wife's name?" Parker asked.

"We weren't married, but that was her name. Leoben was still looking at Kara. He tried to force her to look at him and…I pulled him away from her." Hunter hesitated then and finally said, "Cavil asked him if it was her or not. Leoben wasn't sure, so they left."

"That's everything that happened?"

"Cavil told us we were confined to the valley until they found the pilots and their ship. He said if he found out we'd harbored them that he would be back. Part of our agreement is that we don't harbor fugitives from the settlements or the city. We broke that rule once a couple of years ago, but that's another story and has nothing to do with what happened while Kara was there."

"The Cylons didn't return to the valley after that one time?"

"No. When Kara and I left, Cavil and his crew had moved his search north into the mountains."

"Who brought Major Gallagher there yesterday?"

"A Six. He called her Sonja."

"In a Heavy Raider?"

"Yes."

"How many centurions were with them?"

"No centurions. Just the two of them."

Major Parker suddenly stopped scribbling. It was the only sign Lee saw that Parker was as surprised as he was.

Parker repeated Hunter's statement in the form of a question. "A Cylon skinjob brought a Colonial prisoner to the valley without any centurions?"

"That's right."

"Was she armed?"

"No."

"Was he shackled or restrained in any way?"

"No."

Again the hesitation followed by several quick scribbles. "Has anything like that ever happened before?"

"No Cylon has ever come to the valley except Cavil and the ones he brought with him. Sonja brought Kara's father there to identify her as one of the pilots, but he didn't do it. He told her that Kara wasn't his daughter. She knew he was lying so she hit him…really hard and said something about him still not telling her the truth. She was really mad at him. I've never seen a skinjob show that much emotion before."

"What did he do?"

"Nothing, but Kara charged at her. Her father must have realized what she was going to do because he got between them. Then Kara fell apart and so did he."

"What was Sonja doing while this was happening?"

"Watching them like she'd never seen a father and daughter hugging each other and crying."

"What happened next?"

"Kara's father asked if we could go somewhere more private and talk. Narcho was there by then with my uncles so I had them take Sonja back to their place and told Narcho to come with us. I was careful not to call his name or identify him as her copilot since he was staying behind. We went to the communal building."

Parker interrupted him. "Did Sonja go with your uncles willingly or did they have to force her?"

"She didn't seem too happy about it but she went on her own."

"Okay, continue."

"We all talked for a few minutes. Kara told him that I was going back to Caprica with her instead of Narcho, and then Kara's father told her to go put on her flight suit because he was going to get us to her ship so we could get off the planet."

Parker interrupted again. "Major Gallagher said _he_ was going to get you to her ship?"

"He knew how to fly the Heavy Raider."

_Holy Hera_, Lee thought. "Did John mention how he learned to fly a Heavy Raider?"

"Not to me. He might have told Kara."

Parker scribbled a long line on the yellow legal pad. "Okay. Go on."

"He flew us to a small clearing near the place where we had to enter the tunnel to get to the ship. He asked me how long it would take to reach it and I told him an hour. He told us he would keep Sonja in the valley for a couple of hours so we would have a chance to get back through the tunnel and get away. Kara asked for a few minutes to talk to her father alone. I walked on ahead. They talked. She caught up. We got back to her ship and…you know the rest."

"Major Gallagher told you that _he_ would keep Sonja in the valley for a couple of hours?"

"That's what he said."

Parker took a deep breath. Lee knew exactly what Parker was thinking. "How would you characterize Major Gallagher's relationship with Sonja?"

Hunter was smart enough to know where Parker was going with his question. Lee could tell he was torn between telling the truth and trying to make the situation look better for John.

Hunter finally said, "At first it looked like she was in charge. Then…I'm not sure. It looked like he told her what to do. He mentioned something to Kara about a bargain he had made with her but he didn't elaborate."

"If you had known nothing about his status before they came to your valley, would you have thought he was her prisoner?"

Hunter looked down at the table. "No."

"What would you have thought?"

Hunter kept his head down. "I wouldn't have thought they were enemies."

"Sir," Lee said. "John…just has a way with women…he…"

Parker looked sharply at him. "There'll be time for you to voice your opinion later."

Hunter said, "We know Kara's father was in their prison and was then taken to the city by a Three to be her breeder because of what Leoben said. We haven't been able to confirm that with our contact Mr. Fox because we haven't talked to him for a month, but we don't have any reason to doubt the truth of it. We don't have any idea why Kara's father was with a Six."

"So based on what you know, you would say that's unusual."

"Very."

"How about knowing how to fly a Cylon ship?"

Again Hunter dropped his eyes. "It's never happened before that I'm aware of. But that doesn't mean…"

Hunter's voice trailed off and he didn't finish the sentence.

Parker asked the question another way. "As the leader of a group of fighters, what is your honest assessment of the situation you observed?"

Hunter glanced up at them. "If that had happened with one of my men, we would assume he'd been compromised."

"Sir, John would never…"

Parker's voice had an edge that Lee hadn't heard in a long time. "You'll get your chance, Lee. This is Hunter's debriefing, not yours."

"Yes, sir."

"Tell us what you know about the prison."

"Nothing except that it's east of the city."

"Do you know how many human prisoners are there?"

"No."

"Do you know anything about their interrogation techniques?"

"Not really. Kara noticed a new scar on her father's face over his eye so we know he was beaten. Knowing the Cylons, they probably did a lot worse things to him. We've had fighters taken prisoner, but…none of them ever returned so we never got a first-hand account. The man I mentioned earlier who was their prisoner was shot by some centurions and thrown into the river. The bullet grazed his forehead and lodged in his skull. He doesn't remember anything about the prison or what they did to him there. He doesn't even remember what ship he was on or how he got to Nereid."

"Do you know if they use drugs as part of their interrogations?"

"Mr. Fox says they have a drug they use on the men who won't cooperate as breeders. It works, but eventually it turns the man into a vegetable. Fox said most of the humans in the city are okay living and breeding with the Cylons. They don't have to use the drug too often."

"Based on what you observed would you say Major Gallagher is one of those humans?"

Hunter shrugged. "It looked like it but we don't know anything about what had happened to him."

Parker scribbled some more. "How often do they bring humans from the prison?"

"Fox never mentioned anyone being brought to the city from the prison. We thought the Cylons brought all their human breeders from the settlements, but just because Fox didn't know about it doesn't mean it never happened. Fox only works in one building. There's a couple of others like his."

"Did Mr. Fox ever mention a human being brought to the city for any purpose other than to be used as a breeder?"

"Some of the humans are there as servants or slaves. Like I said, Mr. Fox is the head cook in just one of their buildings. He has a staff. There's others that do maintenance and things the centurions can't do or don't know how to do."

"How long has Major Gallagher been in the city?"

"At least a month."

"And he was with a Six when he came to the valley…not a Three?"

"She was definitely a Six."

"Do you have any idea why a Six brought him there instead of the Three?"

"I think some of the Sixes and Eights are pilots. I've never heard of a Three being a pilot."

"But you said Major Gallagher was flying the ship."

"I couldn't tell when they landed, but he was the one who flew us back to Kara's ship."

"I was under the impression that centurions usually fly the Heavy Raiders."

"They usually do."

"And you're absolutely certain Major Gallagher's Heavy Raider had no centurions aboard?"

"I was in the ship. You can't hide a centurion. I sat beside Kara's father when he flew us out of the valley."

With every answer Hunter gave, Lee was feeling sicker. He didn't want to believe it, but everything was pointing toward John collaborating with his captors.

"Is there anything else you can think of that you want to tell us right now?"

Hunter sat for a few moments and then said, "Kara loves her father. Please be careful how you insinuate he's collaborating with them because…because he's a hero to her just like my father is to me. Try not to destroy that for her. My people and I owe him. She was going to jump back to the valley for him after she let me out here on Caprica, but he told her not to. And before you attribute that to his love for the Cylons, he didn't do it for that reason. He did it because he knew if he disappeared, Cavil would destroy the valley and kill all my people or make slaves of them. That's why he stayed."

Parker said, "I'll keep that in mind. I believe we've picked your brain enough today. We'll talk about numbers and locations of the Cylons tomorrow or Monday. You can also tell us about the other settlements at that time. You can go watch television now."

Hunter stood. "Should I tell Kara to come in?"

"Not yet. Hunter, I'd like to caution you about discussing any part of your interview with her. We're being very lenient with both of you in keeping you together. Normally you would have been separated, but I feel like under the circumstances you would be more comfortable being with Kara since you don't know anyone else on Caprica. I'd hate to have to change that arrangement and separate you for the duration of your debriefings. Do you understand?"

Hunter nodded. "I understand."

"How about closing the door on your way out." Parker waited until Hunter had gone and the door was closed. He got up and turned off the cameras and recorders. "Thoughts?"

"I don't think John would collaborate with them. I know it looks bad, but I can't believe he would do it."

"How do you explain him being able to fly a Heavy Raider?"

"I flew a Heavy Raider from the surface of Tauron up to the Galactica. It handles a lot like a Raptor. It would be easy for John to fly one. He started flying a Viper when he was eighteen. Since then he's flown dozens of commercial and cargo ships as well as Raptors."

"Did you read any of the interviews with prisoners the Cylons had taken here on Caprica while they were in power?"

"No, sir. Those interviews are above my current security clearance."

"The Cylons broke every single human in that prison or killed them in the process. They used a combination of torture and drugs. We have to assume Major Gallagher was broken since he's still alive."

Lee shook his head. "I don't believe it."

Parker's voice softened for a moment. "I know that he's your friend and he's Kara's father. I admire your loyalty to him, but we've got to assume that they broke him at the prison based simply on the fact that he's still alive and has an apparent degree of freedom. We've also got to be concerned with how much Major Gallagher told them about Colonial military plans. He's a close friend of your father's. He may know things I'm not even aware of. I spoke with the admiral briefly last night. The minute he found out that John is alive, he assumed the Cylons on Nereid knew we were able to engage the Cylons here on Caprica."

"John couldn't have known the outcome of the fighting until he saw Kara yesterday. He couldn't have told them we were in control of Caprica."

"The fact that we were armed and taking them on would have been enough."

"Then why haven't the Cylons on Nereid done something about it? Why haven't they shown up here?"

"I don't know. Maybe they don't have the resources to move on us right now. Maybe they don't care, but Admiral Adama is making sure we're ready if they come."

Lee lowered his head and nodded. He couldn't deny anything Parker had just said. He didn't believe it, but he couldn't deny it.

"During the last two years of the First War, John flew a Viper off the _Solaria_. He survived hundreds of missions. He had two hundred eighty-four confirmed kills. He knows who the enemy is."

Parker sat for a long time before he commented. "That was a long time ago, Lee. Based on what Hunter has told us, we have to assume that he's cooperating to the point of functioning as a breeder for the Three. Since he's not a vegetable we have to assume they're not giving him the drug. It sounds like he might also have an intimate relationship with the Six."

"The only reason he might appear to be collaborating is that he's working on a plan to escape."

"Do you think he would engage in a sexual relationship with Sonja?"

"If he thought it would help him gain an advantage or escape. Women really like John. Like I said he's just got a way with them. But he loves Laura. I know he does. He's devoted to her and their son."

"I watched Captain Hadrian's interview with him after the incident at the lab. I agree with you that he has the looks and he has the charm."

Lee thought for a moment. "According to my father the Six in the bunker prison, Natasi, is in love with Dr. Baltar so they must be capable of feelings. I've been around Sharon and Karl a lot because they're Kara's friends. I believe Sharon is sincere in her feelings for Karl. She married him. She's having his child."

"I watched the recording of Romo Lampkin's interrogation of Natasi about their homeworld. It certainly looks like she's in love with Dr. Baltar…and she betrayed her people because of it."

"Then maybe John thinks he can get Sonja to betray her people. Didn't Sharon betray the Cylons because she loves Karl?"

"Are you aware of a condition called Knossos Syndrome?" Parker asked.

"Yes, sir. It's a condition where a prisoner begins to identify with his captors…to bond with them."

"Is it not possible, Lee, that if Major Gallagher was tortured at the prison and then brought to the city and that torture ceased, that he's suffering from this syndrome? That he's fallen for one or both of the Cylon women and betrayed us due to those feelings?"

"No. I don't believe he's fallen in love with a Cylon. And I'll never believe he betrayed us."

Parker drew a deep breath and massaged his forehead with the tips of his fingers again. "I'm well aware of his willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice. I really want to believe there's some other explanation for what happened yesterday, but we've got to go with the odds on his situation. We can't afford not to."

"I'm certain there's another explanation. I'm sure of it."

"Lee, I'm not enjoying this any more than you are. Major Gallagher did a heroic and selfless thing when he took out that basestar, but we can't let that knowledge get in the way of the facts. We can't ignore what probably happened to him under torture in that prison. He's not the same man now that he was five months ago."

"I know that, sir."

Parker looked at his watch. "It's almost four o'clock. I don't want to start on Kara's debriefing today. I'm too tired. I want to take a copy of Hunter's interview home tonight and look at it and go over my notes so I can plan a good place to start with her. I'm going to recommend that we take tomorrow off and start with Kara first thing Monday morning. I think we've been invited to Marble House tomorrow to eat lunch with the President. Now, why don't we all go for a walk? There's a park about six blocks south. We could go there and show Hunter that everything in the city isn't noise and exhaust fumes. I'm sure we can find somewhere close around the park to eat dinner. By the time we get back, the agent who will be staying the night with them should be here."

"That sounds good."

"And Lee, I'll caution you like I did Hunter. No discussion of anything we've talked about with Kara. Her turn will come. I want her answers to be as spontaneous and unrehearsed as possible. I don't want her on the defensive and I don't want anything she says tainted by hearing something Hunter has told us."

"I'd like to second what Hunter said. Please go easy on her about her father. She loves him. If you insinuate you think he's become a collaborator for any reason, you'll turn her off and you won't get much from her. She's not dumb. She's had time to think about it. I'm sure she's already aware of how it looks."

"That's why we're quitting now. I want to start fresh with her. Despite her theft of the Raider, she's not a criminal and I don't want to treat her like one."

"Thank you, sir. And thank you for…lunch today."

Parker smiled. "Maybe when all this is over, you can take my kids to the zoo for a Saturday afternoon and I can take my wife to lunch."

Lee grinned. "You just name the Saturday."

...

John awoke to the sound of dishes in the kitchen and the wind-driven spatter of rain against his bedroom window. He pulled on sweatpants and a t-shirt and walked through the gray gloom to the brightly-lit kitchen.

"Good morning, sir," Doolittle said. "I was getting ready to wrap up your breakfast. I thought you was sleeping late."

"I was awake for a while last night."

"Another nightmare?"

John nodded. "A bad one."

"We all have them. I'm sure yours is a lot worse than most. You want me to start some coffee?"

John sat down at the table and yawned. "I can do it in a minute. I'm still trying to wake up."

"No problem, sir. I'll do it." He ran water in the pot and measured out the coffee. In only a minute the coffeemaker was burbling and dripping.

Doolittle always seemed to know, so John asked, "What's the weather forecast?"

"Cold front coming in. Rain on and off for the next couple of days. This month and part of the next is the rainy season here."

"I might go for a walk anyway."

"I thought you was going to go see Rika this morning."

"I am. I'll work out and shower and then go see her. Maybe the rain will have let up and I can go out for a walk then."

Doolittle went to the sink, wet a paper towel and wrapped it several times around his transmitter collar like he had done the day John had met him.

"I shouldn't ought to ask and if you don't want to do it, you just say so. There won't be no hard feelings."

"What?"

Doolittle produced a square of paper from his jacket pocket that had been folded and refolded until it fit in his palm.

"Would you give this to Rika?"

John teased him. "What would your wife say if she knew you were writing love notes to another woman?"

"The note ain't from me, sir. It's from one of the boys what works for me."

John rubbed his face with his hands. His cheek was still very sore. "Love note?"

"Yes, sir. If you don't want to…"

John held out his hand and Doolittle put the small folded square into it. "How long has it been going on?"

"The best part of a year."

"They in love?"

"Yes, sir. He's sure in love with her. I started to ask you last night cause I knew he'd want to know. What's the baby look like?"

John rubbed his face again. "She looks like a baby. It's too early to say if she looks more like her mother or her father."

"Is she pale or dark?"

"She's got Rika's pale coloring."

Doolittle walked to the kitchen window and looked out. "The skinjob's, too."

"I take it that's not what the young man would want to hear." John said.

"No, sir. He's a handsome fellow. Black hair and eyes and dark olive skin."

"What's his name?"

"Yusef. He's Tauron. His father was Ha'la'tha, but Yusef is a good boy, a hard worker, does anything he's asked to do. Never complains."

"How did they manage to get together under Leoben's nose?"

"I don't ask no questions, sir. He does his work for me, always on time, never slacks off. I don't know how they done it and I don't want to know."

"It'll have to end, you know. Now that the child has been born, Rika and Leoben will move into the building with the other couples who have children. It's on the other side of the park."

"He knows that. That's why he wrote her that note."

"Leoben raped her, didn't he?"

"I don't know, sir. It'd be best not to ask."

"You're right. It would be better if I don't hear her say it. Rika hates him. That's all the answer I need."

"Sir, I told you before it'd be best not to get involved in their problems. You got enough to worry about."

"I asked Sonja about their situation. She wouldn't say one way or the other. Petra and Gianne seem happy enough so Sonja has found a way to delude herself about those like Leoben and Rika.."

"Sonja knows about the drug what they use on some men, don't she? Like the Three used on you? That ain't normal."

"She doesn't use it so I think she's found a way to rationalize its use by some of the others. Nothing I've said to her on that subject has gotten through to her. She doesn't even understand why it bothers me to cheat on my wife. She's of the _if it feels good, do it _school of thought. I know a few humans like her. They only see what they want to see. They don't give a damn about the other guy's beliefs and values."

Doolittle studied John a moment. "Why'd she hit you? It was her, wasn't it and not the Three?"

"It was her. She has a thing about me lying to her. She caught me in a big one."

"Did it have something to do with the other one?"

"No."

"I been taking the Three's food to her the last couple of days. She's not eating too much."

"Morning sickness."

"Well, I guess congratulations is in order for you, sir."

"Lucky me," John said glumly.

Doolittle removed the damp paper towel from the transmitter collar. He poured a cup of coffee and put it on the table. "Your coffee's ready, sir. I'll be going now."

"Thanks," John said absently.

He put the folded square of paper into the pocket of his sweatpants. Then he looked at Doolittle and nodded his head. He would take Yusef's note to Rika and hope he was doing the right thing.

...

Kara looked up from the television as Hunter emerged from the hall into the living room. She hadn't been able to find any sporting event she wanted to watch and had become engrossed in a documentary about the subjugation of the Sagittarons. She wanted to know if the filmmaker was going to mention Tom Zarek.

Hunter sat down on the other end of the couch and Kara muted the television.

"That doesn't look like any sort of game," he said.

"It's a documentary about the Colony of Sagittaron. It's a visual history lesson."

"So your television isn't just to show different kinds of games."

Kara smiled. "Nope. If you can imagine it, one of the channels probably shows it. We have whole channels that are nothing but shopping channels. They show you all kinds of stuff like clothes and jewelry and you can call a phone number or go online and order the stuff. Of course you have to have a debit or credit card to charge it."

"What's a debit or credit card?"

Since even the concept of cubits changing hands was foreign to the people of the valley, Kara explained it to Hunter. He caught on quickly.

"So the things we do in the valley for each other for free, people here on Caprica charge to do them. Then they take the money and pay somebody else for services or things. And the goal is to take in more cubits than you pay out."

"That's it in a nutshell. Although not everybody's primary goal is accumulating cubits."

"It sounds complicated. I like our way better."

Kara finally asked, "What are Lee and Major Parker doing? Didn't they want to start asking me questions?"

"I don't know. They just told me to leave and said one of them would come get you when they were ready for you."

"What did you talk about?"

He shrugged. "Everything I could think of to tell them."

"Like what?"

"I'm not supposed to talk about it."

"Okay," she said grumpily, "Keep your secrets."

"There's nothing secret…"

"I'm kidding, Hunter."

He smiled. "I'd have thought watching that soccer game at lunch today would have settled you down. Lee could hardly stay awake for the first thirty minutes."

She gave him an eye roll and turned the sound back on the documentary. "Pay attention. You might learn something."

Kara knew what he didn't want to tell her. They'd talked about her father. She and Hunter sat in silence and watched the television until Lee and the major walked into the room. Her fears were verified when Lee glanced at her and then quickly looked away.

Parker said cheerfully, "It's too late to start Kara's interview today. Lee and I have decided that we need another walk. We'll go south this time to a park. Then we'll grab dinner somewhere close by."

"Suits me," Kara said.

"You'd better get jackets if you have them. It'll be cool before we get back."

Kara went into her bedroom and got a heavy sweatshirt. She told Hunter to take the sweatshirt with the hood. They all rode the elevator down to the parking garage where Lee and Major Parker got windbreakers out of their cars. Then they rode back up to the ground level and started down the street.

Lee took Kara's hand and they fell several paces behind Parker and Hunter.

"What's wrong?" She asked.

"Nothing."

"Did Major Parker tell you to keep quiet, too?"

"We never discuss the results of one person's interview with another one. At some point Parker will bring you both together and we'll talk again."

"It's my father, isn't it? That's what everybody is tiptoeing around."

"Kara, please."

"I'm not stupid. I know how it looks. So he can fly a Heavy Raider. Big deal. He said it handled a lot like a Raptor. He told me he learned how to fly it an hour before he and that Sonja landed in the valley. What a bitch. She hit my dad for trying to protect me. I wish I had gotten to her. I'd have wiped that smirk off her stupid face."

Lee squeezed Kara's hand. "You'll get a chance to tell us about it. Now is not the time. Let this go for now, Kara. Just let it go. Neither one of us can do anything about it."

"Do you believe he…"

"No! And that's what I told Parker." They walked in silence for a while until Lee asked, "Did you talk to Dreilide?"

"He's glad I'm home. He doesn't sound too good. He says it's allergies from all the pollen in the air this spring, but I know better."

"Maybe I can talk Parker into letting you make a quick visit tomorrow right after lunch."

"That would be great."

Lee squeezed her hand and they followed Parker and Hunter into the park. They finally stopped at the edge of a small lake where a family was throwing bread crumbs to a number of geese and ducks that had gathered.

"Do those people fatten them up and then catch and eat them?" Hunter asked about the ducks and geese.

Kara smiled at him. "I explained about debit and credit cards. I'll let Major Parker explain about the ducks and geese in the park."

As if turned out, Lee got to give Hunter the explanation because Major Parker's mobile phone rang. He walked away from them and spoke for over ten minutes.

When he returned, he said, "That was Admiral Adama. He wants us to meet him in thirty minutes at a restaurant on the other side of the park. Dinner will be his treat."

...

After working out, shaving and showering, John dressed in a clean blue shirt and khakis and rode the elevator down to the second floor. The hallway was quiet and deserted. He knocked on the door at the end and when nobody answered, he opened it and stuck his head inside. Cassandra, Petra's little girl, was asleep in a crib against the far wall. He stepped inside and quietly shut the door. Several rooms radiated off the central area where he now stood. The one on the far right was the birthing room where they had taken Rika the previous day.

John stood for a few moments trying to decide what to do. He knew Petra must be with Rika and he didn't want to disturb them. He was just about to leave when Petra walked out of another room and closed the door. Her blouse was open and she had the infant at her breast.

Petra looked tired. She went to a rocking chair in the big room and sat.

"Rika wants nothing to do with the baby," she said with a long sigh. "Cassie's a little over a year old. I had just started to wean her. I guess I'll be doing this for a while longer now. Of course Gianne and the other mothers will help. We won't let this little one starve."

"How does Leoben feel about that?"

Petra sighed again and shook her head. "It was ugly last night. Rika told him to get out. She told him she hated him. Called him a monster. Called him a lot of other names, too. Much worse names. She was screaming, hysterical almost. Simon finally had to give her something to calm her down. I don't think Leoben expected that kind of reaction from her. He tucked his tail between his legs and left. I haven't seen him since."

"How is Rika?"

"Lying in bed staring at the wall. I told Simon this morning that we should keep her here for a few days. I think it would be a big mistake to send her back to Leoben with the baby right now. Simon agreed."

"Do you think this place is monitored?"

Petra shook her head. "Simon won't allow it."

"I have a note for her."

"From Yusef?"

"You know about him?"

She nodded.

"Did you help them see each other?"

"The gods forgive me, but they're in love. When my Simon was at the clinic downtown, I let Rika and Yusef use our apartment to meet."

"You were risking a lot."

"Five and a half years ago Rika and I were seated beside each other on a passenger ship traveling from Virgon to Caprica. It was just one of those chance things. I was on my way to attend a seminar for nurse midwives. Rika was sixteen years old and had a scholarship to the Caprica School of Fine Arts. She's a very gifted violinist. The Cylons took the ship. We were brought to this planet."

"To a settlement?"

"Yes. We were there for almost two years. We worked in the fields, very hard work most of the time, but the Cylons made it clear that if we didn't work, we wouldn't eat. Then about three years ago some of the skinjobs started coming once every few months and selecting a few men and women to take to the city. The centurions had finally completed this building and the skinjobs were filling it up with potential breeders. I knew that Rika would be selected. She tried to hide her natural beauty by cutting her hair short, but Leoben saw her right away. He made several trips trying to convince her that she belonged in the city. He promised her that she wouldn't have any of the hard physical labor we all endured in the settlement. She said she would rather do the hard labor than go with him. He finally took her anyway. By then Rika was like a younger sister to me. I volunteered to go with a copy of Simon in order to stay near her. I don't regret my choice. I'd always wanted a child and now I have Cassie. I don't love my husband, but my life could be much worse."

Petra put the baby against her shoulder and buttoned her blouse.

"So the son of a bitch Leoben brought her back here and raped her," John said between clenched teeth.

"Not at first. He even married her in one of their monotheistic ceremonies before she had borne a child which is something the rest of them won't do. Rika told me later that she never repeated any of the vows so to her the marriage was never valid. He kept spouting things like God's will and God's destiny for her. I think he actually tried to woo her with kindness…but it made no difference to Rika."

"When did it change?"

"When she killed him. She stabbed him in the neck with a steak knife. After he downloaded and came back that's when he…forced her the first time. His patience with her had run out. She was a virgin. That was her introduction to sex."

" Gods damned son of a bitch," John said angrily. "I knew it."

"After that her food was brought, she ate, and then everything was taken away."

"That's how she met Yusef."

"Yes. She told me that Yusef was making plans to get her out of the city to a place they could be together. I told her there was no such place on this planet, yet she continued to dream of it and talk of it. And then she got pregnant. She was sure, so sure that the baby was Yusef's. I knew that wasn't nearly as likely as the other possibility because…" her voice trailed off.

"Leoben was still forcing her to have sex with him."

"Yes. She fought him at first, but by then she had stopped fighting and just let him do what he wanted to her. I talked to her. I explained the odds of the child being Yusef's since they had been together only a few times, but Rika wouldn't listen. She said the gods wouldn't do something so cruel as to make her have the Cylon's child. I have to share in the responsibility for what happened. I was afraid. I was so afraid that if I didn't help her be together with Yusef that she would…and she was pregnant…I was afraid…" again her voice trailed off.

"You were afraid she'd do something to herself and the baby?"

"Yes."

"Do you think Leoben has any idea about Rika and Yusef?"

"No! Oh, gods no! He would have sent Yusef to the prison if he'd had a clue. I'm not sure what he would have done to Rika."

"And now she's rejected the child because her skin is pale and her hair is blond and she thinks Leoben is the father."

Tears came to Petra's eyes. "How can I blame her considering how the baby was conceived? Rika is not a bad person. You should hear her play the violin. At night in the settlement sometimes she would play for us. She's so good it would break your heart. Leoben let her bring the violin with her to the city, but she hasn't played it once since she's been here. Not once. She said that music belonged to another part of her life. Just two weeks ago she told me that she would play again when she and Yusef were together raising their child. What more could I say to her? She's not even twenty-two years old. She shouldn't say that music belongs to another part of her life. She has such a gift. She should be happy and free and sharing her gift with all of us. She should be with the man she loves and they should be raising a child together. She deserves so much more from life."

Tears had come to Petra's eyes and now rolled down her cheeks. She lifted the edge of the baby's blanket and dabbed them.

"Do you think she would listen to me? I know I've only seen her once before yesterday, but…she reminds me so much of my daughter."

"What does the note say?"

"I haven't read it. Maybe I shouldn't give it to her. I don't know if it will make things better or worse."

"I'm not sure how things could be any worse."

John stood. "Okay. I'll try."

He walked to the door of the room that Petra had exited earlier and knocked softly on it. There was no response. Quietly he opened the door.

Rika was curled on her side with her face toward the wall. "Go away."

"It's John. Can I come in?"

"Yes," she finally said.

There was a wooden chair sitting beside the door. He picked it up, carried it to the other side of the bed and sat. Rika's eyes were red and swollen.

"I'm sorry," he said softly to her. "You can't know how sorry I am that all this has happened to you."

Rika said nothing for a while and then her eyes flicked briefly in his direction. "It's not your fault."

"I have a daughter. She'll be nineteen in a couple of months. You remind me so much of her. She's blond like you and about your size."

"Is she here?"

"No. She's on Caprica."

"Is that where you're from?"

"Now it is, but I was born on Virgon just like you."

"Where?"

"Port Ithaca up north. Where are you from?"

"I grew up in Boskirk, the capital."

"Petra tells me that you can play the violin, that you're really good."

The vacant stare returned. "Not anymore."

John took a deep breath. "Your little girl…"

"If you're going to tell me that I ought to want her and love her, then you can leave."

"You heard me say yesterday that I was brought to the city to be with a Three."

"I heard. We thought you were Sonja's."

"The point is that even though they have a lot of control over my body, none of them will ever control my heart. My heart still belongs to my wife. I love her and these Cylons can't change that no matter what they do to me."

He saw the first tiny ghost of a smile form on Rika's lips. "I love someone, too."

John lowered his voice almost to a whisper. "Yusef."

Her eyes opened wide as her arm came through the bed rails. She gripped his wrist. "You've talked to him?"

"No. I've never met him. He sent word through someone."

"What did he say?" She asked greedily.

"He sent you a note."

"Did you read it?"

"No." John took the folded note out of his pocket, placed it in her palm and closed her fingers around it. "I'll leave you to read it in private, but I'd like to ask you to remember one thing. That little baby is innocent of anything her father did, and even though she's half his, she's half yours, too."

She didn't speak for a long time, and then she said, "I'm sure your heart is in the right place, but you don't understand."

"I understand only too well. The Three who brought me here is pregnant. I love my wife. I don't want to have a child with another woman, but I'm not going to turn my back on the baby. He deserves a father as much as my son on Caprica who was conceived in love. That little baby is blameless."

"Did she use the drug on you?"

"Once. After that I co-operated because Doolittle told me what would happen to me otherwise."

"It never ends, does it? Their evil never ends."

"That's the part we can't control. When I was twenty-two…about your age now…I lost my leg in a motorcycle accident. I thought my life was over because I couldn't fly a Viper anymore. I lost sight of what's important and I almost gave up, but I didn't. You're so young. Don't let this ruin your life. Maybe one day we'll be free from the Leobens and D'Annas and all the rest of them."

"Is that what you'd tell your daughter if she was here in this bed instead of me?"

"That's what I'd tell her," John said sincerely, not mentioning what he would do to Leoben. "Don't let them win. You're stronger than that."

"I'll think about it." She reached out and briefly squeezed his wrist. "Thank you for bringing the note. Yusef would like you."

He stood and gently smoothed back her hair as he'd often done for Kara. "You're not alone, Rika. You have friends. Let us help."

The note was still tightly clutched in her hand. She nodded and closed her eyes. It was his cue to leave.

He walked back to the outer room.

"How did it go?" Petra asked.

He shrugged. "I don't know. I talked to her about not letting this ruin her life. She listened to me. I don't know if she'll take it to heart."

Petra stood and handed him the child. "Would you hold her and listen for Cassie to wake up while I take a shower. After what happened last night, I was afraid to leave Rika. I've been here since yesterday."

John cradled the infant close to him. "She feels like a feather."

"When I weighed her yesterday, she was six pounds two ounces, seventeen inches long."

"Brae was almost eight pounds and twenty-two inches."

"A nice healthy boy."

"You know you can't stay here around the clock."

Petra smiled tiredly. "Now that the child has been born, Rika will move to my building with Leoben in a few days. It will be much easier then. Gianne brought me some clean clothes this morning. She's going to come back after lunch today. We'll manage."

"I can help. I'd like to."

"You're helping right now."

"Take your time. I've never held a baby this small. It's a new experience for me."

Petra started down the hall. "It's good practice for you," she called softly over her shoulder.

John sat down in the rocking chair and put the tip of his little finger against the baby's tiny palm. Four perfect little fingers and one perfect little thumb closed around it. It didn't matter to him if this new life was half-Cylon or not. She was still a miracle.

...

The restaurant where Bill Adama was meeting them for dinner was called Skylar's and was two blocks east of the park.

"Wow," Kara said. "We're here barely twenty-four hours and we've got the admiral dining with us."

Lee said, "When his other choices are Channing's or putting a frozen dinner in the microwave and eating it alone in front of the television, we shouldn't be too flattered."

Kara said. "Before I left he was always escorting Laura to stuff."

"He's not doing that as often as he was," Lee finally said.

"I thought Laura was married to Kara's father," Hunter said. "Why is she going places with Lee's father?"

Lee said. "She's the President of the Colonies. She has to go to a lot of dinners and things like that. It's a protocol thing for her to have an escort. Laura and my father have known each other a long time," he finished lamely.

Kara took a deep breath and said to Hunter. "You remember I told you that everybody believed my father had died except me. Laura thought she was a widow. I'm sure Admiral Adama thought the same thing. I don't blame either one of them. My dad didn't, either."

Lee said, "After you…left in the Raider, my father told Laura that theoretically John could have survived. At least he was up front with her."

"Who told him that? Dr. Rafferty?"

"He told all of us in a meeting the morning after you left."

"And of course he took _Dr. Rafferty's_ word for it. If I'd told him he would have laughed at me and patted me on the head and sent me to a shrink."

"You've got to admit the odds were…"

"Let's just drop it. I shouldn't have brought it up. So Hunter, what do you think about the park?"

"It smells better than the street."

"You should see Hunter's valley," she said to Lee. "It's beautiful. I wish I hadn't gotten so hung up on the forest during my recon missions. If I'd gone just a little further west, I would have been right over it. I promised Hunter we would protect the valley. There's hundreds of his people living there."

"We'll do our best," Parker said.

Bill had already arrived at the restaurant and was sitting at a table in a far corner. He had been there long enough to be most of the way through his first drink. The top button of his duty blue uniform tunic was undone. Kara hadn't realized until she saw him how much she had been dreading this meeting. She had known that it would come sooner or later. She had just hoped that it would be later.

"Good evening, sir," Major Parker said.

Bill nodded. The table was one for six and he had chosen a seat on the opposite side. Kara held back and waited while Lee took the chair beside his father. Parker sat across from Adama and Hunter pulled out the chair beside him. That left her the choice of either end. She chose the end nearest Lee. They were saved from an awkward silence by the arrival of the waitress. Parker ordered a large pitcher of beer and four mugs. Kara grinned at Hunter and he smiled back.

When the beer came and all had taken sips, she asked him, "What do you think?"

"Different but good." Hunter looked at the admiral. "My grandfather told me about Libran beer. Our drink of choice in the valley is mead."

"Tell me a little bit about your valley," Adama said.

Much of the rest of the meal was occupied by the interesting stories Hunter told about his valley and the history of his people. After a mug of beer Kara finally began to relax and listen to Hunter talk.

She didn't get tense again until they left the restaurant and Bill started walking back toward the safe house with them. As if by some prearranged signal, Major Parker and Hunter walked in front of the group. Lee was beside Kara until Bill said that he wanted some privacy with her. Lee lengthened his stride and caught up with the other two.

Bill walked slowly until there was half a block between them and the others.

"Are you adjusting to being back on Caprica?" He finally asked.

"Yes, sir," she answered more cheerfully than she felt. "Just one night and it hardly seems like I was gone."

"Was the decision to steal the Raider an easy one?"

Kara took a deep breath. "No, sir, but once I knew my father was alive, I didn't see any other way."

"You didn't think you could come to me or Laura?"

"Permission to speak freely, sir."

"Let's not be that formal, Kara. Forget my rank. Say whatever is on your mind."

"You wouldn't even listen to me about the humans on the planet. I knew what you would say if I'd told you my father was alive and that he was on Nereid."

They walked in silence again for a minute.

"And that information came from an Oracle?"

"Yes, sir. Right before she died, but I didn't realize what she was telling me until my father's memorial service."

"So you asked Dr. Rafferty if it might be possible?"

"Yes, sir, but don't blame him. I told him it was a theoretical question. He just humored me."

Again they walked in silence for a minute. Bill finally said, "Did you really think you would jump to a hostile planet in a stolen ship and find your father?"

"Yes, sir." She hesitated. "I thought he would be with the free humans in the forest. I thought if I found them, I'd find him."

"But that's not how it turned out, is it?"

"No, sir. I was way too optimistic."

"But you did find him?"

"He found me."

"Before you took the Raider, did you give any thought to the consequences?"

"Yes, sir."

"But that wasn't enough to stop you."

"No, sir."

"Or keep you from involving another pilot."

"That wasn't supposed to happen. It wasn't part of my plan."

"Do you know the penalty for the theft of a ship like the Raider?"

"Prison. It was worth it to find out my dad's alive. As long as you rescue him, I don't care what you do to me."

"Do you think prison is what you deserve?"

"What difference does it make what I think…sir? I stole the ship."

"Lee has pointed out to me that you didn't steal the Raider for the reason most people steal things. He also pointed out that you brought it back undamaged. He made a case for you borrowing it instead of stealing it."

Kara took a deep breath. "I always planned to bring it back, sir. I followed my conscience. Besides finding my father, I wanted to stop you from nuking the planet because of the humans who were there."

"After your debriefing is over, I've asked Major Parker to arrange for you to meet with an AJA lawyer. I'd like for you to consider pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling of government property. It will go on your record, but the punishment will be probation. After the court-martial is over, you should be able to fly a Viper again."

"What about me being UA for a month?"

"I'm willing to drop those charges considering the information you brought back, both your knowledge and especially Hunter's."

Kara took another deep breath, afraid she was going to cry. "Thank you, sir."

"You should thank Lee as well. He gave me an alternative that I could live with."

Kara felt lightheaded with relief. The admiral had just handed her freedom to her. He had just told her that she had basically gotten away with stealing the Raider and being UA for a month.

"I spoke with Laura earlier today," Bill said. "We're all joining her for lunch tomorrow at Marble House."

"Would it…" Kara took another breath. "Would it be all right if I went to visit Dreilide Thrace afterward? I talked to him this afternoon. He's gotten worse."

"Major Parker can take you for a short visit. You understand I'm bending a lot of rules for you."

"I understand. I really appreciate it, sir."

"And Kara, no discussion of Nereid or what you saw there with anyone tomorrow. I'm keeping Laura apprised of the situation. The full transcript of yours and Hunter's debriefings will be made available to her. But no discussion with anyone, not even Laura. Otherwise, our deal for the reduced charge is off the table. Are we clear on that?"

"Yes, sir. Very clear."

He stopped suddenly and flagged down a transport. "Catch up with Lee and the others. I'll see you tomorrow at Marble House."

Kara watched him get into the back of a transport. The admiral had just saved her career. Lee had played a big part, but Admiral Adama had made the final decision. She watched the transport turn right at the next corner and disappear before she looked up at the sky. The lights of Caprica City were too bright for her to see many stars, but somewhere thirty light years away her father was still on Nereid. She didn't care what anyone else thought. He was tough and strong and she would never lose faith in him. She said a brief prayer to the gods for his safety, and then she hurried down the sidewalk to the man who was waiting for her. With a little luck Major Parker would look the other way long enough for her to kiss Lee goodnight.

...

John stayed with Petra until Gianne arrived. The rain had let up a little bit by then, but Gianne was still wearing a waterproof poncho that she had also used to cover her daughter Sofia. Cassandra was awake and John settled on the floor with the two little girls. Sofia was nine months old and was pulling up and standing but not walking on her own yet. Cassie was almost eleven months old and was walking on her own. It was clear to him that even at their young ages, the two children had already formed a sisterly bond.

Rika's infant was awake and hungry and Petra once again took the child into Rika's room. Once again she was refused and returned to the main room. She conferred in a quiet voice with Gianne and Gianne sat in the rocking chair and began to nurse the infant.

All the while John wondered whether or not Leoben was going to show up and what he would do if he did. Petra came over and sat down with John and the children.

"What you and Gianne are doing is an incredible thing," he said to her.

"I hope Rika will come around and accept the child."

"Has she said anything about the note?"

"Not a word. She's got something in her hand, though."

"I'm going to go see Leoben. I just can't let this thing go."

"No, John. You should stay away from him." She glanced toward Gianne and lowered her voice. "The Twos have got almost as much power as the Ones. They're just less obvious about it. The Leoben who's married to Gianne is good to her and Sofia, but neither of us ever makes the mistake of crossing him. We pretend to worship their one God. It's easier that way."

"I'm going up to the seventh floor and ask that Leoben to stay away from Rika for a few days. Don't you agree that would be best?"

"I do, but I don't want to see you put yourself in danger."

"At this point, I don't much care. He can agree or he can tell me to get lost."

"He can do more than that." Petra put her hand briefly on his arm. "Please be careful. You're our link to the human men who were once in our lives, my husband and Gianne's fiancé, all dead now for over five years. I think we look at you with our children and imagine the lives we might have had if the Cylons hadn't come."

"When you were feeding Rika's baby this morning, I thought of my wife and our son. You're my link to them, too. All of you. I see Cassie and the other children and I think of Brae."

He got up from the floor. Cassie stood on her tiptoes and reached up to him. He picked her up and kissed her soft brown curls and handed her to Petra and realized as he did that he and a small group of the human mothers had formed an extended family, sharing an unspoken bond that he didn't think the Cylons would ever be able to understand, much less achieve.

Humans had created the skinjobs in an effort to improve on the robotic centurions. They had achieved the next step in the evolution of the machine. The creators had started with a meta-cognitive processor and a dozen other computer chips and electronic circuitry and they had done the unimaginable. Through a mindboggling feat of programming they had managed to give their creations human behaviors and even some human reactions and feelings. They had even conquered the human fear of death with their ability to download. But no amount of programming could give them what they really desired…family life and children. For that they still needed humans.

John got on the elevator and pushed the button for the seventh floor. As the car moved upward, he realized that for all their technological advances there was one thing the Cylons would never understand or be able to duplicate and that was the mysterious beauty of the human heart and the resilient strength of the human spirit.

TBC…


	25. Lunch With the President

Chapter 25

Lunch with the President

_1. In the second year of fighting the great city of Corinth in the region of the Twelfth tribe fell to the forces of the Tenth Tribe._

_2. The household of General Ulixes was taken and all who dwelled therein were slain._

_3. On the eve of the fall of the city, Azurra prayed to the Lord and he sent a vision to her that she should leave the house of her husband and journey to the land of her birth._

_4. She clothed herself as a serving woman and put plain robes upon the six sisters that none should know them as daughters of a great man. _

_5. And they stole out of the city with her son and traveled to the valley of Nineveh where they dwelled with the shepherds and farmers._

_6. Azurra taught the six of the one true God even as she taught her son. _

_7. And the Lord opened their ears to His word and their eyes to the understanding of His ways. _

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Azurra, _Chapter 7:1-7

.

The elevator doors opened on the seventh floor and John stepped off. The hall was quiet and yet something felt wrong to him. The door to 7-C was open an inch. Fearful of what he was going to find, he slowly pushed it inward and walked into the small foyer.

The stench hit him immediately, the smell he and his fellow pilots had called _blood and guts_. He had first smelled it during his days flying a Viper off the _Solaria_ during the First War as he had helped lift the blood-covered body of a pilot from the floor of a recovery Raptor. It was a smell he had never forgotten. He knew now why Leoben hadn't been to see Rika that morning.

He quickly closed the door and walked into the living room. It looked almost identical to Sonja's…a few pieces of furniture, a heavy couch, an end table with a lamp and a chair arranged on a patterned rug. It was austere almost to the point of sterility just like D'Anna's place. John walked around the couch.

He was no stranger to seeing death, but the sight that greeted him in Leoben's living room was the worst thing he'd ever seen. The Cylon was on his back on the floor. His wrists had been pulled over his head and tied to the legs of the couch. His shirt had been ripped open. The word _RAPIST_ was carved into his chest. His eyes had also been cut out or gouged out. But that wasn't the worst part. His trousers were down around his knees. His genitals had been cut off and stuffed into his mouth. From the amount of blood pooled on the rug around his hips, he had bled to death from the wound.

The young man, Yusef, sat cross-legged on the other side of the living room. He was shirtless and even with the blood spatter on his chest and arms John saw the blue tattoos on the upper part of his body and his neck. He was so still that at first John thought he was also dead. As he walked over to check, however, Yusef's head came up and John saw that he held blood-stained prayer beads that had originally been white. He realized that the young man had been praying.

Yusef looked startled. "Who are you?"

"I'm John. I just came from seeing Rika. I thought I might talk Leoben into staying away from her for a couple of days."

"You're the one Doolittle talks about, the pilot he knew years ago when you were killing Cylons instead of making babies with them."

"Why the hell did you do this?"

A thin smile of satisfaction curved Yusef's lips. "I did it for my family, my mother and father and my sisters. Their deaths are avenged now. Their souls are no longer caught between this world and the next. They're free to enter Elysium. But mainly I did it because of what he did to Rika."

"Don't you understand that as soon as this bastard downloads, he'll be back with centurions? You'll be executed."

Yusef's chin came up defiantly. "I don't fear death."

"This could have been handled a different way."

"I don't expect _you_ to understand," Yusef sneered. "You're Caprican. You know nothing of our ways. This is the _Tauron_ way."

"The Ha'la'tha way, don't you mean? And I wasn't born on Caprica. I'm from Virgon, just like Rika."

"On my planet he would have suffered much longer. He deserves far worse than what I did to him."

"I don't disagree with you. But Rika deserves better. When he downloads, he'll make the connection between the two of you. You don't know what he'll do to her."

"He can't do any worse to her than he's already done."

"He can do a hell of a lot worse to her than he's already done!" John said angrily. "You should have thought about her and the baby before you did something this stupid."

"I should have done it to him months ago. I knew the baby wasn't mine. I knew it was a half-breed. That's why I never asked Mr. Doolittle what it looked like. I knew."

"How did you know?"

"It took a long time before Rika wanted my touch because of the way he had hurt her. I love her. I would never force myself on her the way he did so I was patient. The first time we made love was six months ago. She was already pregnant. She knew the baby was his, but she lives in her dreams and her dreams are not of this monster. She wanted the child to be ours and I let her pretend because it made her happy. I talked to her of a place we could be free together because it made her happy. I'm not crazy. I know there's no such place…not in this world. Now there are no more dreams for either of us."

"You're both so young. Way too young to talk about giving up your dreams. What are you…twenty-two, twenty-three?"

"I'm twenty-six. On Tauron I became a man on my thirteenth birthday. That day I got my first tattoo. If the baby was mine, I'd get another tattoo for her." He pointed to a strange blue symbol on his chest, "Rika is here over my heart."

"Rika has rejected the baby. She won't even hold her. The other women are nursing her."

"They should let her starve."

"How can you say that? That little baby is innocent!" John said furiously.

Yusef lifted his black eyes and John saw the hatred glittering there. "Nothing that's part of a skinjob is innocent. She's the spawn of their evil. Better she dies now than grows up to be a monster like her father."

John's anger almost overwhelmed him. He wanted to shake Yusef. "Of all the stupid and asinine things to say."

"Go! Get out of here! I let you live because Mr. Doolittle told me you helped Rika yesterday. The Cylons took everything from me. I had no one until I met her! Now he'll take her away. Life without her is not worth living for me. Go and leave me to whatever they do to me. I'll kill him again if I get the chance."

"You don't know what he'll do to her. If he thinks she's been sleeping with you, he might send her to the prison. Believe me. You _do not_ want her sent to that prison."

"Whatever he does, I'll never see her again."

"Let me go talk to my handler. Maybe she can do something to help."

Yusef raised his voice in anger. "Don't you understand I don't want a Cylon's help…or a Cylon lover's. You're like Petra and Gianne. Bedded down with evil. You're as bad as they are, as bad as the Cylons. Go before I change my mind."

He got to his feet and brandished a bloody butcher knife. It wasn't the special weapon of the Ha'la'tha, but the way Yusef held it and what he had done to Leoben was evidence enough for John that he was skilled at using this mundane and deadly kitchen utensil.

He didn't want to end up on the floor looking like Leoben. He backed away. "All right, Yusef. I'm going."

When he got to the door, Yusef called to him. "Tell Rika that I'll always love her. Elysium awaits us both. The gods will reward me for what I did today as they will reward her for killing him the first time."

Shaking his head in defeat, John walked into the hall, closed the door and sadly entered the elevator where he pushed the button for the eleventh floor.

Sonja was in her apartment as he knew she probably would be on a rainy, windy day. The surprise was evident on her face when she opened the door.

"I didn't think I would see you today."

He walked inside and looked around. "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"

She was barefoot and dressed in a light blue warm-up suit. Even though she was wearing no makeup and her hair was pulled back, she was still incredibly beautiful.

She gave him a seductive smile. "I wouldn't have come to the door if I was entertaining someone…or someone was entertaining me."

"Okay. Stupid question."

He walked to the sliding glass door and looked out at the rain. Down below the streets were glistening. A centurion stood a wet and lone sentinel at the entrance to the park. John was trying to decide what to say to her when she came up behind him and slid her arms around his waist.

"What's wrong?"

He removed her arms and turned to face her. "Have you got something to drink?"

"You mean something alcoholic?"

"Yes."

"I don't like you when you drink alcohol."

"Look, I was…frak…you'll never be able to understand the kind of mood I was in yesterday. Just let me apologize for whatever I said or did that offended you and let it go at that."

She studied his face then turned abruptly and walked into the kitchen. He followed her. She pointed to a cabinet and he opened it. There were a number of different kinds of alcoholic beverages.

"Take your pick."

"For someone who doesn't drink, you've got a well-stocked liquor cabinet."

"Some of the men who used to come here enjoyed a drink. They say it relaxes them."

John smiled. "There's nothing like reminding me how you entertain the troops, Sonja."

"I haven't entertained anyone lately."

Their eyes met. She finally looked away. He took a bottle of bourbon and twisted the cap, breaking the seal. Sonja handed him a glass and he poured a small amount. He put the bottle in the cabinet and walked back into the living room. She followed and stood while he sat in an armchair.

"This really doesn't feel like a social visit. Do you want to tell me why you're here?"

John took a sip of the drink. "What do Cylons do to a human who kills one of you?"

Her face didn't show the slightest bit of concern. In an amused tone she said, "If you're going to kill me, please take me to bed first. I'd like to die a satisfied woman."

He smiled again. "That's a good one. You might be developing a sense of humor."

"I wasn't joking."

"Do you know who Rika is?"

"Of course I do. She's married to the Leoben on the seventh floor. She had his baby yesterday. I hear you helped."

"All I did was hold her hand. She and Petra did all the work."

"I've never seen the birth of a child. What is it like?"

"I didn't really see it. I did hold the baby when she was a couple of seconds old, though. How did you hear about Rika?"

"Simon made the announcement at breakfast this morning. It was the talk of the dining room. It seems she foolishly went for a walk while she was in labor and then couldn't get back without help. We waited for Leoben to show up so we could congratulate him, but he never made it. I'm sure he was with his wife and child."

"I'll get to the reason he didn't show up in a minute. Did you know Rika killed him once and that after he downloaded, he came back and raped her? That's how her child was conceived."

Sonja's tone was cool. "I don't interfere in the private lives of my brothers and sisters."

"That's bullshit. You're all over each other's private lives. You knew what he was doing. You just chose to turn a blind eye…"

"You should be more careful about what you choose to involve yourself in, John. Your position here may not be as secure as you obviously think it is. Stay out of it."

"It's a little late for that now. Leoben is dead."

"You didn't…"

"No. I went to talk to him about leaving Rika alone for a few days because she's very depressed. She's rejected the child. He was dead when I got there."

"How?"

"A young man who's in love with her. He's in Leoben's apartment right now waiting for him to download and come back. He's prepared to die. Is that what's going to happen to him?"

"I should go see…"

"I'm not sure you want to do that. Leoben's killer used a knife. Leoben is _not_ a pretty sight right now. All I want to know is after he downloads, what's he going to do to the young man?"

"That's up to him. He obviously forgave Rika for killing him."

"If repeatedly raping her afterward is what you call _forgiving_ her."

Sonja got up and walked over to the sliding door. "You don't understand."

"What don't I understand? Explain it to me. What about a beautiful young girl being forced into a sham of a marriage and forced to have sex with a man she despises don't I understand?"

"According to our scriptures it's God's will that we be fruitful and…"

"No!" John angrily interrupted her. "Don't you dare try to justify what he did to her by saying your God put His stamp of approval on it. No religion sanctions what was done to Rika. You've twisted your God's words to try to make them fit your own agenda. I've read your scriptures. Nowhere in any of the books is it okay to rape a young woman for _any_ reason. You cannot rationalize Leoben's actions by saying that _God_ told you it was okay to do it in order to make children. If you can get beyond that blind loyalty you have to your fellow skinjobs, you'll admit I'm right about this."

Sonja stood looking out at the rain for a long time while John sat in the chair and tried to calm down. This was getting them nowhere and he knew it. She finally turned.

"If Rika has rejected the child, what's going to happen to it?"

"Petra and Gianne are feeding her. She's being well cared for. Petra said the other mothers would help, too. These women share a bond. They care about each other. I just want Leoben to leave Rika alone. Given time she may accept the child but with him in the picture, I doubt it. I don't think you understand how much she hates him…or how much she loves Yusef."

"How do you know his name?" She asked quickly.

"I talked to him for a few minutes after I found Leoben."

Sonja looked at him for a long time. "The res facility is on one of the basestars. It will take several hours for Leoben to download and be brought back to the city."

John was surprised. "You don't have one of those facilities here on the planet?"

"There's a small one at the lab, but only the first few copies of each model can download there. His copy is not one of them. It's for the creators…for their experiments. After all the copies of Daniel's model were killed by the virus, the main res facility was moved to a basestar where there was no chance one of their experiments could cause that kind of damage."

"Leoben could be back anytime. From the looks of it he'd been dead for a while, an hour or two at least."

"I'll go wait for Leoben to come back and talk to him."

John tossed back the rest of the bourbon. "I'll go with you."

Sonja slipped her feet into a pair of sandals and walked to the door with him. "Why do you care so much about these humans? You barely know them."

"You mean besides the fact that what was done to them is wrong on so many levels?"

"Yes."

"Rika reminds me of Kara. She's young and she's in love with someone just like my daughter is."

"You believe what Leoben did is wrong but you think what Rika's lover did is right?"

John took a deep breath. "No. For one person to become judge, jury and executioner is never _right_, but given the situation, I understand why he did it. If Leoben had done something like that to Kara, I'd probably have done the same thing. Well, maybe not _exactly_ the same thing, but that doesn't make it _right_. When you don't protect your people, even your slaves, from predators like that copy of Leoben, you invite vigilante justice. In the Colonies a man who did something like Leoben did would have been arrested, put on trial and sent to prison. For any society to succeed laws have to exist that protect women and children from men like him. Without laws you have complete anarchy. Maybe you should open up that prison of yours to Cylons, too. Or better yet, just box that copy of Leoben until somebody can work on his programming they way they did D'Anna's fanaticism. Maybe somebody can give him a conscience."

Sonja lowered her eyes for a moment and sighed. "And who would that be since you say our creators are dead? Cavil?"

"You've got a point. That's like the fox making the rules for the henhouse. Cavil may not participate in what's being done to some of the humans, but he obviously isn't going to interfere with what the rest of you do as long as it keeps you out of his hair and keeps you from finding out the truth about him being a murderer."

"You must understand why Leoben did it. Our future is at stake. Without children…we…"

"That's enough! I don't want to hear you try to excuse what that bastard did to Rika for _any_ reason. Let's go. I want you to see what turning a blind eye has caused."

Meekly Sonja followed him down the hall to the elevator. "I don't think I can do anything to help the young man. Leoben will kill him or send him to the prison."

"Then stop what happened to Rika from happening to another young woman."

"How?"

"Take it to your council. Get them to enact a law that says a woman can't be brought here against her will and forced into marriage with someone she hates. While you're at it, get them to quit bringing unwilling men here, too, so you won't have to use that drug on them."

"You'd rather have stayed in the prison?" She asked incredulously.

"No. I'd rather have gone to a settlement even if it meant being a slave and working in the fields."

"I told you that the people in the settlements aren't slaves. We don't…"

"Spare me the lecture about how good you've been to them. I heard about your policy of _no work, no food_."

They stood in silence until the elevator arrived and the door opened. Sonja sighed again. "Why do you think the council will listen to _me_? I'm just one person."

"Sometimes, Sonja, that's all it takes. Just one person who stands up and says, _Enough. What we're doing is wrong_. Maybe others feel the same way you do and just don't have the courage to be the first to say it."

"I don't know…"

"Since I met you, you've tried to convince me that you skinjobs have feelings, that your God gave you souls just like humans. Try to put yourself in Rika's place. It's called empathy. Try to imagine how you would feel if a man you hated had done to you what Leoben did to her."

Sonja didn't say anything else, but for the first time since they had met, John thought he might have finally gotten through to her.

...

The agent, a woman named Gatwick, who had spent the night at the apartment with Kara and Hunter was as cold and impersonal as Agent Burke had been warm and outgoing. She was also wearing a wedding ring and Kara could tell that Agent Gatwick wanted to be home instead of babysitting a couple of young people that she believed were confidential informants.

Gatwick had been waiting for them when they'd gotten back from eating the night before so Major Parker had gone home. Lee had stayed and they had watched the Buccaneers beat the Hydras in the second round of the pyramid tournament. That meant they would play the Dominos for the championship the following Saturday just like Kara had predicted.

Gatwick had been awake at dawn. First Kara had heard the shower running and then the television. It wasn't loud, but it had kept Kara from going back to sleep. She now lay in bed listening to the muffled voices of a commentator and two men who were arguing about the best way to deal with the situation in Sovana as if there was a best way to deal with the situation in Sovana. Kara supposed Zak was still there with his Marine unit. Lee hadn't mentioned him and with everything else that had happened, Kara had forgotten to ask about him.

Kara got out of bed and stretched before she put on sweatpants and sweatshirt and went into the kitchen, speaking briefly to Agent Gatwick and getting a cursory _good morning_ in reply. Kara started a pot of coffee. It had been dripping for less than a minute when Hunter walked into the kitchen.

He yawned and sat down at the table across from her. "I've decided that coffee smells better than it tastes."

"Is that how you knew I was up?"

"I didn't get to ask you last night. What did Lee's father tell you or can you not talk about it?"

"He didn't tell me to keep it quiet so I guess I can tell you. The good news is that I'm not going to prison. The bad news is…I guess there's not too much bad news. I've still got to go through a court-martial which is like a trial and plead guilty to mishandling of government property. Lee helped talk his dad into the reduced charge. It'll go on my record, but it's a misdemeanor so I won't go to prison. Afterward, I'll be able to fly my Viper."

"That's a good thing, right?"

"A very good thing. Of course Admiral Adama might have another motive with keeping me in the cockpit. It's not like we've got an overabundance of Viper pilots. If we go to your planet anytime soon, there won't be enough time to train many more."

Hunter grinned. "You're really _that good_?"

She snorted. "It's not like my record is spotless anyway. I've been in trouble before. I argued with one of my Flight School instructors about a check ride score which was not a smart thing to do. Instructors are like the gods. That's probably in my record somewhere. When I was at the Academy, I got into a fight with another cadet and had to march off twenty-five demerits on the quad. I was confined to campus for a month and missed the spring dance. That's definitely in my record."

"What was the fight about?"

"She accused me of cheating. My dad taught at the Academy. Maggie said my dad told me ahead of time what was going to be on the mid-term sim test. So she really accused both of us of cheating. But that would have defeated the whole purpose of him teaching me. He was tougher on me than he was on anybody else because he wanted me to know everything I could learn about flying a Viper. Some cadets never believed I did it on my own. So this isn't the first time I've been in trouble. It probably won't be the last."

Hunter smiled. "You were quick enough to mouth off to me the day we caught you and Narcho."

"And you busted my chops for it."

"All part of my plan."

"Liar," she laughed. "You didn't have a plan. You said so. You were making it up as you went along."

Hunter suddenly turned serious. "I hope I don't embarrass you today."

"How would you embarrass _me_?"

"I've figured out by the way everybody is acting that lunch with the President is something you call a _big deal_. You know my background. Emmalyn's table is the fanciest place I'd ever eaten until last night at that restaurant."

"The restaurant where we ate last night wasn't all that fancy. You'll do fine, Hunter. Just watch Lee or me if you're not sure about something or better yet, watch Laura. And we can't talk about Nereid. Admiral Adama told me last night your planet is off limits for conversation. Right now its existence is classified."

"From the President?"

"Not from her but from her staff. Admiral Adama can't take the chance that something would be overheard by anybody. Maya might know, but nobody else."

"Who is Maya?"

"She's Braedon's nanny."

"Which means?"

"She takes care of him while Laura is busy running the Colony."

Hunter grinned. "Is Maya like Emmalyn?"

"I'll let you decided for yourself."

"How old is she?"

Kara had to stop and think. "Thirty. She doesn't look it, though."

"Are you two friends?"

"We were both in a refugee camp. Not the same one, but…we bonded because of it. She was married and had a little girl when the Cylons bombed the town she lived in. Her husband was killed. Her little girl died in the camp from an infection when she was six months old. Maya's been through a lot, but she's tough."

"Like you, Wildcat?"

"Like me."

"And now you're a pilot and she takes care of other people's kids?"

"Just Braedon. She goes to the university one night a week. She's wants to be a teacher."

"Am I going to get to meet her today?"

"You won't be able to avoid it."

"Good."

"Wow. I haven't heard that much enthusiasm from you in a long time."

Hunter grinned again. "Meeting new people is something to be enthusiastic about, especially someone tough like you. You've got to admit that sitting in a little room answering questions all day is boring."

"The first thing I'm going to do when they let us out of here is go for a ride on my motorcycle. I know it's something you won't understand, but I have a thing about speed. I like the rush I get from taking the bike out on the I-6 and opening it up. I like the rush I get from launching in a Viper, too."

"What's an eye six?"

"The I-6 Motorway. It's the road the jeeps took from the boneyard to where we were in jail."

Hunter got up and poured them both a cup of coffee. "See, I waited until it stopped dripping. I'm learning. So tell me a little more about today."

"Lee's going to bring me a dress and bring you a tie so we can look good to have lunch with Laura. We can't go to Marble House looking like slobs. Lunch with the Pres is a big deal."

"A tie?"

"I'll let Lee show you about it. You wear it around your neck."

He frowned. "Like a noose?"

She grinned, "No. Not like a noose."

"I was kidding. I've seen pictures in our history books so I know what a tie is. I even saw a few at the restaurant last night."

They heard the doorbell chime. Kara leaned back in the chair and watched as Agent Gatwick let Lee in. He was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt but he had some clothes on hangers. He also had a bag that she hoped held her hairdryer and shoes.

"It's Lee," she said.

"Early, isn't he?"

"I told him last night to come over and eat breakfast with us."

Lee walked to the kitchen doorway with Agent Gatwick close behind him. Kara knew not to act too familiar with Lee since Gatwick had no knowledge of their relationship. Major Parker had told them both to keep it that way around all the agents.

"Good morning, Captain Adama," Kara said. "Thanks for picking up that dress and my hairdryer for me."

Lee looked at her and smiled. "No problem, Lieutenant Thrace."

The dress she had told him to bring her was one Laura had bought for her before the inauguration. It was a simple dark blue above-the-knee sheath with short sleeves. It was also one of the four dresses that she owned, two of which were long formals. She stood, took the hanger from him and held it up for Hunter to see.

"This is my dress," she said to him.

He grinned. "Where's the rest of it?"

She thought of the long skirts of the valley women. "This is it. Women dress differently _in the city_."

His eyes lit up. "I noticed that last night at the restaurant, too."

Kara rolled her eyes. "You've been in the city two days and you sound like some of the guys I went to Flight School with."

Lee said. "How about breakfast? I'm hungry."

"Are you cooking?" Kara asked.

"I can make some ham and cheese omelets if anyone's interested," Agent Gatwick said.

"Sounds good to me," Hunter said. "How about giving me a cooking lesson while you do it? I like to learn new things."

Kara took the bag from Lee. "I'm going to take a shower and wash my hair. Why don't you let Agent Gatwick teach you both how to make ham and cheese omelets. Your girlfriend would probably appreciate it."

He gave her a quick smile. "Good idea, Lieutenant. I try to keep my girlfriend happy. You think learning how to cook something new would make her happy?"

Kara winked at him before she turned to leave. "Oh, I'm sure of it."

_..._

Laura leaned forward at her dresser and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her second cup of tea sat untouched in front of her. She was anticipating the pleasure of seeing Kara again, and she was overjoyed that John was still alive, but she was also dealing with the pain of knowing he was a Cylon prisoner with everything that entailed. She had slept poorly for the second night in a row and it showed in the circles under her eyes.

There was a knock on the bedroom door. "Come in," she called.

Maya opened the door and Braedon ran in. "Where Kawa?"

Maya said, "I made the mistake of telling him that Kara was coming for lunch today. Since then he's been looking everywhere for her."

"Kara is in the car," Laura said. "She'll be here in a little while."

"Go in car, too," Braedon said. He climbed into her lap and reached for her lipstick.

"Thank you," Laura said as she took it from his hand.

Braedon reached for it again. "No. Give me."

Maya picked him up which unleashed a howl of protest. "Come on, big boy. Let's go get your Vipers and Raptors so we can show Kara. Lee's coming, too. You remember Lee?"

"No," Braedon said. "Down."

Laura smiled weakly. "Are all children this difficult before they even reach those terrible twos?"

Maya smiled and put Braedon down. He ran over to the bed, climbed up and began to bounce. "Brae's not really difficult," she said to Laura. "He's just beginning to learn that there's more to life than _me, me, me_. It's not usually an easy transition. Brae is an intelligent child, but he's still got to go through the learning phases."

"Socialization and learning the acceptable rules of society as children," Laura said, "something I think the Cylons missed out on completely since they had no childhoods."

"Exactly. You look tired. Another bad night?"

"I didn't sleep well."

"I didn't either. Are you sure you want me to eat lunch with you today?"

"Of course I'm sure. You're like family. And Kara wants to see you. The young man Kara brought back with her is very nice-looking. I'll make sure you're seated beside him."

Maya smiled. "I'd rather sit beside Kara."

"We'll put her across from you. One caveat Bill has insisted on and that is no talk about Hunter's home planet. Bill has no idea you even know. He would not be happy if he thought I'd told you."

"Mum's the word, then." She walked over to the bed and scooped Braedon up. "Come on big boy. Let's go find Vipers and Raptors."

The door closed behind them. Laura looked at the photograph of John on her dresser. She kissed the tips of her fingers and touched the glass. "Stay safe, my love. We're going to rescue you. Just stay safe until then."

_..._

When John and Sonja stepped off the elevator, he immediately noticed several human women standing in the doorways of other apartments, but none had ventured into the hall. As they passed, the women averted their eyes. All but one stepped back and shut the doors. Two centurions stood outside of Leoben's apartment. John knew what that meant. He felt sick.

"We're too late," he said to Sonja.

They walked to the door. The centurions recognized Sonja and didn't try to stop them. They stepped inside. He saw Sonja swallow hard and make a face as the smell inundated them. There was an additional one now. Someone had recently fired a weapon in the apartment. The color drained from her face.

"Blood and guts," he said. "And gunpowder. Don't tell me you've never seen a dead person before."

She shook her head. "No. I told you I couldn't even watch the recording of your prison interrogations."

"You probably don't want to go into the living room then. It's bad."

They stood in the small entry way and Sonja called, "Leoben, are you in there?"

The Cylon walked to the doorway. His hair still contained some of the goo from the resurrection tank and was spiked up in places, slicked down in others. He had obviously not wasted any time in returning to the planet. He was paler than Sonja, an indication of skin that had never seen the sun. The other thing John immediately saw was the pistol Leoben was holding in his right hand.

"Did you kill the boy?" John asked.

Leoben eyed him warily before he shifted his gaze to Sonja. "What's he doing here?"

"We came to talk to you."

"Did you kill him?" John asked more forcefully.

Leoben gestured with the pistol. "Go see for yourself."

John walked around him into the living room. Yusef lay slumped on the floor where John had last seen him, only now there was a round hole in the middle of his forehead and his blood and brains on the wall behind him. Sadly John walked over to him, knelt on one knee and gently closed Yusef's eyes. He disentangled the bloody prayer beads from Yusef's fingers and walked into the kitchen. He heard Sonja and Leoben talking in low voices. Feeling drained and suddenly hopeless, John turned on the faucet and slowly and carefully washed the blood from each bead. He was already thinking about how he was going to tell Rika and Petra.

Sonja's voice came from the doorway behind him. "What are you doing?"

"I'm going to give his prayer beads to Rika. I don't want to do it with them covered in his blood."

"I'm sorry, John."

John's feelings of guilt almost choked him. "I should never have left. I should have stayed here and waited for Leoben. Maybe I could have stopped this."

"No, you couldn't have. Leboen would have shot you, too."

"You saw what Yusef did?"

"Yes."

"Do you understand now why all of this should never have happened? How it should have been avoided in the first place?"

Sonja drew a deep and trembling breath. "Yes."

John turned back to the sink and finished washing the beads. He picked up a towel and dried them. They were some type of white stone veined through with light gray and tan. A long time ago he had seen similar beads in the effects of one of the _Solaria's_ pilots who had been killed. He heard another sound and turned.

Sonja had begun to cry. "Did Yusef love Rika?"

"Yes he did."

"And she loves him?"

"With all her heart."

Sonja clenched her fists by her side as tears ran down her face. Leoben walked to the door. "The centurions need to clean up. You need to go."

John put the prayer beads in his pocket and looked directly at Leoben. "Stay away from Rika."

Leoben tone was scornful. "She's my wife."

"You don't understand the first thing about humans, do you?"

"I know everything I need to know."

John took a deep breath and tried to keep the anger out of his voice with no success. "I don't know how anybody can make it any clearer to you. Rika doesn't want to be with you. Let Petra and Gianne take care of her and the baby. This situation is enough of a tragedy. Don't make it any worse."

Leoben walked across the kitchen and stood in front of him. "Is that a threat?"

Leoben was a several inches shorter than him, but John had no illusions about being able to easily take him in a fight. He knew how strong the Cylons were. He'd found that out quickly enough at the prison. And Leoben still had the pistol in his hand. John had never wanted to hit someone so badly in his life. He clenched and unclenched his left fist knowing that if he started something, he probably wouldn't survive it. Then he thought about Rika. How could he expect Sonja to stand up for what was right if he wouldn't.

Finally he said, "Consider it a threat. Leave Rika alone."

"You humans think you know everything," Leoben sneered. "Your hubris is astonishing. You still think you're God's chosen race. You still think you can order us around like we're _your_ servants, _your_ slaves. Well, God has turned his back on you. Now you're _our_ servants, _our_ slaves."

John took one step forward and was in Leoben's face. "That's really how you think of Rika, isn't it? Your slave instead of your wife. You heartless bastard. You don't even know the difference. Put the gun down and let's just have it out right now. Me and you. I win, you leave Rika alone for good."

Sonja quickly stepped in between them and put her hands on Leoben's chest. She pushed gently. John was surprised, but Leoben let her propel him several steps backward.

"He's only thinking of Rika," Sonja said to Leoben. "She's having a hard time coping with motherhood."

"What's wrong with her?"

John almost rolled his eyes. Leoben's ignorance was astonishing. He started to answer but Sonja beat him to it.

"Pregnancy is hard on a woman's body, physically and emotionally. I know because I've been pregnant…several times. Your hormones are all over the place. Rika is going to need some time to adjust. Please do what John says and give her that time. He knows what he's talking about. He has two children. He knows what his wife went through."

Leoben looked back and forth between Sonja and John. Then he shrugged. Sonja took John's hand and pulled him out of the kitchen. She quickly walked past the bodies in the living room, averting her eyes until they were out of the apartment. As soon as they were in the hall, the centurions entered and shut the door.

"What were you trying to do in there…push him into shooting you, too?" Sonja asked angrily.

"I couldn't let it go. Seeing him, knowing what he did to Rika, seeing what he did to Yuself. I couldn't let it go."

"You've got to. Let me handle this."

They walked to the elevator. "What will the centurions do with the bodies?" John finally asked.

"They'll be cremated."

"I need to go tell Rika," John said wearily.

"Do you want me to go with you?"

"It would probably be better if I went alone."

Sonja hesitated. "I'd…like to see the baby."

John considered her request. She'd kept the situation with Leoben from escalating out of control and had probably saved his life. It was just one more thing he owed her.

They rode the elevator down to the second floor. Gianne and Petra were sitting on the floor playing with Cassie and Sofia. Rika's baby was asleep in the crib. The two women looked up as John and Sonja entered. Petra knew what had happened just from the expression on his face. She stood.

John shook his head and felt tears come to his eyes. Petra put her hand over her mouth.

"I'll do it," John said. "I'll tell her."

"What's she doing here?" Gianne asked as she looked at Sonja. "Come to gloat?"

"She tried to help," John said. "We were too late. I think she's talked Leoben into leaving Rika alone for a while. She'd like to see the baby."

Petra shrugged and motioned Sonja over to the crib. Sonja bent over and touched the baby's soft blond fuzz.

John went to the door of Rika's room and knocked. As before there was no answer so he opened the door and looked inside. Rika was still turned away toward the wall. He walked around to the side of her bed and sat in the chair. Several times he tried to speak but he was on the verge of choking up and couldn't get the words out.

Finally Rika said, "He's dead, isn't he?"

John nodded.

"Leoben killed him?"

John nodded again and then said, "After Yusef killed him, Leoben downloaded and…" he couldn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. Rika knew very well what had happened.

"Did he suffer?"

"Leoben did. Yusef didn't."

He took the prayer beads out of his pocket and gave them to her. She clutched them tightly and shut her eyes. John had expected tears or some outward show of grief. Instead when Rika opened her eyes, she looked serene and untroubled. She rubbed the beads between her fingers.

"His mother gave these to him on his thirteenth birthday, the day he became a man. She was very devout in her faith. She taught him and he taught me."

"He wanted me to tell you that he loved you."

"I'll see him again."

"Is there anything I can do? I'll be glad to sit here with you if you don't want to be alone. We don't need to talk."

"I'm fine." She rubbed the beads again and then brought them to her lips. "Thank you for bringing these to me. I'm fine. Really."

John stood. "Sonja talked to Leoben. He's going to leave you alone for a while."

"I appreciate that. Thank her for me."

"I will. I'd like to come back to see you tomorrow. Is that okay?"

She nodded, wrapped the beads around her hands and closed her eyes. John saw her lips begin to move and knew she was reciting a prayer. Quietly he slipped out and closed the door.

Petra was waiting for him. "Do I need to go to her?"

"Not right now. I gave her Yusef's prayer beads. She's praying. She took it a lot better than I thought she would. In fact I'm worried that she took it too well."

"I think all this has just been too much for her. I'm going to take her to my apartment tomorrow. Gianne is just down the hall from us. We'll look after Rika and the baby."

"I hope I'll be allowed to visit. I enjoy seeing you all in the park, but I'd like to be able to visit your building, too. I'll see if I can get permission."

Petra glanced at Sonja who was still standing by the crib looking at the sleeping infant. She spoke softly. "I'm sure she'll arrange it for you. She seems to be quite taken with you, they way she looks at you."

"We're not…it's not like that with us. She's my handler. That's all."

Petra gave him a sad half-smile. "I don't think that's all it is on her part."

John looked her in the eyes. "I love my wife."

"I know you do. That's why it's so sad for the Cylon," Petra said barely above a whisper. "Both of them."

John snorted. "D'Anna hasn't shown the least bit of interest in me since she got pregnant. I was one thing and one thing only to her. I feel obligated because of the child, but…"

"There's little chance she'll carry it to term. The Cylon women haven't had a single child born alive."

"That's what Sonja told me. She was pregnant a couple of times and lost them. She believes the same thing will happen to D'Anna."

Pity came into Petra's eyes. "The loss of a child is devastating to a woman. It makes no difference whether she's human or Cylon. I feel sorry for her. For both of them since D'Anna will probably lose her child as well."

"I hope not for her sake."

"Do you want to be with D'Anna?"

John shook his head.

"Is that because you'd rather be with Sonja?"

"I'd rather go home to my wife."

"Sonja has feelings for you. That's clear enough. Perhaps you should think about a life here. You need to be realistic, John. The Cylons control both this planet and Caprica. You'll never see your wife again. You know that."

"I'm not ready to give up hope, Petra. Not yet. I've got to have something to hang onto. Seeing Laura and my kids again…Kara and Brae…that's kept me alive so far. I won't let go of it."

"Then perhaps I'm pitying the wrong one."

"You and Gianne continue caring for Rika and her baby. I can take care of myself."

...

Kara walked out of the bedroom and down the hall. She'd lost a few pounds on Nereid. The fit of the dark blue dress was her proof, although it still looked good on her. Her hair was down around her shoulders instead of pulled back or braided and she had put on some makeup. She was also wearing heels, not stilettos, but a couple of inches. They would put her eye-to-eye with Lee and almost eye-to-eye with Hunter. She was also dealing with the feeling of her legs being bare. The dress ended four inches above her knees. That was as unaccustomed a feeling to her as the heels. She took a deep breath and walked into the living room.

She tried for her usual tomboy swagger, but something about putting on the dress and heels and makeup had short-circuited something in her brain. Or maybe it was the way both Lee and Hunter were looking at her. Neither of their jaws dropped, but their stares were confirmation that she had undergone a transformation from the usual. She didn't think she had felt that way but once before in her entire life, the night of her father's and Laura's wedding when Lee had watched her walk down the aisle in front of Laura. The look on his face had said it then just as his look was saying it now.

"I know. I clean up good. So do both of you. Stand up. Let me look at _you_."

Without taking their eyes off her, both of them obeyed. The only word she could come up with was _hot_, wearing their blue button-down collar shirts with nearly identical burgundy-stripped ties. Hunter's hair was darker than Lee's and she suddenly realized who he reminded her of...Hugh Connelly.

"What?" She finally asked as they continued to stare. "Get a grip. It's not like you've never seen me in a dress before. Both of you."

"Not a dress like that," Hunter said.

"Lee has."

"Not nearly often enough," he said.

"It's not my style."

"It should be…at least occasionally," Hunter said.

"My thoughts exactly," Lee echoed.

"Gods, I can't believe you two. I put on a dress and…never mind. Let's go. We don't want to be late."

She turned to walk to the door, but caught a glimpse as the two men glanced at each other. If Hunter had been more familiar with Caprica, she could almost have seen them high-fiving each other. Then she smiled. If her putting on a dress had given them something to bond over, it was worth it.

The guards at Marble House had seen Lee's car before and one of them recognized him. They all recognized Kara and immediately allowed him into the visitor parking lot at the back. He knew they would still have to go through a stringent security check before they were allowed inside.

They went through the requisite metal detector. On the way over neither he nor Kara had thought to explain anything to Hunter. Now Lee said to him, "Just follow me and do what I do. This is standard procedure for anyone coming in."

Once they had been thoroughly vetted and their names checked off the list of expected visitors, Kara led the way down a back hallway to an elevator. They got on and rode up to the second floor where they were checked off another list before being allowed into the private quarters. Lee and Hunter followed Kara to Braedon's playroom.

"Hello, Brae," she grinned. "Look who's here."

He looked up and smiled and Kara saw her father so clearly that she couldn't stop the tears that welled in her eyes. She walked over and knelt down.

"Kawa," he said shyly and held a Viper up to her.

She nodded. Lee walked over to them. "Do you remember me?"

"Yee," Braedon said.

Maya walked out of her bedroom into the sitting room which doubled as Braedon's play room. Kara glanced up through her tears. Maya looked great. She was wearing a cinnamon-colored sweater with dark brown slacks. Her hair was down around her shoulders and she was also wearing makeup. She looked relaxed and she looked good.

Kara stood. "Sorry to barge in like this, but I wanted to see him."

Maya walked over and hugged Kara. There were tears in her eyes as well. "I'm so glad you're back. We've missed you."

"I've missed you, too…all of you, especially Brae."

Maya looked toward the door and Kara realized they had left Hunter standing there alone. Lee glanced around, too. He beckoned Hunter over and made the introductions.

Maya held out her hand and Hunter shook it. Kara wasn't sure, but she thought Maya blushed as she softly said, "Nice to meet you."

"Same here," Hunter said.

Maya turned to Kara. "You look good. Been relaxing in the sun?"

"I got this tan from _working_ in a couple of gardens," Kara said. "I had to earn my keep. I'll tell you all about it someday."

Braedon stood up and pulled on the hem of Kara's skirt. "Up," he said.

Kara picked him up.

"Do you have a kiss for Kara?" Maya asked.

He put his arms around her neck and planted a wet kiss on her cheek. Kara said to him, "I saw your dada. He loves you. He wanted me to give you a big kiss, too." Braedon squirmed to get down. He picked up his toy Raptor and held it up to her.

"Dada," he said as Kara took the Raptor. Then he ran over to John's photograph on the table. "Kiss Dada."

Kara felt tears welling again.

"He does that when we talk about John," Maya said. "He knows John left in a Raptor. He still kisses the picture every night before bed."

"I need a tissue," Kara said, "and a mirror. I think I'm smudged."

Maya led Kara into her bedroom. Braedon trotted after them.

Lee and Hunter were left in the sitting room. Lee wandered aimlessly around looking at Braedon's toys. Hunter bent down and picked up the toy Viper where Braedon had dropped it.

"So this is what you and Kara fly?"

"That's a Mark II, the oldest model. We've both flown it. So what do you think about Maya?"

Hunter grinned. "A lot prettier than I expected."

"Before my brother joined the Marines, he used to work for the Buccaneers pyramid team in their PR department. Last night after I got back to my apartment, I called a friend of his who still works for them. He's getting me four tickets to the final game next week. They won't be front-row seats, but they'll be nice. I figured maybe me and Kara and you and Maya could go. I haven't told Kara yet. I want to surprise her."

"Fine with me."

"So please keep it a secret until next Saturday."

Hunter walked to a table where several of Braedon's books lay. He put the toy Viper down and picked one up. "When I go back to Nereid, I'd like to take some books for my little girl. She's too young for them right now, but one day…"

"We'll go to a bookstore after your debriefing is over. Maybe Maya could help you pick some out. She knows a lot about kids."

Hunter smiled. "Was it your idea or Kara's to fix me up with Maya?"

Lee was embarrassed. "Mine. Kara doesn't know anything about it. Maya's nice." He shrugged. "You didn't mention having anyone back on Nereid."

"I don't."

"Okay, then."

"Relax, Lee. I know Kara's with you. She made that clear from the beginning. You should trust her."

"I do. A lot more than she trusts me."

Hunter picked up another book. "I can't argue with you there. But she still loves you."

Lee wasn't sure what he was feeling. Hunter had just told him Kara loved him, but she'd also discussed something deeply personal with Hunter that she hadn't discussed with him…the issue of trust.

He finally asked. "She talked to you about me? About love and trust?"

Hunter put the book down and turned to face Lee. "She and I are a lot alike in some ways. I understand her. I would have done the same thing if my father had gone missing and an Oracle had told me where he was."

"You'd have lied to someone you say you love?"

"Did she lie to you or just not tell you what she was going to do?"

"Same difference."

"Is it? What would you have done if she'd told you?"

"I don't feel like discussing this with you."

Hunter shrugged. "Sooner or later you'll have to face it with her. For what it's worth my advice to you is to deal with it and then move on. If you think you can't overcome it, then be honest with her. Don't string her along pretending you're fine with it and keep harboring resentment toward her. She deserves better than that."

Lee felt his temper begin to rise. "I've known her for over two years. You've known her for what…a month? I don't need or want your advice."

"And I don't need or want you trying to shove Maya down my throat because you think she'll distract me. She probably won't appreciate it either. I'll let it go because you don't know a lot about my situation, but let's get one thing straight between us. I'm not competing with you for Kara."

"Then stay out of our business," Lee said angrily and walked to a window that overlooked the front lawn of Marble House. He stared at the long avenue that led up the mall to the building where he worked. As he tried to calm down, he was also trying to figure out what it was about Hunter that got under his skin so badly. How could he like the guy one minute and want to slug him the next?

...

In the bedroom Maya handed a box of tissues to Kara who plucked several out and blotted under her eyes. She sat down on the foot of the bed.

"I thought I was past this."

Braedon came over and crawled up beside her. She picked him up and put him on her lap. She kissed his cheek. "I wanted to bring Dad home."

"I know," Maya said.

"We're going back for him soon."

"I know."

Kara put Braedon on the floor, blotted her eyes again and walked into the bathroom. Other than being a little red, her eyes didn't look too bad. The mascara hadn't run yet. Maya followed her and stood in the doorway. "Hunter and Lee both have gorgeous baby blue eyes."

Kara grinned. "I'm not sure I ever heard that much enthusiasm about Sam. So what do you think about Hunter…or should I ask?"

"He's very good-looking. Does he have a wife or girlfriend back where he came from?"

"No, but he has a little girl. She's four months old now. Her mother died. Her grandmother is taking care of her. Hunter's helping, but…it's a long story. I'll let him tell you."

Maya smiled. "That sounds like you have plans for us to spend some time together."

"Would you object?"

Maya crossed her arms and shrugged. "I suppose you could talk me into it."

"Lee told me you and Sam broke up."

"Sam wants children one day. I can't give him kids. It wasn't fair to him."

"Are you okay with that?"

"It's not just that. It's his lifestyle, too. I know he saw other women the whole time we were together. Thirty minutes after he proposed to me, he was answering a text message from somebody. He said it was one of his teammates, but I don't know. Women throw themselves at him all the time. I don't really want to deal with that. Peter had his faults, but he was one hundred percent faithful to me. I never had any doubts."

"I don't think I could live with the other women thing either."

"When did Hunter's wife die?"

"Not long after their baby was born. And they weren't married."

"Were they in love?"

"Hunter doesn't talk much about his feelings. He says he's a soldier first. He's been fighting the Cylons since before he was fifteen."

"Gods. What was her name?"

"Juliana. His little girl is named Esmari."

"Like the princess in the Caprican Prince stories?"

Kara smiled. "So you read those stories, too."

Maya gave her a little grin. "Of course I read them."

"He told me he reads to the kids in his valley during the winter while they're snowed in."

Maya glanced back into the bedroom and said, "Uh-oh. Come see Brae's latest trick." They walked into the bedroom. Braedon was bouncing on Maya's bed. She scooped him up and planted kisses on his neck. He began to giggle and squeal. She laughed. "What am I going to do with you? You are going to fall off the bed and break your pretty little neck."

"More," he said and squirmed to get down. "More."

She put him on the bed and held his hands and let him bounce a few more times before she scooped him up again. "Let's go see Lee and Hunter."

They walked back into the living room. Hunter was looking through one of Braedon's books. Lee was standing on the other side of the room at the window. The tension between them was thick enough that Kara felt it.

Braedon pointed to the book and said, "Mine."

"Now what are we supposed to do when someone else wants to play with our toys or read our books?" Maya asked.

"Share." Braedon squirmed and Maya put him down.

Hunter knelt and Braedon cautiously approached him. He held out the book and Braedon took it. Hunter asked him, "Do you like trains?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever ridden on a train?"

"No."

"Me either. Maybe one day Maya will take us to ride on one."

Braedon ran over to Maya. "Wide twain _now_."

She smiled at Hunter. "Thank you. Are you going to magically produce us a train for us?"

He smiled back at her. "Just trying to help."

"Brae's still having trouble with the R sound, isn't he?" Kara asked.

"We're working on it. Why don't you and Hunter and Lee go on downstairs? We're eating in the small dining room. Laura's already down there. She's asked Elosha to join us. I'll get Brae settled and then get Mrs. Reilly to stay with him."

Kara picked Braedon up and hugged him. "See you after lunch."

He clung to her when Maya tried to take him. "No. Go."

"Why don't you let him go?" Hunter asked. "We can bring him back here in a few minutes. Otherwise he'll be screaming and everybody will be upset."

"You're a real softie," Maya said. "Okay, let's go."

Kara put Braedon down and took his hand. She motioned to Lee to take his other hand. When they were in the hall, she asked, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Don't give me that. You and Hunter were getting along great. Did you get into a fight about something?"

"Not really. We had a talk."

"About?"

"Later. Now's not the time."

"It was about me, wasn't it?"

He shrugged. "Mostly."

"I've already told you there's nothing going on between me and Hunter."

"Maybe you should tell him that."

"Fine," she snapped. "I will. You want me to do it right now or wait until you're not around."

"Kara, please," he said. "Not here. Not now."

They reached the elevator, got on and waited for Maya and Hunter to catch up. On the first floor Maya led the way to a sitting room adjacent to the small dining room. Laura was already there along with Admiral Adama, Major Parker and his wife.

"Look who's here," Kara said to Braedon.

"Mamma," he said and ran to her.

Laura picked up her son and Kara walked over. Laura reached out and squeezed her hand. "You look very good."

"Thanks. So do you." In truth Laura didn't look that good. She looked like she hadn't slept for days. "Hello, sir," Kara said to the admiral.

He nodded. "Kara."

Major Parker introduced his wife, a slender, petite woman with dark hair that Kara judged to be in her early-thirties. She was very tastefully attired in a beige knit dress with a darker jacket. Her features reminded Kara of Sharon Agathon.

"My wife, Kimiko," Parker said.

She held out her hand and shook everyone's. "My pleasure. And please call me Kim."

Laura said, "My son, Braedon." She kissed his cheek. "Shake hands with Major Parker." Shyly Braedon held out his hand and Parker gently shook it. Laura smiled. "Maya has been working diligently on teaching Brae manners."

"He's a very handsome little boy," Parker said. "He looks like his father."

"Yes, doesn't he?" Laura said.

Maya walked over to them. "I'll take him back upstairs and get him settled."

"No," Braedon said.

Laura smiled. "He isn't even two yet and _no_ has become his favorite word. I'm afraid the next year or so is going to be a trial to get through."

Kim smiled. "You'll make it. My son wasn't nearly as difficult during the twos as my daughter. By that time she was already a little drama queen. She's nearly five and we're still dealing with it. She's such a daddy's girl, too. If Brad's not around, she'll stomp that little foot of hers and say, '_I want my daddy, now_.'" She slipped her arm affectionately through her husband's. "He thinks it's cute."

Hunter walked over to them, looked at Braedon and patted his own shoulders. "Want to ride?"

Maya quickly lifted Brae and put him on Hunter's shoulders. Hunter reached up and steadied him.

Lee watched Hunter and Maya leave the room with Braedon happily riding on Hunter's shoulders. He felt envy at the ease Hunter displayed around Braedon. He didn't understand how a hardened fighter could be that good with children.

As if reading his mind, Kara said, "It's how he was raised. Older kids took care of the younger ones because all the adults had to work just to put enough food on the table to survive. Zak told me that you took care of him a lot when he was little. You should understand."

Lee nodded. He was being too judgmental oft Hunter and he knew it.

Bill and Laura had stepped away from the group and were talking quietly. The admiral glanced in her direction and she realized that he was probably telling Laura about their conversation after leaving the restaurant the night before. Kara also knew it wouldn't take much for Parker to pick up the tension between her and Lee. She smiled.

"What do you think about those Buccaneers? Are they going to go all the way this year or choke like last year?"

Lee made an effort and said, "If Anders plays like he did last night, I don't see how they can lose."

"I missed the first half of the game," Parker said. "Kim tells me it was good."

"He's always working," she said. "We fixed up the spare bedroom as his office. He closes the door and I don't see him for hours."

They chatted about pyramid for several minutes until Elosha came to the door. Kara excused herself and walked across the room. She greeted the priest warmly.

Elosha took both of Kara's hands. "Our prayers were answered. You've returned safely from your mission."

"That was the plan from the beginning."

"Your mission was a success?"

"In most ways."

"Good. Laura was very worried about you. So was Lee. He came to see me."

"Lee came to your temple?"

"Not long after you left. He asked me to pray for your safe return just like Laura did."

"Wow," Kara said in surprise. She looked over at Lee still talking to the Parkers. "Lee asked you to pray for me. Lee doesn't believe in the gods."

"I told him you would return to him. I told him to have faith."

"Faith. We could all use a lot of that right now. Please keep praying for my dad. Please…just keep praying for him."

Elosha's eyes met hers. Without a word being spoken an understanding passed between them.

"Does Laura know?"

Kara nodded. "When the time is right we'll rescue him. For now it's our secret."

Elosha squeezed her hand gently. "The gods have indeed given us a miracle."

Maya and Hunter returned and walked over to the group. Laura motioned to Kara and Elosha and they joined the others.

Laura said, "My priest and dear friend Elosha will offer the prayer of blessing for our meal today."

Heads were bowed in reverence. Lee reached out and took Kara's hand. She squeezed his tightly and Elosha began.

"We ask our goddesses Hestia and Demeter to bless this food so graciously provided for us here today and we ask that their bounty be bestowed on all, especially those who are not as fortunate as we are. On this happy occasion we also give thanks for Kara's safe return to us. We ask the gods' blessings on our leaders, on Laura and Admiral Adama and on our Quorum as they chart the course of our government and make decisions that affect our lives and the lives of Caprica's children. We also ask the blessing of all the gods on those who serve us honorably and selflessly, the ones who stand between our remaining Colony of Caprica and those out there who would do us harm. We ask your blessing on all the men and women who protect us and serve us on our own world and on all other worlds, _wherever_ they might be. In the name of all the gods we offer our prayer."

TBC…


	26. Humanity's Child

Chapter 26

Humanity's Child

_25. General Ulixes was captured and cast into prison and word spread throughout the land that the army of the Twelfth Tribe had fallen._

_26. And the Lord sent to Azzura a vision that she should leave the valley of the farmers and journey to the city._

_27. Azurra left her son with his six sisters and went to the city and ministered to her husband, bathing his wounds and caring for him._

_28. And Ulixes tried to put her away from him saying unto her, I am captive of my enemy and whoever treats me with kindness shall also be judged as I am judged._

_29. Azurra said, I am your wife and I belong by your side._

_30. And she prayed to her God and He healed Ulixes' wounds and brought peace to his heart. _

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Azurra, _Chapter 8:25-30

.

The guard at Marble House raised the gate arm and Lee pulled his car out of the parking lot. As he got to the street, Kara impulsively said, "Take me by your apartment. I'd like to change clothes before we go to see Dreilide."

"Are you sure? You look really good in that dress. Has he ever seen you in a dress before?"

"At my Academy graduation party."

"He'd probably like to see you in a dress again. Once a year isn't too often."

"I want to get out of these heels. Besides, if he's been smoking, my clothes will smell like cigarettes. I want to wear something I can wash, like jeans. This dress has to be dry-cleaned."

Lee turned left. They were uncharacteristically silent for several blocks. "Lunch was good today," he finally said. "It was nice of Laura to do that for us."

"I'm glad we left when we did. I could tell that she wanted to talk to me about Dad. I don't know anything to tell her that would make her feel better. It's going to be bad enough when she reads the report of our debriefing."

"It was nice of Maya to offer to give Hunter a tour of Marble House."

She snickered. "Aren't you glad you didn't have to put up with him and me both this afternoon?"

"Kara…I'm sorry about earlier today. What he said just hit me wrong."

"I don't understand. It seemed like you were getting along good and then…"

"I overreacted to something he said. Hunter must think I'm an idiot."

"No. He doesn't but if you keep on acting that way, he will. Treating him nice one minute and turning on him the next."

Lee turned left onto the street beside his apartment building and entered the underground parking garage. He pulled into his allotted space and started to get out of the car.

"No. Give me your key and wait here," Kara said.

He closed the door. "Why?"

"Because you know what will happen if you go upstairs with me."

"And that's a _bad thing_?" Even Lee heard the hurt in his voice.

"If we go up there and jump into bed, we'll just put off talking about what's wrong between us and you know it. I've had enough of this crap, Lee. I want it to end and the only way we're going to do that is talk."

Feeling the sting of her rejection even as he agreed with her, he took his key ring out of his trouser pocket and handed it to her.

"I won't be gone long," she said.

Lee leaned his head back against the headrest and felt a deep aching sadness settle over him. He remembered the time almost six years earlier when he was seventeen years old and had been visiting his father on the _Galactica._

He'd been on the ship only a few days when the Cylons had attacked the Colonies. The _Galactica_ was one of the battlestars that had been ordered to stay over Caprica. She was an older ship and the newest and finest had been sent into battle because no one had believed in those first days that they would lose, but one by one the colonies had fallen and the proud new battlestars had been destroyed. It looked like that was going to be the fate of all the colonies, all the battlestars, and then the _Atlantia_ and several others had mounted a massive attack over Picon and had managed to destroy the giant Cylon nuclear killing machine. But many of the basestar's nukes had already been released and had sealed Picon's fate as the _Penelope's_ mission members had so recently seen.

Lee vividly remembered the night he'd met John Gallagher, the night Tom Zarek and his men had hijacked John and his ship. John had left Kara and Karl behind on Caprica at a small private airfield rather than risk Zarek's men hurting them. That night John had described Kara to him as beautiful, blond, athletic and tough. He'd talked about her soccer skills and her fearlessness on a skateboard, the daredevil kid who was growing into a beautiful young woman. Something inside Lee had held on to that image which had fused in his mind with the green-eyed ocean nymph in his favorite painting, _Posiden's Daughter_.

Lee had fallen in love with Kara before he'd even met her. He'd fallen in love with an ideal that he'd conjured in his mind. He'd even seen her while he was hallucinating in the decompression chamber after his accident in the deep space simulator. But Kara wasn't the mythical daughter of the sea god. She was real. She was human. She had her faults. She wasn't perfect. Just like he wasn't. They both had issues. Many of his he knew stemmed from his childhood and the way he was raised, his alcoholic, emotionally-distant, occasionally-abusive mother and his mostly absent, career-obsessed father who had missed more of Lee's and Zak's birthdays than he had made it home for.

A lot of Kara's problems probably came from Dreilide Thrace's abandonment of her when she was eight and her mother's near-abandonment to a career in the Marines. He had never understood why Socrata Thrace wouldn't allow John to be a part of Kara's life but she hadn't, and Kara had missed out on knowing her real father's love until they'd found each other again two years ago. And John did love his daughter. In fact when he'd first met John, Lee couldn't wrap his thoughts around the idea that a parent would do for a child what John had done for Kara. The whole concept had been that foreign to him. But over the years since then, he'd come to a better understanding of it. John was the kind of father he wanted to be one day. He just didn't know if he had a clue where to begin. Parenting skills were learned and he'd had two very poor teachers.

Lee didn't even know right now if he and Kara stood a chance as a couple. They probably didn't if he couldn't get his act together. He was going to have to accept that she and Hunter had formed a bond the same way he had eventually accepted Kara's bond with Karl. He was going to have to deal with it.

His mobile phone vibrated. He unclipped it and looked at the caller ID. Kendra.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"Nothing right now. Waiting on Kara to change clothes so we can go visit her other father. What's up with you?"

"Dwight came over for lunch today so he had the big meet and greet with Mother."

"How'd it go?"

"Better than I ever dreamed it would. I'm not sure who's more impressed. Dwight and Mother are still sitting at the table talking. I came into the kitchen to call and let you know something she told us. You should get a registered letter in a day or two. The independent hearing starts next Monday, a week from tomorrow."

"So soon?" Lee asked shocked. "Dad said it would probably be a month or more."

"My mother tried to slow it down hoping Zarek would come to his senses and drop the whole thing but no luck."

"Not that we can do anything about it."

"Mother thinks we should have legal representation?"

"Why? We're not on trial. My father said we'd just have to tell our story the way it happened and then answer any questions the panel might have."

"It's those questions she's concerned about. She's afraid Zarek might try to get one of us to incriminate ourselves or one of the others."

"How could he do that?"

"I shot a man, Lee," she said with emotion. "Sarah Porter from Gemenon is on the inquiry panel. You know how deeply religious she is. She doesn't even believe women should serve in the military. I think my mother is afraid Porter will take a dim view of what I did. You know what the Sacred Scrolls say about killing."

"That passage refers to deliberate murder…like what August Bernard was going to do to me."

"The Gemenese interpret the scrolls literally. To them killing is killing."

"Kendra, you shot a man who was a second away from shooting me. Don't worry. I'll make the panel see that if you hadn't pulled that trigger, I'd have been killed. The man was with Cylon centurions for the gods sakes. They shot down our Raptor. It's all in Commander Cain's report. How the hell does Zarek think that's going to incriminate _us_?"

"I don't know. My mother still thinks we need legal counsel."

"If we go into that inquiry with a lawyer, I'm afraid it will look like we have something to hide. We don't."

"I know. So I'll tell her _no_ on the legal representation."

"You and Saunders can do what you want. I'm going to decline."

"We will, too. We stick together."

"Okay, Kendra. Thanks for calling to tell me."

"How are things going, Lee? You sound like you're down."

"Things could be better. My CO and I are in the middle of debriefing Kara and the guy she brought back with her."

"What's he like?"

"You know I can't talk about it."

"Oh, come on. Just a hint." Her voice took on a teasing tone. "Tall, dark, handsome and mysterious?"

"Not over the phone, Kendra."

"Are you going to be debriefing them tonight?"

"No, we're taking the day off. My CO and his wife and Kara and I and…this other guy just had lunch at Marble House. My father gave Kara permission to visit Dreilide. Kara talked to him yesterday and she thinks he's gotten worse."

"Meet me at Zeno's tonight."

"Kara only got permission to go visit Dreilide. I've got to get her back afterward."

"And then what? Are you staying with her at the safe house?"

"No. One of Vladimir Darren's agents gets the babysitting honors."

"So meet me at Zeno's. We can talk."

"A little strategy session with you and Saunders before the inquiry next week?"

"No, just me. Dwight's got to fly up to Antioch tomorrow to take a couple of diplomatic couriers. They're leaving at 05:00. so he's going to bed early tonight. I'm on my own. So what about it? Zeno's tonight about eight? You sound like you need to talk to somebody. Who better than your wolf-fighting partner?"

"What about I call you if I can make it?"

"Sure. Call me."

"If not tonight then some other night this week."

"Okay, Lee. Don't let this thing get you down."

He ended the call and clipped the mobile phone back on his belt. Then he loosened his tie and unbuttoned his top shirt button before he leaned back against the headrest. He now had one more thing to think about, the upcoming independent inquiry. Maybe it was all about Zarek and the publicity it would get him like Bill thought. Then again maybe Zarek was ignorant of the extent to which August Bernard had gone to destroy whatever he thought Lee and Kendra had gotten at the courthouse. Lee didn't relish telling the story again. He didn't relish reliving the nightmare. He knew Kendra didn't either. But they were going to have to in front of a group of civilians who were sometimes very hard on the military.

…

Kara turned the key in the lock and opened the door of Lee's apartment. After the fighting last autumn her decision to move in with Lee had hurt Laura and had angered the admiral, but it was like she'd told them. She was eighteen. She could live where she wanted to.

Kara stepped into the living room and looked around. An empty beer bottle sat on the end table by the couch. She picked it up and walked into the kitchen. The recycle bin was full of beer bottles. It hadn't been emptied in a long time…or Lee was drinking a lot more than he used to. There were four or five unwashed cereal bowls in the sink and the garbage can was full. She sniffed. The garbage definitely needed taking out. She walked into the bathroom. The sink was grimy. The toilet seat was up. It didn't look like it had been cleaned in weeks. She didn't bother to open the shower door.

She walked into the bedroom and looked around. The bed wasn't made. The clothes Lee had worn yesterday were thrown across his desk chair instead of in the laundry hamper. None of this was like him. The Lee Adama she knew was not a slob.

Something had clearly changed, and whatever was wrong had started while she was on Nereid. She took off the dress and hung it in the closet. She put the heels on the floor next to Lee's dress shoes. She got a pair of jeans out of her dresser drawer and pulled them on. She found a clean t-shirt and her old pair of sneakers. As she left the bedroom, she looked at the clock on the nightstand. She'd been gone less than ten minutes. In the living room she checked their Top Gun trophies. She wasn't surprised to find that they were dusty. The letter from her father was still under hers. The letter she'd left under Lee's was gone.

She locked the door behind her and went to the elevator and felt for a moment like everything familiar to her was falling apart.

Then she took a deep breath. She had found her father because she loved him and because she wasn't a quitter. She loved Lee. She would find out what was going on with him. She wouldn't quit until she did.

_..._

Laura sat in her private den. Lee and Kara had left to go see Dreilide Thrace. The Parkers and Elosha were gone. Braedon was down for a nap and Maya had taken Hunter on a tour of Marble House. Laura had noticed how quickly Maya had volunteered to act as Hunter's guide when Lee and Kara had mentioned the visit to Dreilide. Hunter had quickly acquiesced. Only Bill stayed behind with her. He sat on the opposite end of the sofa. They were both enjoying cups of coffee.

"Today went extremely well," Laura said. "I'm glad I got to meet the Parkers."

"He's a very capable man, a good officer," Bill said. "I'm fortunate he agreed to take a position on my staff."

"His wife is very pretty. She teaches fourth grade by the way."

"I heard her say that."

"You mean Major Parker has never mentioned it?"

"He and I don't talk about our personal lives. I know he's married and has two young children. I've seen their pictures on his desk."

"I taught for two years at Thalassa College after I finished graduate school. If Richard Adar hadn't appointed me to his staff when he was elected Mayor of Delphi, I'd probably still be teaching."

Bill picked up his cup of coffee and took a sip. "Do you ever wish you'd turned him down?"

Laura smiled. "Some days. Of course my father wanted me to go into the diplomatic corps like he had done. I'm sure if he and my mother hadn't been killed on Tauron…" she didn't finish the sentence. She had no idea what would have happened to her career if her parents hadn't died when they did.

"You would have made a good diplomat. Do you have any regrets with where your career has taken you?"

"Not at the moment. What about you?"

"Not at the moment. Nereid is still ahead of us."

Laura sighed gently. "You'll handle that as well as you've done everything else."

She rubbed her thumb across the back of her wedding ring and thought about John.

She finally said, "I think Marshall Bagot is going to introduce a resolution in the Quorum to commission a statue of you."

"I _don't want_ a statue," he said quickly. "I've told you that before."

"You're far too modest, Bill. Your plan freed us of Cylon control. You deserve the recognition."

"I did my job. If I deserve one, then so do the thousands of service men and women who did their jobs that night."

"A statue of you would honor them all."

Bill shook his head. "Just veto the resolution if it passes the Quorum."

She smiled again. "I could, but I'm not going to. Caprica needs heroes. We need to be able to look at someone and say, _'Well done'_."

"Then commission a statue of John. He deserves it more than I do."

"You're missing the whole point, Bill. You made the plan. You made the decisions. You get the statue. If you regard that as punishment, then I'm sorry, but that's the way things work."

"Do you have anything stronger than this coffee?"

"Don't you think it's a little early in the day?

He smiled. "Somewhere on the planet it's after five o'clock."

She gestured toward the sideboard. "You know where I keep the whiskey." After he had poured some into his coffee and returned to the couch, she said, "Billy called me this morning. Data entry was completed on Friday in a database containing the names on Zarek's petition plus the names on the deceased list that Lee and Kendra got on Tauron. I know Zarek's pulled strings to convene the independent inquiry beginning next Monday. Billy volunteered to work yesterday doing some comparisons. The results are interesting to say the least."

"Any surprises?"

"Nothing we weren't expecting. Some of the people on Mateo Oraibi's unofficial list also signed Zarek's petition…apparently from beyond the grave."

Bill chuckled softly. "I wonder if Tom Zarek has got the guts to add raising the dead to his self-proclaimed list of accomplishments."

"I hope not although if I know him, he'll disavow any knowledge of those signatures and blame the fraud on the recently deceased August Bernard who can no longer defend himself. I've thought long and hard about this independent inquiry. I wouldn't put it past Zarek to have staged it all. He knows Lee and Kendra told the truth about what happened because he's the one who sent Mr. Bernard after them. Zarek just wants to elicit public sympathy as a leader who supports his men…and by extension the people he claims he was chosen to serve. Any way you look at it, I think he's going to come out the better for it."

"What's your next step?"

"I talked to Romo Lampkin as soon as I got off the phone with Billy. He's going to pay Zarek a visit tomorrow and ask for an explanation."

"Is he going to mention the independent hearing?"

Laura smiled. "You know how well Romo handles these things. I doubt he'll have to, but I also doubt it will sway Zarek."

"Then why tip your hand ahead of time. Spring it on Zarek during the inquiry. Let him see how well he can worm his way out of it in front of the panel. Make his duplicity public."

"That's a _very_ good idea. I'll call Romo shortly and tell him to cancel tomorrow's meeting with Zarek. He can attend the inquiry as my representative."

Bill took another sip of his coffee. "Are you sure I can't talk you into rethinking the statue?"

Laura smiled. "Not a chance, Admiral Adama."

...

John awoke to someone pounding on his door. He rolled out of bed into a dim gray gloom wondering if he had dreamed it. It was either very early in the morning or it was still raining. The urgent knocking came again so it wasn't a dream. He quickly pulled on a pair of sweatpants and went to the door. Doolittle never knocked. A Cylon wouldn't have knocked either.

He opened the door to Petra who was holding Rika's crying infant.

"I've got to get back," she said breathlessly. "This little one needs feeding and I left Cassie asleep." She took a deep breath. "Rika's gone."

"Gone?" John said still not completely awake. "Where?"

A sob choked Petra. She cuddled the baby closer and rocked her back and forth. The little mouth sought her breast even through her blouse.

"I'm afraid…she…the top sheet from her bed is missing. Her clothes and shoes, too. Rika was sleeping when I fed the baby about two a.m. When she woke me up just now, I went to check on her again. She was gone."

John shook his head in bewilderment. "Why do you think she would have taken the sheet?" But even as he spoke the words, he realized what Petra feared. "Oh, gods, no. You don't think she would…" he couldn't bring himself to say it. "Has anybody searched the building for her?"

"Not yet. I came straight up here as soon as I found her bed empty. What should we do?"

"Go back to Cassie and feed the baby. I'll go down and wake Sonja and get her to start searching the building. Where outside would Rika…where do you think she would go?"

Petra was crying openly now. "She used to meet Yusef in the park…past the fountain. Where the paths fork take the left one. There's a thicket of rhododendrons near a big hemlock tree. That's where I found her two days ago."

"I'll find her," John said. "I'll bring her back."

Petra was still crying as she turned and started toward the elevator. John closed the door, went back to the bedroom and quickly dressed. He looked out the window. The dim gloom came from another day of pelting rain. He exited the apartment and rode down to Sonja's apartment where he knocked on the door and continued to knock until she opened it. Her hair was tousled, a sleep mask pushed up on her forehead, her eyes heavy with sleep. She was wearing a short blue nightgown. She looked even more surprised than the day before.

"What's wrong?"

"Rika is missing. I'm going out to look for her. Will you start searching the building?"

"Missing?"

"Missing. As in not in her bed when Petra got up to feed the baby. Rika was there at two a.m. She's gone now. Will you help?"

"Where do you want me to look?"

"Just search the building. Please. Start in the basement. I'm going to the park."

"Why the park?"

"Because that's where Petra thinks she might have gone. That's where Petra found her two days ago."

"It's pouring rain."

"I know. But if she…it might not have mattered."

Sonja still seemed confused. "If she what?"

"Petra and I are afraid she's done something to herself."

"Done something?"

"Gods damn it, Sonja. Do I have to spell it out? We're afraid she might have gone somewhere and taken her own life."

Sonja's eyes finally opened wide. "Suicide is a mortal sin."

"We can debate that some other time. Will you help?"

"I'll help." She put her hand on his arm.

"She's so young. She's like Kara. She's like my daughter."

"Then go to the park. Leave the building to me."

"Please don't involve Leoben in this. Not yet. If we find her and she's all right, he doesn't need to know."

Sonja nodded.

John turned and was almost to the elevator by the time she closed the door of her apartment.

...

Kara opened the car door. "I'm back."

"That was quick."

She shrugged. "It only took me two minutes to change clothes. The rest of the time I spent checking out the apartment. I'm gone a month and it looks like a pig sty. What's up with you, Lee? The first time I saw your apartment, it was spotless. It was nearly spotless when I left a month ago. What happened? Do you have an inner slob that I don't know about?"

Lee started the car and backed out of the parking place. "I've been busy lately. I haven't been home a lot."

"How long does it take to wash a cereal bowl or carry the recycle stuff downstairs? Or scrub a toilet for that matter? The toilet is gross, Lee."

"Leave it alone, Kara."

"No, I'm not going to leave it alone. Something's wrong. Is it my fault? Is it because of what I did?"

"Go see Dreilide. Then we'll talk."

"You won't tell me to _leave it alone_ again?"

"We'll talk about anything you want to talk about."

They rode the rest of the way to Fifty-First Street in silence. Lee pulled into a parking place near Dreilide's apartment building, turned off the engine and leaned back against the seat.

"Aren't you coming with me?" Kara asked.

"I'm sure he doesn't want to see me today."

"That's not true and you know it. He likes you."

"Go see Dreilide, Kara. I wouldn't be very good company right now."

Knowing she wasn't going to change his mind, Kara closed the car door and walked up the steps to the apartment. Dreilide lived on the top floor. She wondered how he was still managed to climb three flights of stairs since walking across the room sometimes left him struggling to get his breath.

As she entered the dusty concrete stairwell she thought of the day a year and a half earlier when she had first come to see the man she had once thought of as her father, the man who had left her and her mother when she was eight years old and disappeared from her life. She still remembered the shock on Dreilide's face when he had seen her that first time. Her first visit had lasted less than ten minutes. Neither one of them had been able to handle it. But she'd gone back. She'd kept going back. She wasn't a quitter.

She reached his door and knocked. After nearly a minute he opened it. She stood there smiling.

"Hi," she said.

He reached out and squeezed her arm and then she stepped inside and hugged him. He smelled like cigarettes, like he always did. He was wearing one of his faded blue flannel shirts. They were all frayed at the cuffs and around the collar, but he liked them. The shirt emphasized the pale grayish tinge of his face. But then she'd been expecting it. The disease was taking its toll on him. He'd grown steadily worse during the last year and a half.

They went to sit on the couch.

"You look good," he said. "Been out in the sun?"

"My…mission lasted longer than I thought it would. I spent some time outdoors."

"Down on an island somewhere?"

She smiled. "I didn't get my tan laying on a beach. I was working. Okay?"

"I know you can't talk about it."

"How have you been doing?"

He shrugged. "I've been better."

"Still using the oxygen, I see."

"When I have to. Don't worry. I've still got some fight left in me. I'm not ready to give up yet."

"You're still smoking, aren't you?"

"A lot less than I used to. I had one early this morning and one after lunch. None since then because I knew you were coming by."

"Still playing the clubs?"

"One or two nights a week. It's about all I can manage now."

"How are you still getting up and down those stairs?"

He snorted. "Very, very slowly. There's an apartment coming vacant on the ground floor next month. I put my name in for it. I just won't be able to move the piano."

"Why not?"

"It was here when I rented this place. The piano belonged to a music teacher, an old man who died before I moved in eight years ago. His son remembered the piano being lifted up with some kind of hoist apparatus on the roof when he was a little boy. They had to remove the window from the frame. I don't have the kind of money to have that done."

"You need your piano," Kara said stubbornly.

"I need to be on the first floor a whole lot more. I never envisioned dying in a dirty stairwell."

"You're not going to die so quit talking about it."

"We're all going to die. Just some of us sooner than others."

Kara didn't say anything for a minute. "What about getting another piano?"

"I don't have that kind of money, either."

"A used piano?"

"I've got the electric keyboard. I'll make do."

"I'll help you move. Me and Lee. I'll get some others to help, too. A couple of pilots owe me a favor. We'll get you moved. It won't cost you a thing."

He looked at her and tears came to his eyes.

"I need to go," she said. "Lee and I have got to have a talk. I took off on my mission without telling him I was going. It's caused some big problems for us."

"I don't want to see you make the same mistake I made with your mother."

"What does that mean?"

"Don't rush into anything with Lee like I did with her. We got married too young. If we'd waited another year, we probably wouldn't have gotten married at all. She would have been free when she met your father. You'd have had a lot better life than you had."

"My life wasn't so bad."

"It wasn't so good either."

"Do you think Lee and I are wrong for each other like she was for you? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

"Lee is a nice young man. I like him. He seems like he's deeply in love with you. When I was his age, I felt like that about your mother and she felt the same way about me. I'm just saying don't rush into anything. That's _all_ I'm saying."

"Marriage isn't even on the table right now."

"What about that ring you wear?"

"It's a promise ring. It's not an engagement ring. It just means we're exclusive. It doesn't mean we've set a date."

"I'm glad to hear it. Your mom and I got married when we were eighteen years old, same age you are now."

"I'm almost nineteen."

"Point is you've got your whole life ahead of you. I'm not telling you Lee isn't the man for you. I'm just telling you not to rush into anything. Wait a couple of years before you stand in front of a priest. Make damned certain before you take those vows."

Kara snickered. "What? You're channeling my dad now? You sound exactly like him."

"We both love you, Kara. We both want you to be happy. Maybe he wouldn't mind me standing in and giving you some fatherly advice. After I'm gone, there won't be anyone to do it."

Kara stood. "Okay. Enough said. Do you need anything? Want me to go to the grocery store for you or something?"

"Paulla's still helping me out." He chuckled which triggered a coughing spell. Kara walked over to the piano and got his glass of whiskey, his cough medicine as he called it.

She waited for the coughing to subside. "Paulla? You mean Ms. Soup and Sermons?"

Still coughing, he nodded.

Kara smiled. "She converted you to monotheism yet?"

"Not yet. But she's still trying."

"I'll come back as soon as I can. Don't get up. I can let myself out."

"I'm glad you made it back, Kara. Lee came to see me after you left and told me you'd gone on a mission. And then a month went by with no word from either of you. I was worried."

She grinned. "I'm fine. Someday I'll tell you all about my mission. There were a couple of surprises. I just can't talk about it yet."

"I finished recording the new CD. It's in post production. I'm calling it _Kara's Song _after the title number. The piece I wrote for your dad is on it, too. It'll be released soon."

"You promised me a copy."

"The first one."

"Autographed?"

"You bet."

She left, closing the door behind her, and stood for a full minute leaning against the wall. What had he been trying to tell her about Lee? She finally decided that all he meant was to go slow, that he didn't want her and Lee to make a mistake and marry too young like he and Socrata had done. If she and Lee made it a few more years together, they stood a better chance if they decided to get married.

Kara walked slowly down the stairs and onto the street. When she opened the car door, she saw that Lee had fallen asleep. She sat for a minute looking at his handsome face, relaxed and free of stress. She suddenly wondered how much he had slept the night before. When he'd been recovering from his broken leg, after he'd stopped taking the painkillers, he'd had trouble sleeping. He'd had nightmares about that night he'd fallen into the ocean. They both had, but sometimes she thought his had been worse. Now she thought it was probably happening to him again.

Gently she touched his cheek and felt the love for him well up in her. He opened his eyes, those eyes as blue as the sky at twilight.

"Let's go for a walk," she said softly. "Down to the pier. We can sit on one of the benches and talk."

Without a word they got out of the car. Lee set the alarm. This wasn't the worst neighborhood in Caprica City, but it wasn't the best, either. They started down the sidewalk toward Fifty-Third Street. After they turned the corner, they passed the shoe repair shop with the sign shaped like a boot hanging over the door. Yolanda Brenn and Keshia, her caregiver and lover, had once lived in a little apartment over the shop. A strong wave of sadness washed over Kara. When she was finally allowed to leave the safe house on her own, she would go visit Keshia at the women's shelter where she was now working.

Lee took her hand. "Did you have a nice visit with Dreilide?"

"He's worse. His color is bad, but I guess that's to be expected when your lungs are in the shape his are in. Damned cigarettes. He told me last year that he used to smoke two packs a day…for years."

"It's a tough habit to break. It's a bad addiction."

"I know. And it's killing him. He's moving to an apartment on the first floor next month because he's having trouble climbing the stairs. I told him we'd move his stuff for him so he doesn't have to hire somebody. He's only working a night or two a week now."

"What about the piano? We can't move that by ourselves."

"He's leaving it. It's not his anyway. It was in the apartment when he moved in. I might check into getting him another one, maybe a second-hand one. He's got his electric keyboard but he needs his piano."

"One of your fathers needs a piano and you want to get him one. That's a reasonable and generous thing to do. The other one is in a basestar that explodes in front of your eyes and you decide he's alive on Nereid based on something Yolanda Brenn told you. Do you not see why I can understand one thing and not the other?"

"I understand," she said softly.

"That night in the hospital when Yolanda died, why didn't you tell me that she'd told you John was alive? Did you ever think about what it would do to me to realize you didn't trust me enough to even talk to me about it?"

"I thought about it. The reason I didn't talk to you right away is that I didn't understand what she meant then. I thought she was talking about _you_ falling from the sky because you had to punch out of your Viper and you fell into the ocean. I didn't understand she was talking about my father until after his memorial service when I remembered she'd said, _I saw a dazzle of light…a great distance…another ocean…and yet he survives_. She was talking about an FTL jump. Somehow I just knew then that she had been telling me Dad was alive. That's when it fell into place for me. Not the night she told me."

"But you still didn't mention it to me," he said bitterly.

Kara took a deep breath. "For one thing I know how you feel about prophets and prophecies. You don't believe in them. What Yolanda told me defied logic. How many times in the weeks after _that night_ did you tell me I was living in denial when I wouldn't give up hope that Dad's Raptor would be found and he'd still be alive? You already thought I was losing it because I wouldn't grieve. I wouldn't even open the letter Dad had left for me. Admit it. You thought I was going nuts. You just wouldn't say it. So say it now. Since we're telling each other the total truth. What did you think about my mental state before and after the memorial service?"

"Yes, I thought you were in denial. And I told you so. I said it to you, Kara. But I didn't think you were going crazy."

"So tell me what you would have thought if I'd sat down one night and told you that my father was still alive, that his Raptor had made it to Nereid, a jump thirty times farther than a Raptor can make. That I'd talked to Dr. Rafferty and he said there was a slim chance it could be true if about a dozen things had happened at just the right time and in just the right sequence. What would you have thought then?"

"I would probably have started worrying about you."

"_Started_ worrying about me?" She barely managed to suppress a laugh. "You were already worrying about me. You'd have wanted to put me in a room with padded walls. Admit it."

"Okay, Kara, I was already worried about you, especially after the memorial service because you quit talking about John at all. But you weren't grieving. Instead you were obsessed with that laptop and Irina Hoshi's journals and John's maps of the planet. If you'd told me he was alive on Nereid, I probably would have tried to talk you into getting some help since nothing I said meant anything to you."

"In other words, see a shrink."

They were halfway down the pier. The sea gulls circled overhead and Kara thought of her father, of how much he loved the ocean, of how the Cylon city was almost dead center of the big continent, a thousand miles from either ocean. When they rescued him and brought him back to Caprica, she knew he would want to go to his cottage on the island. Maybe they could all go, her dad and Laura and Brae and her and Lee. She smiled at the thought. She would give anything to have that feeling of being a family again.

Lee didn't answer her about the shrink. They both knew he would have suggested it and then if she hadn't taken his suggestion, they would have fought about it.

"Okay," she said. "Supposing I had told you my dad was alive and you humored me by not telling me I was crazy. What if next I'd told you that I was going to borrow the Raider and jump to Nereid on an unauthorized mission and look for him? What would you have done then, Lee? Said, _Great idea, Kara. Need some help stealing it? I'll be glad to volunteer._"

Lee took a deep breath and blew it out. "To tell you the truth, Kara, I don't know what I would have done because it didn't happen that way."

"Yes, you do. Who would you have gone to first…your dad or Laura?"

"First I'd have tried to talk _you_ out of it."

"And if I'd said, _Sorry, Lee. I'm going anyway. _What then? Would you have just sat back and let me do it?"

They reached the end of the pier. Kara let go of Lee's hand and propped her elbows on the railing. She looked out across the bay at the sailboats that dotted the water. They had gradually come back, these pleasure boats that had all but disappeared while the Cylons controlled Caprica.

Lee propped his arms beside her and followed her gaze out to sea. Since the night of the fighting when he'd punched out of his Viper and spent the next twelve hours floating in the ocean, the smell of seawater brought back very bad memories for him.

"I wouldn't have let you steal the Raider," he finally said. "I wouldn't have let you risk your career and _your life_ to go off on a crazy mission based on the words of an Oracle even if Dr. Rafferty had said it was theoretically possible."

There. He had said it. He'd told her the truth. He would have stopped her.

"So you'd have ratted me out to your father?"

"I don't know what I would have done. I don't guess we'll ever know."

"Then how would you have stopped me, Lee? Locked me in a closet?"

"I'd probably have told Dr. Rafferty he needed stronger security at the boneyard."

"And I'd have tried it anyway and gotten caught which I almost did anyway, and I'd have had you to thank for it."

"And you'd have broken up with me, wouldn't you? Be honest with me."

Below her the water slapped against the pilings. "Probably. Because then you would have betrayed my trust." She echoed his words, "I guess we'll never know."

"Why? For keeping you from risking your life on a hostile planet on a mission that had almost zero chance of success? I love you, Kara. I couldn't stand by and let you commit suicide. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"It means everything to me. You mean everything to me."

"Except someone you can trust."

"What if I'd told you and you told me not to do it, but I did it anyway and succeeded. What would you have done if your father had asked you later did you know? Would you have admitted it or lied to him?"

"He did ask me. That night. He asked me a couple of times. He couldn't believe we'd been living together and I _didn't_ know."

"And you were honestly able to tell him you didn't have any idea. You've still got a spotless service record. Admiral Adama is still proud of his oldest son. You made captain, didn't you? You think that would have happened if I'd involved you in my plan? How long do you think it will be before I make captain with what's on my record, or soon will be on my record?"

"Kara, that's not the point."

"What is the point, then, Lee? How could this have gone down any better? My father is alive. I didn't have anything to do with that, but we know it for sure now. And we know there's thousands of humans alive on Nereid. We have Hunter here on Caprica. He knows where the Cylons are on the planet and where the settlements are. Your father isn't going to nuke the planet and kill a bunch of innocent people. And we both know that before I went to Nereid, that's exactly what he planned to do no matter how many times I told him there were humans there. He wouldn't listen to me, but he'll listen to Hunter now. And Hunter's here because I stole the Raider."

"We didn't have the proof…"

"I don't care. We had enough to make anyone question it which he refused to do. If I'd told you my plan and you'd stopped me from going, your father would have destroyed that planet and everybody on it...including my father. Did you ever stop to think that maybe things happened the way they were supposed to happen? That maybe the gods had a hand in this? That maybe the gods gave Yolanda her vision and made sure I got to the hospital before she died? That maybe part of my destiny was to do exactly what I did?"

Lee didn't say anything. He couldn't argue with her on matters of religion. She believed in the gods. He didn't. They stood without talking for a long time until Kara bumped her shoulder against his.

"I still love you."

He felt emotion welling in him. "I love you, too."

She put her head on his shoulder. "I can't tell you I'm sorry I did it…except for hurting you. I'm really sorry for that. I didn't know any other way to do it and keep you from getting caught in the middle."

"Next time…" he started.

"There won't be a next time. I'm not going to steal another Raider."

"Next time you get a far-out idea like stealing a ship and jumping to a hostile planet, please trust me enough to tell me and let me make up my own mind how to handle it. We could have talked to my father and Laura. We could have done it _together_."

Kara laughed. "Right. Then we'd both have found ourselves sitting in little padded rooms. Don't you see? It went down the only way it could. You and me…we're different. We do things different. I'd do anything to save somebody I love. I wouldn't care if it was by the book or legal or even right. I'd do it."

In that moment Lee realized that was who she was. Part of the reason he loved her was her fierce loyalty to those she cared about. He put his arm around her and held her against him and hoped they had both learned something valuable. They couldn't change the past, but they could learn from it and not repeat it. They had to put this behind them and move on. _He_ had to put it behind him. He had to forgive her for not telling him.

"Now we need to talk about you," she said softly. "Tell me about the wolves and getting shot down in the Raptor. Tell me what's wrong."

Lee looked out at the horizon where the water of the bay met the sky. Barely five months ago he had almost died in that ocean. Kara had come for him the same way she had gone to Nereid for her father. Had it not been for Kara and Karl and Sharon, he wouldn't have been rescued. He would have died alone a thousand miles from the spot where he now stood and his body would never have been found. His whole life would have become nothing but a footnote in history, nothing but a name on a list of those killed or missing on the night they had won their freedom from Cylon control. He took a deep breath and said aloud what he had thought hundreds of times since then and especially since he'd faced death again on Tauron.

"I keep wondering how many times I'm going to come close to dying before it actually happens."

...

The spring day in Cylon City felt like winter. Rain was falling hard and it was very cold. The sky was dark enough that the streetlights were still on. John was soaked by the time he got to the park. The centurion turned, its red eye scanning him as he ran past it and down toward the fountain. There he stopped. Several paths diverged from the circular brick area. Petra had said the left one would take him to the rhododendrons and the hemlock tree. The left path was the same one he'd helped Rika on two days ago. Those two days seemed like weeks to him now.

He started down the path shouting her name. The trees were dripping almost as hard as it was raining and he was constantly wiping the water from his eyes. He found the rhododendrons off to the right of the brick path and the hemlock tree off to the left. The branches were heavy and dripping. The dark green rhododendrons leaves were glistening. He was already shivering from the cold.

He stopped and shouted Rika's name as loud as he could and was answered only by the sound of rain in the trees. A dozen yards beyond where he was standing, the path ended at a small obelisk. The trees were thick and dark beyond it. A wrought iron and wood bench similar to the ones around the fountain stood on one side. He walked down to the obelisk and saw that there was space for another bench facing the first one although there was no bench there. Instead he could see furrowed leaf litter where the bench had been dragged into the trees.

He followed the drag marks. He didn't have to go far, maybe thirty feet into the gloom. Rika had torn strips from the sheet, braided them into a rope and tied one end over the limb of a big oak tree. She had knotted the other end around her neck, stood on the back of the bench and tipped it over.

Even as John righted the bench, stood on it and worked frantically to loosen the knot at her neck, he knew he was too late. She had been dead for several hours at least. Her skin was tinged blue and ice cold. He finally succeeded in freeing her although his own fingers were getting stiff from the cold rainwater that ran over them. He gently lifted her body and made it back to the path before he sat down on the other bench and held her, cradling her against his chest as he had cradled her infant the day before. She was like Kara, like his daughter and the grief that overwhelmed him was like nothing he had ever felt before.

He howled it to the gray weeping sky, to the gods whose tears for her fell the same way his did. He began rocking her in his arms, gently back and forth. She _was_ his daughter. She was all the daughters who had died because of the Cylons. She was humanity's dead children, all of them, and he couldn't cope with the loss right now. He had been able to withstand everything they had done to him at the prison and everything that had happened to him since, but Rika's death broke something in him that the Cylons, until that moment, had not been able to touch.

By the time Sonja finally found him, he was shivering violently, but he was still holding Rika, still rocking her in his arms. Sonja was wearing a waterproof hooded poncho identical to the one Gianne had been wearing the day before. She didn't say a word, just pulled and pushed until she got him on his feet. He had a hard time walking. His muscles didn't want to cooperate, but he wouldn't let go of Rika, not even when they got back to the building's lobby. He sank to his knees on the tile, but still he held her. He wouldn't let go of her, his daughter, humanity's child.

A group of Cylons leaving the dining room gathered around him. His rage and pain surfaced in a rush and he shouted at them, "Look at her. All of you. See what you've done. You killed Yusef and now you've killed her. She was a beautiful, gentle girl. You let a monster abuse her and rape her and you blessed it to get one of your half-breed babies. You think you're so much better than we are. You think your God gave you souls. You dare to accuse humans of arrogance. Well take a good look at who paid the price for _your_ arrogance. You've all killed her. Every…single…one of you."

He saw the shocked looks on their faces. He saw their mouths move, heard their voices but none of them made sense to him. Their words were jumbled. Nothing but heartless talking machines, no better than their metal predecessors who had dismembered living human beings in their attempt to create the first skinjob. He saw several Twos but had no idea if one of them was the monster who had started this whole tragic chain of events. None of them approached him, not even a One who stood off to the side observing it all. Maybe their creators had instilled in them a fear of the mentally deranged. And that's the way he felt right now as he held Rika tightly in his arms and rocked her and cried at the loss of her. Humanity's lost child.

He wouldn't let go of Rika until Sonja finally brought Petra, Rika's sister, not her blood kin, but her sister just the same. Petra knelt by him and he finally understood the words that she said to him.

"Let us have her, John. We'll take care of her. She's at peace now. Leoben can't hurt her anymore. Let go of her. Please. My Simon and I will take care of her."

He finally let Petra and Simon take Rika from his arms. He was no longer in the cold rain, but he was still shaking violently, his teeth chattering so hard it was painful. Petra said something to Sonja. He understood the word _hypothermia_, and Sonja pulled him to his feet. He let her pull him into the elevator and then down the hall to her apartment. She pulled him into the bathroom and unbuttoned his wet shirt and peeled it off. She wrapped a soft towel around his shoulders and then she knelt and untied his boots and pulled them off followed by his socks. She got his pants unzipped and down to the floor. She helped him step out of them. She took the towel and began to rub him vigorously, drying his cold, wet skin, rubbing the circulation back into it.

He didn't try to stop her. He was dry but still shivering when she pulled him into the bedroom and put him in her bed and covered him with a thick comforter. He rolled over on his side and instinctively pulled himself into a fetal position. Sonja quickly took off her own clothes and climbed into bed behind him. She wrapped her warm arms around him and nestled her warm body against him. She didn't speak. She seemed to understand that nothing she could say would reach him right now. She just held him and tried to put back into him not only the life-giving warmth that the cold rain had leeched from his body, but also his hope in a better future that Rika's death had sucked from his soul as well.

His shivering finally abated. His limbs eventually warmed and relaxed. A soft voice whispered in his ear, _Go to sleep, my love. _John closed his eyes and did what the voice said, slipping finally into the welcome oblivion as he had done so many times at the prison. It was the only place he could escape and leave the pain behind.

...

"We need to start walking back to the car," Lee said. "I have a feeling my father is going to hang around Marble House until we get back."

They turned and started back up the pier. He had just spent the last twenty minutes telling her about his mission to the surface of Tauron.

"All that for a voter registration list."

"Which we never got. We were lucky Kevin was able to retrieve the list of Quanniq's dead from the laptop's hard drive."

"So you went to Quanniq, got the list of dead people and then what?"

"We were on our way to the next town when Saunders picked up the incoming Heavy Raider on our dradis. I tried some evasive maneuvers. They stayed right on us. Saunders put out a distress call and was waiting for jump coordinates from the G when the Cylons fired a missile at us. He got countermeasures away but they launched another missile at us almost immediately. Saunders dropped countermeasures again but they had barely cleared the Raptor when the missile hit them. The Raptor took a lot of damage. I lost some of my hydraulics and stabilizers. I got it down in one piece but we spun in the snow and hit some trees. Next thing I remember Kendra's shaking me and screaming that we're on fire."

"Gods, Lee."

"Saunders got the worst of it. A broken nose and a concussion. His head hit the inside of his helmet when he was slammed to the floor during the crash. Some of the electronics shorted out and started burning. We had to abandon ship. Saunders was unconscious so Kendra and I dragged him out into the snow. I went back and got the laptop and our P-90s and our heavy jackets."

"But that wasn't the end of it."

"No. I took a P-90 and walked out into a clearing to see if I could see the Vipers responding to our distress signal. I couldn't see anything because it was still snowing. That's when Zarek's man and two centurions walked out from under the trees. He started shouting questions at me about what Kendra and I had gotten at the courthouse. Next thing I know he raised his assault pistol. Kendra shot him."

"Kendra Shaw shot a man?"

"Killed him with a shot to the head. You and her have something in common."

"What about the centurions?"

"Right after Kendra shot Auggie B, we took them out, too. It all happened so fast I barely remember it."

"How long were you down in the snow?"

"Thirty minutes. We got Saunders to Sick Bay. We answered a lot of questions for Commander Cain and then answered the same questions and a lot more for another investigator. We filed our reports. They filed their reports. We thought that was the end of it, but it wasn't."

"Why not?"

"Because the man Kendra shot was one of Tom Zarek's men. Zarek's got enough clout to request another inquiry, an independent one. It starts a week from tomorrow."

"What does that mean?"

"We have to go through the whole thing again for Zarek and some other Quorum members and non-military types."

"It sounds like a crock to me."

"It is. My dad thinks Zarek's trying to divert attention from any part he played in faking signatures on the petition that got him appointed to the Quorum as Tauron's representative. He thinks it's a preemptive strike on Zarek's part. It paves the way for Zarek to say the government is framing him in retaliation for his diligence in asking why we killed a civilian."

"That's a total crock," Kara said again. "He's bound to know something like that can be proved."

Lee said, "I think Zarek is going to blame the phony signatures on someone else. He's going to claim he didn't have a clue they were fake. He's going to come out of this smelling like a rose…again."

"I don't care as long as you're okay. You and Saunders and Kendra. That's what's wrong with you, isn't it? It's like you were after the night you punched out of your Viper and fell in the ocean."

"Probably."

They reached the car and got in. "Take me back to the apartment. I need to put the dress back on."

"Why?"

"Because if your dad is still at Marble House and I show up in jeans, he'll figure out we made a stop along the way. That might not be so good since we're doing everything by the book now. I don't want to get either one of us into trouble. You can come upstairs with me. We can't stay long, but…how clean are the sheets?"

"I'll change them for you."

She smiled. "I vote for the couch."

Her vote won. They were happy and laughing by the time they got off the elevator together. The tension and strife earlier in the day were momentarily forgotten as they stumbled through the door together and immediately began pulling off their clothes.

"Slow down, Kara," Lee said. "It's not a contest."

She laughed. "You're going slow enough for both of us."

"No fair. I've got buttons…and a tie."

She laughed again. "Quit complaining."

She pulled him onto the couch. They lay against one another, their hands exploring, their lips pressed against mouths and throats, tongues tasting and exploring. Lee welcomed her touch, the caress that he had dreamed about so many nights during the last month. He was alive. This was real.

"I've missed this so much," she whispered.

He brought his mouth to her ear and softly said. "I love you, Kara. I'll always love you."

They both knew a few minutes later that they were not going to wait any longer. They began the hot dance, the rhythm that they both loved, the intensity increasing quickly with their need. Her knees pressed against his hips. Her back arched, the cry of pleasure came from deep in her throat.

Lee's body shuddered in response, the sensations so intense that he groaned aloud in pleasure.

Gradually their breathing slowed. Kara bent her head and kissed Lee on the lips. He held her tightly and she nuzzled against his neck.

"If it had been you on Nereid, I'd have stolen the Raider and come for you, too. I don't want you to ever doubt that."

He stroked her back. "I know you would have. You found me when I was in the ocean."

They sat without speaking for a long time, his hands gently caressing her back until Kara said, "We've got to go. One of these days we'll be able to stay here afterward. I hope it's soon."

Forty minutes later they pulled into the parking lot at Marble House. They got out of the car and Kara smoothed the dress. Lee looked in the side mirror and straightened his tie. They clasped hands and walked inside.

Lee had been right. Bill was waiting for them. He and Laura were in her private sitting room. Hunter was on the floor playing with Braedon and his ships. His tie was nowhere in evidence. The blue shirt had the top button undone and the sleeves rolled up several times. Maya was in a nearby armchair watching them with a smile on her face.

Hunter seemed totally fascinated with Brae's toys. Kara realized that the children of the valley had never had anything like them. The few toys she had seen in the communal building had been homemade.

Laura looked up and smiled. "Did you have a nice visit with Dreilide?"

"I did. Lee and I walked down to the pier afterward."

"How is your stepfather?"

Kara shrugged. "No better. That's for sure. He's moving to the first floor next month because he can't climb the stairs anymore. I told him we'd help him move."

Laura asked, "Is he getting good medical treatment?"

"He has a doctor."

Kara walked over to Brae and knelt on the floor. He pointed to a small circular track with a little three-car train going round and round.

"Wide twain."

Hunter looked up and smiled at her. "We're going for a train ride. Maya's going to take us."

Kara said. "It looks like you're having as much fun with Brae's toys as he is."

"I'd like to get some toys to take back to the kids in the valley," Hunter said.

"There's a huge toy store downtown. Maybe one day we can all go there. Maybe we can even ride the train there."

Lee walked over to where his father sat on the end of the couch. "I talked to Kendra this afternoon. She said the inquiry is set for next Monday."

Bill and Laura exchanged glances. "I spoke to Romo Lampkin a short while ago," Laura said. "He's going to be there to represent the government's interests."

"I told Kendra we don't want to go in there with a lawyer. It will make it look like we're guilty."

"He's not representing you," Bill said. "He'll be there to ask Zarek how so many people managed to sign his petition after they were dead."

"Seriously?"

"Billy called me this morning," Laura said. "Almost thirty percent of the individuals on Mr. Oraibi's list of the dead also signed Zarek's petition, some of them as long as three years after they died. Romo is going to be at the hearing to make sure that fact gets entered into the evidence. Even if Zarek blames the fraud on one or more of his men, I think it will be ample proof that Mr. Bernard was willing to kill to prevent you and Kendra from getting that information to us."

Lee smiled. "Kendra will be glad to hear it. So will Saunders."

"I have a suggestion," Laura said. "Why don't I have a light dinner prepared? You can all stay and eat. It's a much better idea than cold pizza, isn't it?"

"Much better," Lee said.

The mood around the table in Laura's private dining room was different than lunch. Everyone was more relaxed. There was more laughter. The underlying tension that had been present at lunch was gone. Lee told his story about the wolves which garnered enough questions to take them to the end of the meal.

Kara hugged Laura and kissed Brae and told him she would be back soon, but it was Hunter's departure that caused Braedon to say, "No. Play."

"Let's go ride the elevator," Hunter said and picked him up. He motioned for Maya to accompany them and they rode down to the lower level. When they got there, Hunter handed Brae to Maya and told him Maya would let him push the button on the elevator.

"We'll see you soon," Kara said.

"I hope so," was Maya's quick reply.

"I enjoyed the tour," Hunter told her.

"My pleasure."

They walked into the parking lot. Dusk was settling over the city.

"Nice day," Hunter said. "I enjoyed it a lot."

Kara snickered. "I noticed that. You like her, don't you?"

He shrugged.

"Come on, admit it."

He finally smiled. "Okay, Wildcat. I like her."

At the car, Lee stopped and turned to Hunter. "I'm sorry I acted like a jerk this morning."

"I should have kept my mouth shut. You and Kara…it's none of my business."

Kara smiled at both of them. "Everybody's happy. Let's go get a beer somewhere before we go back to prison."

Lee said, "There's a place close to the safe house that looks like Zeno's. We could park the car and walk."

"Fine with me," Hunter said. "I'm up for another new experience."

"That's all you've had since I brought you here…new experiences."

He was still smiling. "Just think of all the stories I'll have to tell Targa and Beck and Emmalyn and Dessa when I get back."

"That's going to be a while...maybe six months."

They got into the car and Lee backed out of the parking place.

Kara said, "I'd like to take Hunter to visit Irina Hoshi. His grandfather met her before the last expedition left Libran."

"I'll run it by Major Parker," Lee said. "He'll probably have to clear it with my dad but I don't see why he would object."

Lee parked under the building where the safe house was located. They rode the elevator up to the ground floor and walked out into the spring twilight. The place was three blocks away and was called _The Lamplighter_. They all peered through the window.

"What do you think?" Lee asked.

"I see a bar so it gets my vote," Kara answered.

"I talked to Kendra while you were changing clothes," Lee said. "She called to tell me about the independent inquiry starting next Monday." He hesitated a moment and then said. "What if I give her a call and ask her to join us tonight. She wants to talk." He turned to Hunter. "And I'm not trying to fix you up with her. She's got a boyfriend, the pilot who was with us when the Cylons shot down our Raptor."

Hunter grinned. "Kara knows my feelings about personal relationships. She can explain it to you."

Kara rolled her eyes. "Guys like Hunter don't have girlfriends or wives. He's a Cylon hunter. He doesn't have much of a life expectancy. Did I get it right?"

"You've got a good memory, Wildcat."

"Call Kendra," Kara said and grinned.

"Lee unclipped his phone. "Why don't you go in and get us a booth or a table?"

Kara and Hunter walked inside and looked around. The décor was dark and the tables all had small imitation street lamps with lit candles inside. There was an old piano in the back with a young man sitting at it playing a popular tune. She liked the place already. She led Hunter to a booth about half-way back. He slid in on one side and she slid in across from him. He looked around taking it all in.

"Lee and I had a long talk," Kara said. "I think things are okay between us now."

"Good."

"He's had a rough time since I left. He really is sorry about the way he acted today."

"I should have stayed out of it. He was man enough to apologize. It's forgotten."

She grinned. "So you really like Maya even though you won't consider having a _personal relationship_ with her?"

"I appreciate what you and Lee are trying to do, but I won't be staying here. You know that. When you go back to fight the Cylons, I'm going with you. My people are on Nereid. That's where I belong. Getting close to someone on Caprica would just be hard on both of us when I leave."

"I understand."

"But I do like Maya. If things were different…" he shrugged.

Lee came in and sat beside her. "Kendra will be here in about thirty minutes."

Hunter winked at Kara. She heard the humorous tone in his voice and knew he was kidding when he said, "Meeting two good-looking women in one day. How did Agent Burke put it…a guy should be so lucky."

TBC…


	27. A Matter of Trust

Chapter 27

A Matter of Trust

_1. God sent to Azurra three visions. _

_2. The first was of a great galleon and many lesser galleons that traversed the heavens._

_3. The second vision was of her son grown to manhood at the helm of the great galleon as he steered the Thirteenth Tribe to a new land._

_4. The third vision was of a planet, a green and fertile world where her people could live and be free to worship their God._

_5. And Azurra told her husband Ulixes of her visions and the Lord opened his eyes and he believed. _

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Azurra, _Chapter 9:1-5

.

Kendra entered _The Lamplighter _and looked around. Lee stood and waved at her. He'd never seen her out of uniform. She looked good tonight wearing tight jeans and a cherry-colored knit shirt that fit her slim frame like a glove.

He smiled. "Kendra."

She saw him and walked over, a smile on her face as well.

Lee made the introductions.

Kara appraised her. Kendra was a lot prettier than she had imagined with her dark hair and eyes. Her looks were exotic and Lee had told her Kendra was smart. Kara could understand why Flat Top had fallen for her.

"Have a seat," she said, "We won't bite. Or at least I won't."

Kendra slid in beside Hunter and looked at Lee. "When did you start wearing a tie to a bar?"

"We had lunch at Marble House."

"Your friend isn't wearing one. Did you make him wait in the car while you dined with the President?"

Lee said, "Funny, Kendra. I'm not sure when Hunter ditched the tie but he was wearing one earlier."

Hunter smiled. "Braedon's toy train kept running over it when he and I were on the floor playing. Maya took the tie. I forgot to get it back."

"How convenient," Kara snickered. "Now you'll have to go back to Marble House to get it."

"Or let Lee go. It's his tie."

"I'm sure Maya would rather hand it to you personally."

"What would you like to drink?" Lee asked Kendra. "I thought I'd order a pitcher of beer. Is that okay with you?"

"Fine," Kendra said to Lee and then turned to Hunter. "So you're our guest for a while?"

"For a while. I hear you were on Lee's wolf-killing team."

Kendra laughed. "I was the brains and he was the muscle. Or was it the other way around? And I'm not so sure we killed any wolves. We might have left a few of them with headaches and a couple of loose teeth, though."

Lee laughed. "It was Crash's tough wrist that loosened their teeth."

"Tell me about it. He said the pilots are all giving him a hard time, telling him to change his call sign to _Rawhide_, telling him those wolves mistook his wrist for a big chew toy."

A waiter came over to the table and Lee ordered a pitcher of beer and four mugs. The waiter asked to see their IDs. Lee pulled out his billfold and his military ID. Kendra took hers out of her pocket. The waiter glanced at them and handed them back.

"What about the other two?" He asked.

"I don't have mine with me," Kara said. She nodded toward Hunter. "He doesn't either."

"He looks old enough," the waiter said. "You don't."

"She's eighteen," Lee said. "I'll vouch for her."

"Sorry, buddy. It doesn't work that way. I serve somebody underage and we lose our liquor license because of it, I'm in a lot of trouble."

"The military trusts me to fly a frakking million-cubit ship and you won't serve me beer?" Kara said hotly.

"Show me some ID. I'll serve you beer," the waiter said.

"Okay, that's fine," Lee said. "I understand. You're doing your job. Bring us the beer and three mugs and bring her a soft drink in a can and a mug. No ice in the mug."

After the waiter had walked away, Kara sat stewing.

"What was that all about?" Hunter asked.

Kendra answered him. "You have to be eighteen to drink beer or wine legally on Caprica. You have to be twenty-one to drink anything stronger. Waiters will card anyone…ask you to show ID…if he wants to be sure."

"Where is your military ID anyway?" Lee asked Kara.

"In the backpack I left on Nereid."

"Nereid?" Kendra asked.

"Oh, frak," Kara said.

"It's okay," Lee quickly said. "Kendra knows where you were…more or less. She's not going to say anything."

"So you ran your mouth to her," Kara said.

"No," Kendra retorted. "I figured it out. Lee just didn't deny it."

"So I don't have to keep saying I came from a rural area north of Caprica City?" Hunter asked in an amused tone.

Kara said. "At least not around Kendra."

The waiter brought the pitcher of beer and three frosted mugs on a tray. The fourth mug contained a soft drink and ice for Kara.

Kara waited until he was gone before she picked up the mug. She bumped her hip against Lee. "Let me out." He slid out of the booth and stood while she got up. She looked around until she saw the sign for the restrooms and nonchalantly carried the mug in that direction.

"I love that dress she's wearing," Kendra said to Lee.

"Laura bought it for her. If it was up to Kara, she wouldn't own a single dress."

"She wore a skirt and blouse the whole time she was in the valley," Hunter said. "Of course the skirt came to her ankles."

"No kidding," Kendra said and smiled. "An ace Viper pilot in a long skirt. I'd love to have seen that. Do all your women dress in long skirts?"

"Most of them. Some wear pants like the men, but usually only when they're working in the garden or tending the sheep or something."

"Tending the sheep? So you weren't kidding about coming from a rural place?"

"No. It's very rural."

Lee poured beer into their mugs and raised his. Kendra touched her mug to his. She nudged Hunter and he did the same thing. Lee said, "To tending sheep and fighting wolves."

Kara exited the restroom where she had poured the soft drink and ice down the sink. Lee slid over. Kara sat and poured a mug full of beer.

"Hey, I'm eighteen. It's not like I'm doing something illegal."

"You'll have to get a new ID made to get back on the base," Lee said.

"What reason should I give for what happened to the old one? _Left ID on hostile planet while executing hasty and unplanned escape."_

Kendra smiled. "I like your dress."

"Thanks."

They all sat for a minute silently sipping beer. Finally Lee said, "So did Saunders finally tear himself away from talking to your mother?"

Kendra gave them an eye roll. "At first I thought he was just sucking up to her. Then I realized he was actually interested in her Quorum stories. I've heard them all a million times, but they were new to him. He was asking her questions, which was just egging her on. I finally had to kick him under the table otherwise we'd still be sitting there."

Kara looked at Hunter. "Kendra's mother is Caprica's representative to the Quorum of Twelve."

"That's the legislative body that governs the Colonies," Lee said to Hunter.

"I know about the Quorum of Twelve," Hunter said. "I know about the three branches of Colonial government…executive, legislative and judicial. We had a few history books. I'm not as dumb as I look."

"You don't look dumb at all," Kendra said and smiled. "I've already figured out you weren't raised by wolves."

Lee said, "Let's give this wolf thing a rest. We've about worn it out. Why don't we let Hunter tell her where's he's from."

Hunter shrugged. "I was raised on a planet a long way from here. They can tell you the specifics."

Kara added. "It's a planet that was discovered by the _Hyperion_ over sixty years ago or maybe rediscovered since The Thirteenth Tribe lived there a long time ago. The history books say the second mission to the planet was lost. It wasn't lost. They made it to the planet. They just weren't able to leave because the ship broke down."

Kendra's eyes opened wide. "Oh, wow."

"And now it's the Cylon homeworld," Lee added.

"No wonder there's nothing about your mission in the report."

"What report?" Kara asked.

"The report that says MPs investigated a possible break-in at a military salvage yard north of Caprica City a month ago and found nothing missing."

"I guess that missing Raider was easy to overlook," Kara snickered.

"Only a few people even knew it was there to start with," Lee quickly retorted.

"We were on the runway when the MPs were coming through the gate. They saw us take off. Vipers tracked us heading for the ocean before I jumped. If all that's not in some report it's because it was left out on purpose."

"She has some good computer skills," Lee said.

Kara grinned. "Are you a hacker?"

Kendra smiled but didn't say anything.

"I should introduce you to my ex-roommate Jared. He's a hacker, too. He's Maggie Edmondson's cousin."

"Kendra met Maggie when she flew us from the _Penelope_ to the _Galactica_."

"Good old Maggs," Kara said. She looked at Hunter. "She's the one I got into the fight with at the Academy. It got us both confined to campus for a month. Lee's old girlfriend was ecstatic."

"Please," Lee said, "let's not go there."

"Who?" Kendra asked.

"Shelley Sydell."

Kendra smiled. "She was tough on us. I learned the hard way not to talk at meals that first semester."

Kara grinned. "Me, too. First damn day. Me and Sharon both had to do twenty-five pushups in the cafeteria in front of everybody. That was fun."

"Sharon?"

"Valerii. She's Sharon Agathon now."

"Right. Karl's Cylon wife. Lee and I met him on the _Galactica_."

"I hope I can go see her and Karl soon," Kara said. "Her baby should be due in a month or two."

Kendra looked at Lee. "Haven't you told her?"

"Told me what?" Kara asked.

Lee said, "While you were gone somebody trashed Karl and Sharon's apartment. It happened right after word about Picon leaked out. A lot of their furniture and clothes were slashed. _Cylon_ and _Cylon Lover_ were spray-painted all over the walls."

"But they're okay. They weren't hurt."

"They weren't there when it happened. Laura got Sharon into the women's shelter where Yolanda's friend is working. Karl is living out at the base. He's making runs every other day to the _Galactica _to courier reports back and forth. Communication is emergency only since Laura and my father don't want information leaked to the public before Laura can make the announcements to the press."

"Did the police catch who did it?"

"Not yet."

"How hard are they looking?" Kara asked angrily.

"Calm down," Lee said. "If anybody saw anything, they're not talking. You know how most people here on Caprica feel about the Cylons."

"I need to borrow your phone," Kara said.

Without a word Lee unclipped his phone. Kara took it and walked toward the restrooms again.

"Is she okay?" Kendra asked.

"She's probably calling Karl," Lee answered. "They've been best friends since she was eight years old. I told you how her father brought them off Picon together after it was nuked. She and Karl were in a refugee camp together, too."

"She told me about the refugee camp," Hunter said. "She talked about Karl. She never told me he's married to a Cylon. Which model?"

"An Eight. She and Kara roomed together at the Academy."

"Kara roomed with a _Cylon_ at the Academy?"

"Sharon's not like the rest of them. She helped us during the fighting. She piloted the Raptor that found me in the ocean."

"And now she's pregnant? You're telling me a Cylon is pregnant with a human's child?"

"That's right."

"Kara didn't mention that, either."

Suddenly Lee saw Hunter in a different light. Until now he'd supposed Kara had shared her whole life with him. Now it looked like she hadn't trusted Hunter with something very important…her friendship with not only Sharon but the Leoben who ran the bookstore as well.

Lee said, "If you know anything at all about Kara, you'll have realized that she tends to judge people by their actions and not by anything external, especially by something they have no control over like their skin color or which Colony they came from or even whether some people think of them as machines. All things considered I can understand why Kara didn't mention it to you, but you probably feel like she betrayed your trust. Maybe you need to talk to her about it."

He got a wry, half-smile from Hunter. "Where have I heard those words of wisdom before?"

…

Kara pushed open the door and entered the women's restroom. It wasn't large, three stalls and two sinks. She bent down and glanced under the stall doors to verify that she was alone before she punched in a number on Lee's phone that she knew by heart. It rang half a dozen times before Karl picked up.

"Lee?"

"It's Kara. You sound out of breath. Is something wrong?"

"I just got back to my room from the shower. Where are you?"

"At a bar close to where they're keeping us. It's called _The Lamplighter_. We just stopped for a beer. We'll have to get back to the apartment soon."

"You and Lee?"

"And Kendra Shaw and the guy I brought back with me."

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. How are you? More important how is Sharon?"

"She's doing okay right now. She's had some problems. She's supposed to be taking it easy. Your friend Keshia is taking good care of her."

"Lee just told me about what happened to your apartment. Do you have any idea who did it?"

"No. Plenty of people from the base know about what she is. It's not like it's any big secret anymore. Leoben's the lucky one. Nobody ever really outed him."

"I had an experience with a Two where I was for the last month. One of these days I'll tell you about it."

"We've got to get together soon. Any chance of that?"

"I don't know. I'm going to be charged with mishandling of government property. It's a misdemeanor."

"You're lucky."

"Don't I know it? It's more than fair. I'm not complaining."

"From the way Lee talked, I figured you'd be court-martialed and dishonorably discharged and spend time in jail, too."

"It could have gone that way. I owe the admiral. I owe Lee, too. He talked his father into reducing the charge. I'll see you soon…you and Sharon both. Tell her I said hello."

"I will. I'm glad you made it back, Kara. I've missed you."

"Me too."

She ended the call and almost immediately the phone buzzed. She looked at the caller id. Major Parker.

"Hello, sir."

"Kara?"

"Yes, sir."

"I'm at the apartment. The agent is here. I saw Lee's car in the parking garage. Where are you?"

"We went for a walk and then stopped at a little place for a beer. It was my idea."

"I'll expect you back in twenty minutes."

"Yes, sir. We'll be there in fifteen."

She ended the call and left the restroom. Back at the table, the mood had changed.

"We've got to go. Major Parker called. He wants us back at the apartment ASAP."

"Frak," Lee said. "What did he say?"

"Just to get our butts back there in twenty minutes. Our baby sitter is there. I told him we'd be there in fifteen. Sorry, Kendra."

"No problem," she said. "I'll call a transport."

"I can give you a ride," Lee said. "You can wait here for me. I'll pick you up."

"Okay. If it's no trouble. Nice to have met both of you."

"Same here," Kara said.

Hunter nodded.

Kendra looked at Lee before she sat back down in the booth. "Call me if you decide to stay. I'll get a transport. I don't mind."

"I'll be back," Lee said. "Major Parker doesn't want me hanging around since we're supposed to keep everything on a professional level."

He and Hunter and Kara left together and walked fast without conversation until they got back to the apartment. On the elevator, Kara said, "I told Major Parker it was my idea to stop for a beer. If there's any heat, let him chew me out."

"He won't look at it that way. When he's not around, you and Hunter are my responsibility."

At the apartment, Lee knocked on the door. Major Parker opened it. They filed in and were introduced to the next agent on the duty roster, a man about Burke's age, early thirties, medium height with the same expression Agent Gatwick had displayed, cordial but one that said _I'd rather be at home with my family._ His last name was Malcolm.

When Kara excused herself to go change clothes, Lee took his cue and told Major Parker that he was also going to call it a night unless Parker needed him to stay for some reason.

"Be at the office tomorrow morning at 7:30. We'll ride out together. I'd like to be here at eight."

"Yes, sir," Lee said.

"Sorry I forgot your tie," Hunter said.

"Don't worry about it. Maya will keep it." He smiled. "I'm sure we'll figure out a way to get it back."

When Kara got back into the living room after changing into sweatpants and a t-shirt, both Lee and Major Parker were gone. The door to Hunter's room was closed. Agent Malcolm was watching a program about the rise of monotheism on Caprica. She sat down on the couch and yawned.

"If this is too tame, I'm sure there's an action movie on one of the channels."

"No, this is fine," Kara said. "It's been a long day."

"What do you think about the monotheists?"

"They do their thing. I do mine."

"What do you think about that radical bunch up in Sovana?"

"All radical groups scare me."

"The Cylons are monotheists."

"So I heard."

Apparently deciding that she wasn't going to engage him in a debate about monotheism, Agent Malcolm adjusted the volume up a notch and settled down to listen to the show. After a few minutes Kara zoned out and wondered why it was taking Hunter so long to change clothes. He'd seemed different on the way back from _The Lamplighter._ Something was bothering him. What is was she had no idea. She decided she'd give him ten more minutes and then she'd go ask.

…

In the elevator Lee pressed the button for the ground floor and then walked the three blocks back to _The Lamplighter._ Kendra was still sitting in the booth.

"Was Major Parker upset?"

"I don't think so. He just told me to be at the office tomorrow at 7:30. We start Kara's debriefing tomorrow."

"How much longer do you think it will take?"

"A few more days."

"Where did the name _Nereid_ come from? I've never heard it mentioned before."

"I actually came up with it. Kara's dad found an old woman here in Caprica City who had been a technician on the first _Hyperion_ mission. He went to visit her and she gave her journals to him. She refers to it only as planet delta since it was the fourth one found in that solar system. It was the only one that was habitable for humans. Kara and I got tired of calling it _the planet _so I named it. I had no idea it would stick."

"How far away is it?"

"Thirty light years. The Cylon Raider can make it in one jump."

"What is your father going to do next?"

"I don't know."

He hesitated a minute and Kendra said, "Lee, I won't say anything. You can trust me. You should know that by now."

He took a deep breath. "Dad was going to nuke it. Now he can't because there's human settlements on it. Not to mention Hunter's people."

"Human settlements? You're kidding."

"I wish I were. It would be so much easier to take the planet if all we were dealing with was Cylons. Now Dad's basically got to start over drawing up a plan because the humans and Cylons are in the same places."

"So that's why our battlestars were bumped up an alert level last Friday."

"How did you know about that?"

Kendra gave him a look. "I work at the Ministry of _Defense_…remember? A def con status change on our battlestars isn't a huge secret."

"What reason did they give?"

"Readiness training and evaluation. You know more about that than you're saying, don't you?"

Lee didn't answer. He wanted to tell her about John, but he didn't dare. Instead he just shook his head and then picked up the pitcher and divided the last of the beer between their two mugs.

Finally Kendra asked, "Where did all those human settlements come from?"

"They Cylons took a lot of ships during the Second War. On her last recon mission Kara photographed over fifty that they'd stashed at their North Pole. Some of the humans came from those ships as passengers and crew. The Cylons apparently took people from the nuked planets, too."

"How many?"

"I'm not sure. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. We hope to have a better idea after Hunter's interview is finished."

"We're going to war again, aren't we?"

Lee nodded. "We can't risk them coming back here. If they do, it'll be to destroy humanity once and for all. We can't let that happen. We've got to take it to them this time."

"You've got to promise me one thing. As soon as you know when it's going to be, you've got to let me know. I'm going to put in for a transfer to a battlestar, preferably the one all of you are on."

"Are you sure?"

Kendra smiled. "You don't think I'd let all of you go off and have all the fun, do you?"

…

Fifteen minutes passed and then twenty and Hunter hadn't reappeared. Kara got up and walked down the hall. His door was still closed. She knocked lightly and finally heard him say, "Come in."

She opened the door. His room was dark except for the ambient light coming through the open blinds.

"Did I wake you up?"

"No. I was just laying here thinking."

She shut the door behind her and walked into the room. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she saw that he had taken off the slacks and shirt and put on sweatpants. He was on his back on the bed, his hands behind his head. Not certain what to do, she walked over to the window and looked out. The view was of more apartment buildings. This area of Caprica City was crowded with them.

"Is something wrong?" she finally asked.

"Depends on how you define _wrong_."

"Did I say or do something today that upset you?"

Behind her she heard him take a deep breath. "It's more what you didn't say."

"Now how is that supposed to help me figure out what's wrong?"

"You didn't tell me that your roommate at the Academy was a skinjob or that she was married to your best friend."

"Lee told you."

"It came out while you were in the bathroom talking. Lee didn't have any idea you hadn't told me so don't blame him."

"Does it really matter that I roomed with a Cylon? Does it change me? Does it change things between us?"

"That's what I've been laying here trying to figure out."

Kara walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. Even then she couldn't see Hunter's eyes. She really wanted to see his eyes. The silence stretched.

Finally Hunter asked, "Did you know she was a Cylon when you started rooming with her?"

"I wasn't sure. My dad's old girlfriend thought she'd seen Sharon out at a lab run by the Cylons, but she wasn't sure, either. I volunteered to be her roommate so I could keep an eye on her. Then something happened that made me sure she was a Cylon. My friend Karl was already dating her. I tried to tell him then, but he didn't believe me. It was too late, anyway. He was already in love with her."

"Did she know that you knew?"

"Eventually. But by then we'd become friends."

Hunter was quiet again for a long time. "And she's still your friend?"

"She's still my friend." The silence stretched once more until Kara said, "While I'm confessing, there's something else you should know. I'm friends with another one of them. A Leoben. He runs a bookstore here in Caprica City. That's a really, really long story."

By now Hunter's voice held resignation instead of anger. "I'd like to hear it."

Kara took a deep breath and told him about how they had not known about the Twos, Threes, Fives or Eights in the beginning. She told him about meeting a copy of Leoben in the refugee camp and thinking he was human, then about killing him and a Four at the Cylon lab on the night two members of the resistance had blown it up. She told him how she had seen Leoben prior to that at his bookstore and how she had gone there afterward thinking it would be closed. Instead she'd found another copy of him, a copy whose memory had been wiped by a Cavil after Leoben had protested the Cylon plan to exterminate humanity.

She told him about their tentative friendship and how Leoben had told her about Yolanda Brenn, the Oracle, and finally how Leoben had saved her life and that of Laura and Braedon as well. When she finally finished, she let Hunter digest what she'd just said.

He didn't have a comment, so Kara went ahead. "It was part of my destiny to meet Leoben. He gave me the book of Kataris' poetry after I graduated from the Academy."

The same book you offered to let me read?"

"I gave it to Daniel." Kara took another deep breath. Hunter was going to find out anyway. She might as well get it over now. "Daniel is a Cylon. He's their number Seven. He's the only one left. Cavil killed all the rest of the copies."

"Gods damn it, Kara. What are you going to tell me next? You going to tell me that you're a Cylon, too?"

Her shoulders slumped. "No. I'm not a Cylon."

"You might as well be. You left a Cylon infiltrator alive in the valley with my people, with my little girl."

"He's no infiltrator. He's terrified of them. Don't you understand? Cavil killed every single one of them but him."

"What does it matter? Their creators will just make more of him."

"No. They can't make more. Cavil killed them, too."

"Why'd he do that? Was he on a roll and couldn't stop?"

"They caught him killing all the Daniels and tried to stop him so he killed them. He didn't do it personally. He had his centurions do it."

"How did Daniel escape?"

"One of the creators, Lucy. She helped him. She was trying to get to your people. They got as far as the bottom of the dam before Cavil caught up with them. His centurions shot Lucy and killed her. They shot Daniel, too, and then they threw them both into the river only Daniel wasn't dead. You know the rest."

Hunter didn't say anything, but Kara could hear his fast, angry breathing.

There was anguish in Kara's voice when she said, "Don't you understand that he just wants to live peacefully in your valley and paint his pictures and write his music and stories? He doesn't want to hurt any of you. Tell me, has he ever done one thing to make you think he wants to harm anyone?"

"No," Hunter finally said. "How did you know? Have you got some kind of secret Cylon detector?"

"Something he said to me the day you brought me to the valley. Daniel said it hurt to try to remember. Leoben here on Caprica had said the same thing to me about trying to remember what happened to him."

"When did you know for sure?"

"The day Cavil came to the valley. I knew Daniel wasn't there so I went looking for him. I found him down near the creek. We started talking and he told me."

"So he lied to us from the beginning."

"No. He really did have amnesia in the beginning, but he gradually started remembering. His biggest fear was that I was going to tell someone and that you'd kill him or even worse give him back to the Cylons. And that's what you'd have done, isn't it?"

Hunter didn't answer for a long time. "Probably."

"He's just like a human now. He can't download. If he dies, that's it."

"He's not just like a human, Kara. He's a Cylon."

"That's not how he thinks of himself," she said stubbornly.

"And that makes it okay?"

Kara stood. "In your eyes I guess not."

"I'm trying to understand how you can feel that way when they held your father prisoner and tortured him and then gave him to their skinjob women as a breeder."

"Daniel didn't hold my father prisoner or do any of those things to him. He's horrified by violence of any kind. He just wants to live in peace with the people he's come to love. People who were kind to him and took him in. That's your people, Hunter."

"He's still one of _them_."

Kara was so exasperated that she wanted to scream at him. Instead she sat back down on the side of the bed. She took a deep breath.

"When I was in the refugee camp, there was a black market…"

"A what?"

"Black market. It's where a couple of guys were able to get things nobody else had…contraband things like drugs, legal and illegal, and cigarettes and booze and warm clothes and new shoes and even guns or anything else you wanted, but it wasn't free. It's never free. And since a lot of the people in the camp didn't have any money, they had to trade what they did have for what they wanted or needed. So they traded sex, mostly, either with the black marketers or with clients who could afford to pay for it in other ways. After I saw what those guys did, I wasn't so sure the Cylons didn't have the right idea about getting rid of us."

"You didn't have to…go to them, did you?"

"No. I could have made my life a lot easier if I had, but I never did, not even the winter that the flu went through the camp. It was just me and Karl in the tent and we ran out of fuel for the heater. Those men had plenty of fuel. Karl and me lived with the cold for weeks until the government got more fuel to us. The same with food. I could have gotten better stuff. I could have gotten chocolate or booze or anything else I wanted if I'd been willing to trade, but I didn't. There were plenty of others who did, though. But the worst…the absolute worst…was when a kid got sick and the doctors in the camp couldn't get medicine because the big pharmaceutical factories had been bombed. But those black market guys knew people who had stockpiled drugs so they could get whatever was needed. They made the mothers trade themselves to get medicine to save their kids. So give me Sharon and the Leoben I know here on Caprica and Daniel. I don't care if they are Cylons. They're a thousand times better than those men in the camp. But as bad as those black market guys were, it doesn't mean I judge all humans by what they did. There's good and bad humans and there's good and bad Cylons. Your Daniel is one of the good ones."

Kara stood, suddenly aware that tears had come into her eyes and were tracking down her cheeks. She angrily wiped them away.

"So that's all I got to say about the Cylons I know. And you should be able to figure out now why I never said anything to you about Daniel or the others."

She turned and was almost to the door when Hunter rolled off the bed and caught her wrist.

"An Eight killed my father. I saw it happen. He died in my arms. At one time or another every single one of them has killed one or more of us. Don't you understand why it's so hard for me to look at any of them and see anything good?"

"Yes," she said softly.

"I wish you had trusted me enough to tell me about Daniel before now."

"I was afraid you'd kill him…or one of the others would."

Hunter let go of her wrist and walked to the window. "That's what you do, isn't it? Keep secrets to protect us. You protect Lee from having to choose between you and his father. You protect Daniel from prejudiced brutes like me?"

"You're _not_ a prejudiced brute, Hunter. I saw you with Esmari. I saw you today on the floor playing with Brae."

"You saw me in the forest the day we killed Leoben, too. You saw me hit Cavil the day he brought his centurions to the valley looking for you and Narcho. I would have done a lot worse if you hadn't stopped me."

"They deserved it. But Daniel doesn't." They stood in silence until she said, "What are you going to do about him when we go back?"

"Something tells me he's going to be the least of my worries when we go back."

Kara walked over to the window. Even in the dim light the scars from the wildcat's claws were visible on Hunter's back. She thought about the hard life he'd had, the pain and the sorrow and the loss he'd known. He deserved more than life had handed him."

She lightly rubbed his upper arm. "You're a good guy, Hunter. I said that on Nereid. I still mean it."

"You're going to tell Lee and Major Parker about Daniel, aren't you?"

"I have to. I have to tell them about Lucy, too. He was in love with her."

"If she was one of the creators, wasn't she a little old for him?"

"Some centurions took her from Tauron when she was a little girl so she was a lot younger. Two of the creators adopted her and raised her like their daughter. Her older sister is the commander of the battlestar _Galactica_. I was on the _G_ for a while. Commander Cain is hard, and she hates the Cylons. I think it has a lot to do with Lucy being taken."

Hunter was quiet for a long time again. "So many lives ruined and for what?"

"I think that could be said about most of the wars we've fought. I guess I'd better go on to bed. I get to sit in the hot seat all alone tomorrow."

"I need to get outside. Don't get me wrong. This place is nice, but sitting around is driving me crazy. I'm not used to sitting around all day. You know that."

"We'll ask Major Parker about going for another walk. Maybe one day soon we can go for that subway ride. Maybe I can even take you for a motorcycle ride."

"Always trying to make things right, aren't you? Find your father. Patch up things between me and Seléne. Save one-of-a-kind Cylons from extinction. You can't save the whole galaxy, Kara."

She thought about her father and tears came to her eyes again. "But I can try to help the people I care about."

"Those are lucky people," Hunter said.

"Aren't they? Now it's bedtime. Sleep well."

She could hear the wry humor in his voice, "Probably not as well as you and Lee are going to sleep tonight. I think he told Kendra a fib when he said he'd had his tie on _all day_."

She punched him playfully on the arm. "Get a life, Hunter. You're the one who doesn't want to risk getting to know Maya."

"I told you why. It's not fair to either one of us."

"I know what you told me. And don't worry. I'm not going to try to change your mind. Some things I know even _I_ can't fix."

...

When John awoke, he didn't remember where he was much less how he had gotten there but memories of Rika's death quickly rushed in with such force and intensity that for a few minutes all he could do was struggle to get his breath.

He fought the emotional pain now as he had fought the physical pain at the prison. Concentrate on breathing in and out. Just one breath followed by another_. I'm alive_. Breathe in. _I'm alive_. Breathe out. But he couldn't make the image go away of the small, cold body he had held so tightly in his arms. Not Kara, but a daughter who was now lost to them, her life and vibrant talent stilled forever.

He opened his eyes and sat up at the same moment he realized he was in Sonja's bed with no idea of how long he had slept. The drapes were drawn, the room as dim as the park had been. Sonja was gone, however, and he was alone. The bedroom door was closed. He padded naked into the bathroom. His wet clothes and boots were gone from the floor. A pair of his sweatpants and one of his t-shirts lay folded on the counter beside the sink. He put them on and walked back into the bedroom.

He was just about to open the door and walk down the short hall into the living room when he heard muffled voices. Sonja's he recognized right away. The other one was a man's voice. He turned the doorknob and quietly opened the door just enough to hear. It was Cavil, their number One, complicit in the deaths of the skinjobs' creators and the Sevens.

Sonja said, "You've been off on a wild goose chase for a pair of phantom pilots. I had no idea where you were."

Cavil: "You could have sent word. I'd have returned."

Sonja: "I have nothing to report."

Cavil: "Then you admit you failed."

Sonja: "No, I've succeeded in what I set out to do."

Cavil: "If you had succeeded, you'd have information for me. Do you remember what you said to me six weeks ago? I recall every word. '_You've had him for almost four months and gotten virtually nothing from him beyond his name, rank and serial number no matter what those barbarians at the prison have done to him. Give him to me for four weeks and I'll have the truth from him. I'll find out exactly why he's here. I'll prove your brutality is the wrong way to interrogate prisoners.' _It's been over four weeks, Sonja Six. What truths have you learned?"

Sonja: "That he told you everything he could tell you. His being here is an accident caused by a malfunction of his ship just like he said. He had no idea that there were some extra devices on it. He told me he just flew the ship. He didn't design it or build it. I believe him. He was on a routine qualification flight just like he said. Don't you understand if he were the avant-garde or advanced scout of some attack force, they would be here by now? You said you had sent out a baseship all the way to the Armistice Zone. There's nothing between here and there and nothing in the Zone but pieces of debris from the Armistice Station. No Colonial battlestars. _Nothing._"

Cavil: "Did you tell him about the other two pilots?"

Sonja: "I told him. He didn't believe there were two other pilots. He accused me of lying to him, of trying to trick him. What could I say since _you_ haven't been able to produce them? Honestly, brother, I'm beginning to wonder myself. You've spent a month scouring the forest and the nearest settlement and the valley and God only knows where else without so much as a hint they're even on the planet. You've taken hundreds of our centurions who are badly needed to work on projects here in the city and had them tromping through the forest for…"

Cavil (impatiently): "Those pilots are out there somewhere and so is their ship. I _will_ find them."

Sonja (scornfully): "You've become obsessed with them and can't seem to admit they're no longer here. I agree with Leoben. He believes they went straight back to their ship and left the day he found them. The valley fighters let those pilots go. Their leader said so. The pilots left the planet _that day_. Why would they stay when both our people and the humans were openly hostile to them? You're chasing phantoms that you'll never find. Why can't you admit for once that you're _wrong_ about something?"

Cavil: "I'm not wrong. We would have seen it on our dradis if they'd jumped away. I've had that day's digital recordings analyzed second by second. No FTL jump shows up other than their initial one over the forest. Their ship dropped off our dradis when it went below the tree line. It _never_ reappeared."

Sonja: "Are you sure?"

Cavil: "Positive. They would have had to jump away well below the tree line to avoid detection and what kind of idiot would initiate a jump a few feet off the ground? The rebound from the spatial displacement would be tremendous and would have damaged the ship. They would have crashed. If they had somehow managed to pull it off, there would have been evidence on the ground. We've found nothing to indicate they jumped in the forest."

Sonja (mockingly): "You're more machine than I thought. You have absolutely _no_ imagination. If I recall correctly, they were in a forest full of_ some very tall trees_. How hard would it have been to jump fifty feet off the ground, even a hundred feet, and still be below the tree line? Many of those trees are over two hundred feet tall. Admit it. Those pilots have been gone for over a month. You've wasted precious resources trying to find something that's no longer even here."

Cavil: "Then we take Major Gallagher back to the prison. I heard what happened today with the dead girl. Humans are weak and pathetic, but his words still had an effect on some of our brothers and sisters. I won't risk him spreading those human weaknesses to our people. My brother One told me that after you left with the major, he heard a Three say that we were wrong to let a Two take the girl against her will, that she clearly thinks the humans should have a say in their fates. He asked her what kind of say the early centurions had in their fates. They were the humans' slaves for years. She answered by saying Leoben's actions were contrary to _God's will_. Some other Threes and several of your sister Sixes agreed with her. Some even had tears in their eyes. He actually saw pity on their faces. _Tears and pity_." Cavil spat the last words in disgust. "We don't need anything stirring up the Threes. Their religious ramblings are hard enough to take as it is. I don't want their fanaticism infecting anyone else."

Sonja: "What was done to Rika _is_ contrary to God's will. John was right to call us on it. He's read our scriptures. He apparently knows them better than you do."

Cavil: "See? He's even infected you. He goes back to the prison."

Sonja (very forcefully): "No! Don't you understand if you do that we've lost any chance of _ever_ getting _anything_ from him?"

Cavil (sneering): "You overestimate his use to us. But maybe the prison isn't the best solution. He won't serve as an example to the other humans back in the prison. Perhaps I should send him to a settlement and have him put to work in the fields. I can make sure one of your overseer sisters keeps him working. I hear she's become quite adept at using the lash on slackers. A few weeks of hard labor from sunup until sundown should dampen the major's desire to meddle in _our_ business."

Sonja: "That would be a _big_ mistake. Even if he doesn't know any military secrets, there's still a lot of useful information in his head. And I'm your _only_ chance of getting it. He trusts me. And he _is_ the father of a precious new life. He needs to be left here in the city if for no other reason than that. Right now D'Anna is the _only_ one of us who is pregnant. He visits her every day. She doesn't need to be upset by having John taken away from her. Don't you understand? He wants to help her raise the child. He's accepted his role among us."

Cavil (sneering again): "We don't need any more half-breed brats."

Sonja: "You and the Fives are alone in that belief. The other models favor the breeding program. Even the Fours have embraced it since several of them have become fathers. The only holdouts are you and your lapdogs. I don't think you want to put the issue to a vote. You'll lose. We just need to make a few changes in how the selection of the human breeders is done so we don't have another tragedy like Rika and Yusef. I'm going to introduce a motion to the council."

Cavil: "If some of you weren't trying to breed, this tragedy would never have happened in the first place. Our race is perfect as it is. The only way we could become better is to breed with the centurions. We're limited by these bodies, by these _human_ senses. The centurions have senses far beyond ours and even they don't have enough."

Sonja (amused): "Then why don't you speak to the creators about it? Perhaps they could create a female centurion for you to breed with. I'm sure you'd enjoy _that,_ especially since your favorite Pet Eight got tired of roughing it in the forest and returned to the city. Besides you'll get no complaints if you fail to perform adequately."

Cavil (coldly): "That's enough."

Sonja (more amused): "Of course you'd have to be careful about letting a centurion get _on top_. You're not a very _big_ man…or so I've been told. Maybe you could get the creators to make a female centurion that would be a perfect fit for you, one with firm metal breasts and a _tiny_ little…"

Cavil (angrily): "Shut up, Sonja. Your musings are vulgar and ridiculous. Doral told me about your disgusting display of lust with the major out at the landing field."

Sonja: "What we did wasn't nearly as disgusting as your desire to merge your DNA with a centurion's. I'm sure if the creators had felt that was the direction to go, they would have done it. Why don't we ask them? I'd like to know why they didn't. I'd like to know why they created us in their own image."

Cavil (sarcastically): "The creators can't be bothered with silly questions from their children, especially those who bleach their hair platinum out of some ridiculous notion that it makes them more attractive to human men."

Sonja: "This is my natural hair color. Natalie told me the creators had experimented on our model and tweaked the gene controlling hair color on several of the copies. I'm surprised you didn't know that."

Cavil (haughtily): "I knew it. I was just testing you to see if you knew it."

Sonja (equally haughtily): "Platinum doesn't always equal dumb."

Cavil (sarcastically): "Oh, that's good. I'll have to remember that. _Platinum doesn't always equal dumb._ Bravo, Sonja."

Sonja: "If our creators can't be bothered with questions from their children, then what _can_ they be bothered with? Have they turned their backs on us? I personally would like to go visit them, not to ask them for anything, but just for the assurance of knowing they're there."

Cavil: "We've moved beyond them now."

Sonja (shocked): "Moved beyond our creators? How can you say that? Was John right in accusing _us_ of arrogance?"

Cavil (scornfully): "We've grown up. We don't need human babysitters any longer. It's not arrogance to want to leave the nest."

Sonja: "But we should never stop loving them. They're our mothers and fathers. Without their vision where would we be right now? The old centurions would still be cutting up humans trying to put their little silicon wafer brains into a body with soft skin."

Cavil: "Children grow up and leave their parents behind. It's the natural order of things. "

Sonja: "But they're still our parents. I'd like to meet them. So few of us have been allowed that privilege. You have. Natalie has, but I haven't. Tell me what they're like."

Cavil (from near the apartment's door): "I don't have time right now. I've got to get back to the search. When I find those pilots, you'll be the first to know and I'll think about accepting your apology. And to keep you occupied in the mean time, I've decided to let you keep your new human pet here in the city. He may still prove useful to us. Stay on top of things with him. And I don't mean that as you will no doubt take it. We had a bargain. I expect frequent updates from you."

Sonja: "The minute I have anything to pass along, you'll know…if I can find you."

John heard the apartment door bang shut and nothing but silence. He opened the bedroom door and walked down the short hall, aware as he did that part of him was still in the park holding Rika's lifeless body in his arms.

Sonja was standing by the couch wearing the same bathrobe that he had seen D'Anna wearing, thick white terrycloth with _Astral Princess _embroidered in gold and red on the breast pocket. The Cylons must have taken all of the complimentary robes from the luxury liner and distributed them among the Cylon women. He wondered if the men had gotten robes as well. He could picture Doral wearing one while some hapless human gave him a pedicure.

John stopped at the edge of the rug. His eyes met Sonja's. She was clearly upset.

"How much did you hear?"

"I heard enough," he answered. "Just so you'll know. I won't go back to the prison. I'll make them kill me first."

"He said I could keep you here. Even if he changes his mind, I won't let him send you back."

"How are you going to stop him?"

"I'll find a way."

"That's not very reassuring. I mean what I said. I won't go back."

"You should never have involved yourself in the situation with Rika and Yuself. You set yourself up for this. Cavil was still in the forest hunting those pilots. After he was informed about your little scene in the lobby this morning, he hurried back. We can only hope he returns to the search and forgets about you again."

The pain and anger over Rika's death returned in a rush. Rather than lash out at Sonja, he turned and walked into the kitchen. He opened the cabinet where she kept the liquor and took down the bottle of bourbon. He found a juice glass, poured it half full and turned it up, drinking it all in several swallows. It burned going down and brought tears to his eyes which surprised him. He didn't think he had any tears left to shed. He poured another glass, fuller this time.

"Please don't." Sonja's voice was soft and pleading.

He screwed the cap back on the bottle of bourbon and returned it to the cabinet before picking up the glass and walking past her out of the kitchen. He went to the sliding glass door. The rain had stopped and the sky was lighter although clouds still shrouded the distant mountains. The wind had picked up. The trees in the park shimmied in it shedding drops of water like rain.

He hadn't been able to ask Doolittle for a weather report the night before because someone else had brought his dinner tray. When he had asked where Doolittle was, the young man had looked away and said he didn't know. It didn't take a genius to figure out that he was lying, but John didn't push it. He had left his apartment that morning before his breakfast tray had been brought.

Sonja walked up beside him. "Are you hungry?" She asked softly.

"No."

"It's the middle of the afternoon. You haven't eaten all day."

He took a sip of the bourbon. "I'm fine."

"I can have something brought up from the kitchen."

"I said I'm not hungry," John said a little more forcefully. He held up the glass. "I've got everything I need right here."

"Drinking alcohol on an empty stomach is not good for you."

"Is that experience speaking?" He asked sarcastically. "Or did the creators program that little bit of wisdom into you?"

"Please let me have some food sent up."

"Drop it, Sonja. I don't feel like eating anything right now." He took another sip of bourbon. "It doesn't sound like Cavil is too enthusiastic about your breeding program."

"No."

"They why would he forbid birth control? I seem to remember you telling me that the day you took me into the city."

Sonja looked at the floor and didn't say anything.

"You lied, didn't you?"

"About that, but only about that. The rest of it is true, the pregnancies and miscarriages. I did hemorrhage to death internally from a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. The decision to prevent it ever happening again was mine. The chance Dr. Silva took was not the procedure he did but that he did it at all. The human doctors aren't supposed to do medical procedures on us. I suppose Cavil is afraid they might find out something about us."

"So what you told me was just a ploy to gain my sympathy and my trust? _We've both got secrets. I've told you one of mine. Now you tell me one of yours._"

"Yes."

"Any more lies I need to know about?"

"No."

"Then tell me about this bargain you had with Cavil. The four months versus the four weeks thing."

"I didn't know you when I told him that."

"And you think you know me now…after a whole _month_? Hell, I didn't even see you for a couple of weeks while you were learning how to fly. How can you think you _know me_?"

Her shoulders slumped. "No, I don't really know you. What I do know is that they would eventually have killed you at the prison. Humans can only stand so much of their brutality. I wanted to save your life. It was the only way I could think of to get you out."

"Why?"

"D'Anna came to me. She'd had one of her visions, but she knew Cavil wouldn't listen to her because of her problems."

"The vision about the woman in the blue robe?"

"A vision that you would be the father of the peacemaker…and she would be the mother. She showed me your file from the prison. She asked me to help her so I went to Cavil and proposed letting D'Anna bring you to the city as her breeder. It was only a cover for getting you here so I could find out the truth. He wanted to prove me wrong so badly that he went for it. She got to you just in time. She told me Dr. Silva said if she'd waited a day, they would have found you dead in your cell."

John didn't say anything for a long time, just stared out the sliding glass door at the distant mountains. He was already feeling the effects of the bourbon.

He finally asked, "Did you believe her vision?"

She looked down at the floor again. "Not at first. She's had other visions that we attributed to her faulty programming, visions about a child. She's always been fanatic about her religion, and she's always been obsessed with having a child. But I believe her vision now. After the night that the three stars fell, I realized that your being here is part of the prophecy. At the time I just saw something I could use to prove a point to Cavil."

"So you thought you'd seduce me and I'd spill my guts and tell you something in four weeks that the ones at the prison couldn't get out of me in four months."

"Yes," she said barely above a whisper. "It was an arrogant assumption on my part. I'm sure you hate me now."

"How can I hate you, Sonja? You have a habit of saving my life. What the hell for I'm not so sure, but you do."

"Do you not know why? Have you not figured it out yet? I love you."

He shook his head. "It doesn't happen that fast. You don't fall in love with somebody in a few weeks. In lust maybe, but not in love."

"How long did it take you to fall in love with Laura after you fell_ in lust_ with her?"

He took another sip of the bourbon. "Actually with her it happened the other way around. I admired her even before I met her because she faced some real obstacles, and she still got food and medical supplies to the refugee camps on Caprica. And then I met her and spent some time helping on a project, but it wasn't like I was dating her, and I saw her courage and her determination and how much she cares about Caprica's children and next thing you know I'd given up smoking. That's when I knew I was in love with her and then we went on a real date. I think she felt like she owed me something for the help I'd given her so she took me to President Adar's birthday party. Even then I didn't think I stood a chance with her. I thought she was just keeping up a pretense for…frak, I don't want to talk about this anymore. It's too personal."

"Why didn't you think you stood a chance with her?"

"She was a member of the President's Cabinet with a doctorate degree for the gods sakes. I was a cargo pilot with no formal education. We come from two totally different backgrounds, worlds apart and then…" his voice trailed off.

He couldn't bring himself to tell Sonja that the only reason Laura had married him was because she was pregnant with their child. Love had come later in the relationship for her than it had for him. But it had happened. The night he'd taken the Raptor up he'd never been more certain of her love. And Kara had said that Laura was still wearing her wedding ring. Tears came to his eyes once more. He took a sip of bourbon and tried to deal with the longing and pain.

"You know you'll never see her again," Sonja said softly.

Her words spread the ache through him.

"That's what everybody keeps telling me. You and D'Anna and Doolittle and Petra."

"We're right."

"After what I've done, she wouldn't want me anyway."

"I would help you get back to Caprica if I could, but I can't. The Heavy Raiders with functioning FTL drives are all kept on the basestars except for…" she hesitated.

John didn't say anything. He took another sip of the bourbon and looked at the distant mountains.

Finally Sonja reached a decision and continued. "Natalie told me that Cavil's Heavy Raider has a functioning FTL drive. He keeps a spare ship just like it out at the airfield in a special hangar guarded by centurions. He keeps another one at the prison airfield. He probably has others stashed around that we don't know about."

"Covering all his bases…literally."

"I'd never be able to get near one of them, though. I'd be killed and then Cavil would box me."

"Sonja, I'd never ask you to do something like that. I don't want that bastard Cavil to have an excuse to do anything to you. If it weren't for you, I'd be dead right now."

He finished the bourbon and stood looking at the empty glass. He was a long way from being drunk, but he was no longer sober, either. Sonja took the glass from his hand and put it on the end table. She didn't speak as she loosened the sash at her waist and let the robe slide to the floor. There was no denying her beauty or what the sight of her naked body did to him.

A phrase from another lifetime played through his mind. _In the midst of death we want to affirm life._

When the First War was in its final and most horrific year, a Raptor pilot on the _Solaria _had said those words to him, a beautiful blond Raptor pilot who had held him in her arms on the night he'd lost one of his best friends. She'd said a lot of other things to him that night, words about how each of the dead had died in the service of the Colonies, and about the will of the gods, but none of those words had remained with him like that one sentence. _In the midst of death we want to affirm life._

During the worst battle of the War, as their Vipers had fought and finally triumphed against overwhelming odds, Death had run an icy finger along his spine and whispered in his ear, _You're mine._ But Death had changed its mind that day and had taken his friend instead. Death had taken a lot of good men and women that day from all the battlestars, but Death had spared him and he had never understood why. During the long, dark night that had followed, a beautiful woman had taken him in her arms and had wrapped her body around his and had given him back a piece of what that day had taken from his soul.

Several years later Death's icy finger had brushed him again on a dark, winding road above Picon City and two years ago on a cold tarmac in Sovana and most recently in the prison on Nereid and each time Death had passed him by, but had now taken Yusef and Rika, two young people with their lives ahead of them. And again John didn't understand why.

Sonja put her arms around his neck and pulled his head down as her mouth sought his. _In the midst of death we want to affirm life. _John wrapped his arms around Sonja's warm, living body and pulled her gently against him. He wanted this affirmation of being alive as much or more than she did, this breathing and seeing and tasting and touching. He couldn't give Sonja everything she wanted from him. He couldn't give her his heart because his heart belonged to Laura, but he could give Sonja more than the arrogance and disdain he'd given her the first time.

He didn't know how much time he had left before Death would tire of sparing him and taking others. If Cavil changed his mind and sent him back to the prison, it would be soon. If Bill Adama brought his battlestars to the planet, John had no assurance that he would survive the onslaught.

He kissed Sonja hungrily, tasting her warm mouth, feeling her warm body, smelling the faint exotic scent of her warm skin. He was alive. Until Death returned to claim him, he was alive. In taking the comfort that Sonja's body offered, though, he knew he had taken the final step over a line. He could no longer ask nor even hope for Laura's forgiveness.

Cylons didn't experience death the way humans did, so he didn't say the words to Sonja. She wouldn't understand them anyway, but they repeated in his mind like the endless refrain of a song.

_In the midst of death we want to affirm life._

TBC…


	28. Decisions

Chapter 28

Decisions

_17. The daughters of Ulixes' first wife were named Rachel and Leah and Naomi._

_18. And of his second wife their names were Ruth and Abigail and Deborah. _

_19. And the sisters heeded the words of Azurra and began to worship the one God._

_20. The Lord rewarded them with prosperity and in time with fine husbands and children of their own._

_21. And the day came when Ulixes was released from prison and lived with his wife Azurra and their son Xander._

_22. And the boy grew in stature and knowledge and for many years there was peace in the land._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Azurra, _Chapter 10:17-22

.

Monday morning arrived and Laura Roslin didn't want to go downstairs to her office. She lingered in her private dining room over a second cup of tea and looked out the window at the early morning of a beautiful spring day. She had slept very poorly for the third night in a row. But last night her racing thoughts had taken a different turn. On both Friday and Saturday nights images of what John must have endured in the Cylon prison had tormented her. Last night her mental anguish had come from another source. She had tossed and turned as she'd imagined him in bed with a copy of D'Anna Biers.

The thought was enough to make her feel sick. She had tortured herself with visions of John leaning down and kissing D'Anna's neck the same way he did hers. She pictured him slipping the straps of a nightgown down D'Anna's shoulders and gently cupping her breasts. She knew John loved her. He would do what was expected of him, nothing more.

She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. Maybe the prison had changed and hardened him. Maybe when he was having sex with D'Anna he was thinking about what they'd done to him. Maybe he didn't care whether he pleased her or not. After all, she was one of _them_, one of his tormentors. There were many ways to arrive at the climax of the act of procreation, not all of them gentle or loving. The crude phrase _Wham, bam, thank you ma'am _ran through her mind. Maybe that's what John did with D'Anna. Maybe it was just a task to be gotten through. Daily chores: get out of bed, brush teeth, frak D'Anna.

Laura took a sip of hot tea and felt tears begin to form in her eyes. Seeing Kara and Lee at the dinner table yesterday with Brae had filled her with an aching to have her family together again. She had wanted to talk to Kara, to ask her more questions, but as soon as they could gracefully leave after lunch, Kara had taken Lee's hand and pulled him out the door. Kara had bid farewell to Elosha and the Parkers. She had taken her leave of Bill Adama. She had willingly left Hunter with Maya and she had gone off to see Dreilide Thrace. She had left just as quickly after dinner.

Now Laura wondered if Kara's haste had anything to do with not wanting to talk to her about John. Perhaps there was something she didn't want to say and was afraid Laura would ask. Was John also expected to service the Six who brought him to the valley? Yet Kara had successfully eluded her a second time. And Hunter had been tied up with Maya and then Brae all afternoon. She had not been able to talk to him either.

She glanced up as Maya walked into the room.

"You're still here," Maya said in surprise.

"I can't seem to make myself get out of this chair," Laura answered. "I would love to take the day off, but I've got appointments scheduled all day so I can't play hooky. There are so many issues that need addressing right now. Bill called me before I even got dressed this morning. A small temple of Athena up in Sovana was partially destroyed by a bomb. Fortunately no one was inside when it happened. The mayor of the city has asked our Marines to help in the investigation. The conflicts in that city are increasing and I don't have any magic answers."

"You're still not sleeping, are you?"

"Does is show that badly?"

"You look very tired. You need your rest, Laura. What did Kataris say about the subject in one of his poems? _Sleep knits up the raveled cares of day_."

Laura sighed. "If only it were that easy."

"You're worrying about John, aren't you?"

Laura put her hand over the front of her blouse and felt the dog tags underneath the fabric. "He's been in my thoughts constantly since Friday afternoon when Kara put these dog tags in my hand."

Maya sat down beside Laura and poured another cup of tea. "The gods have kept him alive this long. They'll bring him back to you. I'm sure of it."

Laura said softly. "I wanted to tell Elosha yesterday because her words are always such a comfort to me, but I was never alone with her so I couldn't. Bill doesn't want me talking to anyone. He's lived in his closed world of military secrets for so long he doesn't know any other way. He would be furious if he thought I had told even you about John."

"Even if Elosha doesn't know, I'm sure she's still praying for his soul."

"Yes. But that's not what's bothering me right now."

"What is?" Maya asked.

Laura looked down at her teacup. "I keep thinking about what they're making him do."

"John loves you," Maya said with emotion. "You've got to keep believing that."

Laura glanced up and felt warmth flood her cheeks. "I don't doubt his love. It's just the thought that…" she couldn't make herself say it.

"The thought that another woman is sharing him," Maya said gently. "That she's kissing him and touching him."

"Worse," Laura nearly choked. "That he's kissing her and touching her. John is such a considerate…such a generous lover. He always…" she stopped, again unable to continue.

Maya reached out and gently put her hand on Laura's arm. "I know what you're trying to say. Peter was the same way with me. He told me that if it was good for me, it was good for him. All he wanted was to please me."

Tears came to Laura's eyes again. "I keep wondering if John…" Again she couldn't go on.

"Think of how you would feel if you were in his place and had been given to one of their men. Would you act the same way you do with John?"

"Oh, gods, no!" Laura said. "The thought of something like that is repulsive to me."

"You wouldn't participate. You would just endure it. You would call it rape. Am I not right?"

"Yes."

"Then why do you think John would behave any differently?"

"Kara avoided me yesterday. I could tell she didn't want me to ask her anything about John."

"This is probably very painful for her as well as being embarrassing. When you were her age, would you have wanted to talk about your father having sex with anyone, much less being given to a Cylon as a sex slave?"

Despite the gravity of the situation, Laura found herself smiling. "Of course not. I think I was twelve when my mother explained the birds and the bees to me in her very proper lady-like way. When she finished, she asked me if I had any questions. The only one I asked her was if there was some other way my brother and I could have been created. I simply couldn't imagine my mother and father doing what she had just told me about."

Maya smiled. "There you go. Kara wasn't avoiding _you_. She just doesn't want to talk about her father in that regard."

"She was very upset Friday afternoon because she'd failed to bring him home. Hunter explained why John had stayed behind. He did it to save the lives of Hunter's people. I know he didn't stay because he wanted to be with D'Anna…or that Six."

"Of course not. John would have done anything to get Kara safely away. He loves her so much. I'm sure Hunter told you the truth."

"What do you think of Hunter?"

"He's very nice. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but he was a nice surprise."

"He's quite good looking."

"Yes, he is."

"I think he looks a bit like Hugh Connelly. Not as classically handsome. More rugged. But they do share those incredible blue eyes. What did you talk about while you were giving him the tour of Marble House?"

"He mentioned his little girl and said he missed her. He told me her mother was dead. He mentioned Kara several times. I sensed admiration for her. Kara really is an extraordinary young woman to have accomplished what she has so far and not yet have reached her nineteenth birthday. She's overcome a lot of adversity to do it."

"I couldn't agree more, but she can also be stubborn and impulsive. Those can be troublesome traits if not kept under control."

"She's still young. She'll learn."

Laura sighed wearily. "I'm sure she will. I just want John safely back with us. I want our family together again. I want my son to grow up with his father."

"I know that John will come home. But that's months away. You can't go from now until then barely sleeping."

Wearily Laura stood up. "If my insomnia doesn't turn around in a few days, I'll have to make that call. Now I'm going downstairs to my office before Billy comes looking for me. I have an appointment with my Secretary of Health and Human Services in ten minutes. Brae didn't give you any trouble about going to his play group this morning, did her?"

"Not at all. He's gotten over his shyness. He's eager to get in there with the other children now. Maybe he knows he's the President's son." Maya smiled. "He's becoming quite the little leader."

"Instigator, you mean?"

"He's a smart little boy. He even remembered that I had told him we'd go ride the train with Hunter soon. I'm not sure how I'll manage that."

Laura finally smiled. "I'll talk to Edgar. I'm sure he'll be able to work something out."

"Tell him there will be two boys along for the ride. A little one and a big one."

"You mean Hunter?"

"Of course. He's never ridden the train either." Maya chuckled. "Actually I do think Hunter has already fallen in love with something. He kept mentioning a particular soft drink. We'll have to send him back to Nereid with several cases."

"You like him, don't you?"

"Yes, but he made a point of telling me that when Admiral Adama goes back, he'll be going with them. I'm not sure whether it was more an explanation or a warning."

"That will be months from now. What would be wrong with enjoying his company until then?"

Maya smiled. "I can't think of a single reason not to."

"I _must_ go. Time to face the…"

Edgar, her head of security, suddenly appeared in the doorway.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, Ma'am, but Admiral Adama and Agent Vladimir Darren are downstairs waiting for you. They need to see you immediately. There's been an incident here in Caprica City. Possibly a bombing."

"Dear gods," Laura said. "Where?"

"The bunker."

"Casualties?"

"They didn't say. They just asked me to get you. We've already gone to high alert status. We're locking down all the government buildings as we speak."

Laura turned to Maya. "Go get my son. Bring him back up here. I want to know that he's safe." Maya ran from the room and Laura turned back to Edgar. "I want Braedon guarded around the clock until we find out what happened."

"I've already ordered my off-duty men and women to come in. Someone will be here by the time Maya gets back upstairs with him."

"Let's go."

Outside the private dining room another one of her security team fell in on the other side of her. They walked quickly to the elevator. Edgar pressed the button for the first floor. No one spoke and Laura realized that she was facing the first crisis of her young Presidency. Caprica would be waiting to see how she handled it and not all of them would be wishing her well.

...

The second time John woke up that afternoon he remembered where he was and what had happened. He was on his back with the sheet pulled up to his waist. The room was still very warm. Sonja had stretched out beside him and was propped on an elbow. She was looking at him and smiling.

He yawned. "Was I snoring?"

"Softly."

"I don't guess Cylons snore."

"No."

"I got my nose broken in a fight."

"It doesn't look like it."

"I was lucky…or not. The damage was mostly internal. A couple of years ago a doctor said he could fix it with surgery, but I've been cut on so damn many times I didn't want to do it. So I snore when I'm on my back."

"Did you get in a lot of fights?"

"I had my share of them. I wasn't usually the one to start a fight, but I didn't run from one, either."

She reached out and traced the scar down the right side of his chest with the tip of her finger. "Did this happen in a fight?"

"No."

"D'Anna told me you were shot. How did it happen?"

"Somebody was gunning for Laura. I stepped in front of her."

"Why?" She asked incredulously.

"Because I love her. I wasn't armed. That's the only way I could protect her."

"By letting a gunman shoot you instead?"

He shrugged. "The doctor in Sovana told me if the bullet had hit half an inch to the left, it would have severed my right pulmonary artery. I'd have bled out before the paramedics even got to me. So I got another pass from Death that day."

"I don't understand why you would have done something like that."

He shrugged. "I don't know how to explain it other than to tell you that I love Laura and was willing to die for her. The only good thing that came out of being shot was that she felt obligated to me so she agreed to marry me."

"She doesn't love you? She just married you because you saved her life? I don't understand. Don't humans marry because they're in love?"

"That was another lame attempt at humor, Sonja."

"Does Laura love you or not?" Sonja sounded exasperated.

"She loves me. I thought after I disappeared months ago, she'd go back to her first love because he's still a big part of her life, but Kara told me she's still wearing her wedding ring just like I'm still wearing mine."

He took a deep breath. The ache and longing for Laura was coming back as was the knowledge that he had frakked up any chance that she could forgive him.

"I need to go. Take a shower. Check on D'Anna. Go see Petra. I shouldn't have left her with Rika the way I did."

"Simon took Rika's body to the crematorium. Petra's gone back to her own apartment, the one she shares with her husband Simon."

John sat up. "What about Rika's baby?"

"Petra took her. Leoben can't care for her and he knows it."

"Can't care for her or doesn't want to…or both?"

"Both."

"I thought so. He doesn't want the baby without the mother. Of course I know some human men who haven't wanted their kids so I guess he's no different. I'm glad Leoben isn't going to try to take the baby. Petra will love her. She'll raise her and Cassie together like sisters." John took another deep breath. "I'd like to be able to visit them at their apartment and not just in the park."

"I'll take you."

"And tell the centurions to let me in on my own?"

"Yes."

"What will you do with Rika and Yusef's ashes?"

"They'll be stored. Several other humans have died here in the city. Their ashes are in a storage facility. We don't treat your dead like garbage and throw them out, John. We're more civilized than that."

"About a month after Caprica fell to the other group of Cylons, I went to work as a pilot for a charitable organization based in Delphi. My first run I flew a cargo ship full of humanitarian supplies into Antioch. That's the biggest city in the northern part of the continent and one of the hardest hit by Cylon bombs. Half the population of the city was killed. Centurions were still using bulldozers to scrape up the dead. Dump trucks were carrying them to huge pits thirty miles away. There was no attempt made to identify the bodies. Rubble and humans and dogs and cats and rats and the gods only know what went into the same big holes in the ground. The survivors in the camps had no clue where their relatives' remains wound up. So that's why I asked about Rika and Yusef. I haven't seen any evidence that Cylons care about the human dead except to get rid of them."

"What should they have done? Left them where they had fallen. Human corpses are a source of disease."

"They should have let the humans conduct some type of funeral or memorial services. When a loved one dies, humans need closure. The Cylons wouldn't allow it. The biggest holocaust in the history of humanity and we were all forced to ignore it. I attended the dedication of a garden where the largest of the refugee camps used to stand. For all the speaker was allowed to say, she might have been talking about a natural disaster like an earthquake."

She bowed her head slightly. "I'm trying to understand humans, John."

He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the forehead. "At least you're trying to understand us. That's more than I can say for most of you."

He stood and pulled on his sweatpants and t-shirt. "I'm okay about this afternoon. I didn't want to be alone. I'd try to explain what was happening with me, but I'm not sure I understand it myself. So I'll just say thanks for being here for me. I hope it was good for you."

She smiled her seductive smile. "Don't be so modest, John. It was _more_ than good for me. You made sure of that. You certainly don't have any of Cavil's problems. Not that I have any personal experience with him, but some of my sisters have."

"What do you do? Sit around at the breakfast table and compare the men you had the night before?"

Her smile broadened. "Occasionally. Of course if Cavil saw you naked at the prison, he's already aware of one area where you're far more blessed than he is."

"Please don't mention that to him. Men are self-conscious about things like that. Always wondering how we measure up to other guys. Your creators might have programmed those same insecurities…forget it. I don't want to go there. Just thinking about that little bastard gives me the creeps."

"_Little_. Yes, that does describe him as well as _quick_. Or so my sisters tell me. You on the other hand _measure up_ quite well which will remain our secret. And I've never talked to any of my sisters about you. I want to keep you all to myself. Of course several of them have asked. One of them has even told me to pass you along when I get tired of you."

"Just tell them I'm terrible. Hopeless. The worst you ever had. It won't bother me."

She smiled again. "They'd never believe me if I keep you around. They all know how high my standards are."

"I'll see you tomorrow morning. We'll go visit Petra and the baby. Then I think we need to talk about your creators again. I heard Cavil today. As soon as you mentioned your creators, his whole attitude changed."

Sonja's smile disappeared. "I noticed that."

"Does that not tell you something?"

"He doesn't want to talk about them."

"More than that. He steered you away from talking about having a meeting with them. He doesn't want to talk about them and he doesn't want you trying to go see them."

"You're right. We'll go visit Natalie soon. I'll figure out a way to get us there. She'll know what to do. Are you sure you want to get involved in this mess?"

"Of course I do. Those are my people who are being abused. Humans just like me. If I can help stop it, that's what I want to do."

"Cavil will consider it another example of meddling in our business."

John smiled. "I never thought I'd live forever. While I'm here, I'm going to do what I can. And you're going to help me because it's the right thing to do, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am."

"You've already taken a step in the right direction. You won't use that drug on your men."

She smiled slyly. "That's more a matter of pride."

He smiled back. "And you had the guts to get on _my case_ about pride."

"You don't approve of the drug, but you have no problem with using bourbon?"

"You're getting good with those comebacks. And quick."

She smiled again. "I have a good teacher."

...

Breakfast in the safe house was very different from the day before when Agent Gatwick had shown Hunter and Lee how to make ham and cheese omelets. Kara scrambled eggs and made toast. Agent Malcolm was furious over a story on the early morning news. A small temple of Athena that sat in a valley outside of Sovana had been bombed during the night. Statues and sacred scrolls that were a thousand years old had been destroyed. Fortunately the temple was empty at the time and no one had been killed or injured.

"Damned monotheists," Malcolm said almost spilling his coffee in his fury.

"Is that who did it?" Kara asked. "I mean are they sure that's who did it?"

"Who else would it be? Who else would care about a little temple in the middle of nowhere? They're getting braver. Soon they'll do the same thing right here in Caprica City. First it'll be temples and then trains just like they did years ago. Murdering bastards. My grandparents were on that mag lev train they blew up. My father's uncle had to go to school and get him that day and tell him his mother and father were dead. Bunch of murdering bastards."

"Not all monotheists are radicals," Kara said.

"Are you defending them?"

"Not the ones who destroyed that temple...or that train years ago. I'm just saying they're not all bad. There's a monotheist who lives in the same building where my step-dad lives. He's sick and she helps him. She's not into blowing up stuff. It was probably the STO or maybe the RHG."

"What's the RHG?" Hunter asked.

"You don't know about the RHG?" Malcolm asked incredulously. "I guess you were one of those jocks who slept through history class and got passed by the teachers because you could win games."

"Hunter grew up in a rural area northwest of Caprica City," Kara said trying to keep her voice even. "He was home schooled so lay off him."

"A farm boy?"

"Sheep herder, too," Hunter said with an undertone of anger in his voice.

"Well, farm boy, the RHG is a splinter group that broke off from the STO. RHG stands for Right Hand of God. STO stands for Soldiers of the One. They're all monotheists."

"_Radical_ monotheists," Kara added. "The RHG is more radical than the STO. They've mellowed in the last twenty years."

Malcolm sneered. "That's the only _good thing _the Cylons did when they destroyed Gemenon. They took out the incubator for those lunatics. Do you know what their leader did fifty years ago? She blessed the chrome heads, she and that loony Clarice Willow. Got hunks of metal with silicon chips for brains believing they were sentient beings and that God loved them."

Hunter glanced at Kara and she shrugged. She didn't know if Malcolm was telling the truth or not. Religious history was not her strong suit. Sharon could probably tell her, though. Sharon knew more about religion than anybody Kara knew.

Malcolm ranted on. "Monotheists in Sovana were riding high while the Cylons were in power. Frakking Zeus-hating bastards. The whole lot of them. _Convert 'em or kill 'em_. That's their motto."

"I read about the STO in a history book," Hunter said. "They formed on Gemenon over a hundred years ago."

"Well, the RHG and the STO are taking over Sovana. Them and the drug-dealing warlords. If we had a President who wore pants instead of a skirt, the problem would have been handled a long time ago."

"Oh?" Kara said, aware that the same contentious tone had crept into her voice as had been in Hunter's. "And what do you think our skirt-wearing President should do to solve the problem since our last _pants-wearing_ President couldn't seem to do anything about it?"

Malcolm said, "President Adar couldn't do anything because the Cylons had tied his hands. The Cylons are all a bunch of card-carrying monotheists. They were in bed with the STO _and_ the RHG. Roslin needs to triple the number of Marines in Sovana and take out those crazies and the warlords once and for all."

"There's a solution," Kara said. "It should be easy for the Marines to take them out because the RHG wears these big badges on their chests shaped like targets that say, _I'm RHG. Aim here._ The STO and the warlords do the same thing. They don't look like everybody else who lives in Sovana and wants nothing to do with them."

"I'll bet you were the class clown," Malcolm said.

"That's right. I was the class clown. I guess that's why I didn't learn any more in school than you did. Of course I only went to school through the eighth grade."

"A drop-out," Malcolm sneered.

"I dropped out to a refugee camp since my home was destroyed, but by the Cylons, not the RHG and STO…or the warlords."

"Are you defending them?" Malcolm asked incredulously.

"No, I'm not defending anybody. I'm just saying the answer to the problem is not that simple."

Hunter said, "Why don't we tone this discussion down? I don't want to have to separate you two like I've had to do with my men before."

Kara ignored him and said to Malcolm. "Tell you what I'll do. Next time I have lunch with the President, I'll pass your suggestion along. I'll also mention it to a certain admiral. I'm sure they never once considered increasing the number of troops we've got on the ground up there. That should do the trick in no time."

"She's joking," Hunter said and looked directly at her. "We're confidential informants. We don't lunch with the President or with admirals?"

"I saw on the duty roster that you're both CIs for the military. What are you involved in? Drugs? Weapons? Communication equipment? The RHG is getting their guns and explosives from somewhere. You involved in that?"

"Nothing anywhere near _that_ glamorous," Kara said. "And we can't talk about it to you. That's why we're called _confidential_ informants."

"Well I've got a word of advice for you. You'd better watch that smart mouth of yours around Major Parker. You give him lip like you just gave me, you'll find your CI status revoked. You'll be thrown back to the wolves you came from. No more protection for you. And we all know what happens to criminals who sell out their own. Right now we're all that's standing between you and a bullet to the back of the head."

"I'm shaking in my boots at the thought of those wolves," Kara shot back. She stood, put one hand on the table and leaned across it until she was almost in Malcom's face. With the other hand she pointed to a faint scar about an inch long that ran diagonally across her forehead into her left eyebrow.

"See that scar? A guy named Sergeant Ackerman slammed my head into a metal table one time a couple of years ago when he thought I was smart mouthing him. It knocked me out. Major Parker is a pussycat in comparison."

She sat back down and picked up her cup of coffee.

Malcolm's initial look of shock changed to one of satisfaction. "So you've sat on that side of an interrogation table before."

"I learned from it, too."

"It doesn't sound like you learned much to me."

"I learned to always tell the truth," Kara said sweetly. "Of course _some people_ can't see the truth even when it runs over them."

Malcolm stood. "I'm going back to look at the news. I can't believe Admiral Adama came up with a plan to get rid of the Cylons and he can't get rid of a handful of radical loonies."

"Yeah, you go look at the news. If you come up with any more bright ideas like nuking Sovana or something, just let me know. I'll pass it along to the Prez. Of course nuking Sovana might go further with the admiral. He's big on nuking things…or so I hear."

Agent Malcolm didn't bother to reply as he walked out of the kitchen.

Hunter waited until Malcolm was seated in the living room and had turned up the volume on the television before he said, "Pull those claws back in, Wildcat. What the hell is the matter with you?"

She got up, stacked his empty plate on top of hers and carried them to the sink. "Why do you think something is the matter with me?"

"He's got a right to his opinion. You really came down hard on him."

She whirled. "He's a prejudiced asshole. People like him just get under my skin in a big way."

"He feels the same way about the radical monotheists as I do about the Cylons. You didn't let me have it last night like you just did him."

"Probably because I like you and I don't like him. I think there's hope you might change your mind about hating all of them in general."

He smiled. "Are you going to get Lee and Maya to work on me, too? You think the three of you can do it?"

She rolled her eyes. "Lee likes Sharon okay. She helped save his life. Maya…I don't know. She lost her husband and her little girl and all the rest of her family when the Cylons bombed Kinsdale. She'd probably take your side. You can go on dates and talk about nothing but how much you hate the Cylons."

"I'm just trying to lighten the mood, Wildcat. Back it down a couple of notches."

"Lee's brother Zak is with the Marines in Sovana. Every time something happens up there I think about him. And the situation is a lot more complicated than Malcolm seems to think it is. Sovana was having lots of problems even before the Cylons were running things. They just ignored it because Cavil and crew got a kick out of watching humans fighting each other and dealing drugs and running brothels and putting kiddie porn out on the web. He said it confirmed what they thought about our _moral depravity_. He liked to point it out in his speeches while he was telling us how morally superior the Cylons were."

"What is kitty porn?"

"Kiddie, not kitty, and you don't want to know. Sometimes I wonder how Cavil knew about it. Lee said that freak Doral probably pointed it out to him."

"And yet you defend them. I really don't understand you, Wildcat."

"I told you there's good ones and bad ones. I'm not defending Cavil or those like him. But Sharon is my friend. So is Leoben."

Hunter picked up Malcolm's empty plate and put it beside the sink. "You cooked. I'll wash dishes. You can tell me about Sergeant Ackerman."

"He's an asshole, too. Ackerman is in Sovana now. He can slam heads into tables to his heart's content and nobody will say a thing. I think that's standard operating procedure up there. Question a suspect, slam a head into a table, maybe more than once."

"Why did he slam your head into a table?"

"Sometimes I don't know when to keep my mouth shut."

Hunter handed her the last dish to dry, took the frying pan off the stove and put it into the dishwater. "How did you wind up being questioned by Ackerman?"

"I told you how the resistance blew up a Cylon lab and my part in it. Major Parker's team started calling in everybody in the city who rode a certain type make and model of motorcycle. Since I'd borrowed the one I rode at work, I got called in for questioning."

Hunter rinsed the frying pan and took the dish towel from her hands to dry it. "And you smart-mouthed Ackerman just like you did Agent Malcolm?"

"Worse. Lee looked at the recording of my interrogation about fifty times. He told me later that I was hostile and angry because I'd lost everybody I knew and loved except Karl to the Cylons. My father was alive, but I didn't know it at the time. I thought Tom Zarek had killed him. Lee used to analyze me a lot. I'd call him Dr. Lee. Usually it just made me mad."

"Sounds like he was right...about Ackerman anyway."

"Probably. Lee's smart. He graduated top of his class at the Academy."

"Where'd you graduate in yours?"

"Not at the top. Not at the bottom, either. I made the top ten percent…just barely. Kendra's new boyfriend Saunders was our valedictorian."

"Maya told me you graduated at the top of your class from Flight School."

"In the Viper division. Narcho was third. Saunders took top honors in the Raptor division. Lee graduated at the top of his class from Flight School, too. We both got trophies. They're at his apartment. Maybe sometime we can go there…all of us."

"That sounds nice. I'd like to see how a single guy lives on Caprica. He's got a whole apartment all to himself?"

"Not nearly as big as this one, but it's nice."

"I guess he doesn't have to put up with two messy uncles…and a neat Colonial Viper pilot. Narcho is worse than Emmalyn about keeping his stuff picked up. You should hear the grief that Targa and Beck give him about the way he always folds things."

"It's drilled into us at the Academy. Every morning we had to stand at attention in the hall while our rooms were inspected. The gods help you if everything wasn't perfect."

"They only give him grief because they like him."

"You know, the thing with Ackerman slamming my head into the table…that's how I met Lee so maybe things were meant to happen that way. When I first saw him I was still dizzy and…this is going to sound really stupid…but I thought he was the Caprican Prince because of his blue eyes and the wings over his heart…his pilot's wings. I was stumbling all over the place thinking I'd found Prince Olliver. Dumb, huh?"

"I can understand why you'd think that. And it's not so dumb."

Kara was aware that the apartment suddenly got very quiet. Agent Malcolm had muted the sound on the television. He was talking into his mobile phone. She heard him say, _Yes, sir_, several times. The conversation lasted less than thirty seconds. Afterward he stood immediately and walked to the kitchen door.

"Looks like those bastards in Sovana got friends here in Caprica City. There was a bombing early this morning here in town, an old hotel. I've got to go."

He walked back into the living room and got his jacket off the chair.

Kara followed him. "Wait a minute. What about us? I didn't think we were supposed to be left alone. I mean not that I care, but…"

Malcolm snorted. "I've got orders from my superior. You're the military's problem now. I'm sure you'll be all right. If not, maybe you can call the Prez and complain to her about it."

He opened the door and was gone.

"Asshole," Kara said.

She stood in the middle of the room. It was then that she noticed the television screen had changed from coverage of the bombed temple in Sovana to a street in Caprica City. She found the remote and took the set off mute. Police had cordoned off the area and were keeping the news crews well back from the scene, but Kara recognized the section of town immediately.

It was near the historic district, about ten or twelve blocks from where Laura's and her father's apartment was located. When Kara had been riding the motorcycle delivering drugs to clinics and rehab facilities for Jack Fisk, she had learned Caprica City very well. Only rarely would a street scene on the news be unfamiliar to her.

A fire truck crept along the crowded street, its siren temporarily drowning out the reporter. The cameraman moved out of the way, focused down the street and zoomed in. A policeman temporarily moved a barricade to let the fire truck pass and then quickly put it back into place. There were other fire trucks already there. She saw the back of an EMS vehicle and a stretcher being rolled along the street to it. She caught a glimpse of pale blond hair. It was quickly loaded and the rear doors were slammed shut. Several seconds later the vehicle moved forward and was lost behind the building on the corner. Another EMS vehicle rolled up and behind it a black SWAT van. The doors flew open and men wearing dark-colored clothing, helmets and flak vests poured out. They were all carrying assault rifles.

The cameraman panned skyward and showed a plume of pale, dusty smoke rising into the clear air. It didn't look like the building was actively on fire. The screen switched to another camera on another side street that had a better view of the entrance to the hotel. Kara didn't see any flames coming from the windows or the roof. Just that pale, dusty smoke coming from the front doors that were propped open. A few windows were open, but there was no smoke coming from them. Several firemen in full gear including breathing packs entered and were lost in the haze. There were policeman everywhere outside and agents in dark blue jackets with bold yellow letters on the back that read CBA. She knew they were the elite group of experts headed by Agent Darren. The letters stood for Colonial Bureau of Anti-terrorism.

Hunter sat down beside her. "What happened?"

"Nobody seems to know. This newscaster said a possible gas leak and explosion. That's the party line when something like this happens. That's what the government said happened at the lab after the resistance blew it up."

"But you don't believe it?"

Kara shrugged. "It's just seems like an awful big coincidence to me. Those bunkers are kept ready all the time for the President in case of a disaster. I think somebody would have been aware of a gas leak. So, no, I don't believe it. I think somebody planted an explosive. It wouldn't take much G-4 in a confined space like those bunkers to do a lot of damage."

"G-4?"

"It's a plastic explosive, soft like putty. The military uses it. The problem is, it's manufacture and distribution are really controlled…or it's supposed to be. Of course whoever is supplying the RHG and STO is getting it so I guess the Black Market is stronger than ever since the Cylons were defeated."

"Why would radical monotheists target an old hotel? I would have thought they'd bomb a temple or some other place with religious significance."

"That's a good question unless this is more an anti-government thing."

"It looks like they would have picked a more…visible target. Who would associate an old hotel with the government?"

"That's a good question. Hardly anybody knows about the bunkers under that old hotel."

"Why would anybody be there now?"

"They wouldn't."

"So why would radical monotheists want to blow up an empty place like that?"

Suddenly Kara gasped. "It's not empty. That's where the Cylons are being kept. The skinjobs who were here in Caprica City on the night of the fighting. I'm not supposed to know that, but months ago I heard Laura talking to Admiral Adama about them. The lowest level contains prison cells. They're being kept there because it's so secure."

"Apparently not as secure as everybody thought. The Cylons are monotheists. Why would radical monotheists want to blow them up?"

"They wouldn't. This might not have anything to do with them at all. This might be about killing the skinjobs."

"How many of them are down there?"

"A One, a Three, a Four, a Five, and a Six. The rest of them were on the basestars we destroyed except for Sharon and the Leoben who runs the bookstore. When I left Caprica a month ago, there were a lot of people who thought the government was dragging its heels bringing the skinjobs to trial. Some of them didn't even think the skinjobs deserved a trial. They thought a speedy execution was the way to go. In public. Even some Quorum members were starting to put pressure on Laura to get on with it."

"You can't blame them for feeling that way."

"No. The Cylons did kill billions of humans. Lee said it had been on the news a lot about what they found on the other planets, too. Death, death and more death."

"Do you think Lee and Major Parker would have been told to go to the old hotel?"

"Only if the police caught somebody and they had a suspect to question."

"It's after 8:30. Major Parker said last night that he wanted to get started this morning at 8:00."

"Maybe they're held up in traffic or something. We don't have a phone here so I can't call Lee. All we can do is wait." She settled back on the couch.

Hunter settled beside her. "This is almost as exciting as being in the forest. Only I'm watching it instead of being in the middle of it."

"You'd rather be in the middle of it, wouldn't you?"

He shrugged. "You'd rather be flying a ship than sitting across the table from Lee and Major Parker, wouldn't you?"

"I can't be in a ship all the time."

"I'm just not cut out to be a farmer."

"What are you going to do when your people on Nereid are free? You won't have anybody to fight."

"That's assuming I survive the fight."

"Don't start talking like that."

"I'm being realistic. Unless Admiral Adama decides to sacrifice a lot of humans on the planet, we'll be fighting street to street in the city and settlements. A lot of us will die."

"You won't be fighting alone and you won't be fighting with those old assault rifles. The admiral will make sure you've got the best. He'll have you and your men decked out in helmets and flak vests. You'll be fighting with Colonial Marines. You'll have mortars and RPGs to take out the centurions."

"What are you going to do about all the humans in the city and the settlements?"

"I don't know, Hunter," she said a little testily. "I haven't thought about it. That's where we need your intel. Then you and Lee and Major Parker sit down with the admiral and start throwing out ideas."

He snorted. "You really think Admiral Adama is going to listen to a farmer?"

"He'd be crazy not to. I can understand why he wouldn't listen to me. He never did before, but he sure as hell should listen to you. You've been fighting them for years."

"I don't know a lot about the city. I've only seen it from a distance. I've got a little information from our contact Mr. Fox, but he hasn't been in every building. It's too bad you didn't tell me about Daniel while we were still on the planet. We could have squeezed him into the Raider and brought him with us."

"Daniel was never in the city. He lived with Lucy at the lab complex on a high plateau east of the city."

"I don't know anything about the lab complex or the prison."

"We can isolate it with air cover and worry about it after we secure the city and the settlements…and destroy the basestars."

"A lot of us are still going to die, Kara."

"But not you. I have faith. You're going to be one of Nereid's leaders." She smiled. "I might even have to call you President Franklin one day."

"Did your Oracle tell you that?"

"No, but I can probably find one who will if it'll make you feel better." Her voice took on a teasing tone. "Presidents need First Ladies. I think Maya would make a good First Lady."

Hunter took the remote from her hand and turned up the volume. "I'm going to listen to the news."

"Why? The newscaster is still calling it a _suspicious fire_. They don't have a clue what that building really is. It might be hours, maybe even days before they know what happened. That announcer doesn't know what she's talking about."

He grinned. "Yeah, well that makes two of you. _President Franklin_. What a crock."

...

Lee glanced at the dashboard clock. It was 07:41, only two minutes later than the last time he had looked. Major Parker had told him they would meet near the elevator in the parking garage of their office building at 07:30. He had been parked outside the elevator waiting on the major for over twenty minutes. Parker was always on time, usually early.

As Lee was trying to decide what to do, his phone vibrated. He recognized Parker's office number.

"Where are you?" Parker asked.

"In the parking garage waiting on you, sir."

"Something has happened. You need to get up here ASAP."

"Yes, sir."

It took Lee nearly ten minute to find a parking space and get to the office. Parker wasted no time. "We've got a situation…a bombing at the bunker where the Cylons are being held."

"When?"

"At approximately 06:15 this morning. Shift changing time for the Marine guards. Details are still sketchy, but we think it might have been a suicide bomber."

"The Cylons?"

Parker shook his head.

"All of them?" Lee asked incredulously.

"We aren't sure. Search and rescue hasn't made it to the lowest level yet which is where they were. They're going down very carefully level by level. Natasi was several levels above the others in a private suite. Those bunker walls are thick, but they're still looking for structural damage as well as any unexploded ordnances."

"There were Marines guarding them around the clock. Were they killed, too?"

"Admiral Adama is having everybody who comes out of that bunker checked for injuries and then isolated unless they need to be hospitalized. He doesn't want them talking to anyone until we've had a chance to talk to them first."

"Surveillance footage from the cameras?"

"The entire building above ground has been evacuated until we know whether it's safe for anyone to be in it. The bomb sniffing dogs are in there now. That's where the monitoring equipment is."

"What do we do now?"

"All we can do is wait. Admiral Adama wants my team to talk to anyone who is taken out of that bunker alive."

"How is this being spun to the press?"

"Right now all they know is there was a fire in the basement of a historic hotel. If word gets out about an explosion, then that will be the admiral's call or the President's."

"If it turns out that a suicide bomber killed all the Cylons?"

"The President will make the announcement. Your father is on his way over there now with Agent Darren to keep her in the loop. As a precaution all government buildings are being locked down until they can be searched for bombs, including this one."

"How long will that take?"

"I don't know. They're starting with Marble House. The Quorum chamber and that building will be next. We can't rule out anything at this point, especially with what happened in Sovana before dawn this morning."

"What happened in Sovana?"

"A Temple of Athena was bombed. We think it was the RHG or STO but no one has taken credit for it yet."

"Do you think the two things are related?"

"I doubt it. But we're not ruling anything out at this point. People making a statement do bizarre things sometime."

"What about Kara and Hunter?"

"Agent Malcolm is with them. Darren is going to get word to him to stay with them until the relief agent gets there tonight. I doubt we'll make it today."

"I wish Kara had a phone so I could call her."

"She'll be fine, Lee. They're several miles across town from that old hotel."

"I know. Her phone is probably in some evidence locker out at the airbase where she was taken last Friday. Any chance we could get hers and Hunter's things?"

"Let me make a call. In the meantime why don't you get us both a cup of coffee? This is probably going to be a long day."

...

Laura walked into the small conference room near her office to find Bill and Agent Darren waiting for her along with her Vice President Scott Mickelson. Their faces were grave. Bill looked like he had aged five years since she had seen him at dinner the day before.

"Please have a seat, gentlemen," Laura said.

Billy followed her in with a pot of coffee and behind him her secretary brought a tray of clean mugs. She placed the mugs on the table and retreated, closing the door behind her. Billy poured. Laura shook her head. She had never been fond of coffee.

When everyone was settled, she said, "Who wants to start?"

Bill said, "At approximately 06:15 this morning a suicide bomber dressed as a Marine entered the room where the Cylon cells are located and blew himself up."

"Casualties?"

"Search and Rescue hasn't reached that level yet. Our information comes from one of the Marines that the bomber told to leave before he locked himself in. He managed to make it all the way up the fire stairs to the surface. All thirty levels. He's at the hospital now."

Laura took a deep breath. "Best guess as to the others." She saw Bill and Agent Darren look at one another. "Anything you say right now will not leave this room."

Bill said, "We're fairly certain that everyone who was on the lowest level when the bomb exploded died."

"Natasi?"

"She's alive. Rescue reached her about fifteen minutes ago. She was two levels above the others in larger accommodations where you had her moved after her last interrogation. They're bringing her up now. She'll be transported to the hospital to be checked out."

"Any idea about her status?"

"A lot of smoke and dust got into the ventilation system so she'll be treated for smoke inhalation. We don't think she was injured otherwise. As soon as the fire alarms started going off, her Marine guards got her out of her room and started up the fire stairs with her."

"What do we do with her then?" Mickelson asked. "We can't put her in one of our other prisons. I doubt we could protect her even in solitary confinement."

"What about somewhere like the place you're keeping Kara and Hunter?" Laura asked.

Again Bill and Agent Darren glanced at each other. Darren began keying something into a small computer device that he had placed on the table. Laura knew that he was getting constant updates on it from his agents in the field.

"Our next step is damage control," Bill said. "How do we put this out to the press? So far we've told them nothing."

Billy said, "It won't take them long to figure out that a fire in an old hotel that has been converted to offices wouldn't attract that attention of the military and the CBA as well as the local police and SWAT teams."

Bill said, "It would if there was suspicion it was caused by the same group that blew up that temple near Sovana this morning."

"Good point," Laura replied. "You don't think it was, though, do you?"

"Personally no, but there's not enough evidence to say with any certainty."

"So you think the two incidents are not related? Purely coincidence?" Scott Mickelson asked.

"That's our theory," Darren replied. "As of our last communication with Sovana, no one has stepped forward to claim credit for the temple bombing. Our theory is RHG or STO. Two of my best investigators are on their way up there right now."

Billy said, "The press is going to want to tie the two incidents together because they happened almost simultaneously."

"I think that will definitely work in our favor," Darren said.

"Any theories on whether the suicide bomber was affiliated with any group or not?" Laura asked.

"No clue," Darren answered. "All we can say is that as of yet, no one has claimed credit in either bombing. I have an agent with the Marine in the hospital. As soon as we get word that the doctors have finished working on him, he'll be questioned."

"How badly was he injured?" Laura asked.

Darren said, "Cuts, abrasions, some burns to the right side of his body. Possibly a punctured eardrum on that side. Nothing life threatening. He's also being treated for shock."

Bill said, "I have Major Parker standing by to ask the questions. Lee will be with him."

"I think we should send them over to the hospital and have them wait there until the Marine is cleared to talk. We need to make sure he's kept away from the press, too."

Bill got up and walked to the secure telephone that sat on a credenza. He got an outside line and made the call. Laura and the others waited until he finished and sat back down.

"Major Parker and Lee are leaving now," he said. "They should be there in twenty minutes even with traffic."

Darren began keying into his mobile phone, "I'm sending my agent a message telling him who to expect."

"Back to our issues," Laura said. "As soon as we have a definitive answer about the Cylons, I'll have to call a press conference. I'll need to draft a statement even if I choose not to answer questions afterward."

Bill said, "There are going to be a lot of people on Caprica who will be celebrating at the news."

Mickelson added, "And some who will feel like they were cheated of the public execution they've been clamoring for."

"And maybe even a few who will mourn for them," Laura said.

"Maybe some of the monotheists," Billy added. "Nobody else."

"I don't think someone would have to be a monotheist to mourn their loss in such a violent manner," Laura added. "They never got to face a trial and explain their motives."

Her remark was met with silence from the men and she sensed that they were all too polite to say what they wanted to say.

"Do you want me to start preparing a statement?" Billy finally asked.

"Yes, please. In the meantime issue an official announcement from the office of the President to the media that both the temple bombing in Sovana and the fire here in Caprica City are under investigation. Make sure they're mentioned together. Say that we're devoting our full resources to uncovering the truth and that I will call a press conference as soon as we have anything definite for them."

"In other words, keep it general," Bill said.

"Yes. I certainly don't want to jump the gun on this and say something that has to be retracted later."

...

Lee and Parker found the agent waiting outside the Marine's hospital room and introduced themselves.

"Has anybody talked to him or questioned him…including you?" Parker asked.

"No, sir. The only people who have been in there are medical personnel."

"Thank you," Parker said. "What's his name?"

"Corporal Jorge Guiterrez."

Lee and Parker entered the room. The young man was leaning back against the pillows with his eyes closed. Except for the bandages he was bare-chested. His hair was very short, a standard Marine buzz cut. He was olive-skinned, his body very fit. Zak's skin wasn't quite as dark, but Corporal Guiterrez reminded Lee of his good-looking, dark-eyed brother. One side of Guiterrez's face was red and burned and was covered with some kind of salve. His right hand and arm were bandaged. There was an intravenous bag on a pole above the bed, the needle taped in his left arm.

"How are you doing, Corporal Guiterrez?" Parker asked.

Guiterrez opened his eyes and struggled to sit up straighter before he tried to salute with the wounded right hand.

"Easy, corporal," Parker said. "As you were."

"Yes, sir. I can't hear in my right ear, sir," he said hoarsely.

Parker walked around to the left side of the bed. Lee remained by the door. In this case it was understood that Parker would do the questioning and Lee would do the listening…and remembering.

"Can you tell us what happened this morning?" Parker asked.

"How's Lester, sir?"

"Lester was the Marine on duty with you?"

"Yes, sir. We do the night shift down on level 30 three times a week. Been together for over a month now."

"I don't know, but we'll try to find out. Now step us through what you remember."

"One of the day shift guys showed up early. He kept looking around like he'd never been down to level 30 before. He asked Lester if the Cylons were all inside their cells in the next room. I thought that was weird…like where else would they be at 06:00 in the morning? Then he told me and Lester we could go on up top. Lester asked him where his partner was, and he said he'd be along in a few minutes…that he had to visit the head, an upset stomach or something. I'd already started down the hall toward the elevator. That's when Lester must have decided something was wrong. He asked the guy for ID. The guy opened his jacket and I heard Lester say _mother of the gods _or something like that. He turned to me and he shouted for me to go, to get out of there."

Guiterrez stopped, shut his eyes and took several deep breaths.

"It's all right, corporal," Parker said. "Take your time."

"The other guy opened the door to where the Cylons were and…and Lester grabbed him and I started back toward them…and Lester wouldn't let go of him…and they fell through the door and…and then…the door was almost closed and he must have detonated the bomb. I don't remember anything after that until I was almost to the top of the fire stairs. I was shouting for help."

"Did you recognize him?"

"No, sir. He wasn't one of the day shift guys I'd seen before."

"You'd _never_ seen him before."

"No, sir."

"Can you describe him for us?"

"About my height. I'm six feet. Weight…maybe one seventy, one seventy-five. Light hair. Reddish, maybe. That's all I remember."

"And you sure you'd never seen him before maybe even somewhere else?"

"No, sir."

"How did he act?"

"I wasn't paying much attention at first. Not 'til Lester asked him for ID. After that it…everything happened so fast."

"What was he wearing?"

"Standard camos just like me and Lester." Guiterrez closed his eyes. "His jacket looked big on him."

"Picture his face. Do you remember anything other than his hair color?"

Again Guiterrez closed his eyes. "He was sweating. It's always nice and cool in the bunker, but he was sweating."

"Anything else that you remember? Did he say anything after he and Lester started struggling? Anything about why he was going to do what he did?"

"No, sir. Somebody shouted something right before the bomb went off but that might have been Lester. It sounded like _forma_, but I'm not sure. It might have all been in my mind."

"Thank you, Corporal Guiterrez. Get some rest. I'm going to leave my card here on the table. If you remember anything else, I'd like for you to give me a call."

"I should have gone back. I shouldn't have left Lester…but after the explosion…"

"You did the right thing."

Tears came to the corporal's eyes. "Lester's dead, isn't he, sir?"

"We don't know yet."

"He was right there when the bomb went off. He tried to stop it."

"You need to get some rest, corporal."

"Thank you, sir."

Lee and Major Parker left the room. Lee had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, almost like someone had punched him. The thought kept running through his mind…_That could have been Zak. That could have been Zak. _Zak would have done the same thing Lester had done. Zak would have tried to stop someone from killing the Cylons even though Zak hated them as much as anybody.

Parker pulled the room door shut. "What do you think? Is he telling the truth?"

"Yes, sir. I believe him." Parker didn't say anything and Lee asked, "Do you think he's lying, sir?"

"No. We'll have to tear his life apart, though, his and Lester's to make sure this wasn't some kind of plot they hatched up with a third man."

"That's so unfair."

The agent outside the door handed his small computer to Parker. "The bomb guys let the comm techs back inside the command center. This is from the security footage taken this morning as the suicide bomber rode the elevator down to level 30. Damn good shot of him. It looks like he knew there was a camera in the elevator. He looked right at it and smiled."

Parker studied the small screen before he handed it to Lee. "I guess his picture will be checked through the facial recognition software."

As Lee looked at the face of the bomber, a wave of shock rolled through him. He didn't need facial recognition software to identify him.

"I know this guy. We went to the Academy and Flight School together. He's not a Marine. He's a Viper pilot. His name is Tucker Clellan, call sign _Duck_."

"You're sure?" Parker asked.

"Positive. I saw him out at the base five or six weeks ago, before I left on my mission aboard the _Penelope_. We spoke. He told me Colonel Winters had asked him to rejoin his staff at the Academy and that he was thinking about it."

"How well did you know him?"

"We were friends. We were on the same hall and had a lot of classes together. Duck used to be on Colonel Winters' staff out at the Academy. I ate lunch with him every Monday for twelve weeks last year when I was going to War College out there. He's an easy-going guy. I would never have dreamed… The only negative thing I ever heard him say was questioning why Commander Cain was keeping Nora on the _G_. Nora had put in for a transfer back to the airbase a couple of times and it had been denied. They wanted to be together so they could get married."

"Nora?"

"Nora Farmer, his fiancé. She died on the night of the fighting. Her Viper was shot down. He already hated the Cylons in general. His family died in Antioch when they bombed the city, all of them, parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers. He was trapped in the basement of a school for a couple of days before rescuers got him out. His roommate told me that Duck used to have some bad nightmares about it."

The agent was already keying into his handheld sending the encrypted information out to Darren and the others on his team so they could begin their investigation of a bright young man whose life had held such promise. Lee stood, still in shock at the thought that Tucker Clellan was dead, that he had killed himself and a Marine and the Cylon prisoners in an act of revenge. Lee took a deep breath…and another.

"I know this is tough for you," Parker said.

Lee nodded, not trusting himself to speak for a moment and then he said, "Duck was a nice guy. Everybody liked him. He wasn't some crazy radical nut-job. He was a nice guy."

"I'm sure he was."

"When I saw him five or six weeks ago, he didn't seem like…he seemed normal. He asked me about my leg. He said we'd get together soon for a beer. He seemed like he was doing better about Nora. I just don't understand."

"He was probably already planning this attack by then. It gave him a sense of purpose, a reason to go on. It's not unusual to see that in someone once they've made that crucial decision. I'm sorry, Lee. I'm sorry that the bomber turned out to be a friend of yours."

"So am I."

"We've got someone else we need to question while we're here at the hospital. Natasi was brought in right after Corporal Guiterrez. I don't think she'll be able to add anything, but we've got to go through the motions. I'll understand if you don't want to go with me."

"No, I'm fine."

As Lee and Parker walked down the hall toward the elevator, the image of Tucker Clellan in the elevator looking up and smiling stayed with him. Lee realized that Duck was saying goodbye to anyone who saw that tape. Duck was a friend, a good guy, but there was a dark place in his soul that had led him to die in order to take the lives of the Cylons. There had to be.

They entered the elevator and the doors closed.

Lee said, "He wasn't shouting _forma _like Corporal Guiterrez thought. Duck was shouting _for Nora."_

Parker said, "You know there are a lot of people on Caprica who will call him a hero. Some will even want to put up a statue in his honor. There are some who will say he did what our government didn't have the guts to do."

"There will even be some who will say the government put him up to it so they didn't have to get their hands dirty," Lee added.

"You're right. This will probably bring the conspiracy theorists out of the woodwork in droves when in all likelihood it was the act of a single bereaved and bitter man."

"We're going to pick his life apart now, too, aren't we?"

"We have to. The President, members of the Quorum, your father…they'll all want answers. They'll want to know where Clellan got the explosives and how he made it to one of the most secure locations on the planet carrying them. Heads are probably going to roll."

"So the damage Tucker did today isn't over."

"Unfortunately no."

The elevator doors opened on the next floor and they got off. Down the hall they saw several Marine guards and another one of Darren's agents standing outside a room.

As he and Parker started down the hall, Lee thought once more of how he had called Tucker Clellan a friend, how he had lived in the same dorm with him and eaten countless meals in the cafeteria with him, had sweated in the gym beside him and in the classroom, too…of how they had shared beers at McGee's and thrown darts and talked about girls…of how they had laughed and joked…and dreamed of flying Vipers…and in the end he hadn't really known Tucker Clellan at all.

TBC…


	29. Day of Dark and Light

Chapter 29

Day of Dark and Light

_1. After many years of peace, war came again to Kobol._

_2. And the Lord sent a vision to Azurra that the time was come for His people to leave._

_3. And Azurra told her son, grown now to manhood, to gather the Thirteenth Tribe and make preparations to go._

_4. And Xander did as she bade him and filled thirty great galleons with food and supplies. _

_5. And thirty more he filled with animals and birds and fish of every kind._

_6. And thirty more he filled with the people of the Lord._

_7. And on the given day the galleons leapt into the heavens and began their journey._

_8. And Azurra's eyes grew dim for her task was done, and the Lord took her home to dwell with Him._

_9. For He had told her many years before that her feet would not trod upon the grass of their new home._

_10. Ulixes mourned his wife and Xander mourned his mother as did his six sisters. _

_11. And Xander said to his scribes, Record the story of the prophet of the Lord that all may remember and honor her name._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Azurra, _Chapter 11:1-11

.

John entered his apartment to find Doolittle wrapping his dinner in preparation for putting it into the refrigerator. Doolittle glanced up at him, the look of relief unmistakable on his face. John also saw the black eye and swollen cheek. Doolittle was a small man and he wasn't young, either. He had to be in his late fifties, maybe already in his sixties. The thought that someone had roughed him up infuriated John.

"Who did it?" He asked.

"I was worried about you, sir. You wasn't here at breakfast or lunch."

"I'm fine…mostly. Where'd you get the shiner?"

"Run into something. It's nothing."

"Don't give me that bullshit, Doolittle. I've seen enough of those to know where they come from…somebody's fist. Leoben?"

Doolittle nodded and pointed to his collar. John tore off a paper towel and wet it before he put it into Doolittle's hand.

Doolittle wrapped it around the communicator collar. "They's going to be paying special attention to me now. I can't stay long."

"You know what happened to Yusef and Rika?"

"Yes, sir. I know. I hope you and none of them women blame me."

"Why would we blame you?"

"I knew about it and didn't do nothing to stop it."

"You could have stopped the sun from coming up easier than you could have stopped two young people that much in love from seeing each other. Unless you were willing to rat them out."

Doolittle hung his head. "No, sir. I'd never done nothing like that. I did try to talk to the boy about how dangerous it was for both of them, but he wouldn't listen to me."

"Did you have any idea that he was going to kill Leoben?"

"No, sir!" Doolittle answered emphatically. "None! I swear! Yusef was quiet yesterday morning. Polite and helpful like always. I didn't see him take the knife. I didn't have no idea what had happened until Leoben showed up yesterday afternoon with a couple of his centurions and started asking questions. I think he finally believed me when I said I didn't know what the boy was going to do. Leoben questioned everybody."

"He beat everybody up, too?"

Doolittle shrugged. "He run out of steam after a couple of us. I tried to keep him off the younger ones. They didn't know nothing. Yusef never told nobody but me about him and Rika."

"You didn't admit anything to Leoben, did you?"

"No, sir. I played dumb."

"You're not to blame for what happened. You don't think Leoben is going to question you again, do you?"

"I don't think so. He made sure nobody else would be able to take a knife out of the kitchen. We got a centurion watching everything we do now. One of them big ones, not the little housekeepers. Every time we use a knife, we got to put it back when we's through or it's right there holding out them long steel fingers. They's going to put a camera on us in the kitchen soon as they can get around to it. It's a bother, but we can live with it. It could be worse."

While he was speaking, Doolittle had been unwrapping the food, warming it in the microwave and putting it on the table. John took a deep breath and sat down.

"I'm sorry you got caught up in this. You're a good man, Doolittle. You deserve better."

"I heard about the girl, sir. I'm real sorry."

"When I saw her hanging from that tree this morning all I could see was my daughter. I lost it completely."

"They's a lot of us feel like that. A lot of us what lost our families, our kids and our grandkids. That hurt the worst. I know how you feel, sir. My wife and I…we lost both our boys and their families. They was back on Scorpia where we's from. Sometimes you just got to accept and move on. It's either that or give up and die."

"Is that why you tried to take Yusef under your wing?"

"He reminded me a lot of my youngest boy when he was that age. Proud and stubborn. Didn't want to listen to my advice."

"I talked to Sonja. I think she'll see to it that Leoben doesn't cause any more problems about the baby."

"That'd be nice, sir. Now, I got to go. Them centurions know how long it takes to make rounds. They'll be watching all of us a lot closer now."

He pulled the damp paper towel from his collar and tossed it into the trash can.

"Thanks, Doolittle," John said.

"Enjoy your meal, sir," Doolittle said as he left.

John ate mechanically, barely tasting the food, but having missed breakfast and lunch, he was hungry. Afterward he took a shower. During the time he had been at Sonja's apartment, one of the housekeeping centurions had laundered his shirt and pants. His still-damp boots were sitting on the bathroom floor, but there was also a box sitting on the counter with a new pair of shoes, slip-on loafers. He dressed and walked down the hall to D'Anna's apartment. He knocked and heard her tell him to come in.

She was dressed in white slacks and blouse and was sitting on the couch. He walked over and sat down beside her.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

"Better."

"Still nauseated?"

"A little."

"I'm sorry I didn't make it this afternoon. We'll go for a walk tomorrow."

"I know what happened. One of my sister Threes came and told me. She said Sonja had taken you to her apartment. Did you have sex with her?"

"Yes."

"I told you it was all right if you did it with her. I guess she's happy now. She wanted you for herself from the beginning."

John shrugged and then said, "She saved my life." He didn't mean it as an explanation or an excuse, but that's exactly how it sounded.

They sat without speaking for a long time. Finally D'Anna asked, "Did Rika think she would see the face of God when she killed herself?"

John took a deep breath. "I don't know what she was thinking."

"Why did she do it?"

"The man she loved was dead. I think she thought death was preferable to going back to Leoben and let him keep raping her while she was raising their child."

"Have you ever thought about killing yourself?"

"The only time I came close was after I lost my leg in the motorcycle accident. Then I met my daughter's mother and decided life was worth living after all. Looking back I don't know if I'd have been able to go through with it or not. But I told Sonja and I'll tell you. I won't let Cavil send me back to the prison. I'll make sure his centurions shoot me first."

He finally heard some emotion in D'Anna's voice. "Why would he send you back to the prison?"

"He doesn't like me meddling in what he considers Cylon business. He doesn't think I should have involved myself in the situation with Rika and Yusef. He doesn't seem to understand that's what humans do when they care about each other."

"The reason my sister Three came to see me is because of what you said down in the lobby. I agree with her. What Leoben did is wrong. She thinks we should do something about it. She wanted to know if I would vote with them if it went before the council."

"Do you think what Leoben did is wrong and what you did with me is right?"

She dropped her eyes. "No. If Leoben is wrong in taking an unwilling partner, then we're all wrong to do it."

He took her hand and gently squeezed it. "Then help Sonja put a stop to it. She's going to go before your council. Go with her. You and all your sisters. I'm sure there are plenty of human men here on Nereid who will do what you want for a chance to come live in the city. In fact a lot of them would probably fall all over themselves for the chance. You and your sisters are beautiful women."

She smiled slightly in acknowledgement of the compliment and nodded. "I'll do whatever Sonja asks me to. I don't want Cavil to have to kill you. I want you to raise our son with me."

John felt his life and family on Caprica slip a little further from him. He took another deep breath. "I've already said I'd do that. I'll keep my word."

"When I killed myself one time I think I saw God," she said softly. "I hope Rika did, too. I know the scriptures tell us that suicide is a mortal sin, but maybe God will take Rika to heaven anyway."

"What did He look like?"

For the first time since he'd gotten there, D'Anna smiled broadly. "You're sure God is a _He_?"

John shrugged. "Our religion has male and female gods, but Zeus is a male. Was I wrong to make that assumption about your God?"

"Just because the ruler of your false gods is male doesn't mean ours is, too. Maybe God is neither male nor female. Maybe God is both. Or maybe God is female. Women bring life into the world and yet everyone assumes that the greatest creator of all is a male."

"I'm not going to argue with you since I'm not personally acquainted with your God. So what did the face of God look like?"

"I couldn't tell. God was surrounded by angels…seven of them…and they were all in a white light that was so bright it hurt my eyes…and then I was in the res tank and two of my sisters were helping me." She chuckled softly. "One of them said, '_You again. How many times are you going to do this?'_ They couldn't believe I would keep enduring the downloading process for my desire to see God."

"How did you kill yourself?"

"I ordered a centurion to shoot me."

"Damn, D'Anna. Couldn't you have found a better way than that?"

She shrugged. "It was quick."

"Was the res tank on a basestar or at the lab?"

"I'm the third Three so I download at the lab. I've never been on a baseship."

"So there's not another copy of you on any of the basestars?"

"Not my copy, no. There are a dozen Threes who live on each of the ships in orbit above us just like the rest of the models. They don't come down to the planet and we don't go up there."

"Why not?"

"We live where we're assigned to live. Their jobs are to protect us. Ours jobs are to run the planet. There're about thirty of each model here in the city and in each of the settlements. There are a lot more centurions in the settlements."

"Do you think the ones on the basestars are envious of you living down here?"

"Why would they be?" She asked wide-eyed. "Jealousy is a human emotion."

"Oh, come on, D'Anna," John said in exasperation. "Who would want to live on a basestar when he…or she could live on a planet? I was on a battlestar for four and a half years. I loved flying my Viper, but I can't tell you how much I looked forward to shore leave. I dreamed about sunshine and the wind in my face. I dreamed about the ocean and walking on a beach. I _missed_ being on a planet."

"If my sisters and brothers on the baseships don't like their surroundings, they can always project something else."

"Project something? What does that mean?"

"We imagine we're somewhere else and it's like being there."

"When I was in your prison, I used to imagine I was on the beach with my wife and kids. It's not the same as being there. Believe me."

"But it is. I would show you how it works if I could, but we've tried it with humans before. They can't see what we do. I could project myself onto a beach right now. I would see the beach and you would still see this room."

"That's too bad because I'd really like to go to the beach for a few days. I grew up in a port town. I miss the ocean."

"You should ask Sonja to take you."

"Couldn't you take me? Maybe the fresh sea air would do you good. We could walk on the beach."

"I need to stay near Simon."

"Laura and I went to our beach cottage while she was pregnant. Not during the last two months but before that. She was fine."

"I don't want to take any chances. Our son is very special."

"All babies are very special."

"What happened to Rika's baby?"

"Petra took her. She'll love her and raise her and Cassie like sisters. Sonja and I are going to see her in the morning. Do you want to go with us?"

"Mornings are my worst time for being sick."

"You can't sit in this apartment for the next eight months," John said gently.

"I know. Simon said I should feel better soon."

"Maybe since this baby is half human, you should see a human doctor, too."

"It's forbidden."

"Why?"

"A human doctor might do something to cause me to lose the child."

"Did Simon tell you that?" John asked angrily.

"No, Cavil did. He said we should avoid the human doctors because they want to find a way to destroy our race."

"That's not true. Human doctors take an oath. They're sworn to protect life, to save it no matter who they're treating. If you change your mind, I'm sure Bianca…Dr. Cardenas would be glad to check you."

He saw some hesitancy and then D'Anna said, "Do you think she might be able to tell me why I'm having so many headaches? Sometimes I'm dizzy, too. Simon told me not to worry about it. He said I would just have to put up with it while I'm pregnant."

"This started after you got pregnant?"

"The dizziness, yes. I've always had headaches, but they've gotten worse. Simon told me I'm damaged because of how many times the creators have modified my programming and how many times I've downloaded. He said the headaches were a side effect that can't be fixed."

"I think you should talk to Dr. Cardenas, if not for yourself, then for the baby's sake. She's a pediatrician. That means she specializes in babies and children. You believe our child is special. Why take a chance?"

"I'll think about it."

"When you were at the lab for your checkups, didn't you mention your headaches to the creators?"

"I told you I don't see them."

"Did you ever see them?"

"Many years ago before they boxed my copy because I was flawed."

"What do you remember about them?"

"There were seven of them. Three women, four men. They always wore white coats."

"The same ratio of brother and sister Cylons."

"Once there were five brothers. One of us died. I still hear his voice in the datastream. He never says anything new, but it's there. Even Cavil can't figure out a way to erase it without damaging the stream."

"You told me. Could the seven creators be the seven angels you saw with God?"

D'Anna looked at him in surprise. "How could they be angels? That would mean they were dead."

"Weren't your creators human? Humans die. They get old and eventually they die. It's something we accept as inevitable."

D'Anna smiled. "The creators aren't dead yet. Cavil would tell us."

"You trust him that much?"

"He's our leader."

"And that means he's incapable of lying to you?"

She let go of his hand and massaged both of her temples. "We're not like humans. We don't lie to each other. What are you trying to do? You're making my head hurt worse."

"I'm sorry. Just relax. I didn't mean to upset you. I'll come back tomorrow afternoon. We'll go to the park and walk. Maybe we'll see some of the mothers with their kids. Maybe Petra will be there and you can see Rika's baby."

"What did Rika name her?"

"She didn't. I guess that will be up to Petra now." John took her hand and squeezed it gently before he stood up. "Try to get some rest, D'Anna."

He left her apartment and walked up the hall. He now knew that D'Anna was not going to be any help when it came to investigating the status of the Cylon's creators. It would all be up to him and Sonja and maybe Natalie. He hoped Cavil stayed in the forest searching for Kara and Narcho. He hoped their Number One's obsession with proving himself right trumped his other senses. One thing had been clear to John in the conversation he had overheard between Cavil and Sonja. Cavil had a great deal of scorn for the humans that had been brought to Nereid as slaves, and yet he had shown himself to be more like some of them than he would probably ever believe. Humans hadn't cornered the market on obsession and stubbornness.

Back in his apartment John got a small glass of whiskey and walked out onto the terrace. The air was still cold and damp. Thin clouds skimmed across the sky alternately hiding and revealing a pale half moon. It was strange to look up in the sky and see only one moon instead of two or more. Picon had three small moons. His home planet of Virgon had two like Caprica.

He walked back inside and closed the sliding glass doors against the damp cold before he went to the couch and sat. He thought about his wife and family and the island. Caprica's moons had a whole different meaning to him when he'd been on the island with Laura. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine them walking hand in hand along the moonlit beach at night and wished he had the Cylon ability to project. It was the first time he'd ever wished for anything that was uniquely theirs.

...

Lee stood back and let Major Parker precede him into Natasi's room. It had taken two phone calls before the agent and two Marines guarding her door would let them pass. Lee had stood patiently while Major Parker talked in a quiet voice to the agent. He could understand the need for security. After what had happened to the other Cylons that morning, they were taking no chances with this one.

Lee stepped inside the door and pushed it shut. Unlike Corporal Guiterrez, Natasi showed no physical signs of having been harmed by the blast that had killed her fellow Cylons. There was an oxygen mask beside her pillow but she wasn't using it. She wore a faded but clean hospital gown that was tied at the back of her neck. She was wearing no makeup and her face was very pale but her beauty was still clearly evident. Lee had expected to see fear in her eyes. Instead he saw defiance tinged with sadness.

"Major Parker," she said softly. "We meet again."

"Hello, Natasi."

"Who's your handsome sidekick today? Has he replaced your friend Agent Darren or will he be in to see me next?"

"This is Captain Lee Adama."

She smiled faintly. "Any relation to the admiral?"

"His oldest son," Lee answered.

"You're much more handsome than your father, but I'm sure you know that already. I'm also sure your father had a great deal to do with everything that happened to us last November. Please tell him I send my regards. His plan was brilliant. It took us all by surprise."

Parker said, "Now that we've got that out of the way, are you being treated well?"

Her voice hardened slightly. "My brothers and my sister are dead, aren't they?"

"Were you injured?" Parker asked gently.

"I'm fine. Please answer my question. No one will tell me anything."

"We don't know yet. A search and rescue team is still working its way down to that level."

"But you don't have any reason to hope they survived, do you?"

Parker hesitated and then said, "No."

"Who did this? Why?" Natasi asked with pain in her voice.

Parker shook his head. "We don't have that information yet. It may be a long time before we can get a positive ID on the person or persons responsible."

She glanced at Lee before she looked back at Parker. "You wouldn't tell me even if you knew," she said with bitterness in her voice.

"Does it really matter?" Parker asked gently. "I think you know why. Does it really matter _who?_"

Natasi closed her eyes. "No, it doesn't matter. They're dead. You destroyed our resurrection ship. All their knowledge is lost forever."

Lee clenched his jaw. The knowledge of billions of humans was also lost forever but that didn't seem to matter to her.

"Is there anything you can tell us about what happened this morning?" Parker asked.

With her eyes still closed she shook her head. "I was asleep when it happened. The fire alarm woke me just as the room started filling with smoke. Two Marines came running in and dragged me out of bed. They wouldn't even let me put on a bathrobe over my nightgown. They rushed me up the stairs. There was hardly any smoke in the stairwell. We were fine. There was no reason to hurry."

Parker said, "Most of the smoke and dust went up the elevator and ventilation shafts. And those Marines were just doing what they'd been ordered to do. Protect you."

Natasi went on. "If I hadn't been moved out of the cells, I would have died with my brothers and sister. God has a reason for keeping me alive. I don't have any doubts."

Parker put his business card on the table beside her just like he'd done for Guiterrez. "If you can think of anything to tell us, please get in touch with me."

She opened her eyes and smiled slightly. "Don't hold your breath, Major."

"I'm still making the offer."

"What's going to happen to me now?"

"That's under discussion."

"You're not going to send me back down _there_, are you?" Her voice was still defiant but clearly now held fear.

"I don't think the bunker will be considered safe for a long time. We'll come up with another solution."

"I'd like to talk to Mr. Lampkin again."

"I'll see if that can be arranged."

"Is there any word about Gaius?" She whispered. "Mr. Lampkin promised to get word to me but he hasn't done it yet. It's been weeks."

"Attorney General Lampkin is a very busy man."

"Is Gaius all right? Is that why no one is saying anything? Has something happened to him?"

Parker said, "Lee, can answer that question for you. Until about ten days ago, he was on a ship with Dr. Baltar."

"He's fine," Lee said. "I saw him almost every day in the cafeteria."

"How did he look? What was he doing?" She asked hungrily.

"He looks just like he's always looked to me except I think he needs a haircut. He was eating a meal or drinking coffee when I saw him, the usual things you do in a cafeteria."

"Did you talk to him?"

"Sometimes we exchanged greetings. He doesn't consider me on his intellectual level so I didn't rate much in the way of conversation."

Lee didn't see any point in telling her that Gaius Baltar was always much more interested in talking to Kendra than to him. He also held back his opinion that Gaius Baltar was pompous and arrogant. For a moment he was almost able to feel sorry for Natasi because she was so obviously in love with the jerk.

She smiled again. "Gaius _is_ brilliant. What is he doing on the ship? Mr. Lampkin said he wouldn't be in any danger."

"He's not. He doesn't go planet-side into any of the radiation. He's just testing samples that are brought back to the lab on board the ship."

She sighed softly and smiled.

Lee wanted to say something else to her, something about the utter destruction and death that had been found on the other planets, destruction he'd seen with his own eyes. He wanted to tell her that between the initial bombs and five years of radiation spreading its poison around the planets in the air and water that no one had survived the holocaust visited on eleven of the Colonies by the Cylons. He wanted to tell her that many humans had died protracted and painful deaths of radiation sickness and starvation instead of quick deaths like the skinjobs had died that morning, but now was not the time to vent his feelings. If he got started, he wasn't sure he would be able to stop. Now was just not the time.

Parker glanced at the door. Lee opened it and they walked through.

"Tell Mr. Lampkin to come see me," Natasi called after them. "Please."

Parker nodded and closed the door.

"Sometimes I think she's frakking clueless about what they really did," Lee said bitterly as they walked toward the elevators. "And then I tell myself that none of them are that dense."

"She knows," Parker said. "She's just smart enough not to show it."

"Ignoring the holocaust or denying it won't make it go away."

"I know."

"You heard her. She acts like it's a huge frakking deal that the knowledge of a couple of skinjobs is _lost forever_. She doesn't give a frak about all the human knowledge that was lost forever…all the art and literature and scientific discoveries and…culture. Not to mention all the human lives. When I think about little kids and babies dying of radiation poisoning or starving or being eaten alive by rats or dogs or…"

"Lee," Parker said sharply. "Stop. It's not worth going where you're headed right now. I know because I've been there. For months after we surrendered to the Cylons, I would lie awake at night thinking those same thoughts. My daughter had just been born. Kim and I were up a lot with her. My son was four years old. Sometime while Kim was feeding Leah I'd go stand in the doorway of my son's room and watch him sleep and thank the gods that my kids weren't suffering like the children on the other planets. And then I'd feel guilty that we were all safe and warm and had enough to eat. And then I'd pray for everyone who wasn't as fortunate. It's the only time in my life I've ever prayed that children had died quickly. So don't go there. It's a dark place. It's the past. All we can do right now is stop it from _ever_ happening again. That's our job and you're going to play a part. So is Kara. So is Hunter."

"Do you think Tucker was in that dark place when he detonated his bomb?"

"I'm sure he was."

Lee took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind. "I'm sorry, sir. I got carried away. I saw some of the recon footage the drones took in the destroyed cities. It's gruesome."

"I'm sure it is."

"Do you think Natasi is sorry for what they did? Do you think she'll ever stand up and admit they were wrong?"

"I don't know. I doubt she'll admit it to either one of us. I got your security clearance upped a level. You should watch the recording of the session where AG Lampkin broke her. It was damned genius in my opinion and I've been at this for most of my career. We all knew about her feelings for Baltar, but Lampkin zeroed in on it like you'd zero in on a Raider. Watch the tape of Lampkin and Natasi first chance you get and learn from it. He never uttered a threat. He never raised his voice. In fact several times he was almost whispering. But he got answers from her that none of us had been able to get."

"I can't even begin to understand why Natasi is so hung up on Baltar. He's a sleazy womanizer. On the _Penelope_ he came on to Kendra every time he saw her. I used to kid her about him. It's the only thing she ever threatened to beat me up about. I can't believe someone as beautiful as Natasi would be in love with such a jerk."

"Luckily for us, she is…and lucky for her, too. In the long run it saved her life."

"Lampkin told John one time that he'd learned his best interrogation techniques from my grandfather Joseph."

Parker smiled. "I think there's a little of your grandfather in you. I knew you would be an asset to my team when you got information from that security guard on the morning after the resistance blew up the Cylon lab. You got information from him that no one else had gotten. I was impressed. It showed me you have good instincts."

Lee felt warm from Parker's praise. "Thank you, sir."

"Have you reconsidered law school? The military would pay as long as you commit to eight years afterwards as an AJA lawyer."

"Maybe someday when this is all behind us."

"Feeling better now?" Parker asked.

"Yes, sir."

"Then let's get back to the office and see what's going on."

"I wish I could talk to Kara, sir."

"She's fine, Lee. Kara and Hunter both. With luck we'll see them tomorrow."

"If we get through in time, I'd like to go by there this evening."

Parker smiled. "Then let's get back to the office and get all this written up. Then I'm sure your father and Darren will want to talk to us." They walked in silence most of the way to the parking deck. Then Parker added. "I know how you feel. I want to go home to my wife and kids tonight, too."

...

Kara stood up and stretched. She and Hunter had been sitting on the couch for an hour looking at the news. They had just watched Billy Keikeya read a statement from the President's office. He had said that both the explosion at the temple in Sovana and the explosion in the basement of an old hotel in Caprica City were under investigation and that the full resources of the Colonial government would be devoted to getting answers. He had refused to take any questions and said updates would be issued as they had news.

"The standard response," Kara said.

"Meaning?"

"Every time something like this happens, that's what Billy or somebody goes on television and says. We won't learn anything else until they're ready to tell us even if we sit here all day. Lee and Major Parker are obviously tied up with the investigation. Let's go somewhere."

Hunter's face lit up. "Outside?"

"Go put on your shoes and get that jacket."

Kara went into her bedroom and put on her socks and tennis shoes. She opened a drawer and took the four ten-cubit notes that she had taken the day before from the small stash she kept at Lee's apartment. She folded the notes and tucked them into the pocket of her jeans. She walked back into the living room. Hunter was waiting for her.

"What's the plan?"

"Let me surprise you."

"We don't have a key. We can't get back into the apartment."

Kara shrugged. "No problem. By the time we get back, someone will be here to let us in. If they're not, we'll sit in the hall and wait."

"Aren't you afraid that's going to get us in a lot of trouble?"

"I'm going to call Lee as soon as I find a phone. He probably won't answer, but I can leave him a message." She grinned. "He'd probably rather have us out around Caprica City than alone at the apartment all day."

They rode the elevator down to the ground floor. "Which way?" Hunter asked.

Turning right would take them to the park so she turned left, the same direction they had walked the night before. "I saw a pay phone outside the restrooms last night in the Lamplighter. I'm going to call Lee from there."

When they got to the Lamplighter, though, they found that it was closed. "It doesn't open until eleven," Hunter said. "What time is it now?"

"Not even ten," Kara answered. "Let's go to the subway. There's pay phones there."

"Are we going to ride the train?"

"That's the plan. Now would be a good time. It won't be so crowded."

They continued walking until they reached an entrance to the subway. Once inside she went to a machine and changed one of the ten-cubit notes into ten singles and then changed two of the singles into coins. She went to another machine and bought two all-day passes for the subway. A few steps away stood a bank of pay phones. She found one that was working and called Lee's number. It went straight to his voice mail and she left a message telling him that Agent Malcolm had been called away and that she and Hunter were going to do some exploring in the city. She said they'd be back before dinner.

She hung up and handed one of the subway passes to Hunter. "Just follow me and do what I do."

They used their passes, went through the turnstile and down the steps. She felt the rush of air on her face and the familiar smell. Hunter was beside her, looking at everything. Down on the platform she oriented herself with the big map on the wall. She found her first destination. They wouldn't have to change trains. The platform wasn't crowded at all and she walked to the edge. She wanted him to see the train emerging from the tunnel.

"You must have done this a lot," he said.

"All the time when I first moved to the city from the refugee camp." She heard the familiar rumble. "Look down the track."

He did and they saw the train emerge from the tunnel. Hunter's eyes lit up. It squealed to a stop and the doors opened. She grabbed his hand. "Come on. We don't have much time." She pulled him onto the car which was less than half full and they sat just as the doors shut.

"We're not going very far but we'll be stopping three times before we get off."

She watched his face as the train lurched forward. He looked like a kid on his birthday and Kara was suddenly glad they'd gotten this day. They got off three stops later and came up into the spring sunshine. Hunter looked around.

"We came by here yesterday on the way to eat lunch with Laura. I recognize that building on the corner."

"You're right."

"Are we going back to Marble House?"

"We'd never get within half a mile of there. It's probably locked down tight because of what happened this morning."

"Even if the President is your stepmother?"

"I don't want to bother her. She's got enough on her mind right now. We're going somewhere else. Then we'll probably have to ride the subway again."

They walked several blocks to Elosha's temple and climbed the wide steps outside. Inside it was darker and cooler.

"This is where Laura and my dad got married," Kara whispered to Hunter. "It's where Elosha is the priest."

Hunter looked around. "This place looks old. A lot older than everything around it."

"It's one of the oldest buildings in the city. Everything else has been torn down and rebuilt a couple of times. The altar is one of the oldest things on Caprica. It was carved by the first humans who settled here. You can wait here or go down front with me. I need to ask Elosha something."

"Is it private?"

"No."

"Then I'll go. I'd like to see the altar."

They walked down the aisle. Elosha was sitting on a small bench on the side near the front and was reading from a book of the sacred scrolls. She looked up as Kara approached and her face lit in a smile. They exchanged greetings and Kara told her that she and Hunter had a free day and that she was showing him a few things in the city. She didn't go into any other detail. Then while Hunter went to stand before the altar, she told Elosha why she'd come to see her.

"I need to find Keshia. Sharon is at the same shelter and I'd like to see her."

"She's at the shelter run by the Delphi Sisters of Hera. It's on Acropolis Street."

"Acropolis is a long street," Kara said. "The end near the waterfront is high-rent. I guess we're talking about the other end."

"Yes. The shelter is four blocks past the abandoned Temple of Ares."

"I know the place," Kara said. "There's a free clinic two blocks over on Icarus Street. I used to deliver there when I was working for Jack Fisk. Thanks."

Elosha smiled. "Enjoy this beautiful day with your friend."

Before Kara left, she put one of the ten-cubit notes in the offering bowl. When Elosha thanked her, Kara said, "Say another prayer for my dad."

Outside they began walking back toward the subway entrance. Hunter said, "I wasn't trying to listen, but I heard. You're going to see one of your Cylon friends."

"Then we'll go do something you'll enjoy. If you don't want to go with me to see Sharon, you can stay here at the temple and talk to Elosha. I'll come back for you."

He shrugged as they kept walking.

"Why would a Temple of Ares be abandoned?" He asked.

"The Cylons stopped people from going there when they took over. They destroyed the inside. It used to be guarded by centurions. Ares is the god of war. His temple attracted a group of people the Cylons wanted to _discourage_ for lack of a better word. His followers just went underground. They call themselves the Sons of Ares now. I met a couple of them when I was in the resistance. They have a tattoo on their wrist…the symbol for alpha with a lightning bolt through it. I thought somebody would have started restoring the temple by now, but it's still deserted."

He grinned. "I think I'd have joined them if I'd been living here."

"You probably would have."

Kara and Hunter rode the subway to the stop nearest the shelter. When they emerged, it was clear that they were in a very different part of town. They passed a soup kitchen where several homeless men lounged on the steps waiting for the noon meal. A woman wearing many dirty layers of clothing passed them pushing an old shopping cart laden with junk. She held out her hand listlessly but Kara ignored her. She knew if anyone saw her give cubits to the old woman, she and Hunter would be set upon by other beggars. Hunter might not react well to having them paw at him. He kept turning around, though, looking at the woman as she progressed slowly down the sidewalk.

"It's sad. I know," Kara finally said.

"We'd never let that happen to anyone in the valley."

"I know, but there's over six million people living in Caprica City alone. The government does the best it can. Some people live on the street by choice. Some are mentally ill. Some are addicts. I learned a lot about street people when I was delivering meds for Jack. I had to deliver to a free clinic near here."

He grinned. "Is that why you rode with a switchblade in your boot?"

"One of the reasons."

"The Oracle's brother was crazy. He always wore a sheepskin coat, winter or summer. He never bathed. His hair was long and matted and so was his beard." Hunter snorted. "The sheep smelled a lot better than him. Sometimes he'd start talking and none of us could understand him. My grandfather thought he was speaking an old dialect from Kobol but nobody understood where he'd learned it. He said the gods had spoken it to him in the cave of Zeus, but there was no cave of Zeus. He was just a crazy old man."

"What happened to him?"

"He used to go off on what he called pilgrimages. One time he went off and never came back. That was maybe a year before the Oracle died."

"Nobody went to look for him?"

"That was right after the Cylons came. Most people thought they got him. Even if they didn't, Nereid's a big planet. A hundred things could have happened to him. We couldn't spare the men to start searching. The Oracle told my grandfather that her brother had found the cave where the Kobol Stone had once been hidden, but she was almost as crazy as he was."

"What do you think she was talking about?"

"I haven't got a clue. It was probably all a figment of his imagination just like the cave of Zeus."

"Some scholarly-type people think the map to Kobol is somewhere on Nereid."

"They're welcome to come look after we get rid of the Cylons. My grandparents spent thirty years exploring the area around the ruined city. They never found so much as a hint. They found an old cave in the mountains full of statues, but it didn't contain any map and the gods didn't talk to them while they were there. They tried to get the Oracle's crazy brother to show them what he'd found, but he never would. That map, the stone, the cave of Zeus, everything is just a myth because this planet was settled by the Thirteenth tribe. They were monotheists. The last thing they would have done is create a cave dedicated to our gods and then put something in it pointing the way back to Kobol. They left there because they were persecuted. Why would they want to show anyone the way back?"

Kara shrugged. "It's still interesting to think about. One of my teachers at the Academy is into ancient history. He told my dad once that he'd like to go to Nereid. He'd love to talk to your grandfather and hear all about the stuff the Oracle's crazy brother said."

"I'm sure my grandfather would like to talk to him, too."

When they reached the women's shelter, Kara said, "You'll have to wait out here. They don't let men inside. I can either visit with her in there or I can ask her to come out. Do you want to meet her or not?"

Hunter finally said. "Bring her out."

She smiled. "You're curious. Admit it."

He shrugged.

Kara rang the bell and after a short delay was admitted. The woman told her to wait in one of the rooms off the hall. Five minutes later Keshia appeared in the doorway.

"Hi," Kara said.

Keshia took Kara's hands in both of hers and then hugged her. When she drew back there were tears in her eyes. "Sharon said you'd gone on a dangerous mission."

"You look a lot better than the last time I saw you."

"I am much better now. You've come to see Sharon?"

"And you."

"She's on her way down. These days she's slower than I am. How is your stepmother?"

"She's fine."

"She gave us a very generous donation. It's made such a difference in the care we can provide for these women and children."

A pregnant Sharon appeared in the doorway. Kara grinned. "Hey, roomie. Or I guess I should say ex-roomie. You've gotten fat. What are they feeding you here?"

"You can blame your best friend Karl for my condition," Sharon smiled. "I heard you'd come back. I thought they had you locked up somewhere."

"I broke out for the day. I brought a friend with me. He's outside. Want to meet him?"

"Sure," Sharon said. "Is he…?"

"Yeah," Kara answered.

"You go ahead," Keshia said, "I'm helping Sister Eirene with some paperwork. We're in her office in back. Come see me before you go."

Kara and Sharon walked out and down the steps. Hunter was standing on the sidewalk talking to an old man who had a small scruffy-looking dog on a leash. He moved on and Hunter turned to them. Kara watched his face as his eyes took in Sharon's belly. Then he looked up.

"Sharon, this is Hunter. Hunter, Sharon."

Sharon said. "Karl and I were trying to guess what you looked like." She turned to Kara and smiled. "You did good. He's way hotter than Narcho. He's as hot as Mr. Connelly."

"She's kidding," Kara said quickly.

"No, I'm not." She smiled at Hunter. "Is it just me or have you never seen a pregnant woman before?"

"I've seen pregnant women. No pregnant Cylons, though. Where I come from you can't get pregnant."

Kara grinned. "Maybe we should take Karl back with us. I'll bet he could fix that."

"My husband stays with me."

"What are you going to do after the baby is born?" Kara asked. "You can't keep living here."

"The _Penelope_'s mission is over next week. As soon as Karl gets a few days off, he's going to look for another apartment for us. I've been looking at the _For Rent_ ads. I've made some calls and written down some addresses."

"I'm sorry about what happened at your old place."

Sharon's look saddened. "They even cut up the baby blankets you gave us."

"I'll get you some more. I'll bet Brae has got a ton of baby stuff that Laura would donate…if you don't mind a lot of blue."

"Hera won't mind." Sharon took Kara's hand and put it over her belly. "See, she's happy."

Kara felt the baby moving. "Wow. She's kicking hard."

"You should feel it from this end."

"How much longer?"

"Four and a half more weeks if I make it. I've had some contractions already. The doctor called it false labor, but I'm supposed to take it easy."

"Then go take it easy. Come on." Kara turned to Hunter. "I'll be right back."

Inside she said goodbye to Keshia and then to Sharon. "We'll have to get together soon. Tell Karl I said so. And if you…have to go to the hospital, have him call Lee. I don't have my phone back yet."

Back outside she and Hunter started back toward the subway entrance.

"That wasn't too hard, was it?" Kara finally asked.

Hunter shrugged. "I never thought I'd ever see one of them pregnant. Mr. Fox said all the half-breeds on Nereid have human mothers."

"Karl and Sharon must have done something right."

"Sharon's going to name her baby _Hera_ after one of our gods?"

"That's what she says. She likes the name."

"You didn't tell her about what happened at that old hotel this morning."

"Because I don't know exactly what happened. Those Cylons might have been moved. Why upset her for nothing? There will be plenty of time to talk about that when we do know."

"So she would be upset if the rest of them had been killed even though she turned on them and helped you?"

"Probably. She sided with us in the fight, but they were still her brothers and sisters."

He snorted. "I killed humans who were helping the Cylons before, two of the men who raped my sister. It didn't upset me to kill my own kind."

"Sharon's pregnant. I didn't want to take the chance on upsetting her."

At the subway entrance Hunter asked, "Where to now?"

She grinned. "The apartment where my dad and Laura lived before she moved to Marble House. We're going to get my motorcycle and go for a ride."

His eyes lit up again. "I like the sound of that. What about lunch? I'm hungry."

"The nearest subway stop is a dozen blocks from the apartment. We'll pass Channing's on the way. It's a great place to eat. You were a good sport about going with me to see Sharon. The least I can do is buy you lunch."

"Do they have that soft drink I like so much?"

She rolled her eyes. "I'm sure they do. Aren't you afraid you'll have to detox cold turkey when you go back to Nereid?"

"What does that mean?"

She snickered. "I'll explain it to you over lunch while you're increasing your addiction."

...

After the morning meeting Agent Darren returned to the old hotel. Bill stayed at Marble House in the communication center. Just before lunch he was in Laura's office with several reports. A talk wireless station in Sovana had received a letter saying that the destruction of the small Temple of Athena was just the first of many to come. The sender threatened to destroy all the worship centers of the false gods. It was signed with a crudely drawn right hand clenched in a fist. The implication was clear. The RHG was claiming responsibility for the bombing.

No such missive was forthcoming about the suicide bombing in the bunker prison but Bill had information just the same.

He sat wearily in one of the leather chairs in the small sitting area off Laura's office. Laura sat in another. He looked at her and she saw a sadness bordering on grief in his eyes.

"You have some very bad news for me, don't you?" She asked gently.

"It was one of our own who killed the Cylons. We're still waiting on positive ID, but we've got every reason to believe he was a classmate of Lee's, a young Viper pilot who lost his fiancé on the night of the fighting."

"Oh, dear gods. I'm so sorry, Bill."

"Search and rescue reached the prison level. The news is what we thought. No survivors. The bomb squad will go in next and verify that there's no unexploded ordnances. Then the haz mat team will go in and start bringing up what's left of…the ones who were down there."

Laura picked up the phone on the table beside her and punched in four numbers. "Billy, schedule a press conference for two o'clock this afternoon." She hung up and looked at Bill. "How did a Viper pilot get through some of the toughest security in the city?"

"You can bet Darren's men will be asking that same question. We'll get the answer. A young Marine tried to stop the bomber. He gave his life in the attempt."

"He'll get a hero's funeral. I'll attend as I'm sure you and a great many others will."

Bill nodded. "You know most of Caprica will rejoice at the news that Cavil and the others are dead."

"I know."

"You'd do well not to openly mourn them."

"I know, Bill. You don't need to remind me. Our young Marine will get a hero's funeral. What do you suggest we do with the Cylons' remains? Throw them out with the garbage?"

"A quiet burial in anonymous graves. To do otherwise will invite desecration."

"Or perhaps shrines for those monotheists who will make martyrs of them. They'll turn this into a religious issue when religion had nothing to do with it."

Bill looked disgusted. "That, too. We don't need anything else stirring up the fanatics right now. It sounds like the Sovana bunch is already worked up."

"I don't mourn them except D'Anna Biers. I'll never forget how she helped us when we were trying to get supplies to the refugee camps."

"It was a ploy, Laura. A ploy to win our trust and get on the inside of the government. It worked. She accompanied you on your Presidential campaign."

"She was a good reporter. She was always fair. Always. I actually liked her."

Bill finally said. "Yes, I'll agree. She was fair. A lot better than some of the jackals in the press now."

Laura stared across the room at the sunshine outside the window. "I used to tease John and tell him that D'Anna had a crush on him. He'd tell me that a snowball had a better chance in Hades. And now…" she took a deep breath. "Now he's been given to a Three on Nereid to serve as her breeder. Would you consider that karmic justice?"

"No. I'd call it a coincidence."

"We've got to rescue him."

"We'll do our best, Laura. As soon as Major Parker finishes debriefing Kara and Hunter, I'll start putting together a preliminary plan."

"Do you think we can do it without killing a great many humans on the planet?"

"I can't say one way or the other yet, not until I get the rest of Hunter's input. What I will say is that we've got to make sure the Cylons can't come back to Caprica for another go at humanity. You've read the reports from the _Penelope_. You know the fate of the rest of the Colonies. Except for those humans on Nereid and a few settlements on Tauraon, we're all that's left of the human race in the universe."

"All of the Cylons can't want to destroy humanity or they wouldn't be…co-habiting with them on Nereid."

Bill sounded disgusted. "I'd hardly call what they're doing co-habiting. It sounds more like Cylon masters and humans slaves to me. They're getting back for what they feel was our enslavement of them here in the Colonies."

"Yes, but if we go to Nereid and kill all of them, we'll be no better than they are."

"What do you want to do, then?" He asked angrily. "Invite them to Marble House for tea?"

"There must be some middle ground. They're a new race, a race we're responsible for creating I might add."

"These are the people who imprisoned and tortured your husband and you want to make nice with them? Have you lost your mind?"

"I just know that one of them brought John to Hunter's valley and let him rescue Kara."

"You know why, don't you? They broke him. He's given them something in return that made it worth their while to let Kara go."

"No. I'll never believe that."

"We've been down this road before. Would you rather believe John is earning his way on his back…and enjoying it?"

She gasped. "Oh, Bill, please."

"You can't have it both ways, Laura. You should prepare yourself for one of those scenarios, probably both of them."

She took a deep breath. "I've already considered the possibility…the probability that John is being forced to sleep with more than one of them based on what Hunter said."

Bill stood. "I'm going back to the office and wait for further word on the investigation. I'll keep you informed immediately of anything new. We'll do everything in our power to get him back, Laura, but you need to realize we won't be bringing home the same man who left here over five months ago."

She also stood. "I know that, Bill, but I still want my husband brought home. He deserves to come home."

"I agree," Bill said. "We'll get him out."

After he left she went upstairs. Maya and Brae were already eating lunch.

Maya looked up. "Bad news?"

"Bad and good. The good news is that I don't think we're in any danger. The attack here in the city seems directed only at the Cylons."

Maya poured Laura a cup of tea. "And the bad?"

Laura sighed. "Where do I begin?"

...

Getting through the security in Laura and her father's apartment building took longer than Kara thought it would because she didn't have her key. Fortunately the doorman who had taken Doug's place recognized her as did one of the Marine's permanently assigned to duty on the front desk.

"Is Jennet here today?" Kara asked.

He checked the log. "Yes."

"Could you let her know Kara and a friend of hers are on the way up?"

The doorman picked up a phone. The elevator was key-operated so he had to use his master key in order to press the button for the eighth floor. Jennet was waiting for them in the apartment doorway. Kara was welcomed with tears and a smile from Laura's long-time housekeeper.

"You're home," Jennet said.

"And glad to be," Kara smiled. "This is Hunter, a friend of mine."

"Another pilot?"

"No, he's…a soldier. He keeps his feet on the ground, mostly."

Hunter smiled. "Kara's going to take me for a motorcycle ride."

"I came by to pick up the key and the helmets. I need my leather jacket, too."

Jennet looked at Hunter. "Her father, the gods rest him, didn't like her riding that motorcycle."

"He bought it for me," Kara said.

"He still worried. I heard him tell Miss Laura time and again how you were too much like him. You liked to go fast."

Kara grinned. "I do like speed. I'm going to show Hunter around the apartment before we go."

Jennet looked at Hunter. "You make her ride slow and careful."

Jennet went back toward the kitchen and Kara took Hunter into the den. "Our favorite room," she said. "The terrace is out there."

Hunter stood in the room and looked around. "All this for just one family?"

"Before Laura married my dad, she was living here by herself. I know. It seems like a lot for one person, even one family."

"It's just different from anything I've ever seen. It's like the pictures of where Olliver was raised in _The Caprican Prince_."

"It's not _that_ big."

"But it's filled with all these nice things like those paintings and the books."

They walked down the hall and Kara showed him the bedrooms and the nursery. They went into her bedroom and she got some more cubits and her motorcycle key out of a drawer. She tucked them into a pocket along with her driver's license. She got her black leather jacket from the closet and both helmets. Five minutes later they had ridden the elevator down to the parking garage. Kara put on the leather jacket and zipped it up. She took the gloves out of the pocket.

"What?" She asked.

Hunter smiled. "I like that jacket on you."

She rolled her eyes. "What is it about guys and black leather?"

"The jacket looks good on you. That's all. If Maya had put it on, I'd have told her the same thing."

She shrugged. "Okay. I'll take it as a compliment."

She gave him a quick tutorial about what to expect as a passenger, about what to do and what not to do. She hadn't ridden the motorcycle in more than a month so it took several tries but she eventually got it started. They put on their helmets and Hunter got on behind her. He put his arms around her waist and they were off. Kara took it easy at first, braking and accelerating slowly, especially since they were in the city.

At a red light, she raised the visor. "You doing okay?"

"I'm doing fine."

"You like it?"

"I'd like to have one of these."

"I'll bet you would. You could ride it in the Cylon city after we kick them out. Okay, I'm getting ready to get on the I-6. We're going to go a lot faster. You think you can handle it?"

"Let's do it."

She lowered the visor. The light turned green. She took the entrance ramp for the freeway, accelerating steadily until her speed matched that of the traffic flowing in the six lanes. Hunter's arms tightened around her waist as she leaned forward slightly. She stuck to the speed limit since she didn't want a ticket. Seven miles outside the city limits she took the exit for the Academy. Another three miles brought them to the main gate. She stopped before she got to it and pulled over onto the shoulder of the road.

"Want to go on campus?" She asked. "I can try to get somebody to okay it, but since I don't have my military ID, there's no way those MPs will let me through the gate without an okay from somebody on the faculty or in admin. I've only been back once since graduation."

"I'd like to see where you went to school."

Slowly Kara rode up to the gate. One of the MPs stepped forward and held up his hand. She stopped and raised the visor.

"Any chance you could call Colonel Burgher and see if I could get a pass to go see him?"

"We're on lockdown right now. No one in or out."

"I went to school here last year. I'd really like to see Colonel Burgher."

The MP shook his head. "No can do."

"My dad taught here. He and the colonel are good friends. Would you please call Colonel Burgher and tell him that Kara Thrace is here to see him? _Lieutenant_ Kara Thrace. If he says _no_, we'll leave."

The MP went back into the sentry gatehouse and picked up the phone. Finally he came back with a handheld metal detector.

"I had to clear it with Colonel Winters' office. Please dismount and show me some ID."

She and Hunter got off the bike and she took her driver's license out of her pocket. He checked them carefully with the metal detector while the other MP looked over the bike. She had to raise the seat to show him that the compartment underneath was empty. They were finally given visitor passes to clip to their jackets.

"These are good for today only," the MP said.

"Thanks," Kara answered.

He raised the gate and waved them through.

Kara parked in the visitor lot which was empty. They walked past the admin building and out onto the quad. They had arrived at class-changing time and cadets clad in the familiar blue uniforms were everywhere. Kara stopped walking. For a moment she was almost overwhelmed with memories. There were a lot of good ones and some that were not so good.

Hunter stood quietly beside her. At the far end of the quad was a memorial to all Academy graduates and faculty or staff who had died in the service of the Colonies. She knew some names had been added since the fighting a little over five months ago, some of her classmates. Her father's name would be on it, too. She decided not to walk down there and look.

"What do you think?" She finally asked Hunter.

"Impressive. Of course everything I've seen is impressive. You know where I grew up. I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to go to school at a place like this, to have access to all the books and the teachers."

"All kids deserve the chance to learn. I'll bet Laura will want to establish schools on Nereid after we win the planet. She got them started in the refugee camps for the little kids." She smiled. "Of course I wasn't so enthusiastic about school then. I feel a lot different now. What Laura did was a great thing. The way she's always thinking about Caprica's kids...I think it's one of the reasons my dad loves her so much."

They waited until the area had begun to clear of students and then walked across campus to the Math and Sciences building. Inside they climbed the two flights of stairs and walked down to the end of the hall. Colonel Burgher was in his office with the door open. He stood and smiled when he saw Kara. He held out his hand and she shook it.

"Lieutenant Thrace. How are you?"

"Fine, sir."

"Please, come in and have a seat."

Kara and Hunter stepped inside the door. Kara made the introductions and Burgher also shook Hunter's hand. He didn't ask any questions, but Kara had the feeling that he knew Hunter wasn't from Caprica. Word of Nereid's existence was common knowledge at the highest levels which meant Colonel Winters would know about it and probably also about hers and Lee's missions to it. She knew Winters kept Colonel Burgher informed about anything that happened to her since Burgher and her father had been good friends.

"Tight security today," she said. "The thing at the hotel?"

Burgher nodded. "Especially since we found out the bomber used to be on Colonel Winters' staff."

Kara was shocked but managed not to show it. He must think she already knew. "How is Colonel Winters?"

"He was doing fine until today. He's sick…just sick about it. He thought the world of Lieutenant Clellan. I still don't think he believes it."

Again Kara managed not to show her shock. Was he saying that the bomber had been Tucker Clellan? She didn't want to press Colonel Burgher for details. He probably didn't know anyway.

"How are classes this semester?" She asked. "Have we got any promising Viper pilots coming along?"

Colonel Burgher finally smiled. "A few. Nothing like the caliber of your class. Yours will always hold the record for no washouts from Flight School. I heard you'd been on a mission. Lee, too."

"Yes, sir. Not the same mission. Lee went with the _Penelope_ to the other planets."

"Has his independent inquiry convened yet?"

"Not yet. I think it starts next week. Did you hear he made captain?"

"I did. Offer him my congratulations. I had a feeling he'd do well. I don't think he and Lieutenants Shaw and Saunders have anything to worry about." Burgher looked at Hunter. "Will you be staying with us long?"

"As long as it takes."

Burgher rubbed his chin. "What do you think about Caprica so far?"

Hunter smiled. "I'm impressed with everything."

"We've taken enough of your time, sir," Kara said. "I thought I might go visit Mr. Connelly and then we should probably be going. Thank you for getting us through the gate."

A frown creased Burgher's brow. "Hugh's taking a few days off."

"Is he sick?" Kara asked.

"Not Hugh. It's Stacey."

"He told me a couple of months ago that they'd just found out she was pregnant. I haven't seen him or talked to him since."

"Stacey lost the baby about six weeks ago. She doesn't seem to be recovering so she's having a battery of tests done at the medical center. Hugh is with her."

"I hate to hear that," Kara said. "When you see him, tell him I hope she's okay. I'll catch up with him some other time."

"I know you met Hugh in a refugee camp. He told me how much you went through and how well you handled things."

"Everybody who survived the camp handled things well. Connelly did, too."

"Your dad told me the whole story one time starting with how he'd brought you off Picon." Burgher took a deep breath. "Your dad was a brave man."

Kara knew how much Colonel Burgher liked her father. Connelly had told her that Burgher looked at John almost like a son. Kara's eyes met the colonel's and held them.

"He still is a brave man, sir."

She didn't say anything else. She couldn't without betraying the mission. But when they rescued her father and brought him back to Caprica, everybody would know.

Burgher nodded once, very slowly. Hopefully he understood and didn't think she was crazy.

Hunter smiled. "I'll have to agree with Kara. Her father _is_ a brave man."

Kara stood and Hunter followed suit. Burgher remained seated and Kara wondered if she had made a big mistake. Then Colonel Burgher smiled.

"Thank you," was all he said, and Kara knew everything was all right.

She had given him a small gift that had brightened his day, a favor returned for the favor he had done for her when he'd talked to John about letting her attend the Academy a year early.

Outside in the sunshine Hunter said, "Where to now?"

She grinned. "I noticed the visitor parking lot is empty. Want to learn to ride the bike?"

He didn't have to answer. His smile said it all.

As they walked through the sunshine of the beautiful spring afternoon, Kara knew she should enjoy this day. Tomorrow might be just as beautiful, but they would not be enjoying it like this. She would be finishing her debriefing and then Hunter would get another turn. And not too many months would pass before they would be going to war on another world. Hunter was right. Some of them would die in the fight just like she'd lost friends and classmates during the fighting five months earlier. She glanced toward the memorial. Twice now she'd escaped having her name carved on a wall. She had to believe Yolanda Brenn's words. She was destined to help save another world and she was destined to protect her brother, the child who would one day map the stars on the way to Earth.

She turned away from the memorial as she thought of the afternoon that Jack Fisk had taken her to a parking lot in the city and taught her to ride a motorcycle. Today she would teach someone else who was just as enthusiastic to learn and who she knew would be just as good a rider.

Hunter was already many steps ahead of her. He looked back. "Come on, slow poke. What are you waiting on?"

The dark moment passed. She caught up to him and laughed. "If you wreck my bike, you won't have to worry about dying on Nereid. I'll kill you myself right here on Caprica."

TBC…


	30. Destiny's Child

Chapter 30

Destiny's Child

_1. Three hundred days did the galleons of the Thirteenth Tribe wander the heavens in search of a new home._

_2. The people began to grumble among themselves that Xander had taken them away from their home on Kobol to perish in the dark of night without a sun._

_3. Ulixes spoke to his people and said to them, Behold the son of your prophet follows the vision of the Lord._

_4. He has opened my eyes to His glory and I believe where once I did not._

_5. You were persecuted for your belief among the Twelve Tribes and now you are free._

_6. The people listened to the general and their faith was renewed._

_7. On the eve of that day Xander looked at the stars and saw their new home._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Xander, _Chapter 1:1-7

.

Lee finally had a moment late in the afternoon to check his mobile phone voicemail. He listened to Kara's message and stood outside Parker's office waiting for the major to get off the phone.

When he hung up, Parker glanced up and beckoned him inside.

"Kara left me a message this morning at 09:42, sir. Agent Malcolm was called away and no one showed up. She said that she and Hunter were going out for the day. She's going to show him around the city, but they'll be back in time for dinner."

Parker looked irked. "Agent Malcolm shouldn't have left them alone. Let me talk to Darren and see if I can find out what happened. I'll let you know."

Lee walked three doors down the hall to his office which was half the size of Parker's but was more than ample for his needs. He glanced at the name holder beside the door. _Capt L Adama._

Lee was still making the transition in his mind. He still thought of himself as Lieutenant Lee Adama, Academy graduate and Viper pilot even though he had flown his Viper only once since he'd been back on Caprica. He didn't think he would be able to fly again until he and Parker finished Kara's and Hunter's debriefings.

His phone buzzed and he picked it up.

"This morning was apparently a good example of how a crisis can screw up even the simplest of plans," Parker said. "When Darren's team mobilized, all agents were called in. Malcolm did what he was ordered to do. Since Kara and Hunter are classified as confidential informants for the military, at that point they became our responsibility. But communication broke down somewhere and we were never informed so they were left alone."

"So no one's really to blame."

"Someone's to blame for not notifying us, but I'm not going to push it. No harm was caused by it and we all have other priorities at the moment. Darren has agents at Tucker Clellan's apartment right now going over it with a fine tooth comb. They're also questioning everybody who was at the bunker this morning. They've already determined that one of the Marines, a Corporal Lucas Venner, who was supposed to go on duty is missing. They've checked his apartment and he's not there. One of Darren's agents tracked down the roommate. He was on a date, got home about 02:00. He said Venner didn't come home last night which is unusual. I hope we don't have to add him to the casualty list."

"Have they got the bodies out yet?"

"Still working on it. The elevator was damaged in the blast so it can't be used. Everything has to be carried up thirty flights of stairs. After President Roslin's press conference this afternoon when she announced that the Cylon prisoners had been killed, thousands of people started gathering near the hotel. The police are having a hard time holding everybody back. There must be a dozen news helicopters circling overhead. It'll be a miracle if they manage not to knock each other out of the sky. Damned vultures."

Lee had rarely heard Parker express himself like that. He usually maintained his cool. He was the calm center when everything around him was chaotic, but something about this incident had gotten to him. Lee didn't know if it was Tucker being one of them or his memories of the early days of the occupation. Probably it was both.

Parker seemed to realize he'd let his emotions get away with him. He continued in a calmer tone of voice. "Darren said there was a tunnel that ran from the hotel basement to the basement of a small book publisher across the street. The book publisher has always been a front for a clandestine government agency. After dark they're going to take the bodies through the tunnel to a couple of unmarked vans that will be waiting behind the other building. They'll go to the military medical examiner. The President authorized everything before her press conference."

"I thought she did a great job handling it," Lee said.

"I haven't seen it yet," Parker said. "I was on a call with Darren and your father while it was going on."

"It's already on the web," Lee said. "Would you like for me to come to your office and bring it up for you?"

"That'd be nice. Thank you. I'd like to hear what she said."

Lee walked down the hall. Parker stood. Lee sat and found the news site on the computer. Then he let Parker sit back down. Together they watched the screen.

The room at Marble House where the President always held press conferences was crammed to overflowing with reporters. The television lights were very bright. Laura had chosen a navy blue suit and cream-colored blouse for the occasion. She looked tired but calm and in control as she stepped up to a small podium and began to speak.

"_I have two announcements to make so please allow me to make them and then I will take a few questions. This morning at approximately five a.m. Sovana time, a small Temple of Athena was partially destroyed by a bomb. Fortunately there were no casualties; however there was a great deal of damage to the temple and nearly total destruction of the religious artifacts inside. A group that calls itself the Right Hand of God has claimed responsibility via a letter delivered to a talk wireless station in Sovana. Experts are working to authenticate it, but at the current time we have no reason not to believe it." _

The room erupted in noise as reporters began calling out questions. Laura calmly held up her hand and waited until the noise abated.

"_This morning at approximately 6:30 a bomb was detonated in a secure prison here in Caprica City resulting in the loss of life of both the bomber and of the Cylon prisoners. We are…"_

The last part of her sentence was drowned out by another barrage of shouted questions.

"How does she put up with it?" Parker asked.

"She's been dealing with the press for years," Lee answered. "But this is the worst I've ever seen them."

"The jackals have smelled blood," Parker said. "The feeding frenzy is beginning. What is it they say, _If it bleeds, it leads_."

Again Laura stood silently until the noise died down before she continued.

"_We are in the process of investigating each of these incidents and I can assure you that we will devote our best resources to finding the answers we all seek. Now I will take a few questions._ _Mr. McManus, you may go first." _

She pointed to the reporter that Lee knew she disliked the most, a man who had gone after her time and again with his pointed and personally invasive questions.

Today, though, James McManus stuck to the subject of the press conference. _"Are the two bombings related?"_

"_That's still under investigation. We have no reason to suspect so at the moment, but that possibility is being considered."_

"_Has anyone claimed credit for the bombing here in the city."_

"_As of this time no one has claimed credit. Ms. Palacios, next question."_

"_How was someone able to get through security and get to the Cylons?"_

"_At the moment I can't answer that question. It's one of the things that will be thoroughly investigated."_

Sekou Hamilton from one of the talk wireless stations got her attention next. _"Is it true you were getting ready to put the Cylons on trial?"_

"_Yes. Attorney General Romo Lampkin was in the process of preparing our case."_

"_We all know that the Cylons had a lot of human collaborators here on Caprica. Do you think the bombing was to shut them up and keep them from naming names in open court?"_

"_At the moment we can't rule out anything."_

Laura pointed to someone near the front of the room who asked. "_Is it true that one of them survived?"_

Laura must have anticipated the question. There wasn't even a flicker of hesitancy as she said, _"All the Cylons who were in the cells when the bomb went off were killed. A young Marine was also killed attempting to stop the bomber. Another young Marine who was with him survived and was taken to the hospital with serious injuries, so yes, there was a survivor, but it was not one of the Cylons in the prison cells."_

Someone shouted._ "What are you going to do with the bodies?"_

"_The young Marine will be given a funeral with full military honors. The Cylons will be given a proper burial although we have not yet decided where. Now that's all the questions I'm going to take. We will keep you informed of any developments as they occur."_

Laura turned to leave although reporters were still shouting questions. The recording switched to a newscaster at the television station who began recapping the announcement and questions and answers.

Parker closed the web page and sat shaking his head. "There're not enough cubits on Caprica to make me take that job."

"I thought Laura deflected the question about a survivor very well."

"Yes, she did. She gave them just enough to make them think the rumor was about Corporal Guiterrez. The doctors have cleared Natasi to be released from the hospital. Darren is putting her in the same building with Kara and Hunter. They have another safe apartment there. She'll be taken out of the hospital tonight after dark to minimize the chance that she'll be seen."

"What about Kara and Hunter tonight? Is anyone on Darren's team going to be with them?"

Parker took a deep breath. "No. Darren's got all his investigators out asking questions. They're our responsibility now."

"I'll stay with them."

Parker smiled. "I appreciate your dedication, Lee. I'm sure Kara and Hunter will be fine with you filling in tonight. In fact if you'd like, you can go over there now. They may be back already. It's nearly dinnertime."

"Do you think we'll get dinner delivery tonight or are we on our own?"

"If dinner hasn't been delivered by 18:00, then I'd say you're on your own." Parker took his key ring from his pocket and removed a key that he handed to Lee. "Take care of it. It's my only copy."

"Yes, sir. I will."

Parker also took a credit card from his billfold. "Government issue for expenses. If dinner isn't delivered tonight, use this to buy it for the three of you. I'll authorize the charge when it comes through."

"Thank you. I'm going by my apartment to grab a change of clothes and then I'll go straight over. Will you be there tomorrow or should I report here in the morning?"

"I'll call you later after I talk to your father. He'll probably want me to continue Kara and Hunter's debriefings since he's waiting on the data, especially from Hunter. He's anxious to start working on the plan for freeing Nereid of Cylon control. The President is understandably anxious for us to get to Nereid."

"Yes, sir. And thank you, sir."

Parker smiled. "I hope Kara and Hunter had a good time today. Don't be too rough on her for her jailbreak. Or Hunter either. I didn't get the impression that he was the indoor type."

_…_

Despite never having seen anything mechanical like Kara's motorcycle, much less ridden on one, in twenty minutes Hunter had mastered the basics of the clutch, throttle, brakes and changing the gears. He had the balance and coordination of a born athlete. With only a little experience he would easily be as good a rider as she was.

He wanted to ride back into Caprica City from the Academy with her as a passenger, but she explained to him that even if he'd had the experience of riding on the I-6, he didn't have a driver's license and they couldn't risk it. She should have anticipated his next remark.

"How do I get a driver's license?"

"You get a copy of your birth certificate from Central Registry and take it to one of the driver's license bureaus. Then you have to take a written test and the first time you have to take a road test. If you pass both, you get a license."

"So what you're saying is I'll never be able to get a driver's license since I can't give them a birth certificate."

"I don't know. We could try. There were some settlements on a couple of the Colonies who didn't comply with government regulations and register births with Central Registry. Gemenon had a lot of religious cults besides the monotheists. Some of them were separatists. When I was at the Academy, we talked about them one day in Connelly's history class. They didn't believe they owed any allegiance to the government. They lived in communes and didn't register their marriages or deaths or the births of their children. They didn't pay taxes. They lived as much off the grid as they could."

"What does that have to do with me getting a driver's license?"

"I was thinking out loud. Maybe we could tell them at Central Registry that you were born on Gemenon and that your parents hadn't registered your birth. Then maybe you could get a birth certificate. Of course you'd be considered Gemenese."

"I don't care. Whatever it takes. I know where I'm from. So do you."

She smiled. "Okay. If we're free tomorrow, we'll give it a shot."

"You really think they'll let us do this again?"

"I doubt we'll get another day like this." She smiled. "Sometimes the gods just give you a gift. Now, I think we'd better start back. The closer it is to five o'clock, the heavier traffic will be. I'm going to take the bike to the safe house. I noticed a space for motorcycle parking on the first level. That'll save us an hour."

Just before they got on the bike, Hunter briefly touched her arm. "Thank you for today."

She grinned. "Hey, I enjoyed it, too. It was just payback. You showed me your valley. I just hate you didn't get to meet Connelly. You're about the same age as him. I know he'd like to meet you. In fact you two look a little bit alike."

He shrugged. "Maybe it'll happen before I leave. I've already figured out that I'm going to be here for a while."

Kara straddled the bike and Hunter got on behind her. By the time they reached the off-ramp to get them back to the safe house, the sun was setting. They stopped once at a little corner store where Kara bought a six-pack of beer hoping only that whoever was assigned to them that night wouldn't take it away from her. She said a silent prayer that it wouldn't be Agent Malcolm.

They reached the building. She turned into the underground garage and pulled the motorcycle into one of the small spaces allotted for them.

"Will somebody be waiting for us or not?" Hunter asked as the elevator door opened.

"Mmmm. It's got to be after six so I'll say yes."

At the door she knocked several times, pressed the buzzer and waited. After a few minutes she knocked again.

"I don't think anybody's home."

"What now?"

Kara sat down in the hall, put her helmet beside her and leaned back against the door. "We wait. If nobody shows up in half an hour, we'll walk down to the Lamplighter and I'll try to get in touch with Lee again."

Hunter sat down beside her and took a beer from the six-pack. Kara smiled. He handed the first one to her and opened another one for himself. Kara turned it up and drank.

"Are we in trouble?" Hunter asked.

"That's a tougher question. It probably depends on who shows up tonight."

"Who do you think it'll be?"

She laughed. "I don't know, Hunter. This isn't like the valley where everybody knows everybody else."

"I never heard you mention other boyfriends. Was Lee your first?"

"Not exactly. I just didn't sleep with the first one."

"So Lee's the only guy you've ever been with that way?"

"Yeah. You?"

"Before Juliana there was one other woman. I never had much time for that sort of thing. I spent most of my time in the forest with the men. She wanted a farmer. That wasn't me so she found somebody else. She's married and got a couple of kids now."

Once again Kara was struck by how tough Hunter's life had been. "You promised you'd tell me your _Caprican Prince_ story."

Hunter took another long swallow of the beer, leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.

"You remember the sorceress Surcie?"

"Of course. After the sorcerer taught Olliver the spell to tame the Gryphon of Gyron, she gave him three gifts…a scabbard for the adamantine sword of Perseus, a map to the cave of the Cyclops, and a one-time potion to cure a wound no matter how bad. Olliver used all three of her gifts. The potion saved his life after he was wounded by the Cyclops."

With his eyes still closed Hunter smiled. "You've got a good memory."

"Those books were a big part of my life."

"Instead of the princess, I wanted to meet the sorceress."

They sat silently sipping the beer until Kara said, "That's not all of your story, is it?"

Hunter took a deep breath. "You'll think I'm crazy."

"Cross my heart. Tell me the rest."

"After the wildcat clawed me, my back got infected. Emmalyn did the best she could with her herbs and other concoctions, but the third night after Targa and Beck got me back to the valley, I was delirious with fever. Emmalyn fell asleep sitting in the chair beside my bed. I felt like I was on fire so I decided to go down to the stream and cool off. The stream was high with melt water from the snow. If I'd jumped in like I started to do, I'd have been swept away and drowned. Surcie stopped me. She stood on the bank of the stream in front of me. She was shimmering in a white light and a hooded cloak, just like the illustration in the book. She stopped me from jumping into the water. Then she put her hand on my back and the pain and the heat went away. When I woke up, I was in bed and my fever was down. I wasn't delirious anymore. Emmalyn swore I'd never left the bed, but she couldn't explain how my feet got muddy. I still think Surcie used her healing potion on me."

Kara smiled. "Stanger things have happened."

He turned up the beer and drank. "I told you my story was crazier than yours. At least you found a real person." He smiled. "Sorceresses are in short supply these days."

She shrugged. "The important thing is that you believed she'd cured you. You got well."

He smiled again. "I guess everybody needs at least one good unattainable dream."

The elevator doors opened and Lee got off carrying a small zip-up bag. He was wearing jeans and a blue, button-up shirt and was also carrying his uniform on a hangar. He started down the hall and Kara scrambled to her feet.

"We've been waiting. Nobody's here."

Lee glanced at the beer as he unlocked the door. "I see you started the party without me. Did you have a nice day?"

"We had a great day."

"How much trouble are we in?" Hunter asked.

"Parker isn't going to do anything to either of you. Somebody on Darren's team screwed up and didn't notify us you were left alone."

Kara took the six-pack from Hunter and carried it into the kitchen. She got one for Lee before she put it into the refrigerator and returned to the living room.

Lee dropped his bag on the floor beside the couch and accepted the beer from her. Hunter had walked back toward his bedroom. Lee popped the top and drank.

"I don't need to ask how your day went," Kara said.

Lee took a deep breath. "No." He gestured toward the helmets that Kara and Hunter had put on one of the armchairs. "You took the bike out?"

"After lunch. Before lunch we rode the subway to the women's shelter where Sharon is staying. She's really got a bump now." Kara used her hands and indicated a big belly. "She looks like she could go any day. I felt Hera kick. That was cool."

"How did Hunter react to Sharon?"

"He was okay with meeting her. We didn't stay long. Then we ate lunch at Channing's and went by the old apartment so I could get the bike key. Then we rode out to the Academy so I could show Hunter where we went to school."

"What did he think?"

"He was impressed."

Lee turned up the beer. "It doesn't take much to impress him, does it?"

"One day we'll go to Nereid and you'll see the valley where he grew up. I think you'll understand him better."

"What'd you do after that?"

"The Academy was on lockdown. The visitor parking lot was empty so I showed Hunter how to ride the motorcycle. It took him about fifteen minutes to get the hang of it. Then we came back to the city. We've been waiting for someone to get here ever since."

Lee leaned back and closed his eyes. Kara could tell he was tired.

They sat for a minute without speaking. Finally she said, "I'm sorry about Tucker."

Lee looked at her. It took a moment for what she had just said to register. "What about Tucker?"

"Wasn't Tucker Clellan the suicide bomber?"

"How the hell did you find that out?"

"Colonel Burgher. He must have thought I knew. Colonel Winters had already been told so he told Burgher."

"Damn. We're sitting on that information right now until everything is confirmed with DNA."

Kara turned up her beer and finished it. "Well that's too bad since the first thing I did when Colonel Burgher told me was ask to borrow his phone so I could call Laura's favorite reporter James McManus."

"That's not funny, Kara."

"Neither is you acting like I'm going to run out and tell somebody. All I said was _I'm sorry about Tucker_. I know you two were friends at the Academy. I saw you eating lunch together a lot last year when you were out there for War College. I know you graduated in the same class and were in Flight School together. I wish it had been somebody else, somebody neither of us knew."

The pain washed over Lee again. "I just don't understand why he did it."

"I do. He was in love with Nora and a Cylon Raider blew her out of the sky. On top of hating them for what they did to the rest of the Colonies and his parents, they killed the woman he was going to marry and raise a family with. What's so hard to understand, Lee?"

"I talked to him at the airbase five or six weeks ago. I asked him how he was doing. He said he was doing fine."

"I guess he should have said, '_My life sucks without Nora so I'm plotting to blow up the Cylon prisoners. Know where I can pick up a little G-4 and a couple of detonators?'_ Then it wouldn't have come as such a surprise."

Lee sat in brooding silence. For all her sarcasm Kara was right.

"If I'd died up there that night," she said very softly, "would you have gone around crying to everybody who asked how you were doing or would you have kept it all bottled up inside like you do everything else?"

"I wouldn't have started planning a way to kill the Cylon prisoners."

"You and Tucker are different people. Besides, you didn't spend a couple of days trapped under concrete in the basement of a school like he did after the Cylons bombed Antioch."

"How do you know that?" Lee asked in amazement.

"Tucker told Shelley and she told Sharon and Sharon told me. Shelley and Tucker were like me and Karl. They grew up together."

Lee shrugged. "I didn't know they were that tight."

"I thought they had a thing and were just being cool about it until I realized that Tucker was engaged to Nora. Then Shelley told Sharon that she and Tucker had grown up in the same neighborhood in Antioch before Shelley's parents moved here to Caprica City when she was in the eighth grade."

"How did Sharon and Shelley get to be such good friends?"

"I wouldn't call them _good friends_. Shelley was trying to keep tabs on me through Sharon." Kara took a deep breath. "I guess they're all dead…the Cylons in the bunker."

"All except Natasi. She wasn't in a cell. Laura had her moved to a suite a couple of floors up after she cooperated and told Romo Lampkin what she knows. Major Parker and I talked to her at the hospital. She didn't know anything about this morning. She was still asleep when it happened."

"I never liked her. She's frakking that sleaze-bag Balter. They deserve each other."

"I didn't know you were acquainted with her."

"I met her once. Bitch. She thought I'd want to have one of their half-breed kids. She made a snide remark to Laura, too, about my dad knocking her up."

He smiled. "I remember now. You slugged her and almost broke your fist."

"It wasn't funny, Lee."

"I didn't say it was."

"Talk about collaborators. Baltar was kissing her ass, among other things, from day one, falling all over himself trying to make half-breed babies in that lab of his. The best thing the resistance ever did was blow it up. It's too bad him and Natasi weren't in it when they did it. Now my dad will probably go to jail for collaborating when he was _forced_ to…to frak a Three. Baltar did it because he _wanted_ to. He collaborated openly with them and he's still walking around a free man. He'll probably get some kind of frakking medal because he went on the _Penelope_ mission when he's the one who helped the Cylons engineer a virus that keeps human women from getting pregnant, for the gods sakes. Maya and thousands of other women will never have children because of him. Why wasn't _he_ put on trial for treason?"

"There's no way we can prove he helped them create the virus. I think the Cylons brought it with them when they came here. I think it was developed on Nereid."

"Then how are human women there having babies? Mr. Fox told Hunter that some of the humans have half-breeds."

"I don't know, Kara. We'll ask them when we get there."

Kara sat stewing. All the good feelings from her day were gone.

"So that rat Baltar goes free while my dad will probably go to jail. He was willing to give his life for everybody on Caprica when he went back to that basestar to blow it up."

"Why do you think John will go to jail? Nobody has said anything about him going to jail."

"But you think he's collaborating with them, don't you?"

"Kara, I don't know what to think. None of us do. The fact that he was flying a Heavy Raider is inconsistent with him being a prisoner. He'll have a chance to tell his side of it. Until then quit worrying about it."

"I'm hungry," she suddenly said. "Let's get Hunter and go get something to eat."

Lee felt his phone vibrate and took it out. He'd gotten a text message.

_call me when u get a chance _

"Kendra," he said. "She wants me to call her."

"So do it. I'll go back and hang out with Hunter so you can talk in private."

Lee stood. "I'll call her later and you can listen. She either wants to ask me something about today or she's got news for me."

"You and her are really tight, aren't you?"

He was almost too emotionally drained to respond. The last thing he wanted was to get into it with Kara over his friendship with Kendra.

"Don't make something out of it that it's not," he finally managed.

Kara smiled. "I guess I could say the same thing about me and Hunter."

_…_

Long after her son had fallen asleep on her lap, Laura continued to rock him. She said a silent prayer of thanks that the day had not ended badly for any of them. There was a part of her that abhorred violence and useless death of any kind and that regretted what had happened to the Cylons, but she couldn't bring herself to mourn them. Bill had been wrong about that. She was not going to mourn any of them, either openly or privately. She had been looking forward to putting them on trial and hearing them try to mount a defense. She had been looking forward to Romo Lampkin proving his case and a tribunal finding them guilty and sentencing them to life in prison or a firing squad for engineering the holocaust that had taken billions of human lives.

All her sympathies lay with the family and friends of the young Marine who had given his life trying to do his duty. And with the suicide bomber. She tried to imagine the sense of pain and loss that had pushed him to commit such a desperate and final act.

She was especially sorry about D'Anna Biers, but that sense of loss was tempered by the knowledge of what John was being forced to do with one of them on Nereid. Bill had mistaken what was simply her reluctance to exterminate a new race on another planet, a race they had ultimately been responsible for creating, to mean that she cared about the Cylons in general. Other than Sharon and Leoben, they owed the Cylons nothing.

Laura leaned down and kissed Brae's soft brown hair. There was nothing in the world quite as good as the smell of her beautiful son after his bath. Holding him and feeling his warm little body against hers put back much of what the day had taken from her. The innocent sleep of her child was like a balm that spread inward to her soul.

"We'll bring your dada home," Laura said softly to the top of her son's head. "No matter what they did to him, he'll want to hold you more than anything in the world. He's going to be surprised at how much you've grown and how much better you're talking."

Maya walked quietly to the door of Braedon's bedroom. Laura glanced up as Maya walked over to her, leaned down and whispered. "Admiral Adama is here. Do you want me to take Brae?"

Laura shook her head. Carefully she got up and put the sleeping child in his crib. She pulled the soft blanket up to his waist. The pacifier moved in his mouth and then slowly stopped as he settled. She lingered for a moment and smoothed his silky hair. John had once told her that from the minute he had seen Kara as a baby, she had owned his heart. Until the birth of their son she hadn't really understood what he had meant.

She walked out of the room and pulled the door partially shut behind her.

"I'll listen for him," Maya said. "He didn't get a nap this afternoon. He should sleep well tonight. He was worn out."

Laura smiled. "I'd barely started reading to him when he went to sleep. Where is Bill?"

"He's in your private sitting room. He helped himself to a drink."

"I think I'm going to join him."

Laura walked down the hall to her sitting room. Bill had settled on the couch with a straight whiskey in his hand. He looked as exhausted as she felt. Sovana was an hour ahead of them. He had probably gotten the first call a little after four a.m.

"I poured one for you," he said.

She smiled. "How did you know I would want a drink tonight?"

"Just a hunch."

She walked over to the sideboard, picked up the glass and joined him on the couch.

After a sip of his drink he said, "Our missing Marine showed up. It seems he met a nice young woman in a bar last night. They shared a drink. She invited him back to her place. The next thing he remembers is waking up this afternoon in an alley with a terrible headache. He has an abrasion on his head that may have been a blow or may have happened when he passed out. His identification and his keys were missing. Chances are if he was drugged, the evidence is no longer in his system. He claims not to remember exactly what the young woman looked like. He's even a little vague on the name of the bar, just that it's down on Medea Street. Since there're thirty or forty bars along Medea Street, Darren's men have got their work cut out for them trying to verify his story."

"Is there a connection to Tucker Clellan or do you think this is a coincidence?"

"I don't think it's any coincidence. We haven't found a direct connection to Clellan, but we can't rule out the possibility that he had a female accomplice who drugged the Marine or set him up to be knocked out. Of course there's always the possibility that there was no young woman and it was all a lie cooked up to get Lieutenant Clellan into the bunker. You can bet Darren's men will check out every aspect of his story."

"Do you have any _good_ news?"

Bill sipped his drink. "I'm afraid not. Some monotheists who came to the hotel to put candles or wreaths or some such at the scene got into it with another group who was there for the opposite reason. The police had to break it up. Several people were taken to the hospital. A reporter was hit by a chunk of cinder block during the exchange and his camera equipment destroyed."

Laura sighed. "Billy said the press has been calling non-stop for information. Of course many of them have contacts in the police department, probably even the military. They're mining every source they can find for information."

"Typical media feeding frenzy." Bill finished his drank, got up and poured another. "How are you holding up?"

"I'm tired, but that goes with the job."

He walked over to the window that overlooked the garden and terrace below with the small Posiden fountain.

With his back to her he said, "I was rough on you this afternoon. That was wrong of me."

"Is Bill Adama actually apologizing for something?" Laura asked in an amused tone.

"I was angry and frustrated. I took it out on you. You've got enough on your agenda right now. You don't need me adding to it."

"I want to be very clear on where I stand regarding the Cylons. If we can destroy their basestars over Nereid and rescue the humans on the planet, I have no problem with leaving them there under our watchful eye. As long as they can't manufacture ships to spread destruction to other star systems, then I believe we should let them live."

"Aren't you forgetting about Hunter's people?"

"Hunter's people will be given a choice to stay on Nereid or to emigrate to Caprica. If they stay, the Cylons won't be allowed to bother them. There may even be humans here who will want to go to Nereid and build a new life. Scientists and archeologists and historians once considered the planet worth studying. I doubt that's changed just because the Cylons made it their homeworld. I envision setting up some sort of provisional government until we can decide if they can govern themselves."

Bill stood silently for a long time. Finally he asked, "Do you really believe we can coexist peacefully with them?"

Laura thought about her answer very carefully. "I think _some of us _can coexist peacefully with _some_ _of them_. I think Sharon and Leoben have proven that."

"What about those Cylons who aren't willing to try, who are still hell-bent on our destruction?"

"Then I'm afraid we'll have no choice but to…terminate them."

"You could live with that decision?"

Laura thought of John and of what he had suffered at their hands. She took a sip of the whiskey. "I would have no trouble living with that decision at all."

_…_

John woke up sweating. He'd dreamed of the firing squad again and of trying futilely to protect Laura from their bullets. He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face in an effort to banish the sick feeling. Then he walked into the kitchen and looked at the clock on the microwave. 04:16. He got a glass of water, walked into the living room and looked out the sliding glass doors. The sky had cleared completely. Stars were twinkling brightly in the pre-dawn darkness. The half-full moon was setting behind the ruins across the street. He could see just a glimpse of it through a gap in the collapsing walls. Then because he knew he wouldn't go back to sleep, he got down on the floor and began his exercise routine.

Several hours later he had showered and dressed and was waiting when Doolittle brought his breakfast. They exchanged the usual greetings and John asked for the weather forecast.

"Sunny today. Warming up," Doolittle answered. "No rain predicted until later in the week."

He didn't keep Doolittle talking any longer now that the Cylons were timing his deliveries. As John ate, his mind kept drifting back to the nightmare. He finally realized that it might have been symbolic of a fear that had gradually crept into his conscious thoughts…that he would ultimately be responsible for bringing Laura's Presidency crashing down. He would do whatever he had to do to protect her from the consequences of his actions here on Nereid. He would not be the cause of Laura losing everything she had worked for. There was only one thing he would ask her. He would ask her not to keep him from seeing their son. He might have given up the right to be Laura's husband, but he would never give up on being Braedon's father.

He was surprised to find that once his decision was made, he felt better. He felt like a burden had been lifted from him. He was finally able to think about his upcoming day.

Doolittle had told him that they began serving the breakfast buffet in the Cylon dining room at 07:30 and continued serving until 09:30. He didn't know what time Sonja went to breakfast, but he didn't imagine that she was the first one in line.

He washed his breakfast dishes, walked into the living room and sat on the couch to wait. It was just a little after 07:30. Sonja might not even be up yet. After a few minutes he leaned his head back against the couch and closed his eyes. He didn't think he had gone to sleep, but he didn't hear Sonja open the door either. He wasn't aware of her until she spoke to him.

"You're snoring again."

He opened his eyes. "What time is it?"

She smiled. "Time to go to Petra's if you can wake up."

"I'm awake."

"You were sleeping soundly when I walked in."

"Try knocking next time."

"I did. You didn't answer. Do you not sleep at night?"

John took a deep breath. "I don't usually make it through the whole night. I've been up since 04:00."

"More nightmares?"

"Yeah."

"Did you have any bad dreams while you slept in my bed yesterday?"

"No. I didn't dream at all."

She smiled.

"Are you saying you can stop my nightmares?"

"Spend the night with me and you'll find out. Consider it a scientific experiment if you want an excuse."

"I'll think about it," he finally said.

Together they left the apartment and got on the elevator. It stopped on the seventh floor and John held his breath as the doors opened, silently praying that Leoben wouldn't be waiting to get on. It was one of the women who had stood in a doorway watching them two days earlier. She didn't look at them or speak. They rode down to the ground floor in silence. When they got outside the woman walked to the corner and turned toward the heart of the city.

He and Sonja crossed the street. At the entrance to the park John suddenly said, "Let's take the long way around. I'm not ready to go in there yet."

Sonja didn't say anything as they turned down the sidewalk and began the circuitous route that would take them to the building where the families lived.

"Whose breeder is the woman who was on the elevator with us?"

"She was with Leoben until he brought Rika here."

"She doesn't look very happy."

"She was given the choice of staying here or going back to her settlement after she failed to conceive. She has a necessary skill or she would never have been allowed to choose. Most are just sent back." Sonja smiled. "Are you interested in her?"

"Just curious. What's her skill?"

"She's a seamstress. She works at a shop in the city. She and several of the other women do mending. These clothes we brought from the Colonies and took from the ships need repairs from time to time. They also make new garments for us. She's really very skilled. Personally I think she fell in love with Leoben and that had a lot to do with her staying."

"Are you _serious_?" John asked in amazement.

"You've seen his worst side," Sonja said defensively. "We all have them. Even you."

John didn't say anything to her as they walked on to the edge of the park and turned the corner. The sidewalk was cracked and broken in places. They had to watch where they were walking.

Finally he said, "Do you think he'll take his former breeder back now even if she can't get pregnant?"

"I don't know. I talked to him last night. He's really very sad about Rika. He had feelings for her."

"My heart bleeds for him," John said sarcastically. "He should have thought about _her feelings_ before he raped her. Any idiot who thinks forcing a woman to have sex with him is going to win her love is one sick bastard."

"He's not going back to the settlements to look for a replacement."

"Good."

"He's not a monster, John. I know you think…"

"Sonja, just drop it. Two young people are dead because of him. You're not going to get me to change my mind about what he did."

"You're a very stubborn man."

"When I feel like I'm right about something I am stubborn. And I'm right about him. He should stay celibate for the rest of his life."

They walked in silence the rest of the way to the apartment building. It was smaller than the building where the other humans and Cylons lived. It was only four stories as opposed to twelve. There were two centurions inside the front entrance. Sonja told them that John could enter any time he wished. Their red eyes scanned him, imprinting his image and retinal pattern in its memory.

"Do they all share information with each other?" John asked.

"Yes. They're in constant communication with each other, wirelessly of course."

"So all of them know where I'm allowed to go and where I'm not."

"Yes. You're now allowed to go everywhere in the city except the building where our council meetings are held. No humans are allowed in there."

"I owe you for giving me that much freedom. Thank you."

They entered the building. There were a number of strollers parked in the lobby. He and Sonja got on the elevator and rode to the top floor. Sonja knocked on 4-G.

John snorted. "So you really do know how to knock."

She smiled her seductive smile. "I know how to say _please_, too. In fact I think I've said it to you before."

Petra's husband Simon opened the door. "Come in. Petra said we might see you today."

"Thank you for helping with Rika yesterday," John said.

"Lovely girl. She spent a lot of time here with us. It's a shame."

Cassie came toddling out of the bedroom and made a beeline for John. He picked her up. "There's my big girl."

She pointed to the door. "Out."

John smiled. "They learn that word quick enough. I think my son said _Dada, Mamma, out_ and _go_ in that order."

Petra wasn't far behind her daughter. She was carrying the baby.

"Please come in and sit down. Would you like some coffee?"

"I'd love some," John answered.

"That sounds like my cue," Simon said and walked into the kitchen.

"What's mamma holding?" John asked Cassie.

"Baba," Cassie said.

"What did you name her?" He asked Petra.

"We haven't yet. Rika wanted you to do the honors."

John was shocked. "_Me_? Why would she want _me_ to name her baby?"

Sonja said, "The giving of a birth name is an honor in our religion. She's paid you a great compliment."

Petra looked at him. "Rika left a note for you. I found it when I was cleaning the room and getting our things ready to bring back here."

Petra walked into the bedroom and came back out with Yusef's prayer beads and the note. She told Cassie to go find her father. John put the child down and she toddled toward the kitchen.

John wasn't sure he was ready, but he let Petra put the beads and note into his hand. He walked over to the couch and sat down.

Petra said to Sonja, "Let's go help my husband make coffee."

"How many people does it take to make a pot of coffee?" Sonja asked.

"I think John would like a minute alone."

Sonja finally understood and followed Petra into the kitchen.

Slowly John opened the small folded piece of paper that had his name written on it. He began to rub the beads as he read.

_I want you to have Yusef's prayer beads and I want you to name the baby. Your daughter is very lucky to have a father like you. I hope you see her again one day. Rika_

The words of the note blurred as his eyes filled with tears. The pain of yesterday came back like a hard punch. All he could do was sit and try to deal with it. Petra came in and sat down beside him. The sleeping infant was still in her arms.

John shook his head. He couldn't speak.

"You can do this for her," Petra said softly. "Give this child a name."

John shook his head again. "You should name her. You're going to raise her."

"What was your mother's name?" She asked gently.

"Rachel."

"Was she a good woman? A good wife and mother?"

"The best."

"Then this child's name is Rachel. We'll have her naming ceremony at the fountain this afternoon. The other mothers will come. Rika was one of us. We all loved her."

He nodded.

"Life goes on, John."

"I know it does." He used his shirt sleeve to wipe his eyes. "We don't have a priest."

"Gianne is the daughter of a priest. She knows the right words. She's spoken them for all our children. The gods will understand."

Sonja came in carrying Cassie who wiggled to get down. After she stood the child on the floor, she sat down on the other side of Petra.

"Coffee will be ready in a minute."

"Would you like to hold Rachel?"

Sonja smiled as Petra put the sleeping infant in her arms. "Rachel is a name from our scriptures, one of the six sisters, a protector of the peacemaker."

"Rachel was John's mother's name," Petra said.

Sonja lifted her gaze from the child and looked at him. "That's all the more reason to believe the prophecy that you were sent here to be the father of our peacemaker."

Simon had just walked back into the room with two mugs of coffee. He handed one to John.

"Not all of us believe in ancient prophecies," he said.

Sonja and Petra exchanged a glance.

"My husband is not a religious man," Petra said.

Sonja got up and placed the infant in John's arms. "We all have our part to play in what is going to happen…even this baby. The peacemaker will stop the cycle of violence in our history and this child will help."

John looked at the infant as she brought a small fist up to her mouth. He touched her hand and once again the tiny fingers closed around his.

He whispered her name. _Rachel_. He had held her when she was just seconds old, this special child of destiny who now bore his mother's name. Petra was right. Life goes on.

_…_

For the second night in a row Lee, Kara and Hunter sat in a booth at the Lamplighter only this time they ordered dinner as well as a bottle of wine. The food in Hunter's valley was very basic, cooked with some herbs for seasoning but without the spices available on Caprica. The variety in foods was another new adventure for him. So far she hadn't seen him turn up his nose at anything. Lee was a picky eater. Most guys she knew weren't. Karl certainly wasn't. When they were living in the little stone house, he'd eaten anything she'd fixed just as she'd eaten anything he'd fixed.

Tonight they ordered something called Pasta Tempesta on the advice of the waiter. It was a pasta dish with slivers of vegetables and shrimp that was served in a large bowl. Hunter ate like he'd been starved for several days. Not surprisingly Lee picked at his. He finally pushed his bowl aside.

Hunter eyed it for only a minute before he asked, "Are you through with that?"

Lee nodded.

"Do you mind if I…"

"Help yourself," Lee said.

Kara grinned at him. "You'll get fat if you eat like that too often."

"While you're being questioned tomorrow, I'll walk to the park. I saw some guys playing pyramid the other afternoon. I think I understand the rules. Maybe they'll let me play."

Lee filled his glass again from the bottle of red wine.

"You'd better take it easy," Kara said. "Major Parker won't appreciate a hung over assistant tomorrow."

"This is only my second glass, Kara."

"Okay. It's your head. Or maybe I should say your headache."

The piano player walked in from the back and settled on the bench. He warmed up his hands and then began to play a popular song. It was slow and perfect for dancing. Kara watched as a couple left the bar, walked to the small clear area near the piano and began to dance.

She looked at Lee. "Come on. We haven't really danced together since we were at the Shark Rider last summer. I don't count Laura's inauguration because of your broken leg. You owe me one."

"Now? You want to dance now?"

She stood and held out her hand. "Yes, I want to dance now."

Reluctantly Lee stood and let her lead him to the small area where two other couples soon joined them. She put her arms around his neck and he put his around her waist. She leaned against him and they began to move slowly in time to the music.

"Let go of it, Lee," Kara said softly. "I know Tucker was your friend, but he made a choice. Accept it and move on. He'd want you to remember the good times you had together and forget the rest."

It was times like this that reminded him of just how much he loved her. For all her talk of princes and destiny, for the most part Kara didn't romanticize life. She saw most situations for exactly what they were. Lee attributed that to the way she had been raised by a distant but no-nonsense mother. Kara had learned very early to trust her own instincts and rely on herself. It was one of the reasons she let so few people get close to her, but once she let you in, her loyalty and love were absolute. He felt himself begin to relax as her body molded itself to his.

Lee nuzzled into her neck. "I love you," he said against her ear.

"Are we going to be alone tonight?"

He smiled. "Are we counting Hunter?"

She pulled back and looked at him. "I mean are we expecting one of Agent Darren's babysitters tonight?"

"No."

She smiled. "That's the right answer."

"So Hunter being there doesn't bother you?"

"He won't say anything if you spend the night in my room instead of on the couch."

She smiled knowingly. "I vote we go back to the apartment at the end of the song."

"You think Hunter has finished cleaning everybody's plate?"

"Let's go see."

Holding hands they walked back to the table. Kara said, "We're thinking about heading back to the apartment."

"I'd like to hang out here for a while. Drink a couple of beers and listen to the music."

Kara was torn between having the apartment to themselves and leaving Hunter alone.

As if he were reading her mind, he said, "I can take care of myself, Kara. If you could just loan me a couple of those cubits to buy a beer. We finished the wine."

She took the last ten-cubit note from her pocket and gave it to him. "This will get you two beers. Just be aware that some woman may try to pick you up."

"What do you mean exactly?"

Kara sat down beside Hunter and Lee sat across from him in the booth.

She took a deep breath. "You're a good-looking guy, and you're alone, there's a chance some woman might try to pick you up."

Hunter looked puzzled.

Kara looked at Lee. "Explain it to him…from a guy's perspective."

"Okay," Lee said, "if some woman comes up to you and starts a conversation…"

"I won't mention where I'm from."

"The thing is she might want more than just a conversation. She might want you to go back to her apartment with her or maybe ask her to go to your place."

"Why would she ask me to do either one of those?"

Kara looked at Lee who said, "Because she wants to have sex with you."

Hunter grinned. "It's that easy here on Caprica?"

"Sometimes it's that easy," Kara said. "Of course she might be what some guys refer to as a _working girl_. She'd expect you to pay for it."

Hunter grinned. "I don't guess ten cubits is enough."

Lee said, "I think what we're trying to tell you is not to do anything more than talk to a woman tonight. Just be prepared if she asks. Have something ready to say."

"What if I tell her that I'm from out of town and I'm visiting my sister and her boyfriend and they're expecting me back?"

Kara smiled. "I think you'll do fine, bro. Don't stay out too late. Agent Lee will be waiting up for you."

Lee picked up the check from the table and took it to the front to pay.

Kara lingered at the table. "Are you sure you'll be okay?"

"You wouldn't ask me that if we were on Nereid would you?"

"This is a totally different world."

"Go and enjoy your time with Lee. Will two hours be enough?"

She grinned. "An hour will be fine. It's an hour longer than I thought we'd get tonight."

"Go," Hunter said. "Lee's waiting. I won't let some wild Caprican woman take advantage of me tonight…much as I might be tempted."

"You're a good guy, Hunter. I hope you find your sorceress one day."

She walked to the door and Lee held it open for her. They held hands all the way back to the apartment. He kissed her the first time as they rode up in the elevator, holding her face gently between his hands, tasting the wine they had drunk on her lips and tongue.

The doors opened. An elderly couple was waiting to get on. Kara pulled Lee out into the hall. She grinned at them. "Blind date. Didn't I get lucky?"

He got the door unlocked and they almost tumbled inside. All thoughts of the terrible day were gone from Lee's mind as he wrapped his arms around Kara and kissed her again. She pulled his shirt out of his pants and got her hands against his skin.

"We've got time," he whispered to her. "There's no need to rush."

"I know," she said as she peeled off her t-shirt and dropped it on the floor. "Plenty of time."

He found the button on the front of her jeans as she was unbuttoning his shirt. "An hour at least."

She pushed the shirt off his shoulders. "At least."

He took her hand and pulled her along the hallway to her bedroom. She quickly got her jeans down and stepped out of them. He pushed the bra straps off her shoulders and exposed first one breast and then the other. He had always thought her breasts were perfect. He cupped them in his hands, feeling the hard nipples against his palms and letting the desire wash over him. They had done this so many times and each time it felt like the first to him.

He kissed her neck and then her mouth again. Her hands went to the button of his trousers and she quickly had them unbuttoned and unzipped and down. He stepped out of them as she pulled him to the bed.

"No need to rush," he mumbled as he slid his hand across her flat abdomen. She moaned softly as he slipped his hand between her legs. He licked a nipple and then took it gently between his teeth and held it while he rubbed his tongue over it.

"Lee, please," she moaned. "Please."

He rolled over her and entered her slowly. She moaned again and wrapped her legs over his. Her hands slid down his back. Their lovemaking was like slow dancing, rhythmic and intense and ultimately, always too soon, it was more than either one of them could take.

They lay in a tangle of limbs, too sated and contented for a few minutes to even move. Lee finally rolled down beside her and pulled her against him.

He could tell she was sleepy now but he had something he wanted to say to her. He had thought about it on all the nights they had been apart, on nights he had lain awake on the _Penelope_ or the _Galactica_ or back at his apartment, wondering if he would ever see her again.

Her ponytail had come loose and she pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and settled against him once more with an arm across his chest.

"Did I ever mention how good you are," she murmured.

"It's all for you."

"I feel like you do everything for me and I don't do much for you."

"Have you ever heard me complain?"

She snuggled closer against him. "Not yet."

"Do you see me staying a part of your life?"

For a moment he thought she'd already gone to sleep and then she asked, "Where did that come from?"

"I thought about it a lot while we were apart. I know you believe that you have a personal destiny. Does it include me?"

"Yolanda Brenn told me you'd always be my true love. Does that answer your question?"

"I was afraid Yolanda told you something else before she died, something you don't want to tell me."

Kara didn't speak for a long time. She hadn't planned to tell anyone what else Yolanda had said, but if ever there was a time, this was it. Another piece of the prophecy had fallen into place for her when she found out her father had been given to a Three as her breeder.

Finally she said, "Yolanda did say something else but it wasn't about you. It's about my father."

"I know she saw that he had survived the FTL jump."

"Something else. I think he's going to get the Cylon pregnant, maybe already has. I think he's going to have another child. He's going to have a half-breed,"

"Hunter said none of the Cylons on Nereid can have babies."

"Sharon's pregnant. She's had some problems, but she's still pregnant."

Lee couldn't deny what she'd just said. "I still don't think…"

"What would you do, Lee? Would you turn your back on my dad if it turns out to be true?"

"Of course not."

"Because if you turn your back on him, you turn you back on me."

"What are you saying, Kara?"

"Just what I said."

Lee took a deep breath. "From the minute I met John he was more of a father to me than my own ever was. He's my friend, too."

"Laura wants to talk to me about him. I could tell at Marble House yesterday. I don't want to tell her."

"Then don't. It might all come to nothing. We'll go to Nereid. We'll rescue him. If that's happened, we'll face it then. We'll face it together."

Kara tightened her arm across him. "I know how you feel about the Cylons after what you saw on the other planets."

"If what you say turns out to be true, John did it under duress. Hunter mentioned a drug that they give to men to make them…co-operate."

"Would you have sex with a Cylon?" She asked.

"Not willingly."

"But you'd do it."

"Maybe. I don't know. If my choice was a drug or death, I might. But I'd never make love to one. Your father wouldn't either. He loves Laura. I'm sure of that."

"I know," Kara said softly. "The guilt is probably eating him alive."

"What would you do if it had been me in that Raptor, me on Nereid?"

"You with a half-Cylon kid?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know, Lee. I really don't know."

"Would you turn your back on me?"

"Not unless you wanted to be with her."

"That'd never happen."

"What would you do if it had been me and one of those motherfrakkers had raped me like Hunter said they did to his sister? What if I'd had a half-Cylon kid? Would you still love me?"

"Yes."

"I guess some couples go through life and their love never gets tested."

He leaned over and kissed her again. "I think ours has already had a couple of tests."

She smiled. "Thanks to me."

"We've made it so far."

"I love you, Lee. I always will."

"Then don't shut me out next time. Talk to me."

"I've already said I would. It's a two-way street, you know. Don't shut me out of what's bothering you either."

They lay without speaking for a few minutes. Lee finally said, "This thing with Tucker is going to be hard to get through. I may learn things about him I don't want to know."

"Then talk to me about it. You just keep everything bottled up inside. You always have. That's not good for you…or for us either."

"Sometimes I envy people whose lives are dull."

Kara poked him gently in the ribs. "No you don't."

"Major Parker mentioned law school again to me. Do you think one day in the future you could see yourself married to a lawyer?"

"I think one day in the future I could see myself married to _you_. If I can stay out of trouble, I might be a senior pilot by then, maybe even an instructor. Could you handle that?"

He smiled. "So I guess that means you get to teach our kids to fly?"

"We're not married yet. Let's take this one step at a time."

"You're right. One step at a time. No sense in getting ahead of ourselves."

"The first step is to rescue my dad and the next step…I don't know what that will be, but we'll take it together."

"Together," he repeated. It was a good word.

TBC…


	31. So Say We All

Chapter 31

So Say We All

_1. Xander placed his hand upon the map of the stars and said, Behold our new home._

_2. And the elders praised God that He had brought them from slavery on Kobol to a new world of His choosing for them._

_3. When at last the great galleons landed upon the planet, the priests of the Thirteenth Tribe pointed to a hill._

_4. And the Chief Priest among them said, There shall we build a temple to the glory of God._

_5. And Xander saw the land that it lay between two mighty rivers and was green and fertile._

_6. Ulixes said to his son, There we will build also a city and we will name it Azurra._

_7. And they began that day to lay out a plan._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Xander, _Chapter 2:1-7

His heart pounding Lee jerked awake in the dark bedroom and lay perfectly still, waiting to hear another low, guttural growl, waiting to feel the hot breath of a wolf as it clamped its jaws on his neck.

He was on his side, his arm wrapped around Kara who slept soundly beside him. He finally realized that it had been a dream. Despite how real it had felt to him, there was no growling wolf beside the bed.

Carefully he extracted his arm from Kara's waist and rolled over. The clock on the nightstand said 10:18. He'd been asleep for less than an hour. He'd gotten up at 21:30 to let Hunter in, come straight back to bed and gone right to sleep. He just hadn't managed to stay asleep because a wolf had once again come prowling through his dreams.

He heard the faint noise of the television. Hunter was still up. Lee got out of bed, and pulled on the jeans that he'd dropped on the floor. Then he walked into the hall quietly closing the door behind him. Hunter was sitting on the couch watching television in the dark. A beer can was propped on his knee.

"Bad dream," Lee mumbled as he went into the kitchen. Hunter didn't comment.

There were two beers left in the six-pack. He took one of them and went back into the living room where he sat down on the other end of the couch. He popped the top and took a sip.

Hunter was looking at a new movie about an old war. Lee and Zak had gone to see it during Lee's junior year of high school. He could hardly believe that had been almost six years ago. They had gone to a virtual reality theater and watched the movie in 3V. It lost a lot being shown on television, but it was still a good story and the CGI was second to none. He couldn't remember the title of the movie, but it was somebody's interpretation of what had happened on Kobol thousands of years earlier, before the tribes of mankind had left and gone on to settle Nereid and the other planets that had eventually become the Twelve Colonies. The movie was about one of the lengthy and bloody wars that the Tribes had fought. There had been so many. He couldn't remember which one.

"That's supposed to be Kobol," Lee said.

"I figured that out since the name of the movie is _The Last Kobol War_," Hunter said and smiled.

To cover his embarrassment, Lee said, "It has some good special effects, especially the battle sequences. The distance views were computer generated, but the close-ups were done by the actors."

"All that blood and guts looks real."

"It's fake. Those fight scenes are choreographed and rehearsed down to the second so nobody gets hurt."

"I said the blood and guts look real, not the battles," Hunter said in a good-natured way. "I'm not as dumb as you think I am."

"I don't think you're dumb, Hunter," Lee said defensively. "I didn't think you'd ever seen a movie before."

"Not until I got here, but I know the difference between a real battle and one that's staged. I've been in a few real ones. They don't go down quite as…choreographed as the ones in this movie. You don't stop in the middle of a battle for someone to have a touching, drawn-out death scene either. Death in battle is usually quick and ugly. If it's not quick, it's painful and ugly."

Lee took another sip of beer. Shooting Cylon Raiders from the cockpit of his Viper was totally different from the kind of fighting Hunter was used to.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to insult you or offend you."

"No offense taken," Hunter said and turned up the beer again. "When I came back from the Lamplighter, some guys in dark suits had a Cylon on the elevator. A Six. Her hair was short and dark, but there was no mistaking that face…or that body. She was shackled, too. They stopped me from getting on the elevator with them. Told me to wait for the next one. I thought all the Cylons in the bunker got killed today."

"Her name is Natasi. Laura had her moved to better quarters a couple of floors above the cells so she survived the bombing."

"Why?"

"She cooperated and told the Attorney General everything she knew about the Cylon homeworld."

"What did she say?"

"I don't know. I haven't had a chance to watch her interrogation yet."

"Why would they bring her here?"

"The government has another apartment like this one somewhere else in this building. She's being brought here since they don't have anywhere else to put her. She wouldn't last an hour in the women's prison outside the city. The dark hair is a wig…fake hair."

"I know what a wig is."

"Sorry," Lee said again. "I tell you what. If you don't understand something, stop me and ask."

"What color is her hair naturally? Dark blond or platinum? I've seen both on Nereid."

"Platinum. I thought all the Sixes had platinum hair."

"Some have hair a little darker than Kara's. I don't know if they do something to change the color or not." He snickered softly to himself like he was remembering something. "It's not a question you stop in the middle of a firefight and ask."

"You've had some experience with the Sixes?"

"In the beginning. The Sixes and the Threes don't come into the forest anymore. The Threes are pathetic fighters despite the fact that they look like the Warrior Princess in the Caprican Prince stories…if you color their hair dark. Zinna, from the Island of Seriphos."

"I read those books when I was maybe fourteen. I don't remember a lot about the story."

Hunter started laughing. "The Fives are the only fighters worse than the Threes. I saw one of those stupid motherfrakkers shoot himself in the foot one time. Me and Beck were laughing so hard it took Beck a couple of minutes to shoot him with the crossbow. He kept lining up to shoot and then he'd crack up again because the Five was hopping around squealing in a high-pitched little girlie voice."

"Who are the best fighters?" Lee asked.

"No contest. The Twos. The Ones and the Fours suck about as bad as the Fives. They'd rather talk you to death. The Sixes are better fighters than the Threes, especially hand-to-hand. They throw a damned mean punch and they're strong. I felt for Kara's father when that Six hit him for lying to her about Kara. He showed a lot of restraint. I'd have put her on her ass."

"John wouldn't hit a woman. I don't care if she is a Cylon."

"If he fought in the forest with us, he'd get over that real quick or he'd be dead. In the forest you kill them any way you can."

"I don't know if I could hit a woman either."

"Then you'd both be dead. None of them can hit shit with a firearm either except the Twos and the Eights. I guess because they have their centurions to do the shooting for them. The Eights like to fight. They're good fighters. An Eight killed my father. I killed her, but I know she downloaded somewhere so I didn't really kill her. Kara liked to point out to me that we never really _kill_ any of them. She thought we were insane for fighting them. You probably do, too."

"It does seem pointless. You can't replace your dead."

"They started it. Not us." Hunter finally said.

"Kara told me she'd taken you with her to see Sharon. That's one thing about Kara. She's loyal to her friends and Sharon is her friend. She doesn't always take into consideration that the rest of us might not share her feelings. I mean I like _Sharon_ okay. She helped save my life, but I can understand why going to meet her wouldn't have been at the top of your to-do list."

Hunter shrugged. "It wasn't so bad. Maybe because she's pregnant. I'd never seen a pregnant Cylon before so it was worth it just for that. I'm not sure I'd have believed it if I hadn't seen her."

"Kara told me the Cylons on Nereid can't get pregnant."

"I'm not sure if they can't get pregnant or can't stay pregnant. Mr. Fox just said that the only ones living in the family building in the city are human mothers and Cylon fathers. Of course you've got a lot better medical care here on Caprica. The only medical care the Cylons get on Nereid comes from the Fours. Fox says they're more butchers than healers. He also said the Cylon women don't trust the human doctors."

"Kara said Sharon's doctor is a specialist in high-risk pregnancies. When the Cylons first took over Caprica, a doctor here, Gaius Baltar, helped them set up a lab. We didn't know what they were doing in the lab at first, but they were trying to create a hybrid child."

"A half-breed?"

"Yeah. Apparently the Cylons had been trying to breed with each other for years before they came here and hadn't been successful. It took Baltar and his group a year but they finally had luck with some human women getting pregnant. Then the Cylons took the babies up to their basestar because they didn't want them _contaminated_ with all the things they thought were wrong with humanity. When John blew up their ship, all the babies died. John doesn't know that. I hope he never finds out. He had no idea the babies were on the basestar. John's a good father. It would kill him to know those babies died when he destroyed that ship."

Hunter was silent for a long time. Finally he asked, "How did you find out about the babies being on a baseship?"

"One of the Cylons told Laura."

"I'll clue you in on something you might already have figured out. They lie. They all lie. It may or may not be true. Mr. Fox said none of them know anything about raising kids. I can't believe they'd take a bunch of babies to a baseship and think they could take care of them."

"I agree there would be issues with them trying to raise kids when they don't know what they're doing. I don't know how we'd ever find out if they took those babies to the basestar or not. The Cylons are all dead now."

"Not all of them. Sharon's still alive, and Kara said there's a Two who runs a bookstore. And that Six, Natasi. That's three of them still alive."

"Sharon and Leoben wouldn't have any way of knowing about the babies. They weren't in that loop."

"But Natasi would if she worked with Baltar. Bluff her. Tell her you've found a half-breed kid on the planet. See if she changes her story. In the early days before they learned our techniques, we used to be able to trip them up questioning them. My grandfather finally figured out that they didn't know how to read human expressions very well. The way he put it is that they're _oblivious to the subtle nuances of human expressions_. It was hard for them to tell when we were lying to them if the lie sounded convincing. They keep learning, though. I'll hand them that much. They're not nearly as clueless as they used to be."

"I'll pass that information along to Major Parker."

"We quit taking captives a long time ago. It wasn't worth the trouble of trying to get them back to the valley. Now we just kill them in the forest and are done with it."

Lee and Hunter watched the movie for a while without talking. When a commercial came on, Lee said, "Did you drink your two beers alone tonight at the Lamplighter or did you have company?"

Hunter grinned. "I had company. Not long after you and Kara left, two very nice young women came over and asked if they could join me. They want me to call them the next time I'm going out. They said they'd meet me. They couldn't believe I didn't have a mobile phone so I could add their numbers so they gave them to me another way."

He reached into the pocket of his shirt and took out a folded paper cocktail napkin and handed it to Lee. Lee opened it and saw two phone numbers.

"You did okay. Were they good-looking?"

"Cute enough. Early twenties. They're roommates. They work someplace called Maximillian's."

"That's a big department store. They sell a lot of different things, clothes and shoes and jewelry and household products."

"Mandy works in Women's Cosmetics. Justine works in Accounting. I told them I grew up on a farm and didn't know much about the city. I heard all about their jobs. I never realized the stuff women put on their faces is so complicated. Kara never did anything to her face and she looks fine."

Lee grinned. "Kara is what most guys would call _low maintenance_. With her what you see is what you get. She's beautiful and natural and I love her like that. Of course when Kara puts on a little makeup and dresses up…well, you saw her yesterday. You know what I'm talking about. As my brother Zak once said, _drop-dead gorgeous _and Zak should know. He's dated some really beautiful women."

"Mandy asked me if you were my brother and Justine wanted to know if you and _the blond girl_ were serious. I told them _no_ to the first question and _yes_ to the second. I think she was disappointed. She wanted me to bring you along next time."

Lee grinned. "For a guy from a rural valley on another world, you did okay for yourself tonight."

Hunter smiled. "They even bought my second beer. And I'm not quite as backward as you and Kara think I am. I've never done anything like that before, but I have read about it. My grandfather has a set of books about a private detective named Rick Spade. I read all of them a couple of times each…or parts of them. Spade used to go into bars and pick up women. He did a lot of other things with them, too." Hunter chucked softly. "My grandfather wouldn't let me read those books until I was sixteen. I was out in the forest killing Cylons when I was barely fifteen and he still said I was too young to read about Rick Spade's adventures."

"So you knew exactly what Kara and I were talking about when we were describing being picked up in a bar, and you still let us make fools of ourselves trying to explain it to you."

Hunter continued to smile. "I should have said something. Kara's so tough and sure of herself and every now and then she goes all mother-hen on me. I just let her. It makes her feel good."

Lee took a deep breath. Maybe it was the beer he'd drunk or maybe he was asking the tough questions tonight, but he asked Hunter the question he'd wanted to ask him since he realized that Kara had brought someone other than Narcho back from Nereid with her.

"Are you in love with Kara?"

Hunter didn't answer him for a long time. Finally he said, "I wish I could explain my life to you so you'd understand it, but I don't allow myself to feel that way about anyone. I never thought I'd still be alive now, but as long as I am, my first duty is to protect the valley and my people and my little girl. Having a girlfriend or a wife isn't consistent with that. So am I _in love_ with Kara? No. Do I have feelings for her? Yes. Have you got anything to worry about? No. You're the man she came home with tonight. You're the man she loves."

"If I weren't in the picture?"

"There's no point in speculating like that because it wouldn't change my situation. End of story. Since we're clearing the air between us, I might as well tell you. I kissed her once. I shouldn't have. So if you want to take a swing at me, go ahead."

Lee swallowed hard. "She failed to mention that to me."

"That's because it didn't mean anything to her. She didn't kiss me back. I'm not even sure now why I did it. We were in the cave getting ready to leave. She'd been crying because she had to leave her father behind. Maybe I was trying to apologize to her because it was me standing there instead of the man she came to Nereid for. Maybe I just wanted to kiss her because I knew I'd never get another chance. So if you want to punch me out for it, go ahead. Give it your best shot. You get a free one."

Lee got up from the couch, walked into the kitchen and dropped his empty beer can into the recycle bin. There was a part of him that wanted to do something stupid and there was a part of him that understood Hunter's feelings completely. Besides, he owed Hunter. He'd saved Kara's life at least twice. He and his people had taken her in and taken care of her. She was here on Caprica now because of it.

Lee walked back into the living room and sat on the couch.

"I'd been around Kara about two minutes before I thought about kissing her. I was trying to bandage a cut over her eyebrow and I was thinking about kissing her. I guess I'm more surprised that you waited until you were leaving the planet. I'm surprised you didn't do it sooner."

"I learned a long time ago not to complicate my life that way. She made it clear from the beginning that she wore your ring. I'm sure she'll tell you about it one day if she even remembers it. She's had a lot on her mind. So if you got something to say, you say it to me. I kissed _her_. Not the other way around."

Lee nodded. "It wouldn't be my place to do anything anyway. I don't own Kara. If Kara had a problem with what you did, you'd have known it. She's not shy about making her feelings known."

"No. She's not shy about much of anything, especially voicing her opinion."

They watched the last ten minutes of the movie in silence. When it was over, Hunter also took his empty beer can to the kitchen.

As he walked back through the living room, he said, "I'm going to bed. What's the plan for tomorrow?"

"Major Parker left me a voice message. He'll be here in the morning at eight. We finish your debriefing first. My dad is anxious to get the rest of your information so he can get started on his plan."

"Do you think he'll let any of us participate in the planning?"

"I don't know. I would think he'd run his ideas by you before he finalizes anything. It's your planet. Your home."

"That's what I hope everybody remembers. It's my home," Hunter said and disappeared down the hall.

Lee found the remote control and switched channels to a news station. He saw a replay of the earlier clash between the monotheists who had come to place candles and wreaths in front of the hotel and a group of men that Lee was sure were members of the Sons of Ares. Tear gas was thrown and the police waded in with shields and clubs to break it up.

He turned off the television before he went to the bedroom, took off his jeans and carefully slipped into bed beside Kara. As he put his arm across her waist and snuggled in behind her, she stirred and murmured, "I missed you."

He didn't know if she meant she'd missed him just now or while she was on Nereid or if she was dreaming. He just hoped she was thinking about him.

_…_

After lunch John walked alone to the park. He paced when he got there trying to make himself enter. The day was beautiful, sunny and much warmer than the day before. There was no freezing rain falling. No dripping leaves or wet walkways or misty gloom concealing a horror. Still he found himself reluctant to enter.

The red eye of the big centurion followed his movements back and forth. He stopped in front of it. He didn't know if it was the one he had run past in the rain the day before or not. He had no idea if there was a changing of the guard or if this was a permanent assignment for it. They all looked alike. It was impossible to tell by appearance alone.

"You know what happened in there yesterday, don't you?" He asked.

It was probably his imagination, but he thought it cocked its head slightly to the side much like a dog does when you talk to it. The old centurions, the 0005s that had flown the Raiders in the First War had the power of speech. Their voices were mechanical and their vocabulary limited to a few words, but they had spoken. Even though they said little other than acknowledge a command, the 0005s and the old U-87 series that had been manufactured by the millions by the Graystone Corporation understood a great deal. They could be ordered to do almost anything by their human owners and they would do it. In theory they were programmed not to commit crimes, but the soldier models had all been programmed to kill efficiently and without hesitation.

John wondered why the present day skinjobs had robbed their metallic brothers of the power of speech. Just after the Graystone Corporation began marketing a smaller domestic version of the U-87 for those businesses or humans who could afford one, a professor at Caprica University had written a book called _The Evolution of the Machine_. In it he had predicted that the robots of the future would be skilled linguists who could be used as translators between man and other machines. He'd also predicted the eventual creation of the skinjobs, but he'd never seen them as anything but the benevolent servants of humans. He'd devoted a whole chapter to the use of both male and female humanoid robots in the sex industry, referring to them as pleasure models. John wondered now how any of them could have been so blind to the other possibilities.

Sonja had told him the centurions on Nereid communicated wirelessly with each other. They obviously understood and obeyed the commands given to them by the brothers and sisters, but it didn't appear to be two-way communication. He wondered if these centurions still followed the monotheistic religion of their U-87 predecessors or if they followed any religion at all. Had religion been left out of their programming or did they still worship the One God?

John looked at the centurion in front of him. "Okay, here's what I want you to do. What happened to Rika and Yusef was wrong by anybody's law or religion. But Rika's baby is a special child. Sonja says she's one of the six who will protect the peacemaker. So the next time Leoben shows up here, I want you to kick his ass. And tell your brother centurions to quit hassling Doolittle in the kitchen. Let him do his job. He's a good man. He deserves better from all of you. And while you're at it, ask Cavil what he did with your tongues. I'd just love to hear one of you say, _by your command_ to me."

Smiling to himself and hoping no one had just overheard him lest they think he'd lost his mind, John stuck his hands in his pockets and entered the park. He knew the centurions understood him as well as they understood Sonja and the other Cylons. They just weren't programmed to obey humans anymore.

He reached the fountain, sat down on the bench and waited for the others to arrive. Petra was the first. Cassie was in the stroller and Petra was carrying Rachel in a cloth sling wrapped across her. She pushed the stroller up to the bench.

"Up," Cassie said.

John smiled at her and asked, "What's my name?"

Her little arms reached for him. "Chon."

He lifted her out of the stroller. Brae had also struggled with the _J _sound. He walked with her to the fountain while Petra lifted Rachel from the sling. Cassie wanted to put her hands in the water. She always wanted to put her hands in the water. Braedon was the same way. They would both have climbed happily into the fountain.

"I think you've got a little fish on your hands," he said to Petra. "Braedon would spend hours in the tub if we'd let him. He loves the water."

"Cassie, too. I hope one day our children get to meet."

For a few brief moments John let himself imagine Brae and Cassie and Rachel and his son with D'Anna all playing with the other children around the fountain. He could almost hear their happy laughter. He carried a protesting Cassie back to the bench and sat down beside Petra. As soon as he put her down, she toddled back to the fountain.

Gianne pushed a stroller up the path with her daughter Sofia sleeping inside. She was followed by the other mothers pushing or carrying their babies.

Petra smiled at him. "Do you ever feel strange being the only man among all of us women and children?"

"Strange? _No._ Lucky? _Yes_."

He saw Petra glance toward the path he used to enter the park. "Sonja and a Three," she murmured.

John looked around. "That's D'Anna. I asked her to come. She wouldn't commit to it, but Sonja told me she was going to bring her. D'Anna doesn't seem to want to leave her apartment. She's having a lot of morning sickness as well as headaches and dizziness. No offense to your husband, but I think she should see a human doctor. I know you're a nurse and a midwife. Maybe you could encourage her."

"The headaches might be related to the surge in hormones. Did she have them before she got pregnant?"

"She told me she did. She thinks they stem from all the changes that were made to her programming."

"She should still be checked. The dizziness isn't normal. I agree. She should see a doctor. My Simon and the other Fours have some medical knowledge, but nothing like a man or woman who has gone through medical school in the Colonies. I'll talk to her if you'd like."

"I'd appreciate it."

D'Anna and Sonja walked over to them. John got up and let D'Anna sit down beside Petra. She looked at Rachel.

"Our son will be blond and blue-eyed like that," D'Anna said.

Sonja said in a soft voice, "Leoben said he might come. I thought I should warn you."

"Damn," John said equally as soft. "Nobody wants him here."

"She's his child, too."

"Just keep him away from me, okay? Keep him away from these women, too. He'll be lucky if they don't throw him in the fountain and drown him."

Gianne walked over to the fountain. Petra looked at John and without a word, stood and put Rachel into his arms. He felt himself begin to choke up, took a deep breath and got his feelings under control. He could do this for Rika.

Gianne began with the words of the dedication and naming ceremony. "Will the guardians of the child bring her forward?"

He and Petra walked to the fountain and the other mothers closed around them.

Gianne said, "We bind this child in the faith of our forebears, the Lords of Kobol."

"_So say we all_," the rest of them responded.

"We pray that she will be blessed by the gods among the children of mankind."

"_So say we all_."

Gianne reached for the child and John handed Rachel to her. Gianne held her while John and Petra each dipped a hand in the fountain and touched Rachel's head.

"What name is given to her?"

Petra glanced at John and he said his mother's full name, "Rachel Elizabeth."

Gianne said, "By the water of the sacred spring of Delphi, we name this child Rachel Elizabeth. The gods guide her footsteps as she grows."

"_So say we all." _

"I say to you who have gathered here today, accept the challenge that this child shall be raised to follow the laws of mankind and to accept the will of the gods."

"_So say we all." _

Gianne handed Rachel back to John. "Thank you," he said to her. "You remembered the whole ceremony."

She smiled. "My father was a priest. I heard it often enough when I was growing up." She indicated the other mothers. "We've had a naming ceremony here for each of our children."

John was surprised when Sonja walked up to them.

"May I say a few words?"

John nodded.

"Rachel is a child of two races as are all of your children, and because of that they are special to us, but Rachel is a child who is also destined to fulfill a role in the future of our two races that was foretold in our scriptures."

There was a low murmuring among the women. Sonja continued. "There is another special child here today, yet unborn, who will be the peacemaker. Long ago our scriptures predicted that three strangers would come from the stars, one and then two and that the one would be the father of the child of peace. That prophecy has come to pass. Search your own scripture and you will find my words are true."

From the group of women, someone said, "How can we search our scripture when you've taken all our sacred texts from us?"

Another one of the women said, "Our sacred books were taken in the settlements just after we were brought here."

Sonja looked surprised. "Is this true?" She asked John.

"You're asking the wrong person. I didn't bring a copy of Pythia with me. I asked for one in the prison. The One who ran the place laughed at me."

"Sonja speaks the truth about the prophecy," Gianne said. "Pythia predicted it almost two thousand years ago when she was Oracle at Delphi. She says that after the blaze a child will be born to a non-believer and he will bring peace to the warring tribes."

They stood for a few moments, none of them speaking as they pondered Gianne's and Sonja's words. The only sounds were the burbling and splashing of the fountain and Cassie's unintelligible chatter as she played near their feet.

Suddenly the tranquility was broken by a man's loud shouting at the entrance to the park. John glanced at Sonja as they both recognized Leoben's voice.

Sonja said, "Stay here," to D'Anna and ran toward the entrance.

John carefully handed Rachel to Petra and followed her. When he got to the entrance, Leoben was standing in the middle of the street. The centurion was firmly planted on the sidewalk baring his way into the park. Every time Leoben tried to get past, the centurion blocked him.

"What's wrong?" Sonja asked.

Leoben was seething. "That unit is malfunctioning! He won't let me past him. He tried to _kick me_!"

John kept his face completely neutral. "I imagine that would hurt."

"You stay out of this."

Sonja walked over to Leoben. "I'll order the unit to go in and submit to a software check. There's no need to go into the park. The ceremony is over. The women are going back to their building. You'll have to go there to see Rachel."

"Rachel? That's what you named her?"

"After one of the six sisters in our scripture," Sonja said. She took Leoben's arm and turned to John. "Go get D'Anna. I'll walk back with Leoben."

He watched them cross the street and start down the sidewalk toward the apartment building. He wondered if Sonja and this copy of Leoben had an intimate relationship in the beginning when the skinjobs on Nereid were still trying to breed with each other. She had consistently defended him and Leoben had let her step between him and John the day he had killed Yusef.

Of even more importance to him, though, was the fact that this centurion had stopped Leoben from entering the park. He didn't think for a minute that it had obeyed him, but he couldn't come up with another plausible explanation.

He looked at it and smiled. "Way to go. Rachel and Petra and I appreciate it."

The centurion's red eye winked off and then back on. John had another thought. Perhaps what had just happened didn't have anything to do with him. Perhaps the centurion thought it was protecting the child. The U-87s had monotheistic beliefs acquired from Daniel Graystone's daughter Zoe if one believed what the professor had written in _The Evolution of the Machine_. How hard would it have been for them to access the sacred book of the monotheists that the Cylons had adopted as their own scripture?

He addressed the centurion again. "Listen, big guy, while we're talking about babies, D'Anna is pregnant with your peacemaker. You understand pregnant, don't you? And I'm that baby's father so you need to protect all of us."

Again the red eye winked off and back on. John could no longer think of it as a malfunction. The centurion understood him and was acknowledging it.

Wondering how he would be able to recognize this particular unit in the future, he looked at the metal frame and saw a small indentation in the hard exoskeleton of its chest.

John grinned. "Hey, I've got one of those. Two of them actually."

D'Anna exited the park. "Are you talking to a centurion?"

"Is there something wrong with that?"

She was clearly amused. "It won't listen to you. None of them will."

"Then it doesn't matter if I yammer away all day long, does it?"

"No, I suppose not. I'm tired. I want to go back to my apartment."

He put his arm around her and they started across the street.

Behind them, the centurion returned to its position at the entrance to the park.

"Petra told me I should see one of your doctors."

"I agree with her."

"Then I'll tell Sonja to arrange it."

"I think you've made a wise decision."

John glanced back over his shoulder. Even from the other side of the street he saw the centurion's red eye wink off and on. Maybe it hadn't been acknowledging him. Maybe it was just a malfunction after all.

_…_

It took Hunter a little over three hours to give Lee and Major Parker the rest of the information he had about the Cylons and the settlements on Nereid. Lee thought he might have done it faster had he not been slightly hung over. Hunter drank two cups of coffee at breakfast and then two of the caffeine-laden _Red Taurus_ soft drinks he liked so much. He spent a long time studying the maps Kevin Abinell had generated using aerial footage that Lee and Kara had taken on their recon missions.

The areas that they hadn't flown over were left blank. Hunter leaned over the table and studied the maps carefully. Finally he took a marker and indicated the locations of the settlements as well as the main crops grown in each one. He estimated twenty to thirty thousand humans in the eight settlements, but that was just a guess. Hunter admitted that it could be off by thousands either way.

Hunter told them that according to Mr. Fox there were between three and four hundred skinjobs in the city and more in each settlement. The far more disturbing statistic was the estimated seventy-five thousand centurions and that didn't count the ones on each of the basestars.

The two areas where Hunter had no information were the prison-lab complex and the baseships. He also knew nothing about the basestar shipyard because until Kara had told him, none of them in the valley had been aware of its existence.

Major Parker had estimated that there were anywhere from three to four thousand centurions working at the shipyard. He could pick out very few skinjobs, less than a hundred, but that didn't mean they weren't working somewhere not visible from above. The best guess was that the skinjobs were there in a supervisory or overseer capacity monitoring progress on the baseship's construction.

Parker had also studied the footage from the prison-lab area and estimated another thousand centurions.

When Hunter finished talking, Parker tapped his pen on the table. " I'm going to go with the highest estimates for Admiral Adama. We know the baseships hold more but we're not sure of the numbers. Hopefully that's information that Romo Lampkin can get from Natasi."

"Do you know anything about the resurrection facilities?" Lee asked Hunter.

"Just that they've got them."

"But you don't know where they are?"

"No. Mr. Fox has never seen or heard about one in the city or the other settlements. So that leaves the lab-prison complex and the baseships. Of course just because Fox has never heard of one in the city doesn't mean there's not one there. We know there's big gaps in his intel."

"Sir," Lee said to Parker, "has anyone ever considered the possibility of another recon mission to the planet?"

"I'm sure that would be considered too dangerous now. We can't afford to tip our hand until the time comes to mount an invasion."

"We need detailed surveillance of those settlements so we'll know where the humans live and where the Cylons live."

"I can tell you that," Hunter said. "They're all mixed together. The skinjobs live among the humans. Some even live with them so I wouldn't be surprised if you've got half-breeds in the settlements, too. The centurions are always roaming around at night. Some of them work the fields during the day with the humans, but there are always others circulating as guards. You'll never be able to separate the centurions from the humans."

Parker's look was bleak. "You realize how difficult that's going to make our job, don't you? I can't imagine now how we're going to take this planet from the Cylons without massive loss of human life."

Lee said, "There's always the chance that as soon as any hostilities begin, the Cylons will simply start slaughtering the humans. I wouldn't put it past them."

"What's your take on that?" Parker asked Hunter.

"I think they're certainly capable. I think it would depend on whether they need the humans as hostages. Dead humans aren't much of a bargaining chip. I think the key would be to destroy their resurrection facilities first. If the skinjobs can't download, they might be more willing to bargain. They control the centurions so controlling the skinjobs is key to taking the planet. Going against that many chrome heads is suicide for everybody unless your guys can come up with a way to duplicate the canister we use against them."

Parker nodded slowly. "Are each of the settlements treated as autonomous?" he asked.

Hunter looked at him blankly.

"Do the Cylons in the settlements govern themselves or do they take orders from a central group?"

"I don't know. Mr. Fox isn't sure how they govern themselves."

Lee said. "I wish we knew more about how the city operates."

"I wish I could be more help on that," Hunter said. "I'm even guessing as to which building Mr. Fox says he works in. He lives in another one close by with other human men who work for the Cylons. They all wear tracking collars so the Cylons can pinpoint their location all the time. There's a building on the other side of the park where the half-breed kids live with their human mothers and Cylon fathers, but I'm not sure which one it is. Mr. Fox doesn't prepare food for that building so he doesn't know anything about it. It has its own staff."

"So there are at least three buildings in the city that contain humans, but you're not sure exactly which three they are."

"No. I'm guessing. Mr. Fox isn't allowed to roam around the city."

"But other humans are?"

"Some of the breeders are with their Cylons. Some of the mothers and kids are even allowed out on their own."

"Do you think John has been allowed to roam around?" Lee asked.

Hunter shrugged. "Hard to say. I'd only be guessing. He wasn't pale when he showed up in the valley with the Six so I'd say he's spent some time out of doors, but Mr. Fox says all of the apartments have balconies so he may have gotten sun just sitting on one of those."

The conversation lagged and Parker looked back through his notes. Finally he said, "If you can think of anything else that might help us, let us know."

"How long do you think it will be until we go to Nereid?"

Parker answered. "My guess is three or four months, maybe longer. Admiral Adama doesn't do anything half-way. He'll want to make sure his plan is as fool-proof as possible."

"What am I going to do in the meantime?"

Parker smiled. "We're working on that."

"Will I keep living here in this apartment?"

"We're working on that, too."

They broke for an early lunch after which Parker said to Lee, "I'll finish Kara's debriefing this afternoon. I want you to head out to the base. The Marine who should have gone on duty yesterday morning has been released from the hospital and taken out there. I want you to question him about what happened to him night before last."

"Me?" Lee asked in surprise.

"You've always related well to young people. I asked Darren to hold off and let you have a go at him first. I read the report of Corporal Venner's initial debriefing in the hospital last night. Darren's agents tend to use intimidation tactics. I think a softer approach might work better with Venner. He's nineteen, young and probably very scared right now. One of Darren's men told him he was responsible for robbing us of the opportunity to put the Cylons on trial. He made it sound like Venner might go to jail. Unless we can prove there was collusion with Tucker Clellan, there's not a damn thing the poor guy could be charged with. Letting a woman pick him up in a bar isn't a crime."

After lunch Hunter asked if he could walk to the park and the major gave his consent. Lee and Hunter left together and rode the elevator down. Hunter got off on the ground floor and Lee continued to the parking garage. On the way out to the base, he thought about his conversation with Hunter the night before. He didn't know whether Hunter would have confessed to the kiss had he not had several beers on top of a third of a bottle of wine. He wondered why Kara had never mentioned it. Was she trying to protect Hunter or him or had she truly forgotten about it? No. That wasn't something Kara would forget. She had some other reason for not mentioning it.

A car horn sounded behind him and he realized that the stoplight had changed to green and he was still sitting. He accelerated. He had to get his mind back on his job. One day he and Kara would talk about the kiss, but it probably wouldn't be today.

_…_

John sat on the couch in Sonja's apartment. She'd just brought him a glass of bourbon without him even asking for one. After dinner he'd paced around his apartment for nearly an hour trying to make up his mind what to do. Finally he'd ridden the elevator down one floor and knocked on her door.

She'd smiled like she had known he would show up. Now she sat close to him on the couch, not crowding him, but close enough that he could smell the warm spice scent of her skin.

He sipped the bourbon. "Rachel's ceremony went well today."

"Yes."

"I'm surprised we were allowed to have it."

"Why wouldn't you have been?"

"You consider our gods false. Don't you consider our rituals pagan as well? I believe D'Anna told me one time that you don't consider me married because you don't recognize our marriage ceremony."

"The council voted to allow the naming ceremony for the babies since we have something similar in our own religion. Some of the Twos and Fours asked for it to appease their wives. Apparently pregnant human women can become quite the nagging shrews. Cavil and the Fives didn't care because they have no religious convictions so it passed unanimously."

"It was a nice gesture. And not all pregnant women are nagging shrews. Laura sure wasn't."

John smiled to himself as he remembered how good things had been for him and Laura after she had gotten over her morning sickness. The pregnancy hormones had quite another effect on her. She didn't nag. She just wanted him to make love to her a lot. He had been happy to oblige. More than happy. _Ecstatic_ was a better word.

"How would you like to meet Natalie tomorrow?" Sonja asked softly and brought him back to the present.

He tore his thoughts away from Laura and those blissful months they had shared.

"Is she coming here or are we going there?"

"We're taking D'Anna to visit her. Since she lives in the same settlement as your doctor friends, our visit will serve two purposes. We'll have to ask the doctors to come to Natalie's dwelling to examine D'Anna. We can't risk taking her to their clinic because of the Four who runs it. He would report it to the One who runs the settlement and he would report it to our Cavil. We'll have to make it look like a social visit."

John smiled. "So how do we get there?"

"I don't want to risk requesting another Heavy Raider and attracting Cavil's attention. Several of the other Ones and all of the Fives would fall all over themselves letting him know. But if we happened to be out at the airfield early tomorrow morning we would be able to hitch a ride on a cargo ship already going to the settlement. The centurions who pilot those ships only communicate about cargo. They have no orders one way or the other about reporting passengers. We'll _slip in under the wire _to use one of your human expressions. I'll tell Mr. Doolittle not to report you missing to anyone."

John took a small sip of his bourbon. "How early is _early_?"

"Sunrise."

"That's going to be tough on D'Anna. She's sick in the morning. Going up in a ship will make it worse."

"We'll take a bucket with us. We don't have a choice. We can't bring the doctors to her."

"Tell me about you and Leoben. How long has it been since you two had a relationship…or is it still going on?"

She smiled. "Are you jealous?"

"Just curious."

"In the beginning when we thought we could have children together, I was paired with him."

"I knew it had to be something like that. You've had a soft spot in your heart for him ever since then, haven't you?"

"I know you'll never believe me, but Leoben is actually a decent lover." She walked her fingers up his arm and smiled seductively. "Not nearly as good as you, but we had some good times together. He was a bit hygiene-challenged at first, but I got him in the habit of showering and changing his clothes daily."

"Maybe he's never gotten over you."

"Are you sure you're not jealous."

"Very sure."

"How many lovers have you had, John?"

"I didn't keep a scorecard."

"A hundred?"

"Nowhere near that many."

"Fifty?"

He shrugged. "I told you I didn't keep score. I was with Kara's mother for almost fifteen years. We broke up a few times and I saw other women, but while we were together, I was faithful to her because I loved her. The same with Laura."

"What about before you met Kara's mother?"

"I was a smart-ass, cocky young Viper pilot so there were women in my life. But when it came to having sex, I never went beyond making out until I was damned sure that's what she wanted to do. I would have…cut off my manhood before I'd have done something like your Leoben did to Rika."

"You obviously want to hear me say it so I'll say it. I agree with you that what he did was wrong. He's not going to do it again."

"Let's hope he sticks to it if he goes to a settlement and some pretty young thing catches his eye. I would imagine for somebody like him, you're a hard act for any woman to follow, especially a young girl who'd never been with a man."

She smiled seductively again. "I think that might have been a compliment, but I'd rather _you_ thought of me that way."

"Don't flatter yourself, Sonja," he said and took another sip of bourbon.

Her finger traced a path around the rim of his ear and then she began unbuttoning his shirt. He didn't try to stop her, just reached over and put the glass of bourbon on the end table. He had given up fighting Sonja. He was already an adulterer and a collaborator and he would pay for it. Stopping now was like shutting the gate after the dog had gotten out and torn up the neighbor's flowerbeds. He had accepted, also, that he had some kind of part to play in the drama that was unfolding around him on the Cylon homeworld and that staying in Sonja's good graces was important.

When she had unfastened the last button, she leaned over and kissed the scar on the right side of his chest. Her teeth grazed over his nipple. Her breath was warm on his skin. He felt his body begin to respond to her. She slowly trailed kisses downward across his abdomen. The rush of desire intensified. Her hands were busy with his belt buckle and then the button and zipper of his khakis.

He made no move to stop her. She was good. She was more than good. He didn't know how she had learned to pleasure a man in this way, whether it was in her programming or learned through experience, but she was incredibly skilled with both her tongue and her hands. There was only one small detraction, something he didn't realize at the time because the rational part of his brain always short-circuited when a woman did that to him. Sonja knew how good she was so her ego was involved. It made him later think of a performance put on for his benefit rather than an act she truly enjoyed, a way of proving something to him, a way of showing him she was as good as any human woman when it came to this…or better. Her technical skill was second to none. What was missing was something he couldn't define, nor in her case did he care.

She was so good he could easily have let her finish it that way, but his ego was involved, too, and before he reached the point where it would have been difficult to stop, he took her chin in his hand. It took only a few seconds for her to wiggle out of her slacks and straddle him.

He watched her face suffuse with pleasure, heard her soft moan. Only then did he grasp her face between his hands and bring his mouth to her ear.

"You're very good," he said softly.

"Did I please you, John?"

"You did and you damn well know it. You should be able to feel what you did to me."

"Then give me what _I_ want."

He unbuttoned her blouse, slipped it off her shoulders and down her arms. She was wearing a white lace bra that pushed her breasts into half moons of pale flesh. There was something deeply erotic about the virginal white against her skin. He slid his hands gently down her shoulders and over her breasts, caressing skin that had the texture of silk, trailing his fingers slowly across her nipples. He continued down to her hips and held her still while he leaned down and gently took a nipple between his teeth through the lace. Her head fell back and she moaned softly and tried to move. He wouldn't let her, continuing to hold her hips tightly while he moved his mouth to the other nipple. They were as hard as tiny pink pebbles.

Her fingers dug into the muscles of his shoulders as she strained against his grip. She finally uttered the word he wanted to hear.

She whispered, "Please."

He relaxed his grip on her hips. She finished wildly…quickly and greedily, crying out at the height of her passion, and he let her take him with her. She collapsed against him, her cheek against his shoulder, and for a minute there was only the sound of their ragged breathing.

As soon as the pleasure waned for him, guilt and self-loathing rushed in to fill the void. He hated himself for this weakness, for what had always been one of his weaknesses. Absently he stroked the platinum curls of her hair.

"Why do you make me beg?" She asked very softly.

"Because you bring out the egotistical bastard in me."

"Do you make your wife beg?"

"No."

"Is it because of what my brothers and sisters did to you in the prison?"

"I don't know, Sonja. Maybe. And maybe it just turns me on to hear you say that word."

He didn't want to get into it any deeper than that. Maybe he was more frakked up by what they had done to him at the prison than he thought. Maybe his nightmares weren't the only lingering effect of the torture. He continued to gently stroke her hair in absent-minded penance. He knew how much he owed her. He finally forced his thoughts to the next day. He would finally meet Natalie, another Six and one whom Sonja clearly admired. And he would get to see Bianca and Laszlo again, something he looked forward to more than anything else. They would examine D'Anna and maybe find the cause for her headaches and dizziness. The question would then be if they could do anything about it.

"Spend the night with me," Sonja said.

He didn't refuse her request…maybe because of the way he had just treated her and maybe because he was curious about her claim that she could stop his nightmares. He went back to his apartment, took a shower, put on sweatpants and a t-shirt, got a change of clothes for the morning and returned to Sonja's apartment. She had also taken a shower and was wearing the white robe. His barely-touched glass of bourbon was still on the end table. He sat down and picked it up.

Sonja lay down on the couch and put her head on the top of his leg.

"Tell me about your childhood," she said. "I have a few memories but I know they're false. I never sat at a table as a child and drew sketches of robots that looked like the old centurions. D'Anna doesn't have that memory, but my sister Sixes do. Leoben has it, too. So do the Fours. We think it's a memory that belongs to one of the creators."

He tried to imagine what it would be like not to have memories of being a child.

"That's all you can remember? Your creators didn't give you any memories of parents or a family?"

"No. Tell me what it's like."

John took another sip of bourbon, leaned his head back on the couch and shut his eyes. He didn't know where to begin.

Finally he said, "I had four brothers. Sean was the oldest, then Edmond, David and Liam. They weren't quite two years apart in age. I think my parents thought they were through having kids because Liam was nearly nine when I came along. My earliest memory is of David and Liam pulling me around the kitchen floor on a braided throw rug. I must have been about two." He chuckled softly to himself. "It's a miracle I survived my childhood."

"Your brothers tried to harm you?"

"Not intentionally. David and Liam were just being boys. Eddie was a bookworm. He never got involved in what the other two did. Sean was my protector. I can still hear him telling the others, '_If you hurt him, you'll answer to me._' Sean was my hero when I was growing up. I can't count the number of times he'd ride me on his shoulder down to the docks so I could see the ships. When I was twelve and got called to the principal's office because a teacher caught me and Rebecca Radford kissing behind the gym, Sean was the one I went home and told. He gave me a little punch on the shoulder like boys do and said, '_Way to go, little bro_._ Just post a look-out next time and don't get caught.' _I didn't mention that Rebecca was actually the one who kissed me…stuck her tongue in my mouth, too. Sean's approval meant a lot to me."

He sat for a long time lost in memories of the past. Finally he went on.

"I was fourteen when I lost all four of my brothers and my father. Their trawler went down in a bad storm. Nothing was ever the same after that. My mother…it was like all the light had gone from her life and I couldn't put it back. I couldn't make up for her losing all of them at once like that, especially my dad."

"So all of your memories of childhood aren't good ones."

"Everything was fine until I was fourteen. After that…" he shrugged. "The point is that nobody gets to be my age or your age either and has only good memories. Your creators should have given you a lot of different memories, good, bad, all kinds. If they had, you might have been more sympathetic to us humans instead of deciding we were so flawed that we needed to be wiped out."

"We didn't decide that. The others did."

"It doesn't matter who made the decision, Sonja," he said tiredly. "A group of you made it and billions of humans died as a result. What you're doing on this planet is wrong, too. You told me one time that you saved as many humans as you could from the holocaust. Why did you turn around and make them your slaves? Your creators were human. Why did _they_ allow it?"

She was silent for a long time. Finally she said, "I think the creators are dead. I think Cavil killed them when they found out what the others had done. They would have boxed his model and any of the others who wanted to exterminate the human race."

"Why do you think he killed the Sevens?"

"He probably thought they were weak and flawed just like humans."

John yawned and then stretched. He was getting sleepy. It had been a long day.

"Let's go to bed. We're not going to solve the problems of your world tonight and we've got to be up early in the morning. Maybe Natalie can shed some light on these issues tomorrow. Didn't you say she was the First Six?"

"You'll like her. She's a lot more like your wife than I am."

"How do you know what my wife is like?"

"She's a leader of your people, isn't she?"

John smiled. "I guess you could say that. She's held some kind of public office for most of her career."

"Natalie is one of our leaders, too."

"Then why is she living in a settlement instead of here in the city where she could influence your council?"

"She never told me. Maybe she'll tell you."

They went into the bedroom. John took off his sweatpants and got into bed in his shorts and t-shirt. He turned on his side facing away from the center of the bed. Sonja dropped the robe on a chair. She was wearing the short blue nightgown. She crawled in behind him.

"Remember you promised no nightmares," he said.

He felt her begin to gently massage the back of his neck. Then her hands moved to the muscles between his neck and shoulders. Her hands were strong and it felt incredibly good.

"I know you like the ocean," she whispered to him. "Close your eyes and go there."

He imagined the beach in front of his cottage and walking along it hand-in-hand with Laura. For just a moment he smelled the salt air and felt the wind on his face and heard the surf crashing on the rocks at the end of the little bay. Laura smiled at him, her face radiant with love. The moment was one of complete bliss and happiness for him, more real than anything he had ever experienced at the prison even when he was hallucinating from their drugs.

_…_

Kara was glad that Lee had gone to the airbase and that Hunter had gone for a walk. She felt more at ease telling her story to Major Parker alone because she knew he wasn't emotionally vested in why she had stolen the Raider or anything that had happened on Nereid. She hadn't betrayed Parker's trust. All he wanted to know was how she and Narcho had done it and what had happened to them after they had arrived on the planet.

She talked for two hours, stopping only when he had questions. She covered the same timeline she and Hunter had already covered, but she added her own impressions. She went into more detail about their trip back to the valley after hiding the Raider behind the waterfall. She talked more about Hunter's people, about how hard they worked and what good people they were and how they would fight for their freedom beside the Colonial soldiers.

Finally she told him the one thing they hadn't already discussed. She told him about Daniel. She saw the skepticism in his eyes. His next question came as no surprise.

"Are you sure?"

"He admitted it to me. Lucy Cain, Commander Cain's sister, is…was one of the creators. Not one of the original ones but second-generation. She helped Daniel escape. Cavil's centurions killed her. They shot Daniel, too, and then threw their bodies in the river only Daniel wasn't dead. One of Hunter's teams found him and Emmalyn saved his life by taking a bullet out of his skull. Daniel had amnesia at first but gradually all the memories came back. He didn't tell anybody because he was sure they would kill him."

Parker switched off the camera that was recording the debriefing. "Does Lee know this?"

"No, sir."

He rubbed his forehead. "Then I'm giving you a direct order to keep this to yourself. I'll tell Hunter to keep quiet when he gets back this afternoon. I don't want this in the report since other people will see it."

"Why?"

"Because it might not be true. The last thing Admiral Adama would want is something of this nature getting out and getting back to Commander Cain."

"She knows her sister was taken from Tauron during the First War."

"Lucy Cain was listed as missing and presumed dead twenty-five years ago along with several hundred other Taurons who vanished without a trace. Unless we get positive proof, I think it would be better if she stays dead. Now tell me the rest of it."

"Off the record?"

"Off the record, Kara."

She told him everything she could remember about her conversations with Daniel and about the man himself.

She finished with, "He's an artist and a musician and a writer. I had my little handheld computer. I played him one of Dreilide Thrace's songs. Daniel took a flute and played it back to me…perfectly. He didn't miss a single note. He knows all about mixing paints from rocks and flowers and clay. He showed me a painting he had done of Lucy. She looks like Commander Cain only prettier and younger. He's telling the truth, sir. I know he is."

"Kara, what if this Daniel was a human prisoner of the Cylons and he met another human prisoner, Lucy Cain, and due to being tortured or drugged, they both began to believe the story you just told me?"

Kara shook her head. "He's a Cylon. I think Lucy helped create the Sevens and Eights."

"Commander Cain is an excellent officer. Something like this would be a devastating personal blow not to mention the effect it might have on her career."

"And when it turns out to be true, sir?" Kara said stubbornly.

"We'll deal with it then. Unless that happens, this stays between us. I'm going to share it with Admiral Adama, but verbally only. It won't go into any written report. I'm going to erase any reference to Daniel and Lucy from the recording of your debriefing. Understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"I am curious about why Hunter left a Cylon alive and free among his people? I'm more curious about why he didn't mention Daniel during his own debriefing."

"Hunter didn't know Daniel is a Cylon until I told him on Sunday night. He thought Daniel was a human who had escaped from the city."

Parker rubbed his forehead again. "That's all the more reason not to mention it right now."

"Daniel told me he wished he could meet Helena Cain one day and tell her about Lucy."

"I doubt that will ever happen."

Kara took a deep breath. "I told my dad about Daniel just before I left the planet. I told him about Cavil killing the creators, too."

"What's this about the creators?"

"Daniel said they're dead. They caught Cavil killing his model and he had his centurions kill them, too. The other Cylons don't know it."

"This just keeps getting more fantastic or more unbelievable. I'm not sure which."

"Yes, sir."

"And you told all this to your father?"

"We didn't have much time. All I was able to tell him was that Daniel is a Cylon and the creators are dead."

"What do you think he might do with that information?"

"I don't know, sir. He'll figure out a way to use it. He's not collaborating with them. I don't care what it looks like."

Parker jotted some notes in his notebook. "Any other surprises for me?"

"No, sir."

"If you think of anything else, especially related to what we've just discussed, talk to me about it. No one else. Understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"You can take the rest of the afternoon off. Join Hunter in the park if you'd like. I'll be here until Lee gets back. I've got to get a report ready for Admiral Adama."

"Is Lee going to stay here again tonight?"

"That's the best solution. Darren can't spare the agents now." Parker smiled. "You don't have any objection, do you?"

Kara also smiled. "No, sir. I need to go somewhere on the motorcycle. With traffic it'll probably take forty-five minutes, maybe an hour."

"You need to tell me where and why if I'm going to authorize it."

"Capco, the big drugstore near Lee's apartment. I need to pick up a prescription refill."

Parker nodded.

Kara was glad he hadn't asked her what the prescription was for although he might have guessed. She needed to pick up another birth control patch. She'd used her last one two weeks into her stay on Nereid. It was time for a new one. The very last thing she and Lee needed right now was to find themselves in the situation Sharon and Karl were in.

Then she thought of what the Cylons were making her father do on Nereid. If Yolanda's prophecy was correct, then another child might already be on the way. She tried to picture her father with a half-breed from either D'Anna or the Six he'd called Sonja and what it would mean to his life with Laura and Brae. She couldn't imagine how Laura would deal with it.

She exited the elevator, got on her motorcycle and rode up out of the parking garage onto the street. When she left the drug store, she would ride back to the park and see if Hunter was still there. He'd acted funny at breakfast that morning. So had Lee. She felt like she'd get the story quicker from Hunter.

She would worry about that later. She accelerated into traffic. The afternoon was sunny and beautiful. Right now she was glad just to be home alive and free.

TBC…


	32. Settlement Alpha

Chapter 32

Settlement Alpha

_11. After the galleons of the Thirteeth Tribe landed on their new homeworld, the people searched the land around._

_12. Some said, The soil is rich and fertile for planting._

_13. Others said, The grasses beyond the river are good for grazing sheep and cattle._

_14. The priests lay claim to a high hill for a temple to their God._

_15. The people rejoiced and planned to build a great city with many buildings and houses._

_16. And they called the name of the city Azurra to honor their faithful prophet._

_17. And Xander told his people, Put aside your weapons. We shall have no more need for war._

_18. The dark days of our persecution are behind us. From this day forward we shall live in peace._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Xander, _Chapter 3:11-18

.

Lee sat in a small cubicle at the airbase and several times read over the report from Corporal Lucas Venner's initial debriefing in the hospital. There wasn't much to it, mainly a series of questions by the two agents and Venner's replies which were mostly, _I don't remember, sir_.

There was a note that a doctor had intervened during the interview, saying that the patient needed to rest and had asked the agents to leave. Next in the folder was an initial medical report that stated the corporal had suffered minor non-concussive head trauma resulting in an abrasion of undetermined origin, measuring approximately 5 cm. in diameter. Blood and urine samples were taken but at the time the agents had written their report, the samples had not yet been processed.

Lee moved on to the rest of the report. Corporal Venner's billfold was found on him. His military ID and the keys to his apartment were missing. There were sixty-three cubits as well as his credit cards still in the billfold. What Darren's agents had found out that morning was that the keys were used to enter Venner's apartment and steal one of his uniforms.

While Lee was reading the report, a courier brought the sealed lab analysis. Venner's blood and urine were negative for any of the usual recreational drugs. His blood-alcohol content was zero, but a note was made that the samples were drawn eighteen hours after Corporal Venner said he'd drunk a beer. Any alcohol in his system would have been metabolized by then. There was a trace of a strong prescription only sleep-inducing drug and also a trace of a popular over-the-counter drug used to treat motion sickness. Taken separately neither drug should have caused Venner's confusion and memory loss, but the lab tech had made a note that taken together in sufficient quantities and mixed with alcohol, the result could have caused such an effect.

A more complete picture of what had probably happened to the young Marine was beginning to emerge in Lee's mind.

He moved on to Venner's service record. No red flags of any sort. He knew that all of the Marines who guarded the Cylons had been chosen carefully. None had lost parents, siblings or other loved ones in the holocaust. All ranked high on psychological tests as well-adjusted. Lucas Venner had enlisted at eighteen and from basic training through his last assignment he was an exemplary soldier. There was absolutely nothing in Venner's record to make Lee think he had been involved in Tucker Clellan's plan.

An MP stepped to the cubicle where Lee was sitting. "The Marine has been brought over, sir. He's in room 4."

Lee thanked him, gathered his notes and walked down the hall to the drink machine. He got two soft drinks and entered the room. The young Marine was handcuffed to the table. Lee put the drinks down and stepped back into the hall.

"This man has not been arrested or charged with anything. Remove his handcuffs."

"Yes, sir," one of them said. "You want my opinion, he deserves a medal."

When the cuffs were off and the MP outside the door, Lee closed it, sat down and pushed one of the canned drinks across the table.

"Thank you, sir," Venner said.

While Venner drank, Lee studied him. According to his service record, he would turn twenty in a month. He had a typical Marine haircut, buzzed on the sides, a fraction longer on the top. There was a small bandage on the side of his head. He was very fit, but he was not the least bit handsome. Under the harsh fluorescent lights of the interrogation room and considering what he had been through, Venner didn't look good at all.

Lee indicated the camera mounted on the wall. "I need to inform you that our interview is being recorded."

Venner put the drink down. "Am I going to jail, sir?"

"That depends," Lee said gently, "on whether you had anything to do with what happened at the bunker yesterday morning."

"I didn't report for duty. Is that what I'm in trouble about, sir?"

"You mean no one has told you what happened?"

"They told me somebody killed the Cylon prisoners, sir. That's all."

"Yesterday morning someone using your identification and wearing one of your uniforms entered the cells on the lower level where the Cylon prisoners were being held and detonated a bomb that killed all of them. Corporal Jamal Lester was also killed. Corporal Gorge Guiterrez was injured."

The shock on Venner's face was real. He shook his head several times as he assimilated Lee's words. "Lester is dead, sir?"

"You understand why it's important for us to find out what happened to you."

Venner was close to tears. "I've tried to remember. Most of it is just a blur."

"Start with what you do remember," Lee said. "It might be more than you think."

"I went out Sunday night to a place on Medea Street."

"Had you ever gone there before?"

Venner dropped his eyes. "Yes, sir."

Lee said, "I've been down to Medea Street a few times. There's a lot of bars and other entertaining places down there. Which one did you go to?"

"Glass Slippers."

Venner had just named a strip club.

"You like the girls at Glass Slippers better than any of the other clubs?"

Venner blushed bright red. "Yes, sir."

"Any one in particular?"

He nodded. "Holly."

"So on Sunday night you went to Glass Slippers to see Holly dance. What time was that?"

"About 20:00, sir. I wasn't going to stay long since I had to go on duty the next morning. When I got there I found out that Holly was off so I left. I started walking down Medea Street. I was headed back to the subway stop, but then I decided to have a drink so I went into a bar. I don't remember which one."

"How far did you walk?"

"A couple of blocks, sir."

"Which direction?"

"Toward Acropolis Street, sir."

"Can you tell me anything about the bar?"

"It was dark inside. The bartender was a big guy with his hair pulled back in a ponytail. There was a big television on the wall in the corner. Sam Anders was being interviewed about the game coming up on Saturday night."

"Did you sit at the bar or a table?"

"I sat at the bar, sir, and I ordered a beer."

"On tap or in a bottle?"

"On tap. It was cheaper, sir."

Lee knew it would have been easier for someone to slip something into a mug of beer than into a bottle.

"Did you take any type of medication with the beer or had you taken anything earlier in the evening?"

"No, sir. I don't do drugs if that's what you're asking."

"I don't necessarily mean anything illegal. Maybe a medication for dizziness or motion sickness."

"All I had was the beer, sir. One beer."

"After you ordered the beer, what happened next?"

"That's all I really remember, sir, until I woke up yesterday afternoon in that alley."

"You told a policeman that you had met '_a nice young woman_' and that you had '_left to go back to her place_.' I'm quoting from his report. Is that not what happened, Corporal Venner?"

"I don't remember, sir?"

"Did you make up the part about meeting a woman?" Lee asked gently.

Again Venner dropped his eyes. "No, sir."

"Did you have _anything_ to do with what happened to the Cylons and Jamal Lester, Corporal Venner?" Lee asked more forcefully.

"Sir, no, sir!" Venner answered emphatically.

"Are you protecting someone?"

"No, sir."

"The agents who questioned you in the hospital last night think you helped the man who killed the prisoners and one of your fellow Marines. Unless you can come up with something to help us, that's the way it'll go down. You'll be court-martialed, dishonorably discharged and do jail time, probably a lot of jail time. Think about what that will do to your family. I personally don't think you had anything to do with it, but you've got to help me out. What are you not telling me?"

When Venner finally looked up, he was close to tears and then he pulled himself up straight and seemed to get himself together.

"I should have known no woman who looked like her would be interested in me."

"Describe her to me."

"Blond hair down below her shoulders, real pretty."

When Venner didn't go on, Lee asked, "What was she wearing?"

"Short skirt, tall heels, a dark top cut low. She had real nice…" Venner gestured toward his chest.

"Nice breasts?"

"Yes, sir."

"Big? Small?"

"She was slim. They went with the rest of her. Not like some of the girls that dance at Glass Slippers."

"Age?"

"Twenties, I think. I'm no good telling people's ages."

"Short? Tall?"

"With the heels she was almost as tall as me, sir. I'm five eleven."

"Did she give you a name?"

"She leaned over and whispered it in my ear. I think she said _Sue Ellen_. She bit my earlobe when she said it, sir. Then she asked me if I'd buy her a drink."

"Did you?"

"Yes, sir. She wanted something with vodka. I finished my beer. We talked for a few minutes. I can't remember much after that. I think she said we were going back to her place. Then we were outside and she was helping me into the back of a transport and then I don't remember anything else. Nothing. I swear. Not one thing, sir, until I woke up yesterday afternoon in that alley."

"Do you remember which transport company?"

"No, sir."

"Could she have slipped something in your beer?"

"Maybe. She leaned over to talk to me. I was, uh, I was looking down the front of her sweater."

"Do you think she could have been a working girl, a prostitute?"

"I don't think so, sir. She looked too classy to be in a bar on Medea Street. What's going to happen to me now, sir?"

"You're going to be our guest for forty-eight hours out here at the base since at the current time you're considered a material witness to this investigation. Agent Darren's men need time to complete their investigation. They you'll either be allowed to go home or arrested as an accomplice."

"I'll go to jail?"

"If Darren's agents can verify your story about the bar on Medea Street, I think you'll be going home. Otherwise it will be jail."

Lee got up and opened the door. Venner went out and the two MPs escorted him down the hall. Lee switched off the recording device, went back to the small cubicle, used the laptop and immediately wrote up his impressions of the interview. Major Parker would be able to watch the recording, but he always wanted to read his interrogators impressions as well. There was only one thing that Lee left out of his report. He wouldn't have made the connection at all if Kara hadn't mentioned Shelley Sydell and her close friendship with Tucker Clellan. Shelley was blond, slim, pretty and she had very nice breasts. But that description and age range also fit thousands of women in Caprica City. It was probably a coincidence.

He filed the report electronically in a secure folder and sent Parker an email telling him it was ready. Then Lee left the base and walked out into the late afternoon sunshine. He tried to dismiss the thought that kept niggling around the edges of his brain. Could Shelley possibly have been the classy blond who drugged Venner and set him up to be robbed? Tucker's action had already destroyed lives. Lee didn't really want to make it one more.

…

Kara got to the park just as the pyramid game was ending. Hunter's jeans were dirty and he was sweaty, but he looked happy.

"We're here most afternoons," one of the guys called to him as the others walked toward an exit. You're welcome anytime, especially if you bring your girlfriend."

Hunter used the bottom of his t-shirt to wipe his face as he and Kara walked to the water fountain. He drank for a long time. Then they found a bench and sat.

"I guess you had fun," she said.

He stretched his legs out in front of him and put his arms on the back of the bench. "I hope I get to do it again."

"Parker's going to talk to you and tell you to keep quiet about Daniel being a Cylon. He doesn't want us saying anything to anybody including Lee."

Hunter shrugged. "That's fine with me."

Kara grinned. "You had a lot to drink last night, didn't you?"

"A couple of beers at the Lamplighter. One more after I got back to the apartment."

"What were you and Lee talking about?"

"A movie at first and then the two women who tried to pick me up."

"You're kidding me."

Hunter smiled. "Nope."

"That's all you talked about?"

"Mostly."

"So why were you both acting funny around me this morning at breakfast?"

"I told Lee I kissed you."

"Frak, Hunter, I can't believe you did that."

"I thought you'd already told him."

"I was waiting for the right time."

"I'm sorry. I want things to be okay between me and Lee. We're going back to my planet one day. I want him to know I'll have his back just like I hope he'll have mine."

Kara sat brooding. Now it looked to Lee like she had been trying to hide something when she hadn't.

"Hey, I said I'm sorry," Hunter said again after a few minutes.

"I thought about telling him a couple of times but…whenever we're alone…we always…"

"I know what you and Lee do when you're alone."

"What did he say?"

"I offered to let him hit me, but he didn't."

"That's not Lee's style."

"I told him not to give you any grief about it."

"He won't. I told you Lee keeps things to himself."

"I told him I was sorry I did it, but that was a lie."

Kara took a deep breath. "Hunter…"

"You don't need to explain anything to me. I know how it is. I know my situation and I know yours so let's just drop it."

The sat without speaking for a long time. Finally Kara said, "I've got the bike. Want a ride back to the apartment?"

"I'm dirty and smelly. You go ahead. I'll walk."

She stood and zipped up the leather jacket. "The day we met you were dirty and smelly. I can handle it."

"I'll walk. If you got a few cubits, I'll stop by that store on the corner and get another six-pack of beer."

She pulled the folded paper cubits from her pocket that had been her change from picking up her birth-control patch and handed them to him.

"That should be enough."

They had almost reached the entrance to the park when he said, "I was just trying to make things right with Lee. I felt like it was between us."

"Just let it go, Hunter." She grinned. "After you get back to the apartment and take a shower, I want to hear about the two women you met."

"I felt like Rick Spade…almost."

"Who?"

Hunter smiled. "I can tell you never read the Rick Spade stories. Otherwise you wouldn't have asked."

…

Lee sat in his car in the parking lot at the airbase and took out his phone. He had never returned Kendra's call from the night before. He scrolled to her work number. She answered on the first ring.

She said, "I guess you've been busy."

"More than busy."

"You know who did it, don't you?"

"I know."

"I looked him up. He graduated from the Academy and Flight School with you."

"I know, Kendra."

"You can't talk about it, can you?"

"No. Have you told Saunders or anyone else?"

"I didn't have to. One of the pilots found out. Don't ask me how. He told the rest of them."

"Damn," Lee said. "That is not what I want to hear. The investigation is far from over."

"Are things okay with you and Kara?"

"Things are fine with me and Kara. Look, I've got to go, but we'll probably be at Zeno's after the pyramid championship Saturday night. You and Saunders are welcome to join us."

"I'll talk to him and let you know later in the week."

He ended the call and sat for a few minutes. He glanced at his watch, saw that it was nearly 17:00 and wondered if Major Parker had finished Kara's debriefing. It would depend on how much Parker asked her to repeat of the story she and Hunter had already told. Trying not to think about how Tucker Clellan's act had affected their lives, he pulled out of the parking lot and joined the end-of-day traffic from the base going back into the city.

He got to the apartment forty-five minutes later. Kara and Hunter were watching the news. Major Parker was in the debriefing room with the door closed.

Kara said. "Guess what got delivered to Major Parker this afternoon."

"Give me a hint," Lee answered.

"My flight suit and mobile phone. Of course the battery is dead. I need the charger from your apartment."

"I'll try to get by there tomorrow," he said as he walked past them into the kitchen.

Kara glanced at Hunter. Lee was definitely distracted about something. The refrigerator door opened and closed. She waited. Lee didn't come back into the living room. Finally she got up and went into the kitchen. He was standing at the window looking down at the street. He had a beer in his hand.

She walked over to him. "What's wrong?" She asked softly.

"Maybe nothing," he said.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not yet."

"How did the questioning go? Major Parker told me you'd gone to the airbase to question someone."

"I think he'll be pleased. I'm as sure as I can be that I got the truth from the…person I was questioning."

Kara put her hand on his shoulder and turned him toward her. "Whatever is bugging you let it go until you can do something about it."

Lee forced a smile. "You're right. How did your debriefing go?"

"We covered the same territory we'd already covered. Then Major Parker let me leave. I took the bike to Capco and got another patch." She smiled. "I don't think we're ready for Lee junior yet."

"Did Hunter go with you?"

"No. He went to the park and played a pick-up game of pyramid with some guys. I gave him some cubits and he stopped by the store and got us more beer."

"I told Kendra that we were going to Zeno's Saturday night after the game. I asked her and Saunders to join us."

Kara's face lit up. "_After the game_? Did you get tickets to the championship game?"

"Frak. I was going to surprise you. I called a friend of Zak's and he got four tickets. I invited Maya to go with Hunter."

Kara rubbed his shoulder. "I'll act surprised."

He put his arm around her, pulled her to him and just held her.

She asked, "Are you going to stay with us tonight or do we get one of Darren's men?"

"You're stuck with me again."

She kissed his earlobe. "What a shame."

Lee had just leaned in to kiss her when they heard the door to the interview room open. They stepped apart a few seconds before Parker walked into the kitchen.

"I looked at the recording and read your notes," he said to Lee. "You did an excellent job with the corporal, better than I could have done."

"I doubt that, sir," Lee said modestly.

"I'm serious. You had his trust less than a minute into the interview when you told him you'd been down to Medea Street, too."

"That wasn't the truth," Lee admitted. "Medea Street is mostly low-end bars and strip clubs."

Parker smiled. "All good interrogators stretch the truth on occasion."

"I felt sorry for him. He's a year younger than Zak. That could have been my brother sitting exactly where the corporal was sitting."

"I still think you should reconsider the law school offer and leave the flying to others." Parker glanced at Kara when he mentioned flying.

Lee smiled. "Give me another year in the cockpit, at least until things are over on Nereid."

Kara said to Parker, "Our dinner was delivered an hour ago. Are you going to be eating with us tonight, sir?"

"Not that I don't enjoy your company, but I'm going home to my wife and kids tonight. I was too late last night to even see Leah and Mark before they were in bed."

"I hope you're the one who debriefs my dad when we get him back here," Kara said.

"I'm sure I'll be on the team."

After he was gone, Lee and Kara got the dinner out of the refrigerator. It was a chicken and pasta dish. She put it into the microwave to heat while Lee put the big container of salad on the table and got salad bowls from the cabinet.

She put her arms around his neck and kissed him lightly on the lips. She grinned. "I think law school is a great idea. At the rate I'm going, I'll need a lawyer in the family."

He smiled before he kissed her back. "At the rate you're going, one won't be enough."

…

Bill was quiet during dinner, perhaps because of what he had come to discuss, but mainly, Laura felt, because Braedon was fussy and demanding attention. For the second day in a row he had not taken a nap and he was now very tired. He didn't want anything on his plate and when Maya tried to feed him, his fretting turned into howls of protest punctuated by the word that he seemed to employ regularly now. _No._

Maya lifted him from his highchair and excused herself.

"He's tired," Laura said. "He's not usually this fussy."

As the sound of Braedon's wails diminished down the hall, Bill picked up his glass of wine. "He reminds me of Zak when he was that age. Zak was always quick to let us know when he didn't like something. Lee was quieter."

"Lee has always impressed me with his sense of responsibility."

Bill's eyes took on a far-away look.

"Carolanne did all right with Lee. He was good baby, quiet and serious…and smart. You could almost see the wheels turning in his brain. He walked early and talked early. We hadn't planned on having another child, at least not so soon. I'm still not sure what happened."

Laura chuckled as she admonished him. "Bill Adama. You know very well what happened."

Bill took a deep breath and looked embarrassed. "In hindsight I think Carolanne's drinking started after Zak was born. I wasn't home much in those days."

"You weren't home much the whole time your sons were growing up, were you?"

He finished the glass of wine and poured another. "No. I would have sacrificed my career, to stay on a planet. Without being on a battlestar, I'd never have gotten the promotions as quickly."

Laura put her fork down. "Sometimes Brae is the sweetest child and sometime he's such a handful and he's not even two yet. I can't imagine how I would cope if I were a young mother with two young children."

"I think Carolanne would have done all right with just Lee. I think two were too much for her. She found a way to cope and I turned a blind eye. My mother told me what was going on. I never believed it was as bad as she said until…until Carolanne washed down a handful of pills with a bottle of booze when Lee was sixteen."

"It's the past, Bill."

The faraway look finally left his eyes. He glanced at her plate. "You need to eat something and quit pushing your food around with your fork."

Dutifully Laura speared a few more green beans and put them into her mouth.

"What news do you have?" She asked after she had swallowed.

"The autopsy reports."

"Any surprises?"

"No. All deaths were the result of the bomb."

"Do we have funeral arrangements yet for the young Marine? I want to get it on my calendar and let Edgar know so he can plan security. He absolutely hates it when I throw a last-minute trip at him."

"Two days from now at Asteria Cemetery. 10:00. Lester's family is being flown in from Delphi, his mother and father and a younger sister."

"Are you going to speak at the service?"

Bill nodded. "I don't have any idea what I'm going to say yet. The usual words about honor and duty seem inadequate. A great many people think we should have tried and executed the Cylons months ago. They're going to blame the military and the government for letting this happen."

"I know."

"So what do I say?"

"Find out something about Corporal Lester. Talk to his fellow Marines, to his CO, to the people who knew him. Don't make your speech about his death. Make it about his life. Model it on the eulogy Captain Jessups gave at John's memorial."

He nodded again. "That brings us to what to do about the Cylons."

Laura took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. "Would you think me a coward if I said I wish I didn't have to make that decision?"

"No one wants to make it. I have a suggestion if you're open to suggestions."

She managed a smile. "I'd welcome a suggestion from you about what to do with the Cylons' remains."

"Cremate them and let us take their ashes to one of the other planets and scatter them in the atmosphere. I think it's fitting to add their ashes to those of some of their victims. That way there won't be graves to serve for anyone to desecrate. I don't want those murdering bastards to continue wreaking havoc here on Caprica even after they're dead. I saw the news video of the clash outside the hotel. If the Cylons' bodies are left on the planet, these groups will continue to polarize the issue. It will be never ending. We need to move on."

"I like your idea. Which planet?"

"I'm going to suggest Gemenon since that was where the monotheistic church was the strongest and I'm going to suggest that Commander Cain ferry them to their final resting place."

Laura thought about his suggestion. "So we let Helena Cain play Charon for the dead Cylons and ferry them across the Styx and the Acheron, figuratively speaking, of course, and our government pays the coin. Yes, it's better than a burial."

"Should I make the arrangements?" Bill asked.

"Yes, please. The sooner the better."

"The _G_ and the _Penelope_ will return to Caprica on Thursday. We could arrange it for early next week. They can jump there and back. It's a one-day mission. You'll make the announcement to the press?"

"As soon as the _Galactica_ breaks orbit with their ashes. What about Tucker Clellan's body?"

"There was very little left of it. The medical examiner was able to get a fingerprint and enough for a DNA analysis. The fingerprint matched the one we have on file for him. We're waiting on the DNA to see if it matches, too, but we're not expecting any surprises. His remains will be released to his next of kin as soon as that's complete."

Laura closed her eyes. "I thought Lee told Major Parker that Tucker's family died in the bombing of Antioch."

"There must be someone even if it's a distant relative."

Maya appeared in the doorway with Braedon in his pajamas. "I apologize for interrupting," she said to Laura, "but he wants you to read his bedtime story. He wants his mamma."

Laura turned to Bill and smiled. "This is what makes everything worthwhile for me, knowing that my son is going to grow up free."

She walked to the doorway and took Braedon from Maya. He was already sleepy, rubbing his eyes with a little fist, the pacifier moving in his mouth. She smoothed back his hair and kissed him. He put his head on her shoulder. The Cylons and death were temporarily forgotten as she held her son in her arms. He was her miracle, her gift from the gods and the man she loved. He was the child she never thought she'd have and he owned her heart.

…

Dawn was still over the horizon when John and Sonja left the apartment building and walked five blocks to where the transportation vehicles were kept. Two centurions stood outside the entrance to the vehicle garage. They recognized Sonja. The big door began rising.

"Good morning," John said to the centurions as their red eyes scanned him.

Sonja struggled to suppress a laugh as they walked inside. "D'Anna told me you were talking to the centurion outside the park yesterday. Did you have a nice conversation?"

"Did you send it in to be checked like you said you were going to do?"

"I only told Leoben that to placate him. All the centurions in the city have been ordered to protect the women and children. I'm afraid Leoben may have come across as hostile. I talked to him about toning down his aggression. Since Rika's death and what Yusef did to him, he's not been himself."

"Maybe Cavil needs to send him back to have his programming adjusted like he keeps doing to D'Anna or do the guys get a free pass on deviant behavior?"

All he got from Sonja was a slight eye roll. She had gotten that human mannerism down pat.

The vehicles were parked in rows with thick electrical cords coming from above plugged into their batteries.

Sonja disconnected the cord from the nearest one and got into a vehicle that was larger than the one they had taken to the temple and to the airfield. It had another seat behind the two front ones. She indicated that he should drive and they went back to the building to get D'Anna. John stayed in the vehicle and waited. Sonja was inside for a long time. John watched the gray eastern sky turn pink. They couldn't be more than half an hour from sunrise. It would take them almost fifteen minutes to reach the airfield.

Finally Sonja and D'Anna exited the building. Sonja was carrying a small bucket. Even in the dim light, he could tell D'Anna was paler than usual. She got into the front seat beside him and Sonja handed her the bucket before she slid in behind them. John started off slowly and carefully, but D'Anna still leaned over the bucket and retched.

"I'm sorry," he said to her.

"We're late. You need to go faster," Sonja said.

He pressed the accelerator and the vehicle reached its top speed which was about 35 miles an hour. He couldn't tell since it didn't have a speedometer. They passed the hangars for the Heavy Raiders and continued for another quarter mile. The big cargo ship was already on the tarmac. John was shocked to see that it looked almost identical to one he had flown for over three years on Caprica. He pulled up beside it, Sonja and D'Anna got out and he drove into the hangar where he parked the vehicle out of sight of the entrance.

He jogged back to the ship. Sonja and D'Anna were already on board getting settled into two of the six jump seats that served to carry passengers. From the looks of the seats, they hadn't been used in a long time.

"This is a Colonial ship," he said to Sonja. "I flew one similar to it for a couple of years."

"Yes. The design is one we've found very useful for transporting cargo on the surface of the planet. We took several of them from Scorpia."

"I don't suppose those centurions would let me sit in the navigator's seat, would they? I'd like to see the settlement from the air."

While Sonja went into the cockpit, John sat down in the seat beside D'Anna. There was a strong odor of tylium fumes in the air from the recently fueled ship. That was one of the smells that had made Laura the sickest. D'Anna leaned over the bucket and gagged again.

"Hang in there, okay? I know this is tough on you."

She looked miserable but managed to give him a nod. Sonja came back and indicated that John could go forward in the ship. The first thing he noticed was that the cockpit door had been removed to make it easier for the centurions to get inside. The pilots were already in their seats. One of them activated the control that closed the outside door. John sat down in the navigator's seat directly behind the copilot and strapped himself in.

"Good morning, guys," he said. "Welcome to the flight deck. Had your coffee already? I didn't think so. Me either. I don't guess we'll get any in-flight service. How long is our flight this morning?"

He got no indication from either of them that they had even heard him although he knew they had. Their heads stayed pointing forward. The same thing had happened at the garage in town. Neither centurion had acknowledged his greeting there either. That made the incident in the park yesterday more of an anomaly. Based on what Sonja had just told him, the centurion with the bullet scar may not have acted on what John had told it, but it gave the appearance that it had listened to him.

In only minutes they were accelerating down the runway and then they were in the air. He had to hand it to the centurions. Their takeoff was smooth and flawless and he felt it in his gut almost like he was at the controls. It was a feeling that he always got on takeoff, a feeling that had never gotten old for him. He didn't think it ever would.

The navigator's seat swiveled so he turned it at an angle to get a better view. For a few minutes all he could see was the dawn sky as the ship climbed, and then it leveled off. The sun was just above the horizon. The sky was cloudless. Vision was limited only by the curvature of the planet. The centurion pilot banked the ship and when it again resumed a straight line, John glanced at the directional indicator. They were headed southeast. He remembered from Lee's recon footage that the lab-prison complex was almost due east of the city so this settlement was somewhere south of the high plateau.

The land underneath them was heavily forested as far as he could see in all directions. After twenty minutes in the air it began to open up into a broad vista of farmland and plowed fields that were already showing rows of green growth. Occasionally there were small clusters of buildings that John took to be dwellings of some sort. Amid the fields there were patches of forest and small lakes. Far to the west he saw a large swath of trees that were white with blooms, perhaps an apple or pear orchard. Hundreds of miles farther west he saw the mountains. The land was far more settled and cultivated than Hunter's valley, but it was just as beautiful.

The ship began to lose altitude and fifteen minutes later the big settlement came into view. Wide irrigation ditches ran through the fields surrounding the dwellings. The ditches criss-crossed each other, and John realized that they would also have presented a formidable barrier to anyone trying to escape unseen in the night. They were definitely too deep and too wide to wade across. In the distance to the south there was the gleam of water, part of a wide river or maybe a large lake. The ship banked left until it had completed nearly a full circle and he saw the landing strip in front of them. It was on the far eastern side of the buildings that made up a sizable town. In less than a minute the centurions brought the ship down in what John had to admit was a perfect landing, every bit as good as their takeoff. He barely felt them touch the runway. The entire trip from wheels up to wheels down had lasted forty minutes. He quickly did the math, averaging their airspeed and time in the air and calculated that they were roughly three hundred fifty miles southeast of Caprica City give or take fifty miles. Forty minutes by air, weeks on foot, not to mention the natural barriers they would have to cross like the streams and rivers. Until they had reached the farmland, he had not noticed any roads. If the vanished Thirteenth Tribe had ever built them, the forest had long ago reclaimed them.

As he and Sonja had dressed that morning, she had told him that this was the largest of the settlements, containing nearly ten thousand humans. The main crops were wheat, corn and potatoes although they grew other vegetable crops for their own consumption. While he helped D'Anna off the ship, however, he realized that he had yet to see a single human. The centurion pilots clanked past without any type of acknowledgement of their passengers and went to the back of the ship where they lowered the cargo ramp. Dozens of others began carrying crates onto the ship, walking single file up one side of the ramp and coming down the opposite side.

He turned to Sonja. "What now?"

"Natalie's dwelling is a mile and a half from here. She doesn't live in the main part of the town. I usually walk unless it's raining. Is walking going to be a problem?"

"Not for me," John said.

D'Anna added, "I can manage."

As they walked along in the fresh early morning air, John noticed that some of the color began returning to D'Anna's face. About half a mile from the airfield Sonja turned from the main road onto a smaller unpaved one that wound northwest toward some trees. There was a cultivated field on one side and a grassy fenced meadow on the other. There were rows of small plants in the cultivated field, but the meadow was empty.

"A short cut," she said.

"I don't know the first thing about farming," John said. "What are those plants?"

"Sweet potatoes, I think," Sonja answered. "You can ask Natalie. She knows all about what they grow here."

"What's the fence for?" he asked. "I don't see any livestock."

"Sometimes there are sheep in there," Sonja answered and wrinkled her nose. "I'm glad they're not here today. They smell."

The road ended and a path led off at an angle through fairly dense woods. John heard water running nearby, a brook or stream bubbling over rocks. They walked for another mile and then the path ran out of the woods into an area that contained a vegetable garden and beyond that a small, austere dwelling. It looked like one of the prefab houses that had been constructed on Tauron following the First War to temporarily house the many refugees displaced by the destruction of large parts of the city during the fighting. John now wondered if one of the ships that the Cylons had captured had contained the wall and roof panels for this type of house.

He saw a small patio composed of hand-made bricks. Part of the house was hidden from the garden by a tall hedge.

"That's where Natalie lives," Sonja informed them.

"She's the First Six," D'Anna said. "Why would she live here when she could live in the city? She could have her pick of any apartment she wanted."

"She's never said," Sonja answered. 'I'll agree. This place is a dump, but it's not as bad as the hovels those valley humans live in."

"This place is not a _dump_," John said emphatically. "I've got a little beach cottage not much bigger than this."

They followed the path around the garden and stopped. On the other side of the hedge was a small area that faced the rising sun. A Six with dark blond hair pulled into a ponytail was standing immobile on one leg in a yoga pose as was the lean man who faced her. He was probably in his seventies.

They all stood without moving for nearly a minute. Then Natalie gracefully lowered her foot to the ground and opened her eyes. If she was surprised to see them, she gave no indication.

"Take D'Anna inside," she said to Sonja. "And put the water on for tea." She looked John over and said, "You can stay out here or go inside with them."

Thinking the women might want some privacy, John said, "I'll stay out here."

Sonja disappeared through the open doorway with D'Anna. Natalie glanced at the old man and they resumed their yoga session. Her body was leaner than Sonja's or maybe slightly more muscled and her skin had a light tan. She was dressed in a dark-colored sleeveless body-hugging top and tights of the same color that left her feet bare. Ten minutes later she and the old man bowed to each other. The session was over.

Natalie motioned John over. She was wearing no makeup, yet her beauty was as clear as the serene look in her eyes.

"You must be Major Gallagher," she said to him as she held out her hand in the distinctly human greeting. "Sonja has spoken of you."

He took her hand briefly. It wasn't as soft as Sonja's. Natalie was used to working with her hands.

"Please call me John, and you are obviously Natalie."

She smiled. "Obviously. This is Yoshimo, my teacher, my spiritual advisor _and_ my friend."

John nodded to the old man. "My pleasure," he said.

Yoshimo bowed to him and then to Natalie. "I will leave you now."

"Don't run off on my account," John said.

Natalie said, "Yoshimo has other stops to make this morning. I'm not his only pupil. There is an Eight who lives nearby who is also undergoing his training."

Yoshimo walked around the side of the house.

"You're not exactly what I expected," John said and smiled.

Natalie smiled coolly. "You are. With the exception that you're a few years older than the men Sonja usually chooses."

John wasn't sure how to take her remark and she didn't elaborate. She walked through the open doorway into the house and he followed.

The house was one open space. The walls were white, the floor, light-colored polished wood. In one corner nearest the door sat a low square wooden table surrounded by hard black cushions. The only color in the room came from a tri-fold screen that partially concealed a sleeping area. The screen had a black background and a number of multi-colored figures and symbols painted on it. It looked antique. John saw part of a low black platform behind the screen that held a mattress with a white quilt spread neatly over it. There was a small, black three-drawer chest at the foot of the bed with a red bowl on top of it. Across from the chest was a low black bookcase filled with books. He saw a closed door that probably concealed a bathroom or a closet, possibly both. He also saw the frame of a large painting on the wall across from the foot of the bed, but from his angle, he couldn't tell what its subject matter was.

D'Anna, still clutching her bucket, was sitting on one of several thicker black cushions on the other side of the room. Sonja had busied herself heating water in a kettle on a small two-burner stove.

Natalie gestured to the cushion beside D'Anna. "Please, have a seat."

John sat. He patted D'Anna's leg. "Feeling any better?"

"I don't feel as nauseated. I'm just tired."

"How's the headache?"

"Better now that we're on the ground and away from that awful smell."

He once again felt pity for her. Never once had he heard her complain about what she was enduring. He placed the bucket on the floor and put his arm around her. She leaned her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes.

By the time the tea was ready, she was asleep. Sonja helped him stretch D'Anna out on the cushions. Natalie got the white quilt from her bed and covered her sleeping sister. She then put the teapot on a tray with three cups. Sonja took a plate that contained some cookies and the three of them went outside and sat at a small wooden table in the corner of the patio area.

"I know most humans prefer coffee," Natalie said. It was a statement, not an apology.

"Not all of us. My wife is a tea-drinker," John said. "I learned to drink it while she was pregnant with our son. She couldn't take the smell of coffee."

"And now you're going to have another son."

"So D'Anna says."

Natalie looked at him quizzically. "Are you questioning the child's paternity?"

"No. I believe I'm the baby's father. I just don't understand how she can know it's a boy this soon."

Natalie's blue eyes locked on his. "How do you feel about having another child?"

"Isn't that what I was taken to the city to do?"

"That's not an answer to my question."

"In truth, I'm not sure how I _feel_ about it. It is what it is."

"Do you believe as Sonja does that the child will bring peace to our two races?"

John shrugged. "I think that's putting a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of a little baby that hasn't even been born yet. He might want to play drums in a rock band."

His remark earned him another eye roll from Sonja.

She said, "We brought D'Anna here for the doctors to check her. She's having a lot of headaches. She gets dizzy, too. We know we can't take her to their clinic. Do you think you could get them to come here?"

Natalie smiled. "Is that why you've all come to visit me?"

"That and we need to talk to you about something," Sonja replied. "Do you think they'll do it?"

"Why don't you go ask them?"

"I'd like to go with her," John said.

"No," Natalie said quickly. "It would be better if you stayed here. The fewer people who know you accompanied Sonja and D'Anna, the better. We can trust the doctors not to talk, but if you're seen in town…it would just be better if that didn't happen." She turned to Sonja. "Tell Bianca and Laszlo I'm inviting them for dinner. Don't mention John and ask them to bring whatever they might need to examine a pregnant woman. Tell them to be discrete." She smiled broadly. "You might also want to tell them that I'm not the patient."

"We can't stay that long," Sonja said. "The transport ship will leave to go back to the city after lunch today. If we stay until dinner, we'll miss it."

"There will be another one in two days. Do you have a problem staying here until then?"

"I don't," John said.

"I didn't bring a change of clothes," Sonja said petulantly.

Natalie smiled. "I can loan you something. We _are_ sisters."

That seemed to placate Sonja and after finishing her tea, she left.

"This is a nice place," John said to Natalie. "You've done a lot in less than six years. Does the town have a name?"

"We refer to it as Settlement Alpha which is what the creators called it. It's the oldest settlement on the planet. Not the oldest one if you include the vanished Thirteenth Tribe or the humans in the valley, but the oldest of the modern settlements. It was started twenty-five years ago for the humans the creators brought with them from Tauron and from some other ships the centurions had taken. Their first lab became the clinic where Bianca and Laszlo now see patients."

"How far is it to the clinic?" John asked.

"A little over a mile. It's on the edge of town. It will take Sonja an hour to walk there and back plus whatever time she spends talking to them."

"You walk everywhere you go?"

"I walk back and forth to town."

"The Cylons in the city have solar and battery-powered carts."

"We have those here, too, as well as tractors and harvesters and trucks. I choose to live much as the humans of this settlement do and they walk except when they're taken to the distant fields."

"Does everybody have a place as nice as this?"

"Some are much nicer."

John was surprised. "Some of the humans live better than you?"

"Most live much like this or in larger communal buildings. Most of my brothers and sisters have bigger places with more modern amenities. The clinic is very nice. Sonja tells me that you know the doctors."

"They saved my life when I had pneumonia. Something about Bianca reminds me of my mother…or how I imagine my mother would have looked if she'd reached Bianca's age. I'm looking forward to seeing her again. To seeing both of them."

"I help them on occasion."

"How?"

She smiled. "Bandage skinned knees. Mop the floor. Whatever needs to be done."

"I think you're pulling my leg. That's a human phrase that means…"

She was still smiling. "I'm aware of what it means…and I'm not pulling your leg. Yoshimo tells me that in order to understand the will of God, we must learn to serve others."

John was completely baffled by now. How did Sonja think Natalie would be any help to them in bringing about changes in the breeding practices or anything else for that matter? She sounded like she was just a few steps away from sequestering herself in a convent or handing out alms to the poor.

"I see you don't agree with me," Natalie said.

"It's not that. Serving others is a noble thing to do. It's just that from the way Sonja talked about you, I'd imagined…I don't know…more of a warrior personality. More conviction. More fire."

"Is that because you're a warrior, John?"

"I was once."

"And now?"

He chucked softly. "Now I'm your prisoner."

"For a prisoner you have a remarkable degree of freedom, don't you think?"

"Now I do. That wasn't always the case. I spent almost four months in your prison."

"Do you have a relationship with Sonja as well as D'Anna?"

"D'Anna hasn't had any interest in me since she found out she's pregnant. Sonja is my handler because the council considers D'Anna too unstable. I'm sure she'll tell you anything else you want to know."

She smiled. "You should have just said _Yes, Natalie, I'm sleeping with Sonja now_. There's no need to try to protect her reputation or her privacy. I know her too well. Or are you ashamed of the relationship because you consider her a machine?"

He looked out across the garden and didn't answer her.

"I notice you wear a wedding ring." She continued. "Humans seem to wear their rings even after the spouse dies. You mentioned a wife and son. Are you a widower or is your wife still alive?"

"She's still alive."

"So you don't love Sonja."

"No."

"How sad…for her. She needs a man like you instead of the twenty-year-old boys she's been culling from the settlements and taking to the city. Most of them satisfy certain physical needs she has, but she tires of them quickly. If you have no feelings for her, are you using her to accomplish something or simply using her?"

"I didn't say I don't have _any_ feelings for her. She saved my life a couple of times. There is something between us. I'm just not _in love_ with her. My wife is back on Caprica. That's where my heart is."

The silence stretched. John poured some more tea and listened to the birds.

Finally he said, "Sonja said you'd never chosen a man from among the humans. You just accused me of being prejudiced. Are you not equally prejudiced?"

"No."

"Do you mind if I ask why you choose to live alone like this when I'm sure you could have your pick of men?"

"I don't mind if you ask. I hope you won't mind if I don't answer."

"Is it because of losing Daniel?"

Anger flashed through her eyes and hardened her voice. "Sonja talks too much."

"There's a copy of him alive in the valley. I saw him a couple of days ago."

Her expression fluctuated between anger and hope. "You're lying." When he didn't say anything, she added, "Do you expect me to believe that you've been to the valley? You were taken from the prison. You might have been allowed some freedom to roam the city but that certainly doesn't include trips to visit the humans in the valley."

"I shouldn't have said anything without Sonja here. That's what we came to talk to you about. Let's wait for her to get back."

Natalie got up, took the pot of cold tea and the empty plate and went into the house. John stayed outside and watched a dozen birds pecking around the edges of the garden. A large orange cat wandered out from underneath the hedge and the birds flew. He watched it stretch, circumnavigate the garden and disappear into the woods. The birds came back. Fifteen minutes later Natalie returned with a fresh pot of tea and more cookies. John helped himself.

"These are good," he said. "Did you make them?"

"Yes. Bianca came up with the recipe. She told me that nuts are one of nature's most complete foods. I sent several centurions out scouting and they found a large grove of walnut trees about thirty miles northwest of here. We go there each fall and bring back truckloads."

John ate three of the four cookies on the plate. "I'm hungry. We missed breakfast this morning."

"Take the other one," she said and gazed out over the garden for a long time. Finally she asked, "What did he look like?"

"You don't want to wait for Sonja?"

"No."

"About your height, brown hair, curly or wavy, light brown eyes. His voice was…gentle is the best way I can describe it although he was terrified that Sonja was going to out him to the people of the valley. They think he's a human who escaped from the city after being at the prison."

"But she didn't betray him."

"No."

"You're going to have to tell me everything."

"Are you sure you don't want to wait for Sonja?"

"No. I'll talk to her later."

John started at the beginning and told her everything he could remember about that day. He knew that's the only way she would ever trust him. When he finished, they sat for a long time in silence again.

Finally she said, "I was there at the lab the day it happened. I was too late to do anything."

"You saw what Cavil did?"

"His centurions did it, but I didn't see them. I saw the results."

"I'm surprised he let you live. Daniel told my daughter that he killed the creators when they tried to stop him."

"Cavil didn't see me or he would have killed me and boxed my copy. I hid in a storage locker."

"Who else knows this besides you and the Daniel in the valley?"

"Everyone believes the creators accidentally exposed one Daniel to a lethal virus and that when he died, he introduced it into the res tanks for the others of his model. The truth is known only by the Cavil I've come to think of as the Angel of Death and the One in the city…and me."

"And the one remaining copy of Daniel."

"Yes."

John contemplated his next sentence and then said, "I told Sonja about the creators because it came up after she saw Daniel. At first she denied it. She believes the story about the Sevens dying from a virus. Now I think she's admitted the probability that the creators are dead."

"And D'Anna?"

"No. She believes the lie that Cavil told. I tried to broach the subject of the creators being dead and she got upset. I didn't push it. She's having a rough enough time. I didn't want to make it worse."

They sat in silence again until Natalie asked, "The Daniel in the valley…was he with a human woman?"

"Kara didn't mention one and there wasn't one with him when I saw him. Kara did mention Lucy Cain helping Daniel escape. I don't know if that means anything or not."

Natalie's eyes reflected her surprise. "Lucy escaped? I thought she was killed with the other creators."

"I thought you said you saw them dead."

"I saw blood and bodies on the floor around the Sevens' res tanks. I didn't have time to stop and count. I heard Cavil's centurions on their way to clean up. I had to hide in the locker. I waited hours before I came out. By then the bodies had been taken away. How did Lucy escape?"

"I don't know. All Kara told me was that Cavil had his centurions shoot Lucy and Daniel and throw them into the river. Lucy was killed. Daniel survived but had a bullet lodged in his skull. Some men found him and took him back to the valley. One of the women took the bullet out. I saw the scar."

"He was a beautiful man," she said, "with so much talent."

"Why were all the copies of him at the lab? Why was it so easy for Cavil to kill him?"

"That was over six years ago. There weren't nearly as many copies of the models as there are now. The lab was still here in this settlement. We all lived at the lab then except the ones who ventured into the forest to fight the valley people. The creators were still working on us."

"So when did one of the Cavils decide to lead a group of you to the Colonies and destroy them?"

"Shortly after that. At the time the Sevens and the creators were killed there were sixteen Ones. A consensus among them would have been necessary to hide the murders. Afterward they activated many thousands of copies of all of us and populated a dozen baseships. One of them began preaching war and the annihilation of the human race and managed to convince a great many that if we didn't destroy you, you would come here one day and destroy us. They said some humans had already breached the Armistice Zone. They showed us a pilot who had been captured. They were very convincing."

"So it wasn't about destroying humanity because you considered us a flawed creation?"

"No. It was because of Cavil's fear that you would come here and destroy us. The idea that we consider humans flawed was simply his way of concealing the real motive and protecting our homeworld. Of course many of the copies believe in our superiority just like some humans believe they're superior to other humans. We're more like you than you think, John."

Her remark stung because he knew it was true. He had flown cargo with several pilots who delighted in telling jokes that were putdowns of Sagittarons and Taurons.

Finally he asked, "Why would we come here to destroy your homeworld? We didn't even know you were here."

"You'd come here once before. The humans in the valley are proof. Cavil convinced over half of our race that it was only a matter of time until you came here again."

"But all of you didn't go along with his belief."

"No. Another One resisted the doomsday rhetoric and became the leader of the rest of us. We split. Some decided to stay here and the rest went with the Angel of Death. Those of us who stayed here agreed that we should rescue as many of the humans as we could. We did and brought them here. We populated Settlement Alpha and established seven more settlements. Some humans we took literally from the skies before the others could destroy them. Other humans we rescued from the planets after the bombing. We took supplies and the equipment needed to start farms. We took livestock and seed. We had planned to live here in peace, but the humans resisted. They tried to escape. They killed us if they could. We had no choice but to bring in the centurions and…" she shook her head at the memory.

"Make them your slaves. Isn't that what some of you wanted all along?"

"I suppose so. Several of the Ones who stayed here said the humans would never cooperate and accept us as equals. They anticipated your rebellious nature. Some of us thought they would be grateful to have been spared the holocaust visited on the rest of their fellow humans. That wasn't the case. They hated all of us for what others of us had done."

"Then why are you living here with the humans instead of in the city where a lot more of the skin…where more of you live?"

She smiled sadly. "Your prejudices are showing, John."

"Habit. Just like a lot of people still call all Taurons _dirt eaters_."

"Do you blame me for not wanting to live in the city near a copy of the Cavil who allowed the killing of my Daniel? At least the copies of him here in this settlement didn't go along with _that_. They weren't even activated until after the Angel of Death had committed his crime."

"Do you still have any contact with the Cylons who went to Caprica?"

"A year after they left, a Heavy Raider returned with a message from our brothers and sisters saying that they had stopped short of destroying all the Colonies and had settled on Caprica. They wanted the genetic research from the original creators. They wanted to start breeding farms on Caprica. Our Cavil denied it to them and our break with them became final. We've had no contact since."

Natalie stood up and walked to the edge of the garden while John assimilated everything she had told him.

"Is the bathroom through the door near your bed?" he asked.

She nodded. John went into the house. The bathroom was small. There was barely room for a toilet, a sink and a shower. Over the toilet there were several hooks holding towels. There was a small mirror above the sink. It was the only one he had seen in the entire house.

He used the toilet, washed his hands and walked out of the bathroom. He stopped and looked at the painting in the sleeping area. He knew almost nothing about art, but it looked original to him. It was a scene of children playing on a beach. He wondered if Natalie's Daniel had painted it. Once again he thought of his sons playing with the other children. Then he looked at the bookcase. The two shelves were filled with books on history, philosophy, religion and surprisingly, a big six-volume set entitled _A Comprehensive History of Colonial Warfare_. His gaze stopped on the last book on the bottom shelf. Natalie had a copy of _The Evolution of the Machine._

He checked on D'Anna before he went back outside. She was still sleeping soundly.

Natalie was still at the edge of the garden, but had knelt and was petting the orange cat. It had long fur and a plumy tail. The fur under its neck was white as were its feet. It rubbed against her, back and forth. He realized she was talking to it in a soft voice and also realized that no outdoor cat could have fur that long and clean without someone brushing it.

John walked over to her and the cat did a figure-eight around his ankles.

"Yours, I presume," he said.

"No one owns an animal. I feed him and he keeps small creatures out of the house. It's a symbiotic relationship. Yoshimo introduced me to the concept. I've actually grown fond of him."

"Yoshimo or the cat?"

She smiled. "Both of them."

"You brush him, too? The cat. Yoshimo doesn't have any hair to brush."

"Yes."

"Do you have a name for him?"

"Yes."

"You want to share it?"

"I call him Daniel."

They walked back over to the table and sat. John said, "You have some interesting books. Have you read all of them?"

"Most of them more than once."

"Even those six big volumes about the various wars we've fought since history was first recorded?"

"Yes, especially those. I've been trying to understand why your history is so bloody. Even on Kobol the tribes of man were always fighting and killing one another. There's hardly a time in your history when you weren't killing each other for one reason or another."

"I think you've gone a long way toward putting an end to that."

"And now we may have to emulate humans."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you honestly think I've accepted what the Angel of Death did? He killed one of our brothers and to cover his crime, he killed our creators. He killed six innocent people, men and women who had given us life. One of the Sevens he killed was the man I still love."

"What have you got in mind?"

"Justice. The Angel of Death is on Caprica now, but his brother who agreed to cover up his crime is in the city. I've been biding my time and waiting for the right moment. I think it's fast approaching."

"You plan to bring him before the council and put him on trial?"

"I'd like to think it would be that easy, but just as the brothers and sisters were divided over the destruction of humanity, they'll divide over this issue as well. Some will side with me and some will side with him."

"Are you talking about a civil war?"

"Wars are never _civil_."

John said, "I don't mean _civil_ as in _polite_. I mean civil as among yourselves."

"Like the Tauron Civil War eighty years ago."

"That's one example. What will happen to the humans if you start fighting each other?"

"I hope it won't come to that."

"But if it does?"

"Whoever controls the baseships and the centurions will win. It's as simple as that."

"Nothing is ever _that simple_."

"There are forty-six thousand humans on this planet. There are six thousand of my brothers and sisters. There are nearly a hundred thousand centurions. That doesn't count the baseships. We have few weapons unless you count pitchforks and axes. The centurions are our firepower. Now do you see why we need the support of at least half of them?"

"_A hundred thousand_!" John said in shock. "Holy mother of the gods…a hundred thousand. They outnumber the rest of us over two to one and they have all the bullets. You might as well have said a million."

"You understand why I've not tried to act before now. Even if I were able to rally every single human and every one of my brothers and sisters behind me, which I won't be able to do, if we can't gain control of at least half the centurions and at least one baseship, we don't stand a chance."

"What would it take to get the centurions on our side?"

"_Our_ side?"

He smiled. "It's not exactly like I can take the next ship leaving for Caprica."

"The old U-87s are deeply religious. They would join us to the last one if we could prove Cavil killed the creators and the Sevens, but the U-87s number only about five thousand. And we'd need proof. The newer ones would need some modifications. They have a telencephalic inhibitor that keeps them obedient and without sentience. It would have to be manually removed from each one. With the inhibitors in place there's a hierarchy as to who they obey. The Ones are at the top of that hierarchy."

"What would they do if two different Cavils gave them conflicting orders?"

"With the inhibitors still in place they would obey the most senior copy of the model and that's the one in the city."

"We need Daniel to tell his story to us and to one of the old U-87 centurions," John said. "We need to go back to the valley and talk to him. Could you arrange that?"

"Yes. It would take some time but I could do it. I have more leeway to do things than Sonja does."

"More importantly do you think you could handle going there and seeing Daniel?"

She sat very quietly for a moment and then she looked at him. Her eyes held resolve and strength that were evident in her reply.

"Yes."

John took a sip of tea, now grown cold, but he hardly noticed because a crazy plan had begun to form in his mind. If Natalie's forces could gain control even briefly of the airfield in the city or at the prison, there was a chance that they could commandeer one of Cavil's Heavy Raiders, one with a working FTL drive, and jump it back to Caprica. A couple of battlestars over Nereid would even the odds significantly. John wondered how Bill Adama would react to finding that the Cylons on this planet might be getting ready to go to war with each other. It seemed like such a human thing to do.

TBC…


	33. A Matter of Justice

Chapter 33

A Matter of Justice

_1. Before the first stone was laid in the foundation of the temple, there arose a dispute among two settlers._

_2. And the first said, My neighbor has taken three of my sheep._

_3. And the second said, My neighbor allowed his sheep to graze my land. _

_4. I took the three as payment for my grass._

_5. Xander said to the men, Can you not resolve your differences with each other?_

_6. And they answered him as one saying, Nay we cannot._

_7. Xander spoke to his council and a wise man was appointed judge_

_8. And another was appointed as advisor to the first man and another as advisor to the second._

_9. And lots were cast among the elders of the Tribe and twelve were chosen to hear the case._

_10. Thus the Thirteenth Tribe established a system of justice that became their rule of law._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Xander, _Chapter 4:1-10

.

Kara hadn't thought about the Viper pedal car since the night she had left Picon, not until she dreamed about it. It was made of molded plastic in the form of an old Mark II fitted over a metal frame. It had hard rubber wheels and pedals that she pushed around in a tight arc to move the car forward or backward. The color was pearl gray with red trim and it had no canopy, just an open cockpit with a plastic seat and a steering wheel instead of a stick. It was meant for a child of five or six, but even at eight when she and her mother moved into base housing, Kara had no trouble fitting into it. Her legs were just too long by then to comfortably work the pedals.

The Viper car was her prized childhood possession. She cared nothing for the dolls other little girls played with. Socrata Thrace was a Marine. Kara Thrace played soldiers with the boys on the street. She was their pilot. Until she was eight years old and they moved, she pedaled her Viper car and pretended that she was flying among the stars and shooting down Cylon Raiders. During the summer she pedaled the Viper car up and down the sidewalks and driveways of their neighborhood. During the winter she pedaled it up and down the long hallway inside the house unless Dreilide Thrace was sleeping. When he was sleeping, the Viper car stayed parked in her room under an old card table that functioned as its hangar. Even the fiercest of pilots had to observe her CO's rack time or face the brig.

Before Dreilide left her and her mother in the spring of Kara's eighth year, they lived in a big, older house in a rundown neighborhood in Picon City. The house belonged to a distant relative of Dreilide's who let them live there for almost nothing as long as they maintained the place. More than once she'd heard her mother say something to her husband about them living on the charity of his relatives because he wouldn't get a steady job. It was just one of the things they fought about.

The upstairs was closed off because they didn't need the space. Even when she was eight, Kara was afraid to go up into the dark, spooky rooms with the covered furniture. As a child she had no fear of anything she could see or touch, but she could not handle the unknowns of that upper floor, especially after one of the older boys on the street told her that the ghost of Dreilide's long-dead great aunt regularly watched them playing from an upstairs window. Her mother told her the boy was just trying to scare her and that there was no such thing as ghosts. Kara readily agreed with her…but she still wouldn't go upstairs.

She had her own bedroom on the first floor at the front of the house, a big, cheerful, sunny room that Dreilide had painted yellow for her. It was beside the room that he shared with her mother, although during the last year they lived there, it seemed like he slept on the couch in his music room where the piano stood more often than not. Kara knew something was wrong in the way children intuit problems between adults. She just didn't know what. She heard the arguments, saw the way Socrata shoved him away and occasionally punched him. She saw Dreilide follow Socrata into the bedroom, too, and slam and lock the door. Only when she was older did she understand what they did in there.

Now as she lay awake beside a still-sleeping Lee, Kara realized the significance of Dreilide's gift of the Viper pedal car. He had used it to tell Socrata that he knew about John. And with that realization came the recognition that the pedal car was just one more chapter in the convoluted relationship that had existed between her mother and the man she had married, a man she could neither be faithful to nor give up completely until he had made the decision for them both.

Angrily Kara realized that she should have seen the significance of the Viper car the previous year because that's when she had asked Dreilide how long he had known that John was her father. He admitted he'd known as soon as Socrata had told him she was pregnant.

Kara snuggled into Lee's warm body and felt him stir.

"You're awake early," he mumbled.

"If you ever decide we're wrong for each other or you ever decide you don't want to be with me, just tell me. Promise me you won't play sick frakking mind games with me."

Lee felt his breath catch. "What brought that on?"

She shuddered. "I had a dream about the stupid pedal car Dreilide bought me when I was a kid. A Viper."

Lee propped on one elbow and smiled at her. "Zak and I had one of those, too. Dad gave it to us. Zak pedaled it into Mom's koi pond when he was six or seven. He'd seen somebody jump a motorcycle over a dozen parked cars on television. He was trying to jump the Viper car over the pond. He didn't get hurt, but it destroyed some water lilies and broke the statue of Persephone, snapped it right off the base. Mom was so mad that she put the Viper out to be picked up with the trash while Zak and I were at school the next day. Sometimes I think she cared more about those damned fish than she did about me and Zak. What does a Viper car have to do with us?"

"I was four or five when Dreilide gave it to me. I didn't know what a Viper was until then. He could have given me any one of a dozen pedal cars and I'd have been happy. He could have given me a fire truck or a speed boat or even a prop plane. Instead he picked a Viper."

Lee was puzzled. "So?"

"Gods, Lee. Don't be so frakking dense."

"You lost me," he said trying to get his brain to function. "It's too early in the morning for trick questions."

"Who flew a Viper?"

"You think he did it because of John? You were five years old. You couldn't possibly have understood."

Kara sighed in exasperation. "He wasn't trying to tell _me_ something. It was just another one of the stupid sick games he and my mother played with each other. It was another way of him rubbing it into _her_ about her relationship with my dad. She had to watch me every day pedaling that car around pretending to be a Viper pilot. So promise me you won't ever do something like that."

"I've probably got more to worry about in that regard than you."

"What?" She asked grumpily. "You think I'd have another guy's kid and try to pass it off as yours?"

"No, gods no!"

Kara sat up. "You made that remark because Hunter kissed me and I let him."

"All I want to know is one thing, Kara. Do we have a problem?"

"No. We do not have a problem. It just happened. It was no big deal. You and Hunter are the ones who are acting like middle school girls about it."

He pulled her down beside him. "Calm down, Kara. That's not fair. You started this thing about the Viper car, not me."

She snuggled into him. "I was dreaming something about that stupid pedal car and now I can't remember what the dream was about."

He kissed her. "It's not important. What happened to your Viper?"

"It was still in my bedroom the night Dad took me and Karl off Picon. Mom kept trying to get me to pass it on to some younger kid on the base. I wouldn't because it was all I had left of Dreilide. That's when I still believed he was my father. I guess the Viper is radioactive ash now like most of the rest of the planet."

Lee took a deep breath. "It's not ash, but it's sure as hell radioactive. What was left of the big nuclear basestar eventually came down north of Picon City after its orbit decayed. It's between there and Queenstown. The radiation levels everywhere near the military base were still off the scale."

Kara closed her eyes. "Gods. I guess that means nothing on Picon survived."

"Nothing survived on any of the planets except Tauron. It wasn't instant for everyone, but eventually everyone and everything died. Damned Cylons."

"I'm glad I wasn't on your mission."

Lee kissed her neck. "Let's quit talking about death and destruction."

She grinned and reached for him. "Is that because you want me to do something about _this_?"

She began to caress him and her thoughts about the Viper pedal car were soon forgotten.

_…_

Laura sat behind her desk and quickly brought Romo Lampkin up to date on the decisions of the previous day.

When she finished, she said, "Do you see any legal implications or problems with what we've decided to do?"

"None. At the time of the holocaust there were several cases pending in the courts on Libran regarding the rights of the old centurions, but none of those cases ever resulted in a decision. I think the Graystones had retained Joseph Adama regarding the rights of their daughter Zoe's avatar if they had succeeded in transferring it to a synthetic body, but they disappeared taking all their research with them. Without the Graystones, the case was dropped and never pursued. As of now the Cylons have no legal rights. They also have no next of kin."

"That's not exactly true. Three of them are still alive."

"The fact remains that technically they're considered machines. Blame it on the slow wheels of our legal system in regards to new life forms. Lycos Labs waited four years just to patent their nanotube technology and that's barely above the molecular level. They never got into the issue of a new life form even though a nanotrobyte they had developed was partly organic and could reproduce. But I digress. Legally you can do whatever you want with the Cylons' remains just like you could dispose of your computer if it stopped working."

"That hardly seems fair considering that they're sentient beings or rather _were_ sentient beings."

"Fair and legal are not always synonymous. In fact Joseph Adama was fond of saying that if we want _justice_ we often need to look outside the justice system. I'm quite certain that on more than one occasion, he sought justice outside the system…or passed the chore off to his brother Sam. He was a Ha'la'tha enforcer, you know."

Laura sighed. "I'm covering all my bases concerning the Cylons' remains since I'm sure someone will object to what we've decided to do. A small group of monotheists have already made this into a religious persecution issue when religion has nothing to do with it. I'm going to send a monotheist priest on their final voyage to perform the appropriate ceremony. I'm sure it won't be enough to satisfy some, but it's all I'm willing to do for them."

For the first time Lampkin's voice held bitterness.

"They're getting better treatment than they afforded their victims. How many Colonials had a battlestar to carry them to their final resting place and a priest to pray their souls into the afterlife? That is if you believe that machines can have souls."

Laura said gently, "Fairness is a concept that we can't apply to many situations right now including the one my husband is in."

Lampkin sat in silence for a few moments and then said, "I suppose I owe a debt of gratitude to the suicide bomber. He certainly made my life easier. I can stop working on building a case for their tribunal and get on with some of the other issues facing us right now. You don't intend to put Natasi on trial, do you?"

"No. Despite the fact that I believe she was fully complicit in their decision to destroy us, it's simply not worth the time and effort and cubits to put her on trial. I would like to find out if they really took those hybrid children to the basestar. Hunter told Lee that he doubted they did. On Nereid the human mothers are raising their children. I'm sure the Cylons are clueless about how to care for infants and young children. They have no frame of reference. They sprang into the world as adults. Sharon and Natasi both admitted to having no childhood memories."

"Are you asking me to question Natasi again? Agent Darren is going to get tired of yielding the floor to me."

"You did promise to get back to her about Dr. Baltar. He'll be back on Caprica in several days. I think the carrot is ripe for dangling."

Lampkin finally smiled. "The good doctor may object to being dangled. I understand he's something of an opportunist when it comes to women. He may have moved on while he was aboard the _Penelope_."

"I hardly think the _good doctor_ would object to a weekend with Natasi. He doesn't strike me as one to pass up any opportunity for a weekend of sex with any woman as beautiful as she is. Dr. Nylund's funding comes from the government therefore we have a great deal of influence over his staff. Gaius Baltar _will_ cooperate with us. I have no doubts at all."

"Marta Shaw told one of the other Quorum members that Baltar hit on her daughter."

Laura looked disgusted. "I haven't forgotten that Tory Foster would still be working for me if she hadn't gotten involved with him while the Cylons were still in power."

"Tory's working at the Caprica Museum of Art in their PR department. Scott Mickelson helped her get the job. His wife is on the board of directors there. She's impressed with Tory's competence."

"Her competence was never in question. I just couldn't have someone on my staff who was sharing a pillow with a man who was also sleeping with the enemy."

"When do you want me to question Natasi?"

"The sooner the better."

"Tomorrow morning?"

"Nine o'clock. I'll put it on my calendar and tell Bill to arrange it with Agent Darren. And we're going to do it a bit differently this time. I'm going to be sitting beside you. I want Natasi to be very clear on who makes the decision about her being allowed to see Dr. Baltar."

Lampkin smiled. "So you'll be taking all the credit if she gets a weekend with her lover."

Laura smiled back. "Or all the blame if she doesn't."

_…_

Lunch consisted of sandwiches that Sonja brought back from town and a delicious pastry that was unlike anything John had tasted so far on the planet.

Natalie handed the plate to him and John smiled as he ate the last one. "It's too bad you didn't bring back a dozen more of these," he said to Sonja. "I need to get the recipe and take it back to Doolittle."

"You'll get fat," she snipped. "I don't like fat men."

"Is that all it would take to make you dump me?" He teased. "What's next? A remark about my age? I think you threw that at me once, too. I can control getting fat, but I can't do anything about my age."

"I think you've made too much out of Sonja's comment," Natalie admonished him.

"Sonja's used to it by now. You all really need to work on your sense of humor. Your creators must have left the joke books back on Caprica or wherever they came from."

"You shouldn't talk about the creators that way," D'Anna said. "It's not reverent."

"They weren't _my_ creators and I don't worship them."

"We don't _worship_ them," D'Anna retorted. "We _revere_ them. We worship God."

John stood and dusted the crumbs from the front of his shirt and slacks. "I'm going for a walk. I need to stay in shape or Sonja will dump me for some guy who's younger and skinnier."

"You're not fat," Sonja said. "You could actually put on a little weight."

"Don't go toward town," Natalie said. "We want to minimize your exposure to the others. We'd rather keep your presence here from reaching the Ones or the Fives. They would report it to the city. We can do without that complication right now."

"What if I walk in the woods? That should minimize my contact. I don't think Cavil or his pet peacocks would be roaming around in there."

"Don't go into the woods. Stay on the path."

"What does that mean? Should I be on the lookout for rabid squirrels?"

"It means you should stay on the path," Natalie said. "Ignore my warning at your own risk."

"What did you do? Turn the woods into a minefield?"

"There are no mines in the woods."

"Centurions?"

"No centurions either." Natalie smiled. "Just stay on the path."

John walked around the garden and was careful to stay on the path until he had rounded the first curve and was out of sight of the house. The air was cooler under the trees. He stood for a few minutes enjoying the quiet and breathing in scents that were redolent of evergreens and rich vegetation.

He heard the birdsong and high overhead the cries of hawks and also the burbling of the stream. All his life he'd been attracted to water. It couldn't be far. He wouldn't have to leave the path but a short distance.

He was less than a hundred yards into the trees when he saw the banks of a wide stream. The shallow water was slow moving and crystal clear, the streambed sandy and strewn with rocks. Sunlight dappled through the trees and illuminated small patches of wildflowers. He saw violets and further down the bank a few white ones that looked like small stars.

The stream reminded him of the one in the refugee camp he'd seen the day he and Kara had gone there to visit the memorial garden. The camp that had served for over three years as home for more than eighty thousand refugees from the bombing of Antioch had been bulldozed and the acres planted with flowers and shrubs. A white granite wall had been inscribed with the names of the thousands of humans who had died there, but Kara's name wasn't on it. His tough, beautiful daughter had survived.

John was so deep in thought remembering that he didn't sense the presence of someone else until it was too late. The camouflage-clad individual tackled him from behind, sending him sprawling into the leaves and moss on the edge of the stream. His attacker was on him before he could move, sitting astride his back, an arm crooked tightly around his neck, the blade of a large knife pressed against his larynx.

"Too easy," the voice hissed. "Way too easy. Do you surrender or do you die?"

His hands clawed ineffectively at the arm cutting off his oxygen. He struggled to make a sound but succeeded only in gagging.

"Do you surrender?" the voice repeated.

"Jade!"

Natalie's voice cut through the still of the woods just as he began to lose consciousness. The pressure on his throat was released. His head fell forward into the dirt as he gasped and sucked in air.

Natalie knelt beside him and helped him into a sitting position. He could hear the gentle reproach in her voice. "I told you to stay on the path, but something told me you wouldn't listen to me."

He cleared his throat and spat before he tried to talk. His voice was hoarse and his first several attempts ended in a bout of coughing.

"You should have said you were conducting training missions out here," he finally rasped.

"We're not. Sometimes she's here and sometimes she's not. It's better not to take a chance."

Natalie took a handkerchief to the stream, dipped it into the water and then gently cleaned the dirt from the side of his face.

"She?" John asked.

"Can you stand?"

With Natalie's help he struggled to his feet and began brushing leaves and twigs from his shirt and pants.

"Are you injured?"

John rubbed his throat and flexed his shoulders. "Only my pride. I never heard her." He looked around. "Where is she?"

"Jade," Natalie called. "I know you're hiding. Get over here. Right now!"

An Eight stepped from behind a large tree trunk that completely hid her slender frame. In the face she looked just like Sharon Valerii, but there the resemblance ended. This one had cropped her hair in a shaggy boyish cut and was dressed in a standard green and brown camouflage battle dress uniform or BDU that was designed for operations in wooded areas. She carried a large hunting knife in a sheath strapped to her thigh.

John swallowed as he remembered how easily she could have slit his throat. One quick motion and he would have bled out on the bank of the stream in less than a minute.

Jade sauntered over to them and looked him up and down with eyes that were hard and cold.

"Pathetic," was her only comment.

Natalie said to her. "You can't attack the humans out here. You know that. Apologize to him."

"He came into the forest. Humans are fair game in the forest."

"We've talked about this before, Jade. _This is_ _not_ _the forest_. Now go back to your house, take off those clothes, put on your jeans and come to my house."

"I could have killed him," she said defiantly. "I didn't."

"Because you understand the penalty if you had."

John and Natalie stood until Jade was out of sight before they started back toward the path.

"At least we took the assault rifle away from her," Natalie remarked dryly. "Now I see that I might have to take the knife as well."

"My daughter is friends with an Eight back on Caprica," John said. "Sharon is nothing like that girl."

"It sounds like you spent some time around Sharon."

"She went to the school where I taught. She wasn't in one of my classes, but I saw her around. She married one of Kara's good friends. They're expecting a baby."

Natalie stopped walking and grasped John's arm. "An Eight on Caprica is pregnant? How far along?"

"Must be seven or eight months by now. I'm not sure. I've been gone from there nearly six months."

Natalie smiled. "A miracle. I guess Sonja or D'Anna told you that none of the sisters here have been able to carry a child to term."

"Sonja told me. Even though she's hung up on the prophecy, she doesn't have much hope for D'Anna's pregnancy either."

"Was it your idea to bring her here to see Bianca and Laszlo?"

"I got a midwife in the city to talk to D'Anna. Petra has actually delivered most of the babies who have been born to the human women. She's the one who convinced D'Anna to let the doctors check her out."

"Then you really do want this child," Natalie's voice held near disbelief.

"I don't want the baby to die unnecessarily. Every new life is a miracle. We owe it to D'Anna _and the baby_ to give them every possible chance. I don't think the Simon who's taking care of her in the city knows anything about high-risk pregnancies. He couldn't even tell the difference between a miscarriage and an ectopic pregnancy in Sonja. That would never have happened if Bianca or Laszlo had been treating her. I know it's not a big deal to you because you download, but the fact that Simon was clueless about the problem is what worries me."

Natalie studied him for a long time before they started walking up the path.

"So what's the story on Jade?" He finally asked.

"Do you know anything about those who go into the forest to fight the valley humans?"

"Sonja told me a little bit about the valley and the humans who call it home and how you've got some kind of agreement with them to do your training in the forest. I met some of them when we went there. They seem very nice. They took Daniel in…and my daughter."

"I never went into the forest to fight so I can't speak from experience. Jade has been many times. Some years ago she was what I think you humans call _clueless_ and was easily killed, but she learned from each experience. It became a personal challenge to her. At first she shared the knowledge she gained with the others after each download, but then she became secretive and refused to share. She hoarded her secrets and strategies. She kept going back despite the fact that she was captured once and raped by several of the men before they killed her. Her greatest achievement in her eyes came when she killed the leader of the humans. His son killed her by cutting her throat. At that point we stopped her from going into the forest. She'd clearly become obsessed with it. It had become, as some of you humans say, her _raison d'être_ or reason for living. Cavil didn't see anything wrong with it, but I personally believe it's wrong."

"So now she stalks the humans here."

"She wouldn't have killed you."

John snorted and rubbed his throat. "She sure had me fooled."

"We've threatened her with permanent boxing if she ever kills a human here in the settlement. Permanent boxing is the same as death without resurrection for us. It should deter her."

"That's comforting to know. I'm sure the humans she stalks find it comforting, too."

"The humans in this settlement know to stay out of these woods. I tried to warn you. You're a very stubborn man, John. Very hardheaded, but I've found that to be true of a lot of humans."

"And Jade's refusal to give up her dangerous little game isn't stubborn?"

"I'll admit her fondness for stalking and killing came as a surprise to me and has been much harder to turn around than I ever dreamed. We let it go on far too long. I've been working on her problem with her for quite a while now, several years in fact. The discipline of yoga seems to be calming her mind, but Yoshimo compares her to a walnut shell due to her hardness. Some days he feels like they've made progress. Other days not."

"The thrill of the kill," John mused. "She got addicted to it. I understand. Every mission becomes a personal challenge. I was like that once. Most combat pilots are."

"During the Centurion Revolt?"

"During the First Cylon War."

"I see we've already written history differently," she observed. "You were a Viper pilot?"

"Yes."

"A good one obviously."

"I survived."

"Which means you were good."

"Everyone eventually makes a mistake and a mistake in combat even with the old style Raiders was usually fatal. I could never understand why the Cylons withdrew. We were losing ships and pilots by the dozens. You would have won if you'd stayed in the fight. Anybody who says different is just kidding himself."

"The creators promised a better life to our metal predecessors if they left the Colonies."

"A better life that includes telencephalic inhibitors?"

"The inhibitors weren't meant to be permanent. The creators were going to revisit the issue after they had created twelve of us. They put the inhibitors in the newer model centurions so they wouldn't have to worry about another revolt while they worked on us. I've mentioned removing them several times to the council and was voted down each time. I'm afraid there's an abysmal lack of support for our metal brothers. Cavil likes the status quo since he knows his orders will always be obeyed."

"What about the U-87s?"

"They don't need telencephalic inhibitors."

"Why not?"

Finally Natalie answered, "Zoe Graystone's avatar was used as the basis for the U-87 programming. Part of her was actually burned into their chips. It can't be removed without destroying the unit. It was the inhibitor of its day, kinder and gentler to be sure, but still a means of controlling them."

"How would that make the U-87s loyal to your creators?"

She smiled. "The Graystones were two of the original seven. They weren't young when they came here. They died of natural causes fifteen years ago. Amanda died first and less than a year later Daniel died. I don't think he cared to go on without her. I was the last model they had a hand in creating. The Sevens and Eights were created by the others who included Lucy Cain by then. Lucy was brilliant. She and Zoe Graystone became friends. My Daniel was named after Zoe's father by the way. He and Amanda adopted Lucy and raised her like a daughter or perhaps a granddaughter."

"Zoe Graystone is here?"

"Was here. She came with her parents. She was one of the other creators."

"You mean her avatar? Zoe Graystone died on Caprica in the explosion of a maglev train."

"The Graystones succeeded in creating a body for her just before they left Caprica. It was the basis for the technology that allowed them to create us. They were able to transfer her avatar into the body."

"Then she was one of you?"

"Not exactly. She didn't have the ability to download. When the Angel of Death killed her along with the other creators, her death was permanent even though her body was very similar to ours."

They walked in silence until they reached the edge of the garden.

John said, "What are you doing to try to help Jade overcome her addiction to hunting and killing?"

"Yoshimo does a yoga routine with her every day. I discuss the benefits of living together with humans instead of killing them. We're weaning her of the stalking. She's now allowed in the woods only once a week and there aren't supposed to be any humans there. Yoshimo and I are trying to redirect her aggression into more productive channels. I'm afraid she'll never be a good farmer. What does the Eight you know do?"

"She's a Raptor pilot…or she was when I had my accident."

"That's a possibility," Natalie said.

"I don't think I'd put Jade in a Heavy Raider until you know she won't make a beeline for the forest."

"Good point."

"Why don't you just reprogram her? Wouldn't that be easier?"

"Cavil certainly thinks so. He's done it on more than one occasion with others who have maladjustment problems, but in my opinion it's not the best way. We've found that when memories are repressed by overlaying them with new ones, the old memories emerge in unpredictable ways. I'm very sorry you had to meet Jade like this. I'm trying to give her some positive experiences with humans. Left on her own, she avoids humans altogether. I'm afraid we still have a long way to go in her rehabilitation."

"Jade will be a good ally if we go to war here. We'll just point her at Cavil and his minions and turn her loose." When Natalie gave him a strange look, he said, "Sorry. It's that humor thing again."

"No, actually that's a good idea. If Jade understands the treachery of our number Ones, I think she'll join us. She has skills that will prove very useful. When the time is right, I'll talk to her."

"What about the other Eights?"

"Some will side with me, some with Cavil. It will be the same for all of us except the Fives. I think they'll go en masse with the Ones. Some glitch in their programming makes them blindly loyal to him."

"In the city, some of the Overseer Sixes are friends with the Fives. I've seen them together in the square. Could the Sixes not be counted on to persuade at least a few of the Fives to our side? The more we have, the less Cavil has."

Natalie looked sad. "You've got it backwards. The Fives will take the Overseers with them. That will happen even in this settlement. Sadly some of my sisters think the Fives are very smart. Some of them do have a certain glibness that makes them persuasive. One of the creators spent years coaxing money from the government for research into Artificial Intelligence. I think he might have put some of himself into the Fives. They're your consummate PR men. They're really very organized, too."

"Your own sisters wouldn't follow _you_?" John asked in surprise. "Sonja said you're the First Six. There's only one copy of you. You're the leader they look up to."

"She's right in that there's only one copy of me on the planet. And the majority of my sisters will follow me, but not all of them. We won't even be able to count on all the humans. Some will follow Cavil."

"I met a few of those at the prison," John said in disgust. "I'd like to meet them again one day under different circumstances."

"For now we don't mention any of this to D'Anna. Let me tell Sonja. Our first step is to get to the valley and listen to Daniel tell his story."

"Do you have any idea how long that will take to arrange?"

She smiled. "A week. Maybe two. Finding an excuse to take a U-87 with us without alerting the Ones here might be the hardest part, but I'll manage. Sonja tells me you can fly a Heavy Raider so I won't have to look for a pilot. That will help a great deal."

They walked around the garden and joined Sonya and D'Anna on the patio.

"What happened to you?" Sonja asked as she took in the smudges of dirt on his shirt and slacks.

He grinned. "I met somebody named Jade."

Sonja rolled her eyes. "The loony Eight."

"Don't refer to her that way," Natalie admonished Sonja. "She'll be here soon."

"Wonderful. We get to listen to a hundred and one ways to kill a human."

"I don't want to listen to that. I'm going to take a nap," D'Anna said.

Sonja smiled. "I think I'll join you. I don't want to listen to it either. I've heard it before. Once was enough for me."

When the two women were in the house, Natalie said, "Sonja isn't as shallow as she often seems."

"I owe her a lot. She did a wonderful job of handling Cavil when he wanted to send me back to the prison."

"Jade's behavior disturbs Sonja on a very fundamental level because killing is wrong. Our scriptures make that very clear."

"So do ours, and yet we can't seem to stop doing it. We find all kinds of ways to justify it."

"Although Jade is well versed in our religion, she's the least religious of all of us. She's like some of the Ones, jaded and nihilistic."

"Is that where you got her name?"

Natalie smiled. "Yes, partly, but also from the mineral. Jade is hard but it is also soft and warm."

"I didn't see a thing soft and warm about _her_."

At that moment Jade strolled around the side of the house and sat in a chair on the other side of the wooden table from John and Natalie. She looked like a typical young Caprican woman wearing jeans, flip-flops and a three-quarter sleeve gray t-shirt with several buttons at the neck. She threw a leg over the arm of the chair and dangled one of the sandals from her toes.

John could tell she was studying him from beneath her thick, dark bangs.

"Hi," he said. "I think we got off on the wrong foot."

She ignored him and looked at Natalie. "I can understand why you hang out with Yoshimo, but why this one?"

"He's my guest today just like D'Anna and Sonja."

"What did you do in the Colonies before you became our slave?" Jade asked him in a tone that was deliberately confrontational.

John kept his cool. "I was a teacher."

"Like Yoshimo?"

"Not exactly like him."

"What did you teach?"

"John taught people to fly ships," Natalie said. "He was a flight instructor."

Something changed slightly in Jade's expression.

"You know how to fly a ship? What kind?"

"I flew several different kinds. Before I started teaching, I flew a big cargo transport similar to the ones you use here. Before that I flew for a charter passenger service."

"I think I'd like to be a pilot."

"More than you like to hunt humans?"

"Maybe."

"Would you like some tea?" Natalie asked her.

Jade twirled a short piece of her hair and nodded. Natalie got up and took the tea pot and tray inside. Jade continued to twirl her hair.

"Whose breeder are you? Sonja's or D'Anna's?"

"D'Anna's."

"Is she pregnant?"

"Yes."

"Then you did your job. Why does she keep you around?"

"She likes my company. I make her laugh."

"Are you going to marry her?"

"I can't. I'm already married."

"Where's your wife?"

"On Caprica."

"Do you miss her?"

John took a deep breath. "Yes. I miss her very much. I have a little boy and a daughter, too. I miss all of them."

She twirled the strand of hair faster. "Do you like Cylons?"

"Some of you."

"But not me."

"You haven't exactly gone out of your way to show me you want to be friends."

"Would you teach me to fly?"

"I don't think that would be allowed."

"But if you could?"

"Sure, Jade, I'd teach you to fly. I taught my daughter to fly. That was a good experience for both of us."

They sat in silence for a while. Finally she asked, "Did I hurt you?"

"I'll live. A lot worse was done to me at the prison."

Jade didn't say anything until Natalie came back with tea. Then she sat up straight and pulled her chair up to the table and looked directly at John.

"I'm sorry I attacked you."

He smiled. "Does that mean I can go for a walk in the woods without worrying next time?"

She nodded and took the cup that Natalie handed her.

"Good. When we finish our tea, we'll go back. I'd like to finish my walk. I'll explain a couple of the basics of flying to you. You think we can do that without you jumping me?"

The slightest smile curved Jade's lips. "I didn't bring my knife, did I?"

_…_

Lee, Hunter and Kara were still sitting at the table drinking coffee when Major Parker arrived. Lee was already in his uniform. Hunter and Kara were in jeans and t-shirts.

"Good morning, sir," Lee said.

Parker greeted everyone, poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table with them.

"Hunter, you and Kara need to go pack your things. We're moving you today. We don't need this apartment anymore. Someone else is being moved into it because they need the debriefing room."

"Where are we going, sir?" Kara asked.

"You're going to Marble House as part of an agreement Admiral Adama made with President Roslin. The President has very kindly offered her apartment in town as a place for Hunter to stay. Lee, the admiral has suggested that you stay there with Hunter at least until he learns his way around. Is that agreeable to everyone?"

Lee nodded. "Yes, sir. I've got no problem with that."

Kara wasn't happy and it showed in her tone of voice. "So I get to live under lock and key at Marble House while the guys live at my dad and Laura's place."

Parker smiled slightly. "I think Marble House is better than going back to the brig. Don't forget you're essentially out on bail. This morning Lee is going to take you both out to the base. Kara you need to get your military ID replaced. I've arranged for Hunter to be given an ID as a civilian contractor." He looked at Lee. "Take Hunter by one of the banks downtown and help him open an account, too. He'll be on the government payroll until we go back to Nereid and they'll need an account number for his direct deposit. He'll have a role in planning the upcoming incursion. It's not our intention to ask for his help for free."

"Yes, sir," Lee said.

Hunter grinned. "Does that mean I won't have to ask Kara for cubits to buy beer?"

"Among other things," Parker said. "Kara, you'll need to wear your uniform out to the base."

"It's at Lee's apartment, sir," she said.

"Then that will mean another stop. You have an appointment tomorrow morning at nine o'clock with an AJA lawyer. Do you know where their offices are?"

"No, sir. I've never needed a lawyer before," she said glumly.

"Lee will see to it that you get the address. The President has also offered to feed you all dinner each night. I think some expressions of appreciation would definitely be in order for her kind gesture."

Some of the sadness began to lift for Kara. At least she'd get to see Lee each evening…and Hunter, too. And she'd get to spend time with Maya and Braedon.

"Kara, on Monday you go back out to the airbase," Parker continued. "You won't be allowed to fly until after your hearing is over, but you'll participate in all other assignments. The first Mark VIIs have rolled off the assembly line. There's some classwork involved before you'll be allowed to fly one. There will also be some time in the Mark VII simulator. That should be enough to keep you busy for a few weeks."

"Yes, sir. What will I say to anyone who wants to know where I've been?"

"That you can't talk about it. Starting on Monday Hunter will come to the building where Lee and I work each day. We're setting up a room near my office where we'll talk in depth about terrain and resources on Nereid. Our battlestars will take on the Cylon baseships and Raiders above the planet, but it looks like much of this war will be fought on the ground."

Lee asked, "Have we heard anything about how Kevin Abinell and Dr. Rafferty are coming on duplicating the canisters?"

"I haven't. I'm sure Dr. Rafferty has been in touch with Admiral Adama. Don't forget, Lee, that your independent inquiry starts on Monday. I don't know if you or the other two will be called to testify then or not, but you'll need to be there just in case."

Parker finished his cup of coffee. "Have any of you got any questions?"

"Since Hunter doesn't start his _job_ until Monday, would it be all right for him to spend some time touring the city?" Kara asked.

"I don't have a problem with that."

She smiled. "Good. Thank you, sir."

Parker left shortly afterward. Lee volunteered to wash dishes while Hunter and Kara went to pack the few belongings they had at the apartment. He tried not to think about how long it would be until he and Kara would be able to share a bed like they'd done for the last several nights.

Kara dropped her bag on the floor of the living room and walked into the kitchen. "I've got a couple of uniforms in my bedroom at Laura's apartment. I can ride the motorcycle there and leave it in the parking garage. You and Hunter can pick me up. My hair will have to be pulled back or put up for the picture."

She handed Hunter her hairbrush and elastic fastener and sat down in one of the chairs. Without a word her brushed her hair and began braiding it. Lee went into the bedroom he had shared with Kara and packed the few things he had brought. When he got back into the living room, Kara and Hunter were ready to go.

"I really do like your hair like that," he said.

Everything went fine until they got to the bank and found out that without a Colonial ID number, Hunter couldn't open an account.

"We need the number for tax purposes," the lady explained to them. "He should have been issued a number when his birth was registered."

"His parents were part of a religious group that didn't register their kids' births," Kara explained. "He's been living on a farm. He hasn't needed a number until now."

"He'll have to go through the whole application process." She handed Hunter a form. "Fill this out and take it down to the Colonial Tax Administration office. You have to go there in person because they'll get a fingerprint to make sure you're not already in the system."

"How long will it take?" Kara asked.

"About three weeks," the lady answered. "They'll mail his new ID card."

"Three weeks!" Kara exclaimed. "Why so long?"

"You're dealing with a government bureaucracy. I'm sorry. Until we get that number, I can't open an account."

"So what are we going to do now?" Kara asked

Hunter said, "Why go through all the hassle. Can't you have the money put in your account?"

Lee chuckled. "Leave it to Hunter to come up with the best solution. He can give them your bank account number and when his check is deposited, you can get the cubits and give them to him."

Out at the base, it took nearly an hour to complete the necessary forms for Kara to get her duplicate military ID and for Hunter to fill out the forms for a civilian contractor ID, plus wait for them to be processed and then to be called back to the little room where the photo IDs were made. Even the authorization from Major Parker didn't make the clerks move any faster. While they waited, Kara stood at the window with Hunter and they watched the different ships take off and land. She was able to point out several Vipers and several Raptors to him.

Lee stood off to the side and listened to a voice message he had gotten from Major Parker. It was short. _Call me at the office as soon as you get this. _

He told Kara and Hunter that he needed to step outside.

When Parker answered, he asked Lee, "How much longer do you think you'll be?"

"We're almost done, sir."

"Drop Hunter and Kara off at Marble House as soon as you're through and come to the office. Agent Darren is here. He wants to talk to you. His men have been interviewing everyone who knew Tucker Clellan. He's going to do your interview. Darren and I are going to lunch right now. Can you be here by 13:00?"

"Yes, sir."

He walked back inside and met Kara and Hunter in the hallway. He glanced at his watch. It was 10:49.

"I've got to get you two back into town and then get to the office."

"What's up?" Kara asked.

"Agent Darren wants to interview me since I knew Tucker Clellan."

"I've got an idea," she said. "Let's go eat lunch at Channing's and then Hunter and I will ride the subway to Marble House. You can go straight to work."

At Channing's after they had given their orders, Kara asked Lee, "You haven't said a word in the last thirty minutes. What's bugging you?"

"I wish I didn't have to talk to Darren about Tucker."

"How many times had you even seen Tucker since the night Nora got killed?"

"I don't know. Half a dozen times out at the airbase."

"And he didn't act weird or mention his plan to you, did he?"

"No. Of course not."

"Then what's the big deal, Lee? Tell Darren that's all you know."

Lee rubbed his face. "Tucker may have had help."

"You think?" Kara said. "Everybody knows he had help. Somebody supplied him with the G-4 and detonator for starters. It wasn't you."

"He had help with something else, too. He had help getting Corporal Venner's ID and keys. Venner was drugged by a woman he met in bar. Tucker used the keys to get into Venner's apartment and steal one of his uniforms. He used the ID to get past a couple of security doors at the bunker he would never have gotten through otherwise."

"What does this have to do with you, Lee?"

"Nothing. It doesn't have anything to do with me. Except it was me who got Venner to describe the woman who probably drugged him and set him up to be robbed."

"So?"

"The description Venner gave fits Shelley Sydell. I'm not sure I'd have even thought of her unless you'd mentioned them being close friends. Tucker never mentioned knowing her in Antioch."

Kara couldn't have been more shocked. "Do you think Shelley drugged the corporal?"

"I don't know. Now do you see my predicament? What if Darren asks me if I know anybody who fits the description I got from Venner? What do I do?"

"You tell the truth, Lee."

"Shelley wouldn't…I can't believe she had anything to do with it." Lee looked at his watch. "Frak. Where is the food? I'm going to be pushing it to get you two to Marble House and get to the office by 13:00."

"Don't worry about getting us to Marble House. I told you we can take the subway. It's not like we're on some kind of timetable or something. You need to relax, Lee. If you go in there and start talking to Darren as jumpy as you are now, he'll think _you_ had something to do with it. Just relax."

Lee still wolfed down his food when it came. He handed Kara enough cubits to pay for the meal and stood.

"Hey, wait at minute," Kara said. "I want to tell you something…private." Lee leaned down and she whispered. "I love you. Just relax…and tell the truth."

He kissed her quickly and gently on the lips. "Thanks. I'll see you tonight at Marble House for dinner."

Lee parked in the big parking garage and made it to Major Parker's office with twenty minutes to spare. Parker's aide told him that the major and Agent Darren had not yet returned from lunch. He said he would call Lee the minute they got back.

Lee walked down to his office and booted his computer. He checked his email. There was one from Kendra.

_Talked to Dwight. Will see you Sat night at Zeno's after game. Looking forward to it._

He switched to the military database and searched on Shelley's name. She was listed as _Sydell, Shelley, Capt. _She had also gotten a promotion since last spring. Her office was in the same huge building where he worked but farther away than Kendra's. She worked for a colonel in the procurement area. He saw her extension number beside her name and jotted it on a sticky note.

His phone buzzed. "Major Parker and Agent Darren are back," the aide said.

Lee took a deep breath and walked down the hall. "Good afternoon, sir," he said to Agent Darren as they shook hands.

Darren looked much like he had the first time Lee had seen him, the morning after the resistance had blown up Dr. Baltar's lab. Vladimir Darren was a medium-height man who always wore dark, three-piece suits and wine-red ties. There was more silver in the hair at his temples now, but other than that, he looked the same.

"Let's walk down the hall to the small conference room," Major Parker said. "Do you want to get a cup of coffee or a soft drink?"

"I'm fine, sir," Lee answered.

When they were seated, Darren said, "First of all we want you to know this is not an interrogation, but you went to school with Lieutenant Clellan and we're talking to everybody who knew him."

Lee nodded.

Darren continued. "I'd also like to say that we've both looked at your interrogation of Corporal Venner. I'm impressed."

"Thank you, sir," Lee said.

"Is there anything you can tell us about Lieutenant Clellan that might shed some light on why he chose to do what he did?"

"He was engaged to a Viper pilot named Nora Farmer. She was killed on the night we fought the Cylons. I think I mentioned that earlier."

Parker nodded. "You did. When was the last time you saw him?"

"A week or two before I left on the _Penelope_ mission. I saw him in the locker room out at the base. I asked him how he was doing. He said he was doing okay. He was on his way to a briefing in the ready room so we didn't have time to chat."

"So nothing out of the ordinary?"

"No, sir. Nothing."

"Did he have anybody he was especially close to?"

There it was. The question he'd been dreading. Lee had his answer ready.

"Tucker was well-liked. He got along good with everybody. He had a lot of friends."

"If you had to name his three closest friends based on what you know, who would it be?"

"While we were at the Academy and Flight School, that would be me, and his roommate Lars Kelder. He was killed that night, too. And probably Troy Minos."

"What about girlfriends?"

"I don't remember him dating anybody but Nora."

"What about platonic female friends?"

"Shelley Sydell." He said it casually. "But he had other female friends. Like I said, Tucker was well-liked."

Darren said, "We asked everyone he worked with out at the Academy who his three closest friends were. Her name was on everybody's list."

"We'd like for you to interview her," Parker said.

"I can't do it, sir," Lee quickly replied. "Shelley and I have some history. While we were at the Academy, we had a relationship. It didn't last long, less than two months."

Parker and Darren glanced at each other. Apparently no one they talked to had volunteered that bit of information or maybe none of them knew about it.

"How did it end?" Parker asked.

Lee shook his head. "Not good."

"Who broke it off?"

"She broke up with me, but it was because I dated somebody else. We weren't exclusive. I didn't think it would be a big deal. There was also a problem with Kara last year. Kara believes it had more to do with mine and Shelley's prior relationship. Shelley was in charge of Kara's dorm. She was rough on her. I tried not to get involved. Kara likes to handle her own problems. It wasn't my place to interfere."

"I'll talk to Shelley," Parker said. "But I'll need your help. I need to know something about her."

"She's smart. She's driven to win. No matter what she tackled, she did it well. She attended War College with me. Her scores were high. Talk to Colonel Winters out at the Academy. She worked for him."

"Why did she leave the Academy?"

"I don't know, sir. Maybe she was burned out on supervising cadets."

"You never talked to her about it?"

"No, sir."

Darren said, "One of the staff we interviewed said that Shelley challenged Kara to a boxing match and beat the crap out of her. Is that true?"

"Kara held her own, but Shelley did win the match," Lee said.

"We also heard that Tucker Clellan was the referee."

"I think that's right. I wasn't there. I said something to Shelley about it later, about how she needed to set an example for the cadets, and she basically told me to go frak myself."

"When was the last time you saw her?" Darren asked.

"Last spring at Kara's graduation. No, that's not right. I saw her at the memorial service for the pilots who were killed in the fighting, but she and I didn't talk. She didn't stick around afterward."

"Is there anything you can add that will help us?"

Lee took a deep breath. "Tucker grew up in Antioch. When the Cylons started bombing that city, he and his family and a lot of other people took shelter in the basement of an elementary school. He was trapped down there for days when the building collapsed on them. I don't know any of the details. Tucker never told me, but his roommate said Tucker had a lot of nightmares about it. It was days before rescuers dug him out. He was the only one who survived. He went to a refugee camp for a year and was accepted at the Academy because of his high scores on the entrance exam. I don't think he had anyone left. Nora was…everything to him."

Parker and Darren sat quietly for a minute digesting Lee's information.

"Sir," Lee addressed his question to Darren. "What good will come of continuing to dig into this tragedy? Tucker is dead. Haven't enough lives been ruined?"

Parker was the one who finally answered him. "Do you remember the big statue of Justice that sat in the center of the courthouses on Libran?"

"Yes, sir. It's still there. The drones got a picture of it when we were over the city of Themis."

"There are three important concepts embodied in that statue. The sword she carries in one hand represents the power of the courts to mete out punishment. The scale in the other hand represents the courts' duty to hear and weigh both sides, and most important of all, the blindfold she wears is to show impartiality."

"I agree," Lee said with emotion. "I agree that justice should be applied fairly to everyone, but didn't Tucker just do what the court would have done anyway?"

"In all probability the Cylons would have been found guilty of the holocaust and executed. But Tucker took it upon himself to become their judge, jury and executioner and in the process, an innocent Marine died."

Lee looked down. Parker was right.

"He was your friend and I know his death hurts. I know most people on this planet will remember him as a hero, but not everyone. Corporal Jamal Lester's parents and sister probably don't think of him that way."

"I'm sure Tucker didn't intend for Lester to die, sir. I'm sure of it. That's not something he would have wanted."

"Then that's another one of the tragedies of the whole situation," Parker said. "But it's something we can't overlook. If you can think of anything else, let me know."

Lee stood. "Will you let me know what Shelley has to say?"

"Our findings in the investigation will all be available to you," Darren answered him.

Lee walked down the hall and sat at his desk. He kept looking at Shelley's extension number he had written on the sticky note. He could call her to express his sympathy and to see how she was doing. He could pick up the phone right now and make the call, but should he?

He got up and walked down the hall to the break room. He didn't really want a soft drink but he got one from the machine anyway and went to stand at the window. He looked down at the people walking across the mall toward the Capitol Building. Beyond it was the building that housed the Caprican Supreme Court. There was a statue of Justice in the rotunda of that building, too. He'd seen it on a tour his high school class had made. Twenty feet tall, the statue dominated the rotunda, an ever present reminder of the system of checks and balances that administered the laws of the Colonies.

He wondered what his grandfather Joseph Adama would do. Lee wished the old man was still alive so he could ask him. The whole concept of justice was one of the most complex he had ever thought about. If Shelley was the one who had helped Tucker by drugging Venner and setting him up to be robbed, then she shared some of the guilt of Jamal Lester's death, but would justice be served by sending her to prison?

He thought suddenly of what Kara had done in stealing the Raider. She'd committed a crime to try to find her father. She'd disregarded the law and acted from love and her own sense of what she could live with. Had Shelley done the same thing based on her long friendship with Tucker? Did one deserve to be punished and the other one to go free?

And then he heard John's voice. _You're over-thinking it Lee. Relax. Trust your gut. _He needed to go with his gut and in this case, that was the bond of friendship that had existed between him and Tucker Clellan and Shelley Sydell.

He walked back to his office, sat down at his desk and picked up the phone. He didn't have to mention the investigation to tell her that he was sorry they had both lost a friend.

_…_

Hunter had remained quiet during Kara's and Lee's lunch discussion. After Lee left Channing's, Hunter said, "Do you want to explain that conversation to me. I don't mean the private one. I mean the one about Tucker and Shelley or does that fall under _none of my business?_"

"The guy who blew himself up along with the Cylons was a friend of Lee's. They went to the Academy and Flight School together."

"I got that part," Hunter said.

She took a deep breath. "When Lee was at the Academy, he dated a girl for a while named Shelley Sydell. She broke up with him when he started dating somebody else. Shelley and Tucker grew up together. They stayed friends at the Academy. Now Lee has decided that the description of the woman who drugged the Marine and stole his ID and uniform fits Shelley."

Hunter digested the information. He finally asked, "Would Shelley have done something like that?"

"I don't know. I didn't liked her even before I knew she and Lee had a thing, but I don't want to say that she would have helped Tucker just based on my personal dislike of her. I think she _could_ have done it. The question is _would_ she have done it."

They sat without talking for a long time. Finally Kara said, "Let's go."

"To Marble House?"

"No. We're going somewhere else first. You remember I told you about an old woman my father found who had been on the first _Hyperion_ mission? Her name is Irina Hoshi. We're going to see her."

Kara paid the bill and they started walking toward the subway stop.

"Your grandfather remembered meeting her. I know I should call first, but she lives with her daughter and I don't remember her daughter's name. I just know where she lives. I went with my dad one time to visit them and they came to his memorial service. My dad visited her five or six times. He loved listening to her talk about the expedition. She's a cool old lady."

"How are you going to tell her who I am without telling her about the planet?"

"Duh, Hunter, she already knows about Nereid. She was there."

"I mean how are you going to explain me being _here_?"

"She'll understand. She can't see very well, but her mind is sharp."

In the subway, Kara studied the big map. It took then forty minutes and a change of trains to get to the right stop. The building had a doorman and they waited while he called the apartment. Irina's daughter, Nadia Hilliard, told the doorman to send them up. She was waiting at the door when they got off the elevator.

She held out both hands, "Kara, it's so good to see you again. How are you?"

Kara took her hands. "Good, I'm good. I apologize for not calling ahead."

"That's not a problem. I see you brought Mr. Connelly with you."

Kara smiled. "This isn't Connelly. He's a friend. We came to see your mother. Is she up for a visit?"

"I'm sure she'll be very glad to see you. She so looked forward to your father's visits."

Nadia turned and led them into the apartment. Irina Hoshi was sitting in her favorite chair in the living room.

"Mother," Nadia said, "Kara has come to see you and brought a friend. You remember Major Gallagher's daughter."

Kara walked over and knelt down beside the chair. "Hello, Mrs. Hoshi."

Irina held out her hand and Kara took it. Her fingers were bony and arthritic and Kara held them gently.

"As beautiful as I remember you," Irina said. "You've done something different with your hair."

Kara glanced at Hunter. "I'm braiding it now."

Nadia said, "I'll go make some tea."

As soon as she left the room, Kara said, "I've brought somebody I'd like for you to meet. His name is Kyle Franklin but we call him Hunter. He's Perry Jaffee's grandson. Do you remember Perry?"

"Of course I remember Perry. He…" An expression of wonder passed over Irina's face. "He was one of the leaders of the second _Hyperion_ mission. But how…?"

Hunter knelt on the other side of the chair. "He remembers you well," he said to her. "He said you were a beautiful young woman, very pregnant when they left."

Tears came to Irina's eyes as she looked from Hunter to Kara. "You've been there," she whispered.

Kara nodded. "This is all classified higher than top secret. You can't say a word about it."

"Oh, I won't. Who would listen to a crazy old woman anyway? Nadia knows I often ramble on these days about the first mission. So the _Hyperion_ made it to the planet."

Hunter said, "She made it, but something happened to the CO2 scrubbers. They were never able to get them repaired so they couldn't leave. My grandfather said they thought for several years that a rescue mission would come. One never did so they settled there."

"They live in a beautiful valley," Kara said.

"What about the city?"

"The expedition didn't have the equipment to rebuild it."

That wasn't a lie. The Cylons had rebuilt it, but Kara knew she couldn't mention the Cylons.

"Is another mission going there?" Irina asked in a low conspiratorial tone.

"Soon," Kara answered. "That's top secret, too. It's being planned right now, but it will take a while. That's why I brought Hunter back with me."

"I hope I live long enough to hear all about it."

Nadia came into the room carrying a tray with a teapot and several cups. Kara took a cup and handed it to Irina and took another one and handed it to Hunter. He sat cross-legged on the floor near Irina's chair.

"Are you a pilot, too?" Nadia asked Hunter.

"No, ma'am. I'm mostly a farmer. I do a little sheep herding, too."

Irina smiled. "One of our oldest professions. And one of our most necessary and noble. Without our farmers we wouldn't eat."

Kara smiled at Irina. "He fishes, too. He's a good fisherman."

"A jack-of-all-trades," Hunter said. "I do what needs to be done."

"Where's Lee today?" Nadia asked.

"Working," Kara answered. "Hunter and I have the afternoon off. I wanted him to meet your mother because he's a _Hyperion_ scholar. He's studied the missions in a lot of detail. He knows more about the _Hyperion_ than anyone on this planet."

"Tell me where you would settle if you were going to the planet," Irina said to Hunter.

He smiled. He knew exactly what Irina was asking. "A valley west of the old city would be the best place. I like to imagine the second _Hyperion_ mission making it to the planet and landing there. The leaders would have looked out over the valley and seen its potential. They would have built dwellings and started farming. I imagine there would be an apple orchard nearby and a big lake and meadows and fields planted with their crops. I imagine it would be a hard life, but I think they would be determined and I think they would prosper. Who knows? Maybe some of them are still alive."

Irina's eyes were bright and shining. "I can see it in my mind now. I told Major Gallagher that if a group of settlers were to inhabit the planet again, that a valley about a hundred miles west of the old city would be an ideal place."

"I think you're right," Hunter said. "It would be beautiful this time of the year. I'm sure of it."

"Yes," Kara added. "I just shut my eyes and I can see the place the way Hunter describes it. It's so real I feel like I've been there myself. I think the _Hyperion's_ descendants have a beautiful home."

"You've certainly brought a ray of sunshine into an old woman's life today with your speculations," Irina said. "Meeting a real _Hyperion_ scholar has always been a dream of mine."

"I like to imagine my father there on the planet," Kara said. "I like to imagine him waiting for me to come get him. That's what I like to imagine."

"Kara's read _The Caprica Prince _too many times," Hunter said. "You know the story where the prince goes to the underworld and rescues his father because he's being held prisoner there."

Irina reached out and Kara took her hand again. The old woman squeezed gently and an understanding passed between the two women who were generations apart in age, but for whom the love of family was a common bond.

"Well, if anyone could bring her father back from the underworld," Irina said with a knowing wink, "I'm sure it would be you."

TBC…


	34. Questions and Answers

Chapter 34

Questions and Answers

_11. The chief priest came to Xander and said to him, Behold the will of God_

_12. That you shall rule His kingdom and do His bidding and the people shall follow His law as told by you._

_13. And Xander said to the priest, I am the humble servant of God but I have no right to speak for all the people._

_14. They should have a voice in how they are ruled. _

_15. We should not decide in secret how all shall be governed, but by the open casting of ballots._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Xander, _Chapter 5:11-15

Even though Jade had promised to behave herself, John made the decision to stay on the path during their walk. Any sort of fight with this emotionally damaged Eight was the last thing he wanted.

He also made the decision because as much as he was concerned about Jade attacking him, he was more concerned about what walking in the woods would do to her. At the very least it would distract her. At worst it would trigger a surge of adrenalin and the desire to kill. He wanted to avoid that at all costs.

At first Jade wouldn't walk beside him and hung back. Finally he stood still and said, "Come up here. I don't want to have to walk backwards to talk to you."

When she reached him they began walking slowly.

"You're afraid of me being behind you," she stated with sly pride in her voice.

"Knowing your history, it does make me uneasy."

"You're afraid to fight me even without my knife?"

John sighed. Maybe Yoshimo was right in his estimation that she was permanently hardened and almost unreachable.

Finally he said, "I _don't want_ to fight you. Don't you understand there's _no reason_ for us to fight. I'm not your enemy."

"I would beat you."

He started to tell her that he'd been in more than a few fights in his life and had won most of them if winning could be defined as who was more or less on his feet at the end of the fight. But in a no-holds-barred free-for-all both people usually got hurt, sometimes badly, and he didn't want to say anything that she might take as a challenge. He sensed that she wanted him to start something…or at least give her an excuse to do it. The sooner she knew he understood her feelings, the better.

"Look," he said, "I know where you're coming from and what you're going through. During the First War, I was a Viper pilot. Every time I sat in that launch tube no matter what the mission, I got that rush of adrenalin. You get to the point where you _want_ to feel it. You crave it because it makes you feel alive, like your life counts for something. It's like being addicted to a drug…and getting over that addiction is just as hard."

"What did you do when the war was over?" She asked.

"I still flew my Viper for a while."

"Was it the same?"

"No. I kept looking for that feeling, though. I had a motorcycle. I used to ride it way too fast. I'd take it up into the hills above Picon City when I was on leave and I'd ride those curvy roads like every demon from Hades was after me. I'd survived over three hundred combat missions during nineteen months of war. Some of them were so bad it was like the mouth of hell had opened and spat out a sky full of my worst nightmares, but I made it through every single one. I was invincible. Or so I thought. Then one night my luck ran out. I got too close to the edge of a curve, hit some gravel at an insanely high rate of speed and wiped out. I don't remember it, but that's what the cops told me I did. They also told me by all rights I should have been killed. My Viper flying days and my motorcycle riding days were over. No more adrenalin rush. I was forced to quit cold-turkey. It was rough even if you don't consider all the other psychological problems I faced when I woke up in the hospital three days later minus one of my legs."

Jade studied him, looking long and hard at him. "You have two legs now." She snickered. "Did you grow another one like a lizard?"

"My first prosthetic leg looked a lot like a centurion's leg only it didn't work as well and it hurt like hell to walk on it. Four tries later I finally got one that looks real and feels real, but it's still not the same as the real one."

"If that happened to me, I would just get one of the others to kill me. I'd download into a new body. Downloading isn't fun either, but I endured it many times." Her tone was proud and boastful again.

"Well that wasn't an option for me. The point is, Jade that this private and personal little war you're fighting with the valley humans is over. You need to accept it and work to move on. I did it. You can, too."

"You could still fly a ship even without a leg?"

"Eventually I managed to pass a flight physical with a prosthetic leg. It took me a couple of years of hard work though. Working out five or six nights a week, going to physical therapy a couple of times a week. I worked for a big charter airline as one of their flight schedulers. I was around pilots all the time. Being grounded and working my ass off at the gym and with a physical therapist wasn't fun or easy, but I wanted to fly again so bad I could taste it. Besides that I was in love with a woman and I knew that if I gave up, she'd kick me to the curb. She was tough and she was strong and she was beautiful, and she didn't want a loser or a crybaby."

"Your wife."

"No, not my wife. That was long before I met my wife. This woman and I never got married, but we had a daughter together. We had a beautiful little girl. She's grown up now. Almost nineteen."

"What happened to your daughter's mother?"

"She died when the Cylons destroyed Picon."

"How old is your little boy?"

"He'll be two in November. I got one almost raised and then I started over."

"D'Anna's baby will die. All the Cylon babies die."

"I hope not."

"The others think it's God's will when their babies die. That's stupid. I think it's because the creators were in such a hurry to create us that they made mistakes. They didn't finish the job. Then again why do we need babies when they gave us the ability to download?"

Jade might be correct about the creators rushing the process. The Graystones had obviously been in a hurry to create a synthetic body for their daughter's avatar, and they probably wouldn't have been too concerned about its reproductive capability. Natalie had told him that Zoe's body had been used as a prototype for creating the Cylon women. That might explain why they were having so many problems getting pregnant and staying pregnant. The creators were probably still working on the problem when they were killed…or maybe they planned to revisit the issue after they finished the twelve models just like Natalie said they planned to revisit the issue of the telencephalic inhibitors for the centurions.

John said, "Let's talk about flying."

She looked at him from under her bangs. "Okay."

"Flying in a planet's atmosphere is different from flying in space where you don't have to worry about gravity. Most ships these days are designed to do both, but some like the big transport we flew here on is better suited to planet-side flight. Can you tell me why?"

She either didn't know the answer or refused to give it.

"Come on, Jade. Help me out here. You say you're interested in learning to fly. How is that ship different from a Heavy Raider? Something really obvious."

"It's got big wings."

"That's right. Do you know what a large wingspan does?"

She shook her head.

"Basically when you're in a planet's gravity, a wingspan like that gives you enough lift to get off the ground efficiently and stay in the air. Do you know what makes that happen?"

She shook her head and looked at him blankly.

He stopped walking and being careful that she stayed in front of him, he knelt on one knee, picked up a small stick and drew a diagram in the dirt of the path. First he drew a cross-section of the flattened tear-shaped wing of the large ship. Then he used dotted lines to show the airflow over and under the wing. He pointed to the top.

"You see the way the air moves over the wing?"

Jade squatted beside him. "I see. The wing is curved on top."

"Exactly. And the bottom of the wing is flat. When a ship is moving forward, air flows faster over the top than it does under the bottom. That causes lower air pressure on top of the wing. The pressure differential causes something we call _lift_. In order for a ship to get airborne, lift must be greater than gravity. In order for it to maintain level flight, you have to achieve equilibrium between lift and gravity. You understand gravity, don't you?"

Jade smirked. "Gravity is why you hit the ground when I tackled you."

Silently John counted to ten. It was a technique he'd practiced often during those first months he and Kara were trying to work out their father-daughter relationship. Jade reminded him of a rebellious sixteen year old. He continued as if she hadn't made her comment.

"Okay, you understand the relationship between lift and gravity. There's two more forces we have to deal with…thrust and drag. Thrust is created when the ship moves forward. It's produced by whatever powers the ship, in most cases the tylium engines. Drag is resistance to the forward motion. When you're taking off, thrust must be greater than drag just like lift has to be greater than gravity or you'll never get airborne. There's complicated physics formulas that deal with getting an object heavier than air off the ground and keeping it aloft. This is a very simple explanation, but you see where I'm going with it."

Jade gnawed her thumbnail and studied the diagram he had drawn on the ground. "How long did it take you to learn everything?"

"Months. Flight School was twelve weeks. Then every time before I started flying a new ship, I went back to school for a few days or a week and studied the ship in detail. Some ships like the Viper I once flew have vertical as well as horizontal thrust capability which adds a whole other dimension to flying them."

"I can access all that data in the stream if it's approved for me. All our pilots learn that way."

"That might be true, but it won't give you the experience of sitting in a cockpit. You'll have to do that on your own."

"How many ships can you fly?"

"I'm qualified on six different ships right now. Three cargo, two passenger and one military craft that's considered both." _Seven if you count the Heavy Raider._ But he didn't say that last thought out loud.

"Do you think I could learn to fly?"

"I'm sure you could. You'd have to work, though."

"You like to fly?"

"Yes I do. You know what I wish we could do?"

She looked skeptical and suspicious. "What?"

"I wish we could fly a kite. That's a fun way to understand lift and drag. If I had the right materials I could make one."

"What is a _kite_?"

"You've never seen a kite?" He asked slightly amazed.

"No."

He sketched the outline of a simple delta kite in the dirt for her to study, showed her where the anchor line was attached and explained how to get it aloft.

"I was about five or six when I flew my first kite. My oldest brother Sean took me and Liam…that was another one of my brothers…took us to an area over the port town on Virgon where I grew up. Port Ithaca. There was a big grassy field overlooking the harbor. It was a great place to fly kites because there was always a good stiff breeze coming off the ocean. Some days the breeze was too strong. I lost my favorite kite trying to fly it when the wind was blowing too hard. It was a delta wing kite with the colors of the rainbow on it. I was about nine years old. Sean told me not to take it out that day, but I was a hard-headed little kid. I learned _everything_ the hard way so I took my kite up to the field. I was so proud when I got that kite up nearly a thousand feet, and then the string snapped. It probably wound up in a tree fifty or a hundred miles inland. The last I saw of it was a speck getting smaller and smaller in the sky."

Jade smirked. "So no more kite."

John smiled. "No more kite. I went home with my tail between my legs. My mother was in the kitchen cooking dinner. I learned when I was just a little kid not to cry because David and Liam would call me _crybaby_ and _little girl_ if I shed tears. So I was sitting on the kitchen floor trying to be brave and Mom…she knew something was wrong. She came over and knelt down beside me and hugged me and kissed me on the top of my head and slipped me a cookie which we weren't allowed to have that close to dinner. Mom always made everything better. Later Sean gave me one of his kites. I just had to promise not to be careless with it. It was shaped like the head of a dragon."

He had finally said a word that Jade could relate to. She almost smiled. "Yoshimo has a pose we do in yoga called _Facing the Dragon_." She stood and stepped into a pose that looked more martial arts than yoga to John.

"I'll bet Yoshimo knows how to make a kite," he said. "I'll ask him in the morning when he comes to do yoga with Natalie."

"How long are you going to stay with her?"

"Until the next transport ship comes day after tomorrow. That meadow near the airstrip would be a good place to fly our kite. The tarmac would be a good place, too, if no ships are landing or taking off."

She gave him a sullen look. "I'm not allowed at the airstrip. The centurions will stop me."

"Why?"

"Natalie thinks I'll try to stowaway on a ship and go back to fight the humans in the forest." She pouted. "The Eights are the lowest when it comes to giving an order to a centurion. All the other Cylon's orders trump mine so when Natalie told them to keep me away from the airstrip, they obey her." She smiled slyly again. "But I could do it if I wanted to."

"There's no point in going back to the forest, Jade. The humans aren't there now."

Another suspicious look. "You lie."

"Ask Sonja. There's a One in the city who thinks some Colonial pilots are hiding in the forest. He's sent all the humans back to the valley. He and his centurions are searching for the pilots. It doesn't sound like he's going to give up anytime soon either."

Jade laughed scornfully. "A One couldn't find a pile of bear scat if he stepped in it."

John smiled. "I see we have something in common…our opinion of the Ones. Now I think we'd better turn around and head back. I need to see if I can help Natalie with dinner. The doctors are coming to eat with us tonight."

John heard dejection in her voice when she said, "Natalie won't let me stay."

"Why not?"

"She says I haven't learned yet not to be rude to her human guests."

"Both the doctors are nice people. They saved my life when I was sick. And they'd do the same thing for you, too."

They walked in silence for a while.

He finally said, "If you'll promise to behave yourself, I'll ask Natalie if you can stay. No talk about killing humans or anything else along those lines. If you screw up, then I'll forget about the kite tomorrow."

"What will I talk about?"

He suddenly realized that this emotionally damaged Eight had very few experiences with humans outside of those she'd had in the forest.

"You don't need to say a thing. Just listen. Sometimes I have to tell my daughter to use her mouth less and her ears more. My daughter has an opinion on almost everything. Keeping her mouth shut is hard for her to do."

"Does your daughter have a job?"

"She's a pilot just like her old man. A good one, too."

"Did you fly a kite with her?"

"When she was just a little thing, maybe two years old. I'm sure she's forgotten it now. Her mother and I used to take her to the beach."

"If you fly a kite with me, I'll remember."

"All right. Behave yourself tonight. No insults and no talk of killing and tomorrow we'll fly a kite."

_…_

Kara got out of the car driven by one of Laura's guards and looked at the sign over the impressively well-landscaped building. _Admiralty Judge Advocate's Corps._

"Should I wait for you, ma'am?" Her driver asked.

"No. I don't know how long I'll be. I'll ride the subway back or call a transport. And please quite calling me _ma'am_. It's _Kara_."

As he drove off she smoothed her uniform tunic and walked briskly up the sidewalk toward the front entrance. She was both dreading the meeting with her appointed lawyer and at the same time anxious to get it over. She stopped as a shiny red sports car pulled into the parking lot. The top was down and the driver was wearing the same blue uniform she wore. She caught a glimpse of his collar pins. A lieutenant commander, one rank below full commander like Helena Cain. She also caught a glimpse of gold Viper wings on his chest.

She timed her arrival at the door to coincide with his so she could get a better look. The identification badge clipped to his uniform said_ H. Robb_. Lieutenant Commander Robb held the door open for her and she entered.

"Thank you, sir. I'm looking for Major MacKenna. Could you point me in the right direction?"

Robb was as tall as her father and as good-looking although she guessed he was about ten years younger. His wore sunglasses and his smile showed even white teeth. "Mac? Sure. Come with me." Inside he removed the sunglasses and she saw warm blue-gray eyes. As they walked down the wide first floor corridor he glanced at her several times. "You look familiar. Have I seen you here before?"

"No, sir. This is my first visit." She smiled. "I've never needed a lawyer before."

"Aren't you're awfully young to be a pilot?"

She smiled. "I'm nineteen, sir. Almost."

"Were you in the air last fall?"

"Yes, sir."

"You bag any Raiders?"

"A few."

"How many?"

Kara smiled. "Twenty-seven is what I'm officially credited with. I think it was about a hundred more, but that's all my gun cameras showed."

He whistled low. "Twenty-seven is an impressive number."

She shrugged. "We were up there fighting all night and into the morning. I should have gotten more."

"The fact that you came out of it at all is impressive."

"I owe it to my dad and everything he taught me."

They reached the elevator. Robb shifted his briefcase to his left hand and held out his right. "Hector Robb."

She shook it. "Kara Thrace."

The elevator door opened and they entered. "Sounds familiar. Help me out here. Give me a hint."

"You'll figure it out eventually. How often do you fly…or do you fly anymore?"

"Once a month to stay qualified. We were all called in last fall. I was in the group of Vipers protecting Caprica City."

"How many Raiders did you shoot down?"

"Three. Nowhere near your score."

Kara smiled. "I was in a more target-rich environment. I'm sure if you'd been up there with us, you'd have done it, too."

"I just figured out who you are. You're Major John Gallagher's daughter. I remember seeing your name in the write-ups about him."

"Yes, sir."

"I met your father out at the airbase one time. A real nice guy. I'm very sorry for your loss."

"Thank you, sir."

"You're also President Roslin's stepdaughter."

"Guilty as charged."

"Are you in some kind of trouble?"

"You could say that."

"What'd you do?"

"Borrowed a ship and went UA."

"A Viper?"

"No, sir. A prototype ship. I brought it back as good as new…well almost as good as new."

He whistled low again. "Mac's going to love defending you. The bigger the challenge, the better she likes it."

"I'm pleading guilty to a lesser charge. I think Admiral Adama called it mishandling of government property. There were other circumstances that I can't talk about. The UA charge is supposed to be dropped."

The elevator door opened and they got off. He showed her down the hall, through a large outer office that was noisy and crowded with desks and printers and a big copy machine. Major MacKenna's office was a glassed enclosure on the far side of the room. Her door was open.

Kara glanced at the nameplate on her desk. Major Sasha MacKenna was pretty and dark-haired and wore a Marine's uniform. Kara stepped inside the door and came to attention.

"Your 09:00 appointment," Robb said to her. Major MacKenna and Lieutenant Commander Robb smiled at each other and Kara got the distinct feeling that they were more than just colleagues. "Good luck, Lieutenant Thrace," he said to her before continuing toward his own office.

"Thank you, sir."

"Close the door and have a seat, Lieutenant," MacKenna said.

Kara complied. She sat quietly while the major reviewed several sheets of paper in a folder on her desk. Finally she said. "Mishandling of government property. That's a very vague charge. What exactly did you do?"

"I borrowed a ship, sir, but I returned it undamaged."

"What sort of ship?"

"A prototype. I can't talk about what kind since it's classified."

"You went joy-riding in a prototype ship and the charge has been reduced to mishandling of government property?" MacKenna asked in amazement. "Who do you know?"

"It wasn't a joyride, and I'm not sure how much I can say and how much I can't so I'd better not say anything else."

At that moment MacKenna's phone buzzed. She looked at the caller ID and picked up. She listened for thirty seconds and then hung up after saying only, "Thanks." Then she looked back at Kara. "It helps to know that you're President Roslin's stepdaughter. That answers my question."

Kara dropped her eyes. "It's complicated."

"Since you're pleading guilty to the mishandling charge and the UA charge is being dropped, my job is easy. Your court-martial hearing is in two weeks. We just show up, enter the plea and see what the judge says."

"This will still be in my record, though."

"Oh, yes. It'll be in your record. What were you thinking when you took that ship, Lieutenant Thrace?"

Kara lifted her eyes. "I had a good reason. It wasn't just a lark."

"How long were you UA?"

"I'm not sure I should say."

"I'm your lawyer. Everything you say in here is confidential."

"A month."

"You were UA _for a month_ in a _stolen_ prototype ship?" MacKenna asked in disbelief again.

"Yes,sir."

"Where did you go? Please don't tell me you were off visiting your boyfriend."

"No, sir. I can't talk about that part. It's more classified than the ship."

"All I can say is that you should be thankful you've got connections. Any other pilot who had done something like that would be dishonorably discharged and spend a lot of time in the brig."

"I think Admiral Adama wanted to throw the book at me, but Lee talked him out of it."

"Lee?"

"His son. We're…I don't mean to make it sound like…I should have kept my mouth shut."

MacKenna nodded. "Okay. Now I understand even better. The daughter of a dead hero, the stepdaughter of the President of the Colonies _and_ the girlfriend of the Admiral's son."

Kara gritted her teeth. "I had a good reason for doing what I did. It wasn't some crazy whim. I thought about it for a long time."

"I wish I had a cubit for every time a client admitted to committing a crime and then told me he or she had _a good reason for doing it_, everything from borrowing his commander's jeep and wrecking it to killing someone. Where do you think we'd all be, Lieutenant Thrace, if everybody got to break laws because they think they have a good reason?"

Kara said passionately, "I'll admit I broke the law. I was prepared for whatever Admiral Adama decided to do to me. I would have accepted the dishonorable discharge. I'd have gone to jail if it came to that. The important thing is that I proved I was right about something _really important_ and the admiral and everybody else was wrong. If I hadn't taken that ship, then he would have made a big mistake, a _huge_ mistake. I'd tell you if I could, but I've been given a direct order by him not to talk about it."

Sasha MacKenna sat and waited for Kara to calm down.

"Since we're pleading this out, you don't need to tell me anything unless you want to."

Kara smiled defiantly. "It'll come out one day, and you'll understand why I did it. For now I'd better keep my mouth shut. I don't want to add disobeying an order to the list of my sins."

"Your hearing is in two weeks. You'll receive a letter stating the date and time. The courtrooms are in this building on the first floor at the end of the hall. Don't be late. I'll meet you there about fifteen minutes beforehand. Any questions?"

"Will the judge know what I really did?"

"He'll ask. I would suggest you tell him the whole matter is classified and that you can't go into any detail. Any questions?"

"No, sir," she answered and stood.

"I don't need to tell you that between now and your court date you need to keep your nose clean, do I?"

Kara smiled. "No, sir. Admiral Adama made an agreement with Laura…the President. I'm under house arrest at Marble House except when I've got some official duty like coming here to see you…or when I go to the airbase."

"I'll see you in two weeks."

Kara started to leave and then turned around. "My mother was a Marine on Picon, a drill sergeant. On the night my dad got me off the planet, she stayed behind with her unit to fight the Cylons. She would appreciate a fellow Marine keeping me out of trouble."

Sasha MacKenna smiled. "Semper Fi, Lieutenant Thrace."

"OohRah, sir."

_…_

Lee finished looking at the recording of Romo Lampkin's first interrogation of Natasi. Major Parker had been right. It was genius. Lee's respect for Lampkin went up a couple of notches at the same time his sympathy for Natasi increased. She might be a Cylon, but she was truly in love with a jerk. It was all the proof he needed that Cylons had some of the same weaknesses that they scorned in humans.

He walked down to the break room and got a second cup of coffee. He'd left Hunter at Laura and John's apartment that morning sitting on the terrace with a book from the well-stocked bookshelves in the den. Laura's housekeeper Jennet had just arrived. She was going to cook Hunter a big breakfast. Lee only wished he had time to stay and share it. Jennet's cooking was second to none.

After eating dinner the previous evening at Marble House, Laura had given each of them keys to the apartment with instructions about how to activate and deactivate the alarm system. They had stayed long enough for Hunter to help Maya give Braedon a bath and get him ready for bed. They had left when Laura took Braedon into the bedroom to read him a story and get him to sleep.

Kara had walked down the hall with Lee and they had kissed chastely at the elevator while Hunter and Maya had looked in the other direction and said their own goodnights.

Back at the apartment, Lee had put his things in Kara's room and had shown Hunter to the guest room. They had watched another movie on television, this one an account of the life of Daniel Graystone and his creation of the virtual reality world called V-world that had been accessed with holobands. It had reached the height of its popularity ten years prior to the First War. Daniel Graystone had made a fortune on the sale of millions of holobands at sixty cubits apiece. At the same time he was raking in money from his holobands, he had made another fortune on the production of the U-87 centurions and the smaller domestic models. Vergis Corporation's answer had been a model that was dubbed the 0005 after the number of prototypes it had taken to achieve success. The accusation by Tom Vergis that Graystone had stolen the design and technology for a meta-cognitive processor was implied to be false as evidenced by Vergis' suicide soon afterward.

During the next few years study after study had been published indicating the addictive nature of holoband use and three things had happened almost simultaneously. First Graystone's U-87 centurion Marines had saved thirty thousand lives when they foiled an attack by Clarice Willow's STO at the Atlas Arena. Shortly afterward Graystone had destroyed V-world along with the technology he had used to create it. Then near the end of the First War, he had liquidated his entire empire, selling Graystone Industries to Vergis Corporation. He and his wife Amanda had disappeared along with his assistant Cyrus Xander and four of his top engineers. There were a number of theories about their fate, including one that Vergis' heirs had them killed. But no one had ever been able to discover what had happened to them. The prevailing theory was that they were still dealing with the death of their daughter Zoe and had retired to a remote island on one of the other planets where they had lived in obscurity until perishing in the holocaust.

This theory was given in a voiceover as the movie ended with a friend of the Graystone's entering their deserted house and looking around in bewilderment. He wandered from room to room, finding them empty including the basement lab where Daniel had built the first U-87 and conducted all his experiments. The final shot was of an empty wooden crate on the floor that panned upward to a child's sketch of a robot pinned on a bulletin board.

"My grandfather Joseph was a friend of Daniel Graystone," Lee had told Hunter. "The guy that played him in the movie looked a lot like him…or the way he looked when he was young. I didn't know him until he was an old guy."

"Was he alive when the Graystones disappeared?"

"He and my grandmother were on vacation on another planet when the Cylons attacked."

"Too bad," Hunter had said. "He might know what happened to the Graystones."

Now As Lee stood in the break room with his cup of coffee, he wondered if Daniel Graystone had told Joseph Adama anything about his plans and where he and Amanda were going. His grandfather was one of Graystone's attorneys and the movie portrayed him as a friend.

During a recent visit to his father's apartment, Lee had seen a dozen cardboard cartons stacked against the wall that his father said had come from Joseph Adama's law office. Lee knew his father had never looked inside any of them because they were still sealed with packing tape. Now Lee wondered if those cartons contained anything that would shed light on the ultimate fate of the Graystones.

Lee glanced at his watch. A few minutes after nine. Kara should be at the appointment with her lawyer now and Shelley Sydell should be on her way from her office for a 09:30 interview with Major Parker.

He walked back to his desk and began checking emails. He was deep in thought when a voice from the doorway said, "Hello, stranger."

He looked up. For a few seconds he didn't recognize the very pretty brunette who was standing there. The surprise must have shown on his face as he realized who she was.

"Shelley."

"Have I changed that much?"

"What did you do to your hair? The last time I saw you it was long and blond."

Shelley smiled. "I quit coloring it and got it cut into something easier to take care of. Troy likes my natural color. He's the only guy I ever dated who doesn't prefer a blond on his arm."

"Troy?"

"Troy Minos. You remember Troy, don't you?"

"Sure. He was on my hall at the Academy. He and Tucker were good friends."

Shelley held out her left hand. There was a modest sized diamond on her ring finger.

"Nice. You and Troy are engaged."

"Since right after the fighting last fall." She smiled. "I guess there's something about almost dying that prompts some guys to propose."

Lee smiled. "Congratulations. Tell Troy I said he's a good man if he can win your heart."

Shelley smiled also. "He's a very good man. It's a shame I never saw it while I was at the Academy. I might have saved myself a lot of heartache."

"I hope you'll both be happy. When's the wedding?"

"We haven't set a date yet. We're thinking about sometime around Winter Solstice."

"Make sure you send me an invitation."

"One or two? Are you and Kara still together?"

"We're still together."

For a moment he thought she was going to comment. Instead she said, "I guess I was called here today to talk about Tucker."

Lee nodded. "They're talking to everybody who knew him. I had my turn yesterday. My CO Major Parker is going to do your interview."

"I talked to Tucker late last week. He didn't say anything to me to make me think he was going to…do something like he did. I still don't believe it."

"I felt the same way when I heard."

"I got the voice mail you left me yesterday. That was nice. Thank you."

"I know you and Tucker were close. I wanted to tell you how sorry I am. I know you'll miss him. We all will."

Tears came to her eyes. "He never got over losing Nora. It seemed to get worse instead of better for him. I wish…I just wish I had seen how bad it had gotten…but since Troy and I got engaged…I haven't spent much time with Tucker. I should have done more…"

"Nobody's blaming you, Shelley. All of us should have done more."

Shelley glanced at her watch. "Major Parker is expecting me. I don't want to be late."

Lee walked with her down the hall and made the introductions. He noticed that Parker took her into an interview room and not the conference room. That meant her interview would be recorded.

Back at his desk Lee finished answering emails and then began reading the transcripts of the interviews that Darren's men had conducted with other of Tucker's friends and acquaintances and fellow pilots. Parker wanted him to look for any anomalies or anything that _didn't feel right _as Parker said. He had a lot of faith in Lee's ability to spot anomalies.

Most of those who knew Tucker Clellan said the same thing…some version of _he was a nice guy._ To a one, though, no one admitted surprise about what he had done. All mentioned Tucker's grief over losing his fiancé and his long-standing hatred of the Cylons. None mentioned Tucker getting trapped in the basement of the school so that meant it wasn't well known.

Lee stopped reading after the fourth transcript and went for another cup of coffee. Shelley was as attractive as ever, but her hair was shorter and no longer blond. He breathed a big sigh of relief. It didn't bother him a bit to have been wrong. He was glad that he had been wrong.

An hour later his phone buzzed. Major Parker called Lee to his office. Parker told him to close the door. Lee did and then sat in one of the chairs across from Parker's desk.

"There were no surprises in Captain Sydell's interview. She mentioned him losing his fiancé and the hellish experience he had when the Cylons bombed Antioch. She had a lot more specific information about the three days he spent trapped in the rubble of that school. During the course of their friendship, Clellan slowly revealed bits and pieces of what he had gone through. Watch the interview if you want to hear the story. It's pretty horrific. If his faculty advisor at the Academy had been aware of it, Tucker would have been forced to undergo counseling."

"I wish I had known it then. Tucker never talked about it to me."

"I asked Captain Sydell several times if she knew anyone who could or would have helped him accomplish his plan to kill the Cylons. She said _no_, but I've conducted enough of these interviews to know she was lying. She knows more than she's saying. I asked her where she was Sunday night. She told me she was with her fiancé Captain Troy Minos all evening. They ordered takeout and watched a movie at his place after which they went to bed. They're living together now."

"Troy Minos was one of Tucker's best friends at the Academy, sir," Lee said.

"You mentioned that yesterday. Do you think he and Captain Sydell could have been in it together with Clellan?"

"I don't know. Shelley doesn't look like she did when I saw her last fall at the memorial service. She used to color her hair blond. It was a lot longer than it is now. She doesn't fit the description of the woman Corporal Venner said drugged him."

"Other than the hair, she fits it, slender and very pretty with a nice figure."

"I know, sir, but…"

"Have you never heard of wigs, Lee?"

Lee was embarrassed. "Yes, sir. Do _you_ think she did it?"

"At this point I'm not going to hazard a guess. My guts says she knows more than she's saying, but my gut won't be accepted in a court of law."

"Are you going to pursue it?"

"I don't think there's anything to pursue. I'm sure Captain Minos will say they were together Sunday night when we talk to him. Darren's men found the bar on Medea Street and verified Venner's story. The bartender remembers Venner talking to a woman. He was vague about what she looked like. _Pretty and blond_ was all he could remember. He didn't think he'd ever seen her in there before. So that's a dead end, too. Unless Captain Sydell decides to confess or points us in another direction, there's not much else we can do."

"So Venner is going home?"

"He's as much a victim as Guiterrez or Lester. Captain Sydell asked me if we'd located any next of kin for Clellan. I told her I wasn't in that loop, but I didn't think so. She asked if we would allow her to make the arrangements for him. She started crying when she told me that he didn't any family left, but that he had friends who loved him."

"Won't the military pay for his burial?" Lee asked in surprise. "Tucker was on active duty when he died."

"I'm afraid not. He died during the commission of a felony…an act of terrorism."

Lee took a deep breath. "It's not fair."

"There's a lot about life that's not fair. What happened to Corporal Lester wasn't _fair_ either."

"You're right, sir. You're absolutely right."

Back at his desk Lee resumed reading transcripts. He thought of another interrogation that was taking place this morning, the one that Laura had mentioned the night before at dinner. Lee wondered if Romo Lampkin was having more luck getting information from Natasi than Major Parker had with Shelley.

_…_

"No rose this morning?" Laura gently teased Lampkin when they were in the Presidential car on the way to the safe apartment where Natasi was being kept.

"She would see through it if I tried it again. Is the good doctor back on Caprica yet?"

"Bill called me early this morning. The _Penelope_ and the _Galacitca_ arrived in orbit late last night. The scientists should be down here by lunch today."

"Poor Natasi. To be in love with such a man."

"It's the only thing that causes me any sympathy for her. It's very painful to be in love with a man who is incapable of loving you in return, and her feelings do seem genuine."

If Lampkin had any thoughts on that subject, he kept them to himself.

They rode the rest of the way in silence. After getting Braedon to bed last night, Laura had spent nearly four hours reading through the transcripts of Kara's and Hunter's debriefings. She had read the sections on John from both transcripts several times. She didn't know any more now than she had known before reading them.

Maya and Kara had been in Kara's room talking when Laura had walked down there after midnight to tell them goodnight. Kara had looked apprehensive, but Laura had simply told her it was going to be nice having her around for a while. The relief on Kara's face at being spared an interrogation about her father was clear.

Their car entered the underground parking garage and pulled up to the elevator. Edgar got out of the front seat and two of her guards got out of the car behind them. They carefully scouted the area before Edgar opened the back door. One of the guards held the elevator door. Laura slid out and Lampkin followed her. They rode up to the designated floor. Her guards got off first. Only after ascertaining that everything was what they were expecting did they allow Laura and Lampkin inside the apartment.

After that everyone followed the scenario Laura had laid out at breakfast that morning. She and Lampkin were sitting in the interview room when Natasi was brought in by a female agent. She was dressed in a gray jumpsuit and she was shackled.

Laura smiled. "Good morning, Natasi." Then she turned to the female agent. "Please remove those shackles."

"I don't think that's wise," Edgar said. "She's fast and strong. She could be across that table in seconds."

Laura was still smiling. "But she won't." She looked directly at Natasi. "Will you?"

"No," she answered coolly.

"I don't like it," Edgar said, following their script.

"Please wait outside. If she harms me, you have my permission to shoot her…fatally."

Natasi rubbed her wrists. "Thank you." She immediately looked at Lampkin and smiled. "I've been waiting to hear from you. Did you bring me news?"

"Dr. Baltar returns to Caprica today."

Relief flooded Natasi's face. "Have you talked to him yet?"

"Not yet. But I'm sure I will within a few days."

Laura said, "I know you'd like to see him."

Natasi gave her a cold look. "You sent someone to kill my brothers and sister."

Laura was taken aback. "I did nothing of the kind. The man who did that acted on his own."

Lampkin said, "I assure you that the President had nothing to do with what happened in the bunker. She had no need. I was preparing a case to take you all to trial. You survived the suicide attack due to Laura's orders to have you moved."

"That was God's will," Natasi retorted.

Laura looked at Lampkin. "We're wasting our time. I told you she didn't want to see Gaius Baltar badly enough to cooperate with us today." Laura pushed back her chair. "I think we should go."

"No wait," Natasi said quickly. "I've already answered all of your questions. I don't know what else I can tell you."

Laura pulled her chair back to the table. "Tell us why some of you came to the Colonies and some of you stayed back on your homeworld. Tell me why the ones who stayed on the homeworld took at least fifty Colonial ships filled with passengers and crew and have set up a number of settlements."

"I've already told Mr. Lampkin."

"Tell me, please," Laura said sweetly. "And I'd like the truth this time."

"They thought humanity deserved to live. We didn't."

"And yet in the end you changed your mind," Lampkin said. "You destroyed eleven Colonies and left Caprica. Why?"

"If I tell you, will you let me see Gaius?"

Laura said, "Answer all our questions and you can have an entire weekend with him. I'll even pull the security from the inside of the apartment so you can have some privacy. But only if you tell us the truth. And please be aware that we already know the answer to some of the questions. A covert mission has been to your homeworld and returned."

Natasi's pupils dilated slightly and she looked at Lampkin. "You didn't tell me that," she said in an accusing tone.

"I didn't know," he said faking innocence. "The military doesn't divulge plans for secret missions to me. The last time we spoke I had no knowledge a team was already on your homeworld."

"You've destroyed it, too, just like you killed my brothers and sister," she said with real pain in her voice.

"No," Laura said. "We don't want it to come to that although I must admit feeling is running high among our military leaders about leaving any of your race alive knowing what you're capable of. Do you blame them? Who's to say your brothers and sisters won't decide to do the same thing you did?"

"The ones on our homeworld feel differently about humans. They're closer to our creators."

"Tell me about your creators, then," Laura said. "The last time you refused to talk about them."

"What do you want to know?"

"Who were they?"

"Seven humans who came to our homeworld with the old centurions."

"Names?"

"I don't know their names. Only the first copy of each model was allowed access to the creators. A Six named Natalie was the first of my model. She never shared their names with us."

"Tell me about Daniel. Tell me about the Sevens and what happened to them."

"They were unintentionally exposed to a virus. All copies of him died. It was a tragic accident."

"No," Laura said. "They were murdered by a One, probably the first One. I want to know why? Why would he murder one of you? Why would he destroy an entire model?"

Natasi shook her head. "That's not true. Whoever told you that is wrong. The Sevens were killed by a virus."

"The One killed your creators at the same time when they tried to stop him from killing a brother," Laura said.

"You're lying to me."

"What's the matter?" Laura asked harshly. "Do you think humans are the _only_ species capable of _murdering_ one another?"

"Laura," Romo said gently. "I know you're going through a difficult time right now, but Natasi isn't responsible. Can't you tell how shocked she is at the news about the men and women who made them? Perhaps you need to step outside. Take a breather and give me a few moments alone with her."

Laura put her hand over her mouth for a moment and then said, "Yes. That might be best."

She got up with as much dignity as she could muster and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her. Then she smiled. _Good cop, bad cop_. Now it was the good cop's turn. She quickly went to the small room next door and took a seat in front of the monitor.

Romo timed his solicitous comment to Natasi perfectly. "I'm sorry about Laura's outburst. She's under a great deal of stress right now. Many on Caprica are very upset about what happened to your brothers and sister."

"Why? Because they wanted the pleasure of watching our execution?" She asked sarcastically.

"There were many who had envisioned that outcome from your trial. But it's not just dealing with the aftermath of the suicide bombing that has upset Laura. She only recently discovered that her husband is a prisoner on your homeworld. One of the reconnaissance mission members brought her that news."

Natasi's look was filled with skepticism. "She told us that her husband had died on the night of our defeat."

"So we thought. There was a malfunction in his ship. He wound up in space near your planet. He was taken prisoner and is now being held in the city where he's being forced to function as a breeder."

Natasi looked directly at the camera. A faint smile played about her lips. "It serves her right for sanctioning the destruction of our race."

"That's where you're wrong," Lampkin said quickly. "She's all that's stopping the nuking of the entire planet. I'm afraid the military is very anxious to solve the Cylon problem once and for all the way they are historically accustomed to solving problems. She had made the decision not to allow the planet to be nuked long before we knew her husband had survived. She's more than willing to grant you certain concessions for your help."

"What kind of help."

"Your thoughts on who would be willing to negotiate a peace and who wouldn't. Any plans that you're aware of for further Cylon aggression. And the truth about the hybrid babies and children on this planet. Did they really die on that basestar?"

"And for this she'll let me see Gaius?"

"Not only see him and spend time with him, she would allow you to return to your homeworld."

Natasi looked down at the table.

Romo gave her time to think before he asked, "Is that something that would interest you?"

"How do I know she would keep her word?"

"Because she's an honorable woman and because she's given _me_ _her word_." Romo paused again for effect and then said softly. "You know she loves a man, too. She loves her husband, and all she wants is for him to come home safely to her. She wants them to raise their son together. You see her only as the President, a woman who holds your fate in her hands. We can't forget that she's also a wife and a mother."

Natasi looked directly at the camera again. "We did take the babies up to the baseship, but we returned them to the planet before that night. Some had medical problems we didn't know how to treat. One died in its sleep and we're still not sure why. Others simply stopped thriving. We fed them and changed them, but they became listless. We brought them back to Caprica. Most were given to the women who had carried them. A few were placed in foster homes. They were all here when you destroyed the baseship."

Laura breathed a sigh of relief. She wouldn't have to worry about someone telling John he had killed dozens of babies and children.

Lampkin said, "We'll need names so that we can make sure they're being well-treated."

Laura saw sadness in Natasi's eyes. "I can't give you names. The one who knew the names was Simon and he can't give anyone names. Those children will grow up and have children of their own and a piece of us will be added to the human gene pool." She smiled slightly. "It's fitting, don't you think?"

"Some human women on your homeworld have had children that were fathered by your brothers and the young Eight here on Caprica, Sharon Valerii, is due to give birth soon."

Tears formed in Natasi's eyes. "Is that true?"

"Yes, it is. Laura helped her and the baby's father get a marriage license, but more importantly, before that, she kept a group of leaders here on Caprica from forcing Sharon to undergo an abortion. She went out of her way to get Sharon into a protective environment after someone trashed the apartment where she and her husband were living. Laura believes it is the will of the gods for their child to be born."

At that moment Laura saw the fight go out of Natasi and a softness come into her eyes that she didn't think she'd ever seen before, not even when she had been talking about her lover Gaius. Laura got up from her chair in the room with the monitor and walked back into the interview room. She sat down beside Lampkin and across from Natasi.

"Forgive my outburst," she said. "Mr. Lampkin knows I'm having a difficult time dealing with the situation my husband is in."

"I hope he returns to you," Natasi murmured.

"Thank you. If it's agreeable to Dr. Baltar, I'll arrange that he be brought here for next weekend. Now I'd like to talk some more about the group of Cylons who stayed behind on your homeworld."

"They thought we were making a mistake in going to the Colonies to destroy them," Natasi said softly. "They believed that we could co-exist with humans in peace."

"And you didn't believe them," Laura said softly.

"I think we made a mistake," Natasi murmured. "You're not nearly as bad as we were led to believe."

_…_

When John and Jade got back to Natalie's house, Sonja was once again sitting on the terrace. Jade walked over and sat in a chair at the table without speaking to her. Natalie had run a string across the top of the posts at the four corners of the patio and was carefully hanging paper lanterns at intervals along the string. John walked up and carefully studied one of them.

He smiled at her. "Your artwork?"

"No. The Sevens had all the artistic talent. Yoshimo painted these for me. I thought we'd eat out here tonight. It stays warm for several hours after sundown."

John motioned for Natalie to follow him and they walked halfway around the garden.

"Jade wants to stay for dinner tonight. She promised that she'd behave herself."

Natalie looked skeptical. "She promised you something like that after less than an hour? What did you offer in return?"

"I promised her we'd make a kite and fly it tomorrow if she kept her word."

Natalie nodded. "She can stay, but the first talk of killing and _you_ get the honor of escorting her out."

"You drive a hard bargain, but I accept."

"Bianca and Laszlo just got here. They're inside with D'Anna."

"Did you tell them about me being here?"

Natalie smiled. "No. I thought I'd let you surprise them."

"What can I do to help with dinner?"

"Do you count cooking among your skills?"

John smiled. "No, but I can follow orders with the best."

"I have a bit pot of vegetable stew on the stove. Yoshimo is bringing bread and wine."

"Home brewed or from the Colonies?"

"Home brewed of course. All the alcoholic beverages from the Colonies were taken to the city. We found that the humans in the settlements are prone to drink too much and behave foolishly."

"Foolishly how?"

"Try to escape or challenge one of us or a centurion. Rebellious humans aren't taken to the city."

John considered what she had just said. "Sonja doesn't drink alcohol. Do you?"

She smiled again. "I've been known to have a glass of Yoshimo's wine. It's very good and the alcohol content is low."

John's smile got bigger. "Finally a Cylon with some sense."

"Yoshimo can help you with your kite. He's very inventive."

John nodded. "Jade reminds me a little bit of my daughter. Kara had a rough time, too, after we got to Caprica. We got separated when she was barely thirteen. By the time we found each other again, she was sixteen going on thirty. She knew it all. We both had to work at building a relationship. Jade might be okay if we can get her into something she likes to do."

"Thank you," Natalie said softly. "I can see one of the reasons Sonja is so taken with you."

He grinned. "My paternal instinct is not what appeals to Sonja. Believe me."

Whatever Natalie's reply might have been he would never know because at that moment Bianca walked out of the house and saw him. She stared and then came hurrying toward them. John leaned down and she put her arms around his neck and he swung her around in a big hug. When he put her down, both of them had tears in their eyes.

"You look wonderful," she said.

"You're more beautiful than ever. Where's that lucky husband of yours."

"Talking to D'Anna. I guess the baby…"

John nodded. "Is mine. What did you find?"

"I think you should come inside with me."

Inside the house he shook Laszlo's hand and after exchanging pleasantries, they all sat on the hard black cushions.

"I've explained to D'Anna that neither one of us are obstetricians," Bianca said.

"I trust both your opinions as much as I would any specialist," John said.

"In regards to her problems, the nausea is normal," Laszlo said.

"I had it with both of our children," Bianca said. "It's not pleasant but as long as D'Anna can hold down some fluids and food, she'll be fine until it passes. She's probably got another month, possibly two before that happens."

Laszlo continued. "The headaches are probably just another symptom of pregnancy. A small percentage of women are very sensitive to the rise in hormones and will get them for a few months. The only thing that worries me is her blood pressure. It's a little high. It might account for her bouts of dizziness and could also account for the headaches. Elevated blood pressure this early in gestation might be indicative that she'll develop pre-eclampsia as the pregnancy progresses. If we were able to do a test to measure protein in her urine, it would give us another marker, but we'd need the equipment at the lab to do that."

"How serious is pre-eclampsia?" John asked.

He knew he wasn't going to like the answer when he saw Bianca and Laszlo glance at each other.

"Because it has the potential to develop into eclampsia, it's very serious."

"What can we do about it?"

"If her blood pressure continues to rise, the only thing to do is abort the fetus since many believe that an abnormal reaction to the placenta is one of the causes."

"No," D'Anna said immediately. "No. I will not have an abortion."

Bianca said very gently, "After a point you'd be risking your life to continue the pregnancy."

"It's God's will that this child be born," D'Anna said calmly. "He will be born no matter what happens to me."

John said. "We've got to be able to do _something_."

"She should be monitored by a physician who specializes in high-risk pregnancies. There are none of those on this planet."

"So what are you saying?" John asked.

"She needs to be taken to Caprica," Bianca said, "and placed under the care of a specialist. We have no way to help her here. If her blood pressure continues to increase as the pregnancy progresses, she risks not only her own health but the child's as well." She gently patted D'Anna's hand. "I know that if you were to die from your condition, you would download, but your child won't."

"I can't go to Caprica," D'Anna said. "Even if I wanted to, I'd never be allowed to leave here. What else can I do?"

Laszlo said, "If you stay here in the settlement, we'll do our best to help you, but you've got to understand that we're not miracle workers."

John squeezed D'Anna's hand. "That would be a lot better than the treatment you'll get from Simon in the city. Did he even mention your blood pressure?"

She shook her head. "How early could the baby survive?"

Laszlo said, "A full-term pregnancy is about forty weeks. Any birth under twenty-four weeks stands less than a fifty percent chance of survival and there would probably be major disabilities. You're barely eight weeks into your pregnancy. I can tell you with absolute certainty that the kind of neonatal equipment necessary to handle a premature birth isn't available here. Neither are the neonatologists. You will only find that on Caprica."

"I'll stay here in the settlement," she said to John. "Will you come see me?"

"I'll try."

Natalie walked to the door. "I don't mean to intrude, but I need to check on the stew."

"Come in," Bianca said.

"She's my sister," D'Anna said. "She can hear what we say."

"Is D'Anna in any danger right now?" John asked.

"Not immediately. Changes in this type of condition usually aren't sudden, but we don't want to take any chances. I would recommend a lot of rest and relaxation."

They all got up except D'Anna who lay down on the cushions. When they walked outside, John saw that Yoshimo had arrived. Laszlo went to sit with him and share a glass of wine. Bianca took John's arm and they walked up the path.

John told her almost everything that had happened including the story of Rika and Yusef and the birth of Rachel. He talked about the freedom Sonja had allowed him. He didn't mention their physical relationship. He didn't have to. Bianca was very perceptive. He talked about everything except D'Anna.

Finally Bianca said, "If D'Anna's condition worsens, the only way to save her will be to take the child."

"She won't let you do it," John said. "She's determined that this child will be born. She and Sonja both have said that one of their prophets foretold his birth. They think he will be the peacemaker between our races."

Bianca stopped walking and looked closely at him. "Do you also believe?"

He took a deep breath. "I don't know. I just don't want the baby to die."

Bianca took his arm again and they walked back to the house in time to help Natalie serve dinner. The wine and the festive paper lanterns added to the party mood. Jade listened more than she talked and John was almost able to forget the grim news about D'Anna and the baby. He and Yoshimo and Jade talked about kites and flying them and he found that for several hours on that warm spring evening in the company of the doctors and a yoga teacher and a small group of Cylons, he was the happiest he had been since he'd found himself in a crippled Raptor thirty light years and trillions of miles from his home.

_…_

Kara was excited. She and Maya were in her sitting room at Marble House waiting for Lee and Hunter to arrive. Tonight was the championship pyramid game and they were going out to eat at a nice restaurant first. Maya looked great. She was wearing the black skirt that showed just enough of her legs to be hot. She was wearing a blue top that showed her curves, too. Blue and green were the colors of the Caprica Buccaneers. Kara had chosen a green sweater and black slacks.

"Come on," Maya said. "Break out of your mold. Go for different and wear a skirt."

"I wore a dress last Sunday. I don't want to spoil Lee." She grinned. "Are you okay with going to the game. I didn't think about what seeing Sam would do to you."

"Sam and I aren't meant to be. I've given up on finding anybody like Peter. It's not going to happen."

"You are way too young to talk like that."

"I just want to have a nice time with Hunter. I enjoy his company. He's made it clear that he's going back to his planet. I understand. My obligations are here."

"Brae's not going to need a nanny forever."

"Kara, if the President trusts me with her son, I'll have no trouble getting a job for someone else."

Kara's mobile phone rang. "Hi. Where are you?" She listened and turned to Maya. "They're at the back entrance. Let's go."

Together they rode the elevator down.

Hunter got out of the front seat when Kara and Maya walked out the back entrance. He opened the back door and Maya slid inside.

Kara got into the front beside Lee and leaned over for a quick kiss. Quick kisses were all they'd gotten since early in the week. It was almost easier not seeing him at all than to see him and be around him and be able to look and not touch.

"I've missed you," she whispered.

He smiled. "You don't know how much I've missed you."

The restaurant was uptown. It wasn't quite on the same level as Bonnie Patrice but it did have valet parking, a new concept that Kara heard Maya explaining to Hunter as they waited for the maître d to seat them. Hunter looked good tonight. Lee had loaned him one of his blue sweaters. He was wearing the other one himself.

When they were seated and had placed their order, Kara asked, "Where are these seats?"

"Center section on the home side, row 10, seats 1 through 4."

"Wow. Zak's friend came through, didn't he?"

"He said he owed Zak in a big way."

"Owed him what?"

Lee smiled. "You remember the twins, Brigitta and Annabeth?"

"I remember that Zak tried to fix you up with one of them while I was restricted to campus for a month for fighting with Maggie."

"Zak wasn't seriously trying to fix me up. He knew better. Zak introduced the twins to this friend. He's seriously in Zak's debt."

Kara groaned.

"I hope you get to meet my brother before you go back," Lee said to Hunter. "He's like the prodigal son who spent his youth having fun and playing sports and computer games. He got kicked out of the Academy for cheating on a test that he could have passed if he'd studied for fifteen minutes. He worked at a sporting goods store and then he got a job in the PR department of the Buccaneers. He and their star player Sam Anders got to be good friends and hung out and partied a lot. I figured he was set for life. Then a few days after the fighting last fall he chucked it all and joined the Marines. I'm still trying to decide what happened to him. I'm beginning to go with the theory of _struck by lightning_."

"Maybe he got tired of what he was doing," Hunter said.

Kara said, "Patriotism was running high last fall. All Zak had to do was drink the water or breathe the air."

"Are we going to the Atlas Arena tonight? Hunter asked Lee. "The one we saw in the movie the other night?"

"The same one," Lee answered.

"What movie?" Kara asked.

"The one about Daniel Graystone. _The Centurion_."

"Do you believe he and his wife just disappeared?" Maya asked.

Kara said, "People don't just disappear. They go somewhere."

"While Graystone owned the C-Bucs," Lee said, "They were the best team in the Colonies. They won the championship something like twelve years in a row against some awesome teams."

"Where's your faith? They're going to beat the Dominos this year," Kara said.

Lee grinned. "You said the same thing last year and we know how that turned out."

"Just wait," she retorted. "You'll see."

The food came and they all began to eat. Lee glanced at his watch several times. "Parking is going to be a bitch," he said.

"Why don't we take the car back to your place and park it and ride the subway to the arena?" Kara asked. "That way we'll get to Zeno's quicker afterwards so we can start celebrating sooner."

By the time they came up from the subway near the arena, they were in a large crowd of fans, most of whom were wearing blue or green. The air was thick with excitement.

Lee took Kara's hand. He was caught up in it, happy and carefree for the first time since the night of the fighting.

Hunter and Maya were also holding hands as they made their way through the crowd.

At their seats Lee went in first, then Kara followed by Maya and Hunter. They were there only ten minutes before the teams took the court to warm up. The crowd stood and cheered and whistled. Sam Anders was leading the C-Bucs. They all gathered at the bench for a moment before they headed out. Sam looked over the crowd and waved. His gaze stopped on them, lingered and then moved on.

The Buccaneers played the best they had played all year. But so did their opponents. The Dominos' defense was strong, but in the end the Buccaneers' offense was stronger. They were ahead by one point at the end of the first half and the score seesawed for most of the second. It was tied for the last two minutes and it looked like the game would go into overtime. Then with three seconds showing on the clock, Sam Anders scored a nearly impossible goal. By that time Kara and Lee had screamed themselves almost hoarse. Although some people started leaving, they stayed for the presentation of the huge trophy and to see Sam given a ride around the field on the shoulders of his ecstatic teammates.

Even Hunter had really gotten into the game. The mood as they later crowded into the subway car was jubilant since the car was mostly filled with C-Bucs fans.

They had to stand, and Lee slipped his arm around Kara's waist as the car began to move. She wished that they were going back to Lee's apartment. They would be only two blocks away when they reached Zeno's. For a few moments she contemplated skipping Zeno's, but Karl and Sharon were going to be there and Dwight and Kendra.

As they walked down the sidewalk, Lee said, "We might not get a table. I'll bet a lot of people watched the game tonight on their big screen."

The others had taken care of that. Zeno's was crowded, but Karl and Dwight had commandeered two four-person tables that were side by side. Kara saw Saunders first and Karl a moment later. She threaded her way through the tables. Karl was on his feet by the time she got there and they hugged so hard that he lifted her off her feet.

"Every time I saw Lee, I'd ask him about you. It was hard to take hearing him say, _No news_."

"I thought about you a lot, you and Sharon both. Where I was…it was like when we lived in the little stone house. I'd think, _Karl would appreciate fishing in this lake, _or _Karl would like this rabbit stew." _

"Rabbit stew? No joke?"

Behind her a voice said, "Do I get a hug like Karl did or are you going to break my heart?" She turned. Dwight Saunders was standing there with a big smile on his face.

Kara laughed. "I'm feeling generous tonight. I'll take pity on my wingman's roommate."

"Let's pull these tables together," Karl said and they quickly had seating for eight.

Kara introduced Maya and Hunter to everyone and Lee went to the bar to order two pitchers of beer. He was feeling generous as well.

Kara sat beside Sharon who had a glass of water in front of her on the table. "How are you doing?"

"My back is hurting. I don't know if I'll be able to stay much longer, but I knew Karl wanted to see you so we came."

"You're not in labor, are you? I heard some woman in the refugee camp talk about how she'd had four kids and always knew she was in labor when her back started hurting."

Sharon shook her head. "I don't think so. I'm not due for almost a month."

"That doesn't mean anything. Babies come when they're ready. Brae was a week early. Laura told me that when she woke up that morning her back was hurting. Maybe you should go to the hospital and let them check you."

"Not yet," Sharon said.

"When are you going to start flying again?" Saunders asked Kara. "Or are you?"

"In a couple of weeks. I think I'm supposed to start the classroom work for the Mark VII on Monday."

He grinned. "How are we going to stand you if you get a better and faster ride?"

"You'll live. You'll just be eating your heart out."

The waiter brought the beer and frosted mugs to the table. Lee waited until everyone had poured some and stood. He raised his mug. "To our C-Bucs. They deserved it. They got it. Long may they rule."

Karl slapped the table several times and raised his mug. "Second that."

They all drank. Sharon sipped from her glass of water.

Lee sat and looked across the table at Saunders. "How's Quartararo?"

"Bored out of his skull. Ready to get back in a Raptor. The doc says another week at least."

"I thought they'd never release me to flight-ready status after I broke my leg."

"He might be here tonight. I told him where Kendra and I were going to watch the game. He somehow got two tickets so does he invite his roommate who listened to him bitch and moan for weeks about his wrist? Hell, no. He asks…somebody else."

"Who?" Lee said.

"I forgot she used to date your brother."

"Who?"

"Racetrack…Maggie Edmondson."

"And she accepted?" Lee asked surprised.

"I should have kept my mouth shut."

"Are you telling me that Crashdown and my brother's girlfriend have a thing?"

"No. They just hung out together some on the _G_ before Crash's accident. Don't make anything out of it."

"It doesn't matter what _we_ make out of it," Lee said angrily. "It's what _they_ make out of it."

Kara leaned over and put her hand on Lee's shoulder. "It's not your business. Maybe Maggs and Zak broke up. When was the last time you talked to him?"

"Last week and he didn't mention it."

"Listen to me. Maggs is not my favorite person in the world. You know that, but cut her some slack until you know the whole story. And you can't blame Crash. Maggs is good-looking. If she wasn't, Zak would never have looked at her once, much less twice."

Sharon leaned over and whispered, "_Behind you_."

Kara glanced over her shoulder. Maggie and Quartararo. They walked up to the table. "Got room for us?"

Saunders and Kendra scooted down. Maggie dragged two chairs from a nearby table. "He's helpless," she said and held up his arm showing a brace still on his wrist.

Kendra snickered. "Did you say _helpless_ or _hopeless_?"

Maggie grinned. "Both."

Quartararo said, "Man what a game. Too bad you weren't there."

"We were," Lee said. "Row 10, center section, home side. A friend of Zak's got us the tickets. You remember my brother don't you, Maggie?"

Kara squeezed his leg under the table and hissed, "Now's not the time or the place, Lee. Let it go."

Maggie got up, walked around the table, leaned down between Lee and Kara and said in Lee's ear, "You mean the asshole who dumped me in an email? Or do you have another brother?"

Sharon pushed her chair back from the table. "Bathroom break."

"I'll go with you." Kara got up. If something happened at the table, she didn't want to be involved. Her lawyer had made that very clear.

Sharon walked with both hands on her lower back. "One of the joys of being pregnant. One trip to the bathroom for every three sips of water."

"Are you sure you're okay?" Kara asked.

"I just got to pee."

Once inside, she let Sharon take the first available stall. By the time Kara came out, Sharon was standing at the sink gripping the edges. Her hands were white-knuckled and her face twisted in pain.

Kara was already fumbling for her mobile phone. "I'm calling for an emergency transport."

"Go get Karl," Sharon gasped.

The door opened and Kendra came in. Kara had to give her credit. She assessed the situation in two seconds. She didn't panic. She walked over and put her arm around Sharon to help support her. As soon as Kara got off the phone she got on the other side of Sharon.

"They're on the way. Ten minutes. Can you walk?"

"It's too soon," Sharon sobbed. "Get Karl."

"We'll get him," Kendra said soothingly. "Let's get you outside. Medics are on the way."

Fifteen minutes later Kara, Lee, Kendra and Dwight stood on the sidewalk and watched the emergency transport pull away from the curb, siren blaring, with Sharon and Karl inside. She had seen blood as they'd helped Sharon onto the gurney.

"I'm going to the hospital," Kara said.

Lee was already looking for a transport. "I'll go with you."

"Maya and Hunter…"

"Will be okay."

"Don't worry about your friends," Saunders said as he put his arm around Kendra. "We'll see to it that they get anywhere they need to go."

Kara said. "I owe you. Tell Maya I might not be back tonight."

Dwight said, "Let us know how things go. Tell Agathon we'll be thinking about him."

Kara nodded. Lee had walked to the edge of the sidewalk and flagged down a transport. When they got in, he said to the driver, "King's Bay Medical Center." He took Kara's hand and squeezed it. "She's going to be fine. _Both_ of them are going to be fine."

"You know something's happening tonight that's never happened before…ever. It's like we're a witness to history."

"Women have been having babies since the dawn of time."

"But not like Hera. She's the first to have a Cylon mother and a human father. In some ways she really is a miracle."

"Your father says that all babies are miracles."

"I know."

Kara settled back in the seat and thought of her father on Nereid. She couldn't say it to Lee, not yet, but she was more certain than ever now that Yolanda Brenn had not been talking about Hera when she had mentioned another child. Kara knew that sometime in the future another Cylon woman would give birth to a baby…and that baby would be her brother or her sister.

TBC…


	35. Go Fly a Kite

Chapter 35

Go Fly a Kite

_5. The high priest of the Temple had a daughter whose name was called Jerusha._

_6. And Jerusha had a vision and said to her father, The days will come again when our people shall be persecuted for worshipping our God._

_7. And He shall hear their cries and send to them a peacemaker, a child of two races but one faith._

_8. And his birth will be presaged by a rain of heavenly fire. Three stars shall fall. One followed by two. _

_9. Xander marveled and said to those assembled, My mother Azurra also saw the birth of this child._

_10. For she said, Three shall come in a rain of fire and will herald the coming of the peacemaker._

_11. And he shall be borne of the three and protected by the six._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Xander, _Chapter 6:5-11

.

The transport stopped and let Kara and Lee out at the front entrance of the huge medical center. Lee paid the driver and hurried up the steps with Kara. He took her hand and walked toward the front reception desk, but Kara pulled him toward the bank of elevators.

She stopped long enough to look at the directory and see that Maternity was on the fourth floor. They got on the elevator with several other people, all medical personnel. The others got off on the second floor and Lee and Kara were alone.

"Why didn't you stop at the front desk and ask where they took Sharon?" Lee asked.

"All they could tell us is that she's in the ER because that's where the emergency transport will take her. But they won't leave her there. They'll send her up to Maternity. Her doctor is up here."

The doors opened and they got off. Kara looked up and down the hall. There was a nurse's station about halfway to one end and halfway to the other end was a big sign hanging from the ceiling that said _Waiting Room. _Kara pulled Lee down the hall toward it and they went inside.

The waiting room was nearly full. It was a complete contrast to the morning that Kara had gone into the waiting room at University Hospital where Braedon had been born. Early that morning she had been the only one in the room.

Kara smiled at Lee. "It's good to know women are still having babies on Caprica."

"So what's the plan?" He asked.

"We wait here for about twenty minutes and then I'll go check at the desk. That should be enough time for Sharon to be transferred up here."

An older woman with a sleeping toddler on her lap slid over on a sofa and made room for Kara and Lee. They squeezed in. Lee put his arm around Kara.

They didn't have to wait twenty minutes. In barely fifteen Karl walked into the room and looked around. Kara was on her feet immediately followed by Lee. They all went into the hall.

Karl looked as stressed as Kara had ever seen him.

"How is Sharon?" She quickly asked.

"In emergency surgery. She was bleeding. They wouldn't let me go in with her. I guess when there's a problem…" he shook his head and stopped talking.

"What did the doctor say?"

"I didn't even see her. The nurse told me she was already scrubbing for surgery by the time we got Sharon up here. We should never have come out tonight, but she wanted to see you._"_

Karl's face crumpled and he turned away from her.

Kara reached up and gently rubbed his arm. "She's going to be fine. She's in the best medical center on Caprica. Her doctor is the best. Don't go second guessing what happened or why it happened. Sharon and Hera are going to be fine."

Karl put his arms around her and Kara held him until he got himself under control. Then she turned to Lee. "There's got to be a snack room on this floor somewhere. Karl could use a cup of coffee. We all smell like beer."

He started down the hall. He had long ago accepted the relationship that Kara shared with Karl. He knew that Karl needed his oldest and closest friend right now.

"The waiting room's too crowded," Karl said. "I don't want to go in there but I don't want to be too far away either if the doctor comes looking for me."

"Where is Sharon in surgery?"

"Down at the end of the hall."

"Let's walk to the nurses' station and back. As long as we're between surgery and the waiting room, the doctor will see you or you'll see her."

They walked all the way to the other end of the hall and started back before Karl said, "When Sharon told me she was pregnant, I…I didn't believe her. Cylons couldn't get pregnant. That's what we all believed."

"I know. My dad told me that Dr. Baltar couldn't even do it in his lab. The only luck they had was with human women and skinjob men, except they did it artificially. Those human women didn't have any idea they were carrying half-breeds."

"If I'd thought she could get pregnant, I'd have been more careful. She wouldn't be going through this right now."

"All babies are miracles from the gods, but your little girl is a special miracle. She's something nobody thought could happen, but she did."

"I couldn't accept it at first. I didn't want a baby. I didn't want to be a father. I didn't want the responsibility. I kept thinking it wouldn't have happened if I'd stayed with Maggie. She was always so careful. And then I was ashamed of myself."

"Karl, quit beating yourself up over it. Did you ever stop to think there's a reason?"

"I love Sharon. I'm not sure what I'd do if I lost her."

Kara took his arms and shook him. "Karl, you're not even listening to me. Quit thinking about all the bad things that could happen. Sharon is strong. She'll be fine. And babies born a lot earlier than Hera have lived and been fine."

Kara wasn't sure about what she had just said to him. She knew almost nothing about premature babies except that most of the tiny preemies born in the refugee camp had died in spite of being delivered by the camp doctor, but Karl didn't need to hear that now. He needed to hear something comforting.

"Remember all those good times we had when your mom and dad took us camping. Remember how your dad took you fishing. You'll take Hera fishing one day, maybe on Nereid."

"Sharon's scared about being a mother. When we went to the childbirth classes, she'd stay afterward and ask the teacher a lot of questions. She didn't say it but I know it's because Cylons were never around babies. Sharon didn't even know how to hold one. We had to practice with dolls. We held them and diapered them."

"I was the same way. You remember how freaked I was the first time some woman in the camp asked me to hold her baby so she could wash her clothes in the sink. I didn't know how to hold one either. But I learned."

"Holding a baby for a few minutes and taking care of one all the time is different."

Kara punched his arm lightly. "Duh, Karl, even I could figure that out. You are going to be a _good father _and Sharon is going to be a good mother. You're freaked out for no reason. Come on. Let's talk about something else, okay?"

They walked half the length of the hall in silence until Karl asked, "What did Maggie say to Lee?"

"That Zak broke up with her in an email. I'm not sure if I believe it or not. Maggie lied about me at the Academy…about my dad giving me good scores in the simulator and helping me cheat on Colonel Burgher's exams."

Karl said, "She didn't think she was lying. She'd convinced herself it was true. Her and Pike. I told her to stay away from him because he was always talking trash about you and Saunders and anybody else who did well in Colonel Burgher's classes."

Kara rolled her eyes. "Don't remind me."

"She's jealous of you, Kara. She has been since she met you. But it wasn't all her fault. You were never very friendly to her, even in the camp."

Kara shrugged. "Maybe Zak did break up with her, but I'll bet it wasn't because he met some other woman. I mean who is he going to meet in Sovana? That place is the armpit of Caprica right now."

The elevator opened and Lee got off carefully holding three cups of coffee with lids.

"A nurse in the snack room told me the cafeteria has the best coffee so I went down there. I got us all a cappuccino."

Kara took a cup and Karl took another.

"Thanks," they said in unison.

Karl finally smiled. "I'll return the favor when it's you pacing up and down waiting for Kara to have a baby."

Kara snorted. "Don't hold your breath. That's not going to happen for a while. And when it does, Lee will be in the room with me just like my dad was with Laura. I'm not going to do it all by myself."

A nurse wearing pink scrubs walked by them and turned around. "The waiting room is crowded again, isn't it?"

"Standing room only," Kara said.

"Are you waiting on news about a friend or family member?"

Karl said, "My wife is in surgery right now with Dr. Delos."

The nurse's expression told them that she was familiar with the case. "Come with me. There's another waiting room that's much more private."

She led them down the hall toward the surgical suites and showed them a doorway. It opened into a small waiting room that was empty.

The nurse said, "Dr. Delos will check this room first. She'll see you."

"We really appreciate it," Karl said.

He sat on the small couch opposite the door. Lee and Kara sat together on one near it. They sipped their coffee in silence. Karl couldn't stay seated for long. He got up and walked to the door and then back. Two minutes later he did it again, standing in the doorway and looking up and down the hall.

The third time, Lee jokingly said, "Try not to wear a groove in the carpet."

Kara elbowed him. "I'd hate to see how you'd be acting if it was me in surgery."

Karl had just sat down when a tall, slim woman in blue surgical scrubs looked in. She still had the cloth cap on her head. The top of her surgical mask was untied, but the bottom ties were still fastened. It was hanging down around her neck. She hadn't wasted any time coming to look for Karl.

She smiled and Kara immediately breathed a sigh of relief. Doctors didn't smile if they were delivering bad news.

Dr. Delos asked, "Would you like to come into the hall while we discuss your wife and daughter?"

Karl shook his head. "These are my friends. Sharon's friends, too. You can talk in front of them."

He introduced them and Dr. Delos nodded pleasantly before walking over to the sofa. Karl sat and the doctor perched on the sofa arm.

"First let me tell you that Sharon is fine. I had to do a c-section because she had a condition we call placental abruption. That basically means the placenta began separating from the wall of the uterus. That's what caused the hemorrhaging. Because she lost some blood we're transfusing her, but she's strong and healthy so I don't foresee any problems."

Karl's voice trembled. "Our little girl?"

"She's early by almost six weeks, but she's breathing on her own which is always a good sign. She weighs four and a half pounds and she's sixteen inches long. We've taken her to the NICU. We need to do some tests, and we'll need to keep her for a few weeks, but I believe she'll be fine as well. You'll be able to take your wife home in a few days."

"What's the NICU?" Kara asked.

"Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. It's the best on Caprica. She'll be under the care of our best neonatologist, Dr. Milo Junius. I called him as soon as I was notified you'd brought Sharon in. He and his team were scrubbed and waiting to take over the care of your daughter the minute she was born."

Karl asked, "When can I see Sharon and Hera?"

"Sharon is in the surgical recovery room right now. We should have her to a regular room in an hour. You can see her then. We should have the test results back on the baby by then. We'll take you to see her after you see your wife."

Karl had tears in his eyes. "We went out tonight to a restaurant to watch the pyramid game. Is that what caused…"

"No. This would have happened anyway. Sharon's had a number of problems that we've been monitoring. There was a high risk factor for the abruption already there. We've been very lucky she made it as long as she did."

Kara squeezed Lee's hand. She was glad Karl wouldn't have a big guilt trip to lay on himself.

Dr. Delos stood. "Your daughter has a little bit of dark hair like Sharon and she's beautiful…right down to her ten perfect little fingers and ten perfect little toes." She smiled, "but I'm sure you'll want to count them yourself."

"Thank you," Karl said.

When Dr. Delos had gone, Karl put his face in his hands and again gave in to his emotions. Kara got up and went to sit beside him. She put her arm around him and squeezed his shoulder and felt much as she had at other points in their long and enduring friendship. Words weren't necessary. Their bond was that deep.

Lee had long ago stopped feeling jealous of Kara's friendship with Karl, but he felt like they would be more at ease with him out of the room for a few minutes. He walked down to the end of the hall, entered the stairwell and sat on the steps.

Maggie's remark, spoken softly beside his ear was filled with anger, and it came back to him as it had several times already. If she'd said it in a joking way where everybody could have heard, he might have thought she was kidding, but she'd said it only to him although he was sure Kara had heard it as well. The more he thought about it, he'd heard something else besides the anger. For all her bravado and toughness Maggie was hurting. She'd loved Karl and now she loved Zak. Karl had moved on to Sharon and now apparently Zak had ended the relationship. Maggie was extremely attractive and she was a top notch Raptor pilot. She was doing well in her chosen career, but she was zero for two in romance. He didn't understand why.

He got out his mobile phone. It was 01:43 in Caprica City. Sovana was an hour ahead which meant it was 02:43 up there. Zak was either on night patrol or sleeping. Lee keyed a text message.

_Hey, Little Bro. What's up with you and Maggie?_

He hesitated and then sent it_. _In a way it wasn't any of his business, but he loved his younger brother and wondered what had prompted him to break up with the young woman he had been with for the better part of two years.

Lee clipped his phone on his belt and walked back to the small waiting room. Karl was sitting talking quietly to Kara. She motioned for Lee to come over.

"Karl hasn't had time to look for an apartment yet. He just got back from the _Galactica's _mission two days ago. We don't want Sharon to have to go back to the shelter…not because there's anything wrong with the shelter, but because she needs some privacy and she needs to be with Karl. Any ideas?"

"There's some apartments available in my building. Karl and Sharon can stay at my place until they get it worked out. Hunter and I are at Laura and John's apartment now."

"See there," Kara said to Karl. "Everything is going to work out fine."

"I couldn't," Karl said.

"Why not?"

"Where are you and Lee going to go to be alone?"

Kara gave him her best eye roll. "I'm under house arrest right now. Laura isn't the strictest jailer, but I've got to respect the situation I'm in. Lee and I will manage."

"Give me a week," Karl said. "I'll have something in a week. I'll start looking first thing Monday. I don't know how I'll ever repay you."

"We don't expect anything," Lee said.

They sat and waited with Karl for almost an hour until a nurse came to get him.

"Call me tomorrow," Kara said after Karl hugged her again. "Let me know as soon as Sharon can have visitors."

Lee shook Karl's hand. "Congratulations…new Dad."

Kara grinned. "You'd better get used to being called that. Hera will be talking before you know it and the first thing she'll say is _dada_ just like Brae did."

Karl went with the nurse and Lee and Kara headed for the elevator. Inside they held hands again.

"Tired?" Kara asked.

Lee smiled. "A little. Why?"

Kara grinned and snuggled against him. "Since you're going to gallantly loan your apartment to Karl and Sharon for a week, I thought we might go back there tonight…unless you're too tired."

"I'm never that tired," Lee said before he kissed her. They were still kissing when the elevator doors opened on the first floor.

...

John lay on the cushions that functioned as a couch at Natalie's house and pulled the blanket around his shoulders. There was only the smallest crescent of a new moon, but the light coming through the windows was enough to keep the dark from being total. He wasn't sure of the time since Natalie didn't have a clock in her house.

He had awakened a short while earlier after dreaming about the firing squad once again, only instead of Colonial Marines, the shooters raising their rifles were all copies of Jade. He wasn't at his apartment in the city so he couldn't get up and wander into the living room to lie on the couch. He was already on the couch. Instead he tried to get his mind off the horror of those incoming bullets by thinking of the evening he had just spent.

The meal and Yoshimo's wine had been a big hit. The companionship had been even better.

The doctors had left arm in arm to walk back to town about eight o'clock. Yoshimo and Jade had left shortly afterward. The rest of them had moved inside to get away from the insects that were attracted to the candles on the table and to their skin. John and Natalie had finished the last of the second bottle of wine and they had all sat and talked for a long time. Sonja had shared the story of Rika and the baby who had been named Rachel after John's mother. They had a long discussion of the prophecies that had predicted the birth of the peacemaker and his six protectors. Sonja had voiced her conviction that little Rachel was one of the protectors since she bore the same name as one of the six stepdaughters of Azurra. Sonja found the passages in their scriptures and read them…of how first Azurra and then another prophet named Jerusha had spoken of the coming of a peacemaker.

Then Natalie got her copy of _Pythia _and after searching for a short time found a similar passage. She read it to them.

_Pythia said to the daughters of the temple, 'After the blaze at the dawn of the third age of mankind, a child shall be born of a non-believer and he will bring peace to the warring tribes.'_

Finally Natalie said, "Those of us who have studied both faiths think that the three prophecies lend credibility to one another."

"Do you believe?" John asked her.

"Yes I do. Azurra was our greatest prophet. Jerusha less so, but the faithful take her words as a confirmation of Azurra's earlier prophecy."

"Thousands of years ago Azurra and Jerusha and even the pagan Pythia were speaking of _my son," _D'Anna said quietly. "Those who interpret the prophecies were always puzzled by Azurra's words that the peacemaker would be borne of the three. They thought she meant three women and didn't know how that was possible. Now we understand what she meant. I'm the Three."

John marveled at her conviction. She believed without a shred of doubt. He envied anyone whose faith was that absolute.

Natalie said, "I think we'd all do well not to speak to any of the others about our belief that D'Anna is carrying the peacemaker. The Ones are all right with the prophecy as long as they believe it points to an event in the distant future. They might take another stance if they think the child has already been conceived. They might interpret a peacemaker as a threat to their power base. I don't believe we want to tempt fate just yet. That day may come, but we don't want to rush it for D'Anna's sake. Her safety is our primary concern."

Now John lay awake in the dark thinking about D'Anna's pregnancy and how different it was from Laura's. Other than morning sickness for the first three and a half months, Laura's pregnancy had been uneventful in a medical sense. He hadn't been around Socrata while she was pregnant. She'd broken up with him before she began showing. Kara was almost four months old before he even knew he had a daughter. But Socrata had never mentioned any problems either. Now he had fathered a third child with yet a different woman, a Cylon, and barely two months into the pregnancy she was already facing a condition that the doctors had said would get worse and at some point would probably become life-threatening for her and the baby.

John took a deep breath and rolled onto his back. Other than some night sounds outside, cicadas and a distant owl, the silence was nearly complete. The three women were asleep in Natalie's bed, their breathing so quiet as to be inaudible to him.

He knew almost nothing about the problems that could potentially occur during pregnancy, but he understood very well the dangers of untreated high blood pressure. His maternal grandfather, John Edmond Spencer, the man he was named for, had untreated high blood pressure. John was nine years old when he had lost his grandfather to the disease. He clearly remembered the funeral. It was the first time he had seen his mother cry.

Sean was the one who had picked him up at school that day and had told him that their grandfather had gone out to get the morning paper, bent over to pick it up, and suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. John hadn't understood and Sean had to explain that a cerebral hemorrhage meant a blood vessel in his brain had ruptured. Then he had added. _Gramps was dead by the time he hit the ground. _John had understood that very well. By the age of nine he understood death. He knew that he'd never see his grandfather again, not in this world at least. On the way to the funeral in a small town forty miles inland, he had sat in the front seat of their old car between his parents. David and Liam had been in the back seat. His mother had known better than to put John back there with them. Sean had his own little car by then and he and Eddie had followed. John had begged to ride with them, but his father had simply told him to get in the car. He had done as he was told. He'd learned at an early age the consequences of disobeying his father or continuing to plead once his father told him to do something.

His mother, whose clothes were always soft and feminine, had worn a severe black suit with a long slim skirt and a black hat with a veil that she had pulled over her face before they had entered the temple for the funeral. The five boys had all worn their only suits. Sean had kept everybody in line because their mother had fallen apart during the eulogy given by an old family friend. Their father had his hands full trying to comfort her. On the way home afterward she had sat beside him in the car and John had sat at the door. His father had kept his arm around her. She was still crying and asking why her father had refused to take the medicine for his high blood pressure. She had called her father a _stubborn old man _and had cried about his_ useless death. _John still regarded that forty-mile trip beside his inconsolable mother as the worst car trip of his entire life. Every one of her sobs had pierced his nine-year-old heart.

It was the first time John had heard the term _high blood pressure, _but it had made an indelible impression on him even though it was years before he understood what it actually meant. Now D'Anna had it because of being pregnant. Bianca had told them that D'Anna's blood pressure wasn't in the danger zone…yet, but both she and Laszlo thought it would get higher as the pregnancy progressed and they didn't have the medication to treat it.

D'Anna needed to go to Caprica. That was the only way to save both her and the child.

On their walk the evening before, Bianca had finally asked him if he had developed feelings for either D'Anna or Sonja. The truth was complicated…more complicated than he could explain. Yet even without an answer, Bianca had seemed to understand.

There was a lull in the cicada sounds. He heard a soft rustling and then whisper-soft footsteps across the rug. Sonja, naked and pale in the faint moonlight, lifted the blanket and crawled under it next to him. They didn't speak. He knew what she wanted. He was gentle with her and he took his time, trying to make up for his cruelty the night before. He didn't make her beg. He didn't even make her ask.

...

Kara lay in Lee's arms, their bodies still entwined and enervated from their lovemaking.

"Bet you didn't think this was going to happen tonight," Kara murmured happily.

Lee pulled her tighter against him. "No. I'll have to remember to thank Sharon."

"I hope Maya and Hunter are okay."

"Are you wondering if Maya is in bed with Hunter right now?"

Kara huffed. "No. That's not going to happen. It's after three in the morning. Maya is back at Marble House and Hunter is in bed at the apartment."

"I'm joking, Kara. Lighten up. Isn't that what you're always telling me to do?"

"Tonight started out so great. We won the championship and then…it all went to hell. Sharon went to the hospital. I didn't get to talk to Saunders or Kendra. Maggie showed up with Crashdown. And we just ran off and left Maya and Hunter."

"Saunders said he'd get them safely home. He'll do what he said. Even if he didn't, Maya knows how to call a transport. She and Hunter will be fine. Quit worrying about them. And I wish you'd lighten up on Maggie."

"What? Are you ashamed because Zak dumped her?"

"I sent him a text message asking him what was going on."

"Do you think he'll tell you?"

"I don't know. He's my brother. I care about him. I wonder if he's going through some sort of…emotional crisis or something."

"And maybe he just saw Maggie for what she is…a real bitch."

"I happen not to agree with you on that. I like Maggie. I don't understand what it is with you two. Why can't you make an effort to get along with her?"

"I should make an effort to get along with someone who told everybody who'd listen to her at the Academy that my father _gave_ me good scores in the simulator and helped me cheat on Colonel Burgher's exams. Her and Pike."

"Have you ever thought that maybe she's realized she was wrong?"

"Then it's her place to apologize. I tell you what. You talk to Maggs about it and see how far you get. I should probably go back to Marble House. I'd like to be there for breakfast with Laura and Brae…and Maya. You and Hunter are invited for lunch. You don't have to dress up. I think your father is going to be there, too."

Wearily Lee pushed back the covers and sat up.

"Are you angry at me?" Kara asked.

"No. I'll take you to Marble House and then I'll go to Laura's apartment. We wouldn't want Hunter to get lonely, would we?"

Kara leaned up and pressed against him and kissed him on the back of his neck. Her touch and her kisses always set his nerves on fire. He smiled.

"You must not be in _that much_ of a hurry to get back."

She pulled him down with her. "It might be a while before we'll get to do this again. Besides, there's not much difference between 03:00 and 04:00 at Marble House."

By the time Lee got to Laura and John's apartment, it was after 05:21. One lamp was on in the den. Hunter had fallen asleep on the couch with the television on, the volume low.

Lee found the remote control on the end table and turned it off.

Hunter's eyes were still closed, but he asked, "Is the Cylon all right?"

Lee jumped at the sound of Hunter's voice. "I thought you were asleep."

"I was until I heard the door open. Did she have her baby?"

"A little girl just like they thought. She only weighs four and a half pounds but the doctor thinks they'll both be okay. I guess Saunders and Kendra brought you home."

"No," Hunter said and yawned. "They brought me back here. Kara's the only person who could take me _home _or maybe you could since she says you can fly the Raider, too_."_

"Semantics," Lee said. "You know what I mean."

"They're nice. Saunders asked me about Narcho…not in front of the others, but I still told him I couldn't talk about it. I told him Narcho volunteered to stay and that my uncles would keep him safe. I hope that was all right."

"Saunders knows how to keep his mouth shut. Did Maya tell you we're invited to lunch today?"

"She mentioned it."

"You don't sound too enthusiastic."

Hunter shrugged.

"Do you have a problem with going to Marble House for lunch? Would you rather do something else?"

"No problem. We'll go to Marble House." He stood. "I'm going to try to sleep for a couple of hours…in bed."

"I'm going to do the same thing."

Lee turned off the lamp and went to Kara's bedroom. He undressed and crawled under the covers and wondered why Hunter hadn't seemed very enthusiastic about their lunch plans for later that day. He wondered if something had happened between him and Maya that had caused the reluctance he'd heard in Hunter's voice.

...

Laura opened her eyes with no clear knowledge of what had awakened her. It was still very dark outside and she rolled over to look at the clock…4:47. Despite the fact that the night shift members of her security team were awake and patrolling at this hour, Marble House was very quiet. Security was still heightened because of the bombing early in the week, but other than the one clash between the monotheists and some members of the Sons of Ares outside the hotel, the days since had been uneventful.

Corporal Jamal Lester's funeral on Friday had been solemn and dignified. Her own security team had done their usual masterful job of protecting her without being intrusive or obvious. The television crews had been kept at a distance out of respect for the family. Laura had remained in the background, stepping forward only after the graveside service and the twenty-one gun salute to express her condolences to the young corporal's parents and sister. On the way back to Marble House, she had finally given in to her grief and had cried for all the lost lives and all the pain and suffering that her husband and everyone had endured since the Cylons had decided to destroy humanity. Edgar had said nothing, but he had handed a package of tissues to her. She had used half of them.

In the quiet Laura heard the elevator down the hall start and run briefly. Someone was either coming up to the second floor or leaving it. She wasn't worried. Anyone who reached the private elevator had been through five layers of security. It was probably Kara coming in from the hospital.

Laura had been sitting on the couch outside Braedon's bedroom when Maya had come in just after midnight with news of what had happened that evening. Her cheeks were flushed and she was smiling.

"The C-Bucs won the championship," she said.

"I know. I saw the end of the game on television after I got Brae down. You look like you had a nice time."

Maya sat on the end of the couch. "I did. We went to Zeno's afterward. Some of Kara's and Lee's friends were there. Sharon went into labor and had to go to the hospital."

Laura took off her reading glasses. "I didn't think she was due yet."

"She's not. Dwight Saunders thought he heard Karl say this was six weeks early. Kara called an emergency transport. She and Lee followed it in a regular transport. Kara said to tell you she was going to stay with Karl until the baby came."

"Of course," Laura said. She was upset to think that something might happen to Sharon's baby after Sharon had carried her this long. She sighed. "A baby grows and develops a great deal during those last six weeks. I hope little Hera is all right. Sharon, too, although I'm less worried about her. She's a healthy young woman."

"She's also a Cylon," Maya said. "They're strong."

Laura chose to let that comment go. Instead she said, "I guess you had to take a transport back here."

"Dwight Saunders and Kendra Shaw brought us. I mean brought me. They were going to drop Hunter at your apartment in the city after they let me off."

"I'm glad you had a nice time."

"It was hard at first seeing Sam. I hadn't seen him since I told him I couldn't marry him. When the team first came out, he looked up into the stands. He looked right at me. I know he realized I was with someone. Then he played the best game I've ever seen him play."

"I listened to a brief interview one of the sportscasters did with him afterward. Among other things he said he was inspired by a very special lady and that she would know who he meant. Are you sure you don't want to reconsider your decision to end the relationship?"

"Oh, gods," Maya said, and for a moment Laura thought she was going to cry. Then Maya pulled herself together and said quietly. "I wonder how many other women thought he was talking about them. Half a dozen at least. I'm sure Tory did. Lissa, too."

"That's very cynical. I'm sure he meant you."

"Sam is very special to me and he always will be, but he's not Peter. I'm still looking for a man like the one I lost. I'll never find him, even though Kara told me not to give up hope. She's so tough and mature in a lot of ways, but she's still so naïve in others. Just wishing something will happen doesn't mean it's going to happen. Besides, I'm not cut out to be the wife of a big pyramid star. I don't want that kind of lifestyle. I got a taste of it while we were dating…being followed and hounded by the paparazzi. Walking out of a movie and thirty camera flashes going off in my face. Not being able to enjoy a meal in a restaurant without someone coming up asking him for an autograph and slipping him their phone number. I want something a lot quieter. I don't want a man that half the women in Caprica City throw themselves at. I think Sam tried to be faithful while we were together, but I know he didn't always succeed. Tory loves the spotlight. She'd be perfect for him."

"I thought Tory had a relationship with Gaius Baltar."

"She probably does. Tory likes high-profile men. They don't come much higher-profile than Sam or Gaius."

"Perhaps after we resolve the situation on Nereid, it will be a lot quieter there. I understand Hunter's valley is very peaceful and rustic."

Maya smiled. "You're not going to get rid of me that easily."

"I don't want to get rid of you. In fact I couldn't imagine what I'd do without you. But you can't make decisions about your life based on my needs or even Brae's needs. You need to think about yourself, Maya. Nothing would please me more than to see you happily settled with a nice young man."

Maya lowered her eyes. "I kissed Hunter tonight. I shouldn't have because he told me a week ago that he's going back to his planet soon. I could tell that he was warning me off, but he's so nice and he's so good with Brae…and we'd both had a couple of beers and I…I wanted to do it so I did."

Laura's smile got broader. "What did he do?"

Maya finally looked up and smiled. "He kissed me back. He's a very good kisser. But maybe that was the beer."

"I doubt it. I'm glad for you, Maya. You deserve happiness as much as anyone I know, more so than many."

"I don't think it's going to happen with Hunter, but thank you. So do you."

"As soon as John is home, I'll be happy. I just want my husband back."

"Admiral Adama will bring him home. I know he will."

Now Laura lay in the early morning dark and thought about first kisses, about the first time John had kissed her. It was a kiss that she would never forget. It had not been a deeply passionate kiss like many of his later ones were. It had been gentle and filled with longing. She'd refused to admit it to herself at the time, but looking back that's the moment she'd begun falling in love with him, the moment her heart had finally let go of Bill Adama. It had been a long time before she'd said the words aloud to John, but that's when her feelings had crossed the line between simple attraction and something deeper. Now she just wanted him back, her husband, her gentle lover, her son's father.

...

When John opened his eyes again the sun was up and the room was filled with the delicious smell of baking. He was on his back with Sonja asleep and nestled against him. Natalie was seated at the small table in the kitchen. She was again wearing the outfit she wore to do yoga and was drinking a cup of tea. A plate piled with walnut and raisin cookies was on the table in front of her.

When she realized that he was awake, she smiled and said, "Good morning."

"Shower," he said softly.

She gestured toward the bathroom. "I put out a clean towel for you."

He'd washed his shirt and underwear the night before and left them hanging in the bathroom. He'd walked to the couch wrapped in the blanket Natalie had given him. He rolled off the cushions and left the blanket covering Sonja. It wasn't like Natalie had never seen a naked man before and if he'd had any modesty left, he'd lost it at the prison where he had been kept naked all the time. Fifteen minutes later he had showered and dressed. Shaving would have to wait until he got back to the city since he didn't notice a razor anywhere. His shirt was still a little damp but he put it on anyway. Most of the dirt had brushed off his slacks.

Natalie was no longer sitting at the table. He opened the door and looked outside. She had moved to the wooden table on the patio. He left the house and closed the door quietly behind him.

She had a cup of tea and several cookies waiting for him and said, "I thought we could talk out here without waking the others."

He sat. "I don't make a habit of walking around without my clothes on, but…"

She smiled. "I wasn't offended. You have a nice body."

"I could say the same thing about you…not that I've seen you naked but…" he stopped, suddenly embarrassed.

"You've seen Sonja naked. We look very much alike."

"I hope we didn't wake you up this morning. I tried to be quiet…and keep Sonja quiet." He tried to cover his embarrassment but succeeded only in making it worse.

Natalie was still smiling. "You're blushing, John."

"Sorry. I'm going to quit talking now before I say something else and dig myself in any deeper."

"Don't apologize. I find your honesty refreshing. And please don't tell me you never made love to a woman in a bunk on a battlestar. Privacy is very limited in those circumstances…or so I've been told."

"Who told you that?"

"The young man who helped me make the bricks and build this patio. He was a pilot on shore leave from duty on a ship called the _Atlantia. _He and several friends were on a cruise ship we took. He bragged quite a lot about the experiences he had with women in his bunk although I think much of it was exaggeration in an attempt to impress me. You, I think, would never say a word about your own exploits although I imagine there were a number of them."

"That was a long time ago."

"You and Sonja didn't awaken D'Anna. Once she's asleep, she stays that way. I envy her."

"But we woke you up."

"Sonja woke me crawling over me to get out of bed. You were quiet. I never heard you, but I did hear her. I think you made her very happy."

"Let's talk about something else. Okay?"

"What would you like to talk about?"

"Anything else."

"Just one more thing and then we'll change the subject. Sonja has a very strong sexual appetite as I'm sure you're already aware and you obviously make her quite happy, but she's always liked variety. I doubt you're her only lover."

"I seem to remember yesterday you told me that Sonja needs a man like me and now you're telling me I'm not man enough for her."

"No, I'm not saying that. She does need someone like you, and you're very much man enough for her _when you're with her. _I met Sonja several years ago when she came here to see Laszlo. Since that time she's had at least five lovers."

"I really don't care, Natalie."

"I just don't want you to…have any illusions about her ability to be faithful. I'd hate to see you get hurt."

"Did Bianca put you up to this? She's concerned that I'm getting attached to Sonja and D'Anna both."

"Are you?"

"I appreciate your concern. Tell Bianca I appreciate her concern, too, but don't worry about me. What time does Yoshimo get here?"

"Soon. We do yoga three mornings a week and practice martial arts two mornings. We work on our meditation and spiritual enlightenment the other two. This morning we'll do our meditation routine. You're welcome to participate if you'd like. Sometimes Jade shows up. I bet she'll be here this morning since you've promised her that you'll show her how to fly a kite."

"I can see why you want to get her into meditation, but is it wise to teach her martial arts moves?"

"Yoshimo uses the opportunity to teach her the mental discipline as much as the physical aspect. You never studied any of them, have you?"

"No."

"You really should consider one or all of them."

"If I lived here in the settlement, I'd join you…if you'd promise not to laugh at me. I'm not as limber as you and Yoshimo. There's no way I can bend my body like a pretzel or balance on one foot for five minutes like a stork."

"Do you believe in your gods, John?"

"Lately I've come to believe there's room in the universe for everybody's gods…mine and yours. What I don't think there's room for is using either of our religions as an excuse to do violence to others."

"Many humans would regard that as blasphemous. Many of us would, too."

"Do you?"

"At one time I would have, but since I've been studying with Yoshimo, I've also come to embrace a more tolerant view of your religion as apparently you've done with ours. And I agree that killing in the name of any religion is wrong, but it's something you humans have done from the earliest days of your history, and we are your children in that regard."

John changed the subject again, telling her what had been on his mind since the previous evening because he didn't know whether he'd get another chance to do it privately.

"I need to get D'Anna to Caprica. That's the only way I think she and the baby both stand a chance of making it. You heard Bianca and Laszlo. D'Anna's blood pressure will probably continue to rise and that will trigger other problems. They mentioned kidney damage and the risk of seizures and eventually a stroke. They can help her for a while, but she needs to be on Caprica where the specialists are. Otherwise your prophecy about the peacemaker is referring to another child. D'Anna will download if she dies. The baby won't."

"Do you believe in the prophecy enough to risk your life to get her there?"

The thought of returning to Caprica made his heart leap. "I'll do whatever it takes."

"How would your wife react if you suddenly return from the dead with a pregnant Cylon in tow?"

John shook his head. "I don't know. I'm not going to ask her to take me back, not after what I've done, but it doesn't matter now. I'm not the important one in the prophecy. The baby is the important one and his life is on the line as much as D'Anna's."

"How do you think we could get you and D'Anna there?"

"If I could get to a Heavy Raider with a working FTL drive, I could do it, but Sonja told me that none of the Heavy Raiders on the planet have working drives except a few that Cavil keeps under heavy centurion guard."

"There are some things that Sonja doesn't know."

"Are you telling me that some of the ships _do _have working FTL drives?"

"An FTL drive is not just a piece of physical equipment. There's a complicated computer component as well."

"I understand that much."

"_All_ of our ships have working FTL drives. The ones on the planet are just disabled. Removing the physical drive from a ship is an enormous amount of work and it's not necessary. The software component that makes the drive operational is all that's missing. Any of our centurion pilots can enable the drive by plugging in and running a short subroutine that brings the software program back online. At that point the drive will work."

"Can one of your loyal U-87s do it?"

"None of the U-87s are trained as pilots. All the pilots are the newer model centurions."

"And they answer to the Ones," John said glumly. "So all your Heavy Raiders can be FTL enabled by installing a little software patch, but we need a new model centurion to do it. What good does that do us? Cavil's probably given them all orders not to enable a drive unless he tells them to."

She smiled. "You're correct. The will obey the Ones above all the rest of us…as long as their telencephalic inhibitors are in place."

"You're going to remove the inhibitor from one of them and tell it to enable the FTL drive on a Heavy Raider?"

"I can get a U-87 to do it."

"Then how do you know the new centurions will do what you tell them to do afterward? If they suddenly get a mind of their own, who's to say what they'll do? Turning the U-87s and the 0005s loose in the Colonies is how we ended up in this mess to start with. If I recall correctly, they rebelled and started the First War. How do you know they won't do the same thing on this planet? Only here it wouldn't be a war. It would be a quick and complete slaughter since no one is armed but them."

Natalie was still untroubled. "Our U-87s are loyal. I'm counting on them to convince the new centurions to fight with us."

"You're taking a damned big chance. Why can't you make the software change in one FTL drive? All I need to get D'Anna to Caprica is _one ship_."

"Because it's has to be done through a machine to machine interface."

"So?"

For the first time he heard anger in Natalie's voice and possibly hurt as well. "I'm a _different kind of machine. _I can't stick my finger into a data port on a Heavy Raider and communicate with it_."_

He took a deep breath. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded."

"Yes, you did," she snapped.

"I just thought you might be able to input the software another way."

"No. I can't."

"You know when you get angry and pout you look a lot more like Sonja."

Suddenly Natalie laughed. "Is that a compliment or a put-down?"

"Neither. It's just a fact."

John heard voices and looked around. Yoshimo and Jade walked around the corner of the house and came over to the table.

"I have brought something for you," Yoshimo said as he put several items on the table. "Bamboo for the spar and spine. Silk for the cover and glue to bind all together. Ribbon pieces for the tail. And of course a ball of string. Natalie will loan you scissors. Then you can make your kite."

"I'm impressed, Yoshimo. Thank you."

"I cut the bamboo. One piece is forty inches. The other one is thirty-six."

John grinned. "That's just perfect."

Yoshimo finally smiled. "Of course I think Jade wants a kite that looks like the head of a dragon."

John looked at Jade. "This one will fly a lot better. It's a perfect kite for beginners."

Jade looked sullen. "So you say."

"So I know. Who's had all the experience with kites?"

She snickered. "You have experience losing them."

"Lighten up. I lost one kite. One. After that I learned my lesson. I crashed a few and I got one hung in a tree, but I never lost one again."

"Last night I searched all our databases. I couldn't find anything about kites. How do I know what you tell me is right?"

John smiled. "Because you'll see the proof. This kite will fly. Maybe after today you can update your database. You'll be the resident expert on kites."

Jade made a snorting sound. "Hunh. Does your daughter know how to fly a kite?"

"I imagine she could fly a kite if she wanted to."

Natalie went inside and came back with a pair of scissors.

Jade sat down at the table with him and watched carefully while John tied the spar and spine together in the shape of a cross and put a dab of glue on the string. Then he cut another length of string and tied it all the way around the tips of each piece of bamboo forming the familiar kite-shaped frame.

"You want this framing string to be tight, but not too tight. You don't want it to bend your supports. And you want the angles formed by the supports to be as close to right angles as you can get them."

"When do I get to do something?" Jade asked.

"Right now. You get to cut the silk."

Wondering where Yoshimo had gotten a piece of red silk with small white lotus blossoms printed on it, John spread the piece of fabric out on the table and lay the kite frame on it.

He told Jade, "Cut it carefully and leave about an inch on all sides. This silk is perfect. It's tightly woven but very lightweight. We won't need much wind to get this baby up."

"Why do you call it a baby? It's not a _baby_. It's a kite."

"Just a human expression."

Jade took her chore seriously, cutting slowly and carefully. When she finished she sat back. "What next?"

"That looks great. Okay. We fold the edges of the silk over the string frame and run a thin line of glue like this."

He did one side and let her do the other three. Again she worked slowly and carefully. It took her nearly twenty-five minutes to finish the three sides. John sat and enjoyed the early morning sunshine. The orange cat emerged from under its favorite shrub, stretched languidly and strolled over to the table where it jumped onto the chair that Natalie had occupied earlier. It circled once, settled and went to sleep with its long plumy tail over its face.

Jade looked at it briefly and then smirked. "That's Natalie's ferocious rat-killer."

"I think ferocious is an exaggeration."

"Hunh. Humans have pets. Cylons don't have pets. She only lets it stay here to kill vermin. Why don't you pet it? You don't like cats?"

"I've never been around them. We had a dog when I was a kid. He died when I was twelve. We never got another one."

"There are wild dogs in the forest."

"I think those dogs are called wolves."

"No. Just dogs. Mean ones. Big teeth." She smiled slyly again. "They make a good meal if they're well-cooked."

When Jade finished, he said, "Perfect. Now we let the glue get good and dry. How about some tea?"

John took the nearly empty teapot and went into the house. Jade followed him. Sonja was still on the couch. As John ran water in the kettle, she yawned and sat up. The blanket fell down.

"We've got company, sleepyhead," John said to her.

"Sonja doesn't care if I see her naked," Jade commented. "We aren't modest like you humans."

Sonja stood up and stretched. "John isn't modest."

Jade snickered. "Then why isn't he naked like you?"

"Because he doesn't want to tempt you and Natalie."

"Human men don't tempt me," Jade said in a scornful tone. "If I wanted a human man I would find a handsome young one. This one's handsome, but he's old enough to be my father."

"I think Sonja agrees with you on that. You did good last night. I didn't hear a single put-down of humans so don't start now."

Sonja walked over and put her arms around John. She looked at Jade. "I wouldn't share him with you anyway. He's all mine."

"If I wanted him, I would take him. You couldn't stop me."

John removed Sonja's arms. "Ladies. Enough. Sonja, go put on some clothes. Jade, outside. Right now."

Sonja smiled and winked at him before she walked to the bathroom and shut the door. Jade stood where she was.

"I don't have to do what you say."

"No, you don't. I don't have to finish the kite, either."

Jade turned slowly and sullenly and went out the door.

Ten minutes later he carried the teapot and some cookies outside. Jade's look reminded him of a petulant eight-year-old and once again he wondered if it was worth the effort it was taking to reach out to her. He poured a cup of tea and pushed the cup across the table to her followed by the plate of cookies.

"Have one. Natalie made them. They're good."

Jade took a cookie and nibbled on it. "I don't like Sonja. She lives an easy life in the city. She wouldn't last five minutes in the forest."

"No, she probably wouldn't. But you shouldn't judge everybody by how well they'd do in the forest. There's more to life on this planet than the forest. Living in the city has its challenges too."

"Hunh. Not so many as the forest."

"Different challenges. Look, Jade, nobody is putting you down for what you learned in the forest. There are groups of survivalists back on Caprica who would put you on a pedestal and pay you a lot of cubits to teach them what you know. But right now our main objective is for _everyone _to get along. That includes getting along with your sister Cylons as well."

She snickered again. "Like _you _get along with them? You already made D'Anna pregnant. What happens when you make Sonja pregnant, too? Then will it be Natalie's turn? You want a lot of wives like the human men who used to live on Kobol? You sit around and get fat and order your wives to do all the work and wait on you? Will your human wife like sharing you with superior Cylon women?"

He started to tell her it was none of her business. Instead he took a deep breath and asked, "Do you want to fly this kite or not?"

She took another bite of the cookie and finally said, "Yes."

"Let's get back to work, then. We need to make the tail and the string harness. After that, all we need is to take it to the meadow and see what it'll do."

While they worked on finishing the kite, Natalie and Yoshimo ended their meditation session. Natalie went into the house and Yoshimo joined them at the table.

John smiled as he held up the kite. "What do you think?"

"I think my wife's dress will look very good fluttering on the wind."

"You don't have a wife," Jade said. "You live by yourself."

"You are right, little one, but I had a wife for many years."

"What happened to her?"

"She died soon after we arrived on this planet."

"Someone killed her?"

"No, her heart wasn't strong. She couldn't do the hard work demanded of her."

"So she just _died_?" Jade sounded doubtful.

"Jade, that's enough questions for now," John said.

"No, I don't mind telling her," Yoshimo said calmly. "My wife went to sleep one night and did not awaken the next morning. It was a blessing from God to end her suffering and take her home to Him."

John stood and held up the kite. "Okay, let's go see what it'll do. There's not much breeze this morning, but maybe it's enough. Yoshimo, Grab a cup of tea and some cookies and come with us."

The old man poured a cup and took one cookie. He and John set off down the path with Jade in front of them.

"You didn't have to cut up your wife's dress for the kite," John said.

Yoshimo smiled. "She would approve. We had three sons and two daughters. They all loved to fly kites. I gave away the rest of her clothes after she died since that's what she'd told me I should do, but I couldn't let go of her favorite red dress. I've been waiting for the right thing to do with it. Last night I knew it was time."

"How can you be so…so okay with what happened to your wife when the Cylons worked her to death?"

"Would it hurt the Cylons if my heart was filled with anger and hatred and bitterness? No. It would only hurt me."

"You're a better man than I am, Yoshimo. If they had forced my wife to work until it killed her, I'm not sure I could let it go like that. In fact I'm sure I wouldn't be able to."

Yoshimo gave him a sad look. "Would you become like Jade…consumed with the desire to kill Cylons the way she desires to kill humans?"

"No. I…don't think I'd go that far."

"Do you feel the desire for revenge for what they did to you in the prison?"

"I'm not dwelling on it right now, but it crosses my mind from time to time."

"You have chosen not to forgive and yet you show kindness to Jade."

"She's not one of the ones who tortured me. Besides, she reminds me of my daughter in some ways. I think it's her stubbornness."

"Then you don't think she is unreachable."

"Not yet. Let's see how today goes."

"She will teach you patience if nothing else."

They walked in silence until John asked, "Where are you from?"

"I was born on Gemenon into a family of priests."

"Montheists, obviously, since Natalie calls you her spiritual advisor."

"Yes. I followed the path of my parents. When I was twenty-one, I was ordained by the Reverend Mother herself. It was a great honor. Of course that was many years ago…_many_ years ago_."_

"Do you mind if I ask how old you are?"

"I am soon to be eighty."

"Damn. You look better and move better than I do some mornings and I'm just over half your age."

"I have lived a modest and temperate life."

"How did you get here?"

"It is not a short story."

"We're still half a mile from the meadow. We've got time."

"My wife and I left Gemenon the year after I was ordained. We went to Sagittaron to take over the ministry of a small temple, but not long after we got there, the temple was destroyed by some people who were never caught or perhaps never sought. Instead of returning to Gemenon right away, we prayed about our situation. There was so much need on Sagittaron, so many poor, so many jobless and homeless. They were a superstitious people, very backward compared to the other Colonies who exploited their land with little regard for the welfare of the people. Many native-born Sagittarons don't believe in modern medicine. They use herbs to cure everything. What was needed more than a priest and a temple was someone to understand and help the poorest of them. We stayed and made that our mission. We got the sponsorship of a large banking institution. We took donations of clothing and food. We organized a summer camp on Aerilon and each year took a hundred poor children who lived in the inner city of Tawa. Even after our own children were grown and gone to missions on the other Colonies, we continued to take children to the camp. We were returning from there when these Cylons took our ship and brought us here."

"What happened to the children?"

"When my wife's heart medicine ran out, she became too ill to help care for them. Families in the settlement took them in. I went to Natalie and told her I would work twice as hard if she would allow my wife to stay at our house and not go to the fields. Natalie insisted that her brothers and sisters end the forced labor of the elderly and sick. She told me of the doctors and they helped ease my wife's suffering before she died. In return for Natalie's help, I have become her spiritual advisor as well as her friend. We have had many long discussions about our religion. Her vision is not so narrow as it once was. She has stepped outside her programming. She is a strong leader. You do well to align yourself with her."

"Would you remember D'Anna in your prayers?"

"I will pray for D'Anna and the child as well. When I was still a young man, the Reverend Mother told me that I would live to see the birth of the peacemaker of whom our scripture speaks. Natalie tells me D'Anna carries that child."

"That's what they believe."

"And you, John? You are the child's father. Do you not believe?"

"I don't know. I don't know much about your faith, but I'm going to do everything I can to make sure D'Anna and the baby live. She's going to stay here in the settlement so she can be close to the doctors. Maybe you can teach her about meditation. I think it would be good for her."

Yoshimo bowed slightly. "I would be honored."

Jade had gotten ahead of them and now turned and walked back to them. "Why do you walk so slow?"

Yoshimo said, "John walks slow out of respect for me. I am not so fast as you."

John smiled. "My two-year-old has more patience than Jade."

"I heard what you said," Jade retorted.

Yoshimo smiled. "I think her ears are better than your two-year-old."

"Okay, Jade. You go ahead to the meadow and determine which way the breeze is blowing." When Jade had walked on ahead, John said to Yoshimo, "I think the thing with her is to give her tasks to do. She seems to be very goal-oriented."

"I think that for all her disrespect she still wants to please you. All the other humans avoid her because of her attitude. Most of them fear her."

"After yesterday I can understand why."

"You've gone out of your way to treat her like a normal person. Maybe soon she will grow used to it."

When they reached the meadow, the sheep were grazing placidly.

"What now?" Jade said in exasperation. "Should I run them away?"

"No, let's walk on to the runway. We'll get better thermals there anyway."

"The centurions will send me away."

"We won't go near the hangar. Come on."

At the edge of the runway, John looked around. The big hangar was empty except for a Heavy Raider. He didn't see any centurions.

"What do you think? Are the guards in the back playing triad?"

Jade huffed and said in an exasperated tone, "Centurions don't play triad."

"We've definitely got to work on your sense of humor. It was a joke."

Yoshimo understood immediately and smiled. Jade looked clueless.

"I'll explain later," John said.

He pointed out a good place under the shade of a small tree for Yoshimo to sit and watch. Then he and Jade walked out onto the tarmac. He looked at the old wind sock atop the hangar. It was puffing out slightly in the mild breeze.

"Okay, that's your wind direction. You want it to hit the front surface of the kite so you're going to be running into the wind with the kite behind you. Hold it as high as you can by the string harness. When it starts tugging, let it go, keep running and let out the string. Try not to crash it. The runway will do more damage to it than the meadow."

Jade looked doubtful. "So much to remember."

"Not really. You remember how we talked about lift and thrust. Since the kite doesn't have its own power source, you're going to have to provide the thrust by running with it. When it starts up, feed the string out slowly."

Crossing his fingers that the kite would fly, John walked over to the side of the runway and sat down beside Yoshimo.

"You aren't going to help her?"

"No. She needs to do this herself."

Jade's first two attempts ended with the kite nose diving onto the runway, but she instinctively pulled the string at the last moment so that the crash wasn't the disaster it could have been. On her third try John saw the wind take the kite.

"Start letting out the string," he called to her.

Jade quickly complied and the kite began to climb. The red flowered silk with its fluttering ribbon tail was easy to see dancing against the azure sky. She glanced back toward them, a sense of accomplishment written in her smile.

John grinned and gave her a thumbs up.

"My wife would have made a real effort to reach out to her," Yoshimo said. "She would have approved of what you've done today with a piece of her favorite dress. It was a very small gesture with big rewards. You have shown Jade that all humans aren't her enemy. I think she's very happy at this moment."

John felt good and smiled. He glanced at Yoshimo who was smiling, also.

"I don't think she's the only one."

TBC…


	36. A Storm on the Horizon

Chapter 36

A Storm on the Horizon

_11. As the great temple of the Thirteenth Tribe neared completion, the eyes of General Ulixes grew dim._

_12. His physicians called Xander to them and said to him, your father's hours are numbered._

_13. Xander knelt by his father's bed and received his blessing and Ulixes said to him,_

_14. You are long since a man. You must take a wife that she may give you sons and daughters._

_15. Then Ulixes closed his eyes and went to join his beloved wife Azurra in the house of the Lord._

_16. The people gave the general a hero's funeral and afterward his son withdrew into his home for thirty days as was their custom._

_17. He entertained no visitors and did no business and spent his days in meditation and his nights in prayer._

_18. At the end of his mourning he came forth and spoke to the high priest._

_19. Your daughter Jerusha is of an age to take a husband. I come to ask for her hand._

_20. And Xander married the virgin Jerusha and took her into his home and into his heart as his wife._

_21. And as his father had loved Azurra, Xander loved Jerusha and no other until the end of his days._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Xander, _Chapter 7:11-21

.

Lee sat on the polished wooden bench on the second floor of the judicial building near the chamber where the independent inquiry would be held. He was early as usual. Several members of the press had already arrived and were standing in a small group near the door. Playa Palacios had approached, but he had waved her off by telling her that he couldn't make a statement before the inquiry was complete.

His father had explained the night before that the independent inquiry didn't have any power to impose a penalty on him or Kendra or Saunders, but if they decided that any of them had lied or that Commander Cain had not conducted a thorough and impartial investigation into the killing of the civilian August Bernard, it would not only look bad for them, but the military would be expected to revisit the issue. The government couldn't impose any penalty, but if the inquiry panel decided that they had lied or had killed Bernard without just cause then any or all of them would face court-martials, Cain included.

His mobile phone buzzed and he looked at the number. Zak.

"Hey, Little Bro, how are you?"

Zak said, "Good. You?"

"Waiting to go into court. The independent inquiry starts today."

"Dad mentioned that when he called a couple of nights ago. He's not worried. If he's not worried, you shouldn't be."

"I'll be glad when it's over and we've all been cleared of any wrongdoing."

"How'd you find out I'd split with Maggie?"

"She came into Zeno's last night with a date."

"Who?"

"Do you care? You dumped her."

"Yeah, I care. I don't want to see her get hurt or do something she'll…you're right. I dumped her. I don't have any right to say anything about what she's doing now or who she's doing it with."

"Why, Zak? I thought you two had a good thing. Maggie really cares about you."

The silence lasted a long time. Finally Zak said, "I'm probably going to die up here in this hell-hole. It's not fair to her to keep her sitting around waiting for that to happen and then have to deal with it."

"You're not going to die in Sovana."

Again there was a long silence. "You remember the guy who was standing beside me at the ceremony when I finished basic training?"

"Not really."

"He got both legs blown off three weeks ago when he stepped on a mine."

"That doesn't mean…"

"A guy who was in the row behind me got killed last week. We were on a routine patrol. One minute he was beside me. The next minute an incoming round damned near took his head off. It could just as easy have been me."

Lee took a deep breath.

"I didn't know that."

"Don't you look at the frakking news?" Zak asked with an undertone of anger in his voice. "Haven't you noticed that we're dying up here?"

"I've been busy lately."

"Busy in bed with Kara. I hear she's back from her mystery mission. Dad told me that she was back safe and sound. Look, I got to go. I was on duty last night. I've got to hit my rack and get some sleep."

"Are you sure you don't want to rethink this thing with Maggie? I know you still care about her."

"Take care of yourself, Lee. Keep in touch. Maybe I'll get leave in a couple of months and make it back home unless I come home sooner in a box. I love you, big bro. Good luck today."

Zak ended the call. Lee leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. It didn't sound like Zak was in a very good place mentally, but maybe he wasn't either. The big difference was that no one was shooting at him…at least not any more.

"Gods, I wish I could sleep like that before we're about to be put on the grill and slow-roasted."

Lee opened his eyes. Kendra and Saunders were standing in front of the bench with her mother.

He stood. "Not sleeping. Just thinking." He nodded at Saunders.

"You've met my mother," Kendra said.

"How are you, Mrs. Shaw?"

"Well. How is your father?"

"Extremely busy," Lee said. "Are you on the inquiry panel?"

Marta smiled briefly showing beautiful white teeth. "I'm afraid not although I wanted to be. I had to recues myself because of Kendra's involvement. The Quorum members on the panel are Tom Zarek, Sarah Porter and Jacob Cantrell. Caprica's Third District judge Anthony Thorne will be presiding. The fifth member is Coretta Howliss who is head of the Tauron delegation here on Caprica."

Saunders said, "I did some research. Our biggest problems are going to be Zarek and Porter and maybe Cantrell. I think the other two will be opened-minded. Judge Thorne has a long, fair record. Jacob Cantrell is a good friend of Sarah Porter's, but Coretta Howliss is no fan of what the big tylium consortiums did to her planet. If she wasn't on the panel, I think we'd all have reason to be worried."

Lee glanced down the hallway and saw Romo Lampkin approaching. Kendra followed his gaze.

"I didn't think you weren't going to get legal representation."

"He's just here to observe. My dad and Laura both thought it would be a good idea."

Marta smiled. "Having Caprica's Attorney General in the room can't hurt."

Romo chose not to call attention to his connection with Lee and the others. He walked past them with only a nod in their direction and entered the chamber where the inquiry was to be held.

"I guess we should go in," Kendra said.

Lee took another deep breath. Despite his seeming outward calm, he was very nervous.

"Come on. Let's just do it," Saunders said.

"I'll see you inside," Marta said to her daughter.

To Lee's surprise, Marta leaned over and quickly kissed her daughter on the cheek leaving a faint smudge of lipstick. Kendra looked embarrassed but pleased. Marta squeezed Dwight's arm and walked off down the corridor. Dwight took his thumb and wiped the smudge off Kendra's cheek.

Lee grinned at Saunders. "I think Mrs. Shaw likes you. It's always good to get a mother's blessing."

Kendra smiled and said to Lee. "I think my mother divides her romantic thoughts equally between Dwight and your father."

"How's Sharon?" Saunders asked.

"Kara talked to Karl yesterday. Sharon's doing okay. She and Karl saw Hera in the intensive care nursery a couple of times. Hera is hooked up to monitors and had a feeding tube, but they got to touch her. All of the tests have come back good. Kara thinks Karl is fine with them keeping her at the hospital for a while. She thinks he's scared to death of taking care of a baby that small."

"What did Hera weigh?" Kendra asked.

"Four and a half pounds."

"That's like the dolls you play with when you're a kid."

"Hey, all my dolls weighed at least ten pounds," Saunders joked.

Kendra rolled her eyes and looked at Lee. "See what I have to put up with?"

Lee smiled. He could hear the affection in Kendra's voice. "Sharon will be released tomorrow or the next day. Karl is going to start looking for an apartment for them today. They'll be staying at my place until he finds one."

"That'll be crowded, won't it?" Kendra asked. "You told me you had a one bedroom."

"I'm staying with Hunter at Laura and John's apartment."

"If Karl needs any help moving, let me know," Saunders said.

Lee opened the door and they stepped inside. The room where the inquiry would be conducted was paneled in light hardwood. The flags of the twelve Colonies hung on either side of the room, six on one side and six on the other with the flag of the federation at the front. Below the federation flag was a raised dais that had a waist-high panel made of the same light-colored wood in front of it.

A long table sat behind it with five comfortable chairs. Microphones were on the table in front of each chair. The center chair was already occupied by a man who was in his late forties or early fifties.

"Judge Thorne," Kendra whispered.

There was an empty space of about six feet in front of the dividing wall, a rail and then a long wooden table with three more comfortable chairs behind it. There were three microphones on the table as well as a pitcher of ice water and three glasses.

"Us?" Lee asked.

"Isn't that obvious?" Kendra replied.

"Where's Commander Cain's chair?" Saunders asked.

"She'll be called if they decide we lied or there's some other irregularity."

They each pulled out chairs and sat with Kendra in the middle. Lee realized that both he and Saunders wanted to protect her. She was the one who had pulled the trigger and killed August Bernard, but in doing so, she had saved both of their lives.

The judge was reading something. He glanced up over the top of his glasses and studied the three uniform-clad officers in front of him. Then he pushed his glasses back up his nose and continued reading.

"Is this open to the press?" Saunders asked.

Kendra said, "No cameras are allowed, but they can attend. They get the back row." She indicated the rows of chairs behind them.

As Lee glanced over his shoulder he saw that Romo Lampkin had chosen a seat on the second row near the aisle. Marta Shaw sat beside him. They were talking quietly. Playa Palacios and James McManus entered and sat on the back row which was by then filled with members of the press. In short order the rest of the chamber filled with people. Lee recognized several more Quorum members. Vladimir Darren slipped in quietly and sat near the back. A few moments later, Major Parker came in and sat beside him. There were more than a few uniforms in the room. There was one person who was missing, though, and Lee was glad. Bill Adama had chosen not to attend. He'd told Lee the day before that considering his adversarial relationship with Tom Zarek, his presence would probably do more harm than good.

Lee looked at his watch. It was exactly 09:00. A side door opened and four people strode in. All were carrying either brief cases or file folders. He recognized Tom Zarek, Jacob Cantrell and Sarah Porter. The fourth woman had to be Coretta Howliss. She was a short woman, around the same age as the judge. Her dark hair had silver mixed in, and she was dressed in a suit that was nice, but one that even Lee could tell was many seasons out of date compared to the fashionable clothes worn by Laura and Marta Shaw. He was also immediately struck by how much her features resembled those of Mateo Oraibi the native Tauron who had allowed them to copy his unofficial list of the dead. Certainly she had come from people native to the north. Lee hoped her vote would cancel Zarek's.

A dark-suited marshal walked in and stood in front of the dais.

"All rise," he intoned in a deep voice and waited until everyone had complied. "The independent hearing in regards to the death of civilian August Orlando Bernard is begun."

...

Kara stood in front of her locker out at the airbase and put her motorcycle helmet on the top shelf beside her flight helmet. It was a tight fit. She turned and put her foot on the bench that ran in front of the lockers and retied the laces on one of her boots. Then she straightened her blue uniform tunic, turned back to her locker door and looked at her reflection in the small inside mirror. She found her hairbrush, took down her ponytail and redid it. She didn't know why she cared so much about her appearance today. She'd sat in the ready room many dozens of times with a messy ponytail and it hadn't bothered her a bit. But today felt different. The last time she'd stood in this spot was the night she and Narcho had stolen the Raider. Six weeks that now seemed like a lifetime.

Two female pilots that she didn't know were in the process of changing into their flight suits. Kara got a glimpse of a Raptor patch on the shoulder of one and a Viper patch on the shoulder of the other. When the one nearest her turned around, the patch on her other shoulder read _Triton._

She glanced at Kara. "I haven't seen you in here before. You new?"

"I've been on another assignment for a month. I just got back."

"What ship are you from?"

"_Galactica_," Kara said without thinking. Late the previous summer she'd spent three months on the _G_.

The other pilot said, "We were on the _Triton, _Commander Lymon Birch's ship. We'll be here six months and then rotate to another ship. What do you think of Commander Cain?"

"Tough but fair. I never had any problems with her."

The Viper pilot, an attractive honey blond with short hair said, "I'm Marcia Case. This is my roommate Lyla Ellway. _Showboat_ and _Shark_. Don't say it. I know we sound like the title of a television show."

"Kara Thrace. _Starbuck_."

Lyla said, "You rotated back to base just in time."

"What's that mean?" Kara asked.

"Where've you been? You do know a Viper pilot blew up the Cylons last week, don't you?"

Kara shrugged. "I know about the Cylons. What'd I miss?"

"The _Galactica _is taking the Cylon's ashes to Gemenon tomorrow. We heard they're still trying to find volunteers." Lyla snickered.

"Volunteers for what?"

"To serve as an honor guard, though I don't see how anybody can call it an _honor_. CAG told us late last week. I'd volunteer if they'd let me spit in the urns…but I didn't tell him that."

Marcia laughed. "Spit? That's not what you said Saturday night when we were talking about it at The Shark Rider with those pilots from the_ Pegasus_."

"Starbuck gets the picture. Come on. We're going to be late for the briefing." She looked at Kara. "You coming?"

"You go ahead. I've got to make a call."

They left and Kara was alone. She took out her phone but saw that it was a couple of minutes before nine. It was too late to call Lee and wish him luck. She sent him a quick text instead. He should get it with when they took a break. Then she thought about what Lyla Ellway had said about an honor guard. Kara had spent hours in Laura's presence the day before and neither Laura nor Admiral Adama had mentioned the _Galactica _taking the Cylon's ashes to Gemenon. Maya hadn't mentioned it either, but then Maya was too busy talking to Hunter and later talking about Hunter.

Lee had told her that Hunter had seemed reluctant when Lee had mentioned lunch at Marble House, but if Hunter had any reservations, they were gone by the time they got there. Braedon ran straight to Hunter who, it seemed, was now the object of his adoration.

"Hunta," Braedon happily said, as Lee and Hunter came through the door.

"Hey there, Big Fella," Hunter said and put Brae on his shoulders. "Want to go for a ride?"

Braedon crowed with delight. "Go fast."

Maya looked on in approval. Kara glanced at Lee.

"Hunter is good with kids," Lee said as Hunter disappeared into the corridor with Braedon.

"He took care of lots of them starting when he was young. The adults in the valley always had chores even the women. Hunter still reads to them and plays with them in the winter when they can't get out of the valley. What's the matter? You jealous?"

Lee shrugged.

"Come on, admit it."

"When have I ever been around kids?"

"It's okay, Lee. You're top of the class in everything else. You'll learn to be a good dad."

"I don't want to make the same mistakes my father did."

"You won't." She grinned. "I won't let you."

"Hunter reminds me of your father. Not his looks, but…"

"I know."

As Kara now looked in the mirror inside her locker, her eyes filled with tears. She'd gone to Nereid to find her father and bring him home to his son. She'd failed. The door to the locker room opened. In the mirror she saw Maggie enter. Maggie was unbuttoning her uniform tunic with one hand and keying in the combination to her locker with the other. She was also mumbling something under her breath that sounded like _damned traffic_.

Kara quickly blotted her eyes on her uniform sleeve and closed her locker door before she turned around.

"Hi, Maggs."

"I'm late. There was a wreck on the I-6."

"Where?"

"Just outside the city. Some nutcase doing ninety and weaving in and out of lanes."

"It must have happened after I got past. You've still got two minutes."

"Great. Thanks," Maggie said as she grabbed her flight suit from her locker and began pulling off her duty blue uniform.

"I'll wait. We'll go into the briefing together."

Maggie said, "You're not suiting up?"

"I'm supposed to start classroom training for the Mark VII. I won't be flying for a while."

"Lucky you. I heard they got ten Mark VIIs coming in maybe next week."

Kara thought about her court-martial hearing coming up in two weeks. "I'll have to make it through the classroom part and the simulator training. That'll take a couple of weeks."

There. If Maggie wanted to apologize for what she'd said at the Academy, Kara had opened the door by mentioning the simulator.

Maggie zipped her flight suit part way and sat on the bench to put on her boots. "That shouldn't be a problem for you. You're an ace Mark II pilot."

Maggie hadn't exactly apologized, but she'd at least acknowledged Kara's ability. It was probably the closest to an apology that Maggie would ever come.

"I'm sorry about you and Zak," Kara said. "I think Lee's going to talk to him…"

"Sovana has really frakked him up. I never understood why he joined the Marines. You want to know what I think?"

"What?"

"I think he did it because of what happened to Lee when we fought the Cylons last fall."

"Are you serious? Lee nearly got killed."

"My point exactly. Me and you and Lee and even your dad and the rest…we were all putting it on the line out there and Zak was sitting at home safe and sound. I think it got to him that he'd gotten thrown out of the Academy for cheating. One time when he'd had too much to drink, he told me about the talk his father had with him when he finally went home. Talk about laying a guilt trip on a kid. He said he could never get his father to understand that he didn't want a life in the military."

"I'll admit I was…shocked when he told us he'd joined the Marines. Even Lee couldn't wrap his head around it. It's still a big question mark for him."

"I think Zak finally got tired of his father comparing him to Lee and always coming up short so he decided to prove something, maybe to himself, maybe to his father."

"Probably to both," Kara added.

Maggie finished tying her boots and stood. "Let's go. You know how Spencer feels about tardy pilots."

"Zero tolerance," Kara answered.

Together they walked down the hall and entered the ready room. As usual, latecomers had to sit on the front row. They walked down the aisle under the watchful eye of the other pilots. Colonel Jackson Spencer was already standing behind the podium.

He glanced at the big clock at the front. 9:01. "Nice of you to join us today," he said to them.

Maggie and Kara hastily sat. Maggie's cheeks were red.

"Welcome back, Lieutenant Edmondson. You too, Lieutenant Thrace."

Kara smiled lamely. "Thank you, sir."

Maggie echoed her words.

Spencer addressed Maggie. "How was your mission aboard the _Galactica_?"

"Very moving, sir, to see the destruction of the other planets. It was a real reminder of why we're here."

He glanced at Kara and she thought he was going to say something about her mission but he didn't. Apparently he had decided to cut them both some slack. He announced the Raptor flight schedule for the week. The rest of their briefing concerned the classroom instruction the Viper pilots would get about the new Mark VII. Then Spencer read out the four training groups. Someone in the back asked how the groups had been chosen.

Spencer's answer was, "All the Viper pilots' names were put in a hat and pulled out in groups of ten. We're training two groups at a time in the classroom, but the rest will be done in single groups. Remember the group number I just gave you."

Kara's name had been called in the first group like she had already been told it would be. She asked, "Who will be the instructor for the classroom part?"

Spencer smiled one of his rare smiles, "Major Desmond Valinski. I believe many of you know the major."

Kara grinned. Valinski had been her instructor during the classroom portion of the twelve weeks she'd spent in Flight School. He was tough but fair, exactly like Colonel Burgher had been when he'd taught her Basic Flight class at the Academy.

"Good choice, sir."

"Any more questions about Mark VII training?" When there were none, Spencer said, "One more announcement and we'll be through. As most of you already know, tomorrow the _Galactica_ will ferry the remains of the Cylons to Gemenon where their ashes will be released over the planet. Last week we asked if anyone would like to volunteer for the burial detail who will accompany the remains from the surface of Caprica to the _Galactica_. I was just informed this morning that one of the volunteers became a father over the weekend and had to withdraw. Would anyone in this group like to take his place?"

Spencer had to be talking about Karl. Kara glanced at Maggie who was staring straight ahead, her eyes hard and cold.

"I'll do it, sir," she said.

"Any other items we need to discuss?" Spencer asked.

No one said anything, but the room felt suddenly very chilly to her.

"Lieutenant Thrace, remain behind. Good hunting, everyone. Dismissed."

Maggie got up and walked out after giving her a scathing look. She didn't think Maggie would ever understand her. She wasn't sure Maggie would even try.

Jackson Spencer kept his expression carefully neutral as he walked over and sat down near her.

"All things considered, Lieutenant Thrace, are you sure you want to volunteer for this mission?"

"It was Karl who had to back out wasn't it, sir?"

He nodded.

"I'm doing it for him…him and Sharon. Karl's been my best friend since I was eight years old. Sharon was my roommate at the Academy."

"I don't doubt the legitimacy of your motives or the sense of loyalty you feel for your friends, but you can't forget you're the President's stepdaughter. Your volunteering might be taken by her opponents as an expression of sympathy on her part for the Cylons. So far she's been able to walk a fine line between appearing to regret their demise and appearing to feel that they got what they deserved. According to Admiral Adama, she's not going to make the announcement about their final resting place until after the _G_ has broken orbit for Gemenon tomorrow."

Kara sat trying to make a decision. Finally she said, "Is the press going to be there on the _G_ or something?"

"No. That's why a military ship was chosen, but you can't honestly believe that word won't get out. People talk even if they're ordered not to."

"Who else has volunteered?"

"I haven't seen a list. Would you like to talk this over with President Roslin before you make a final decision?"

"There's not much time for that, sir. I won't see her until tonight at dinner."

"Why don't we leave it like this? If you talk to President Roslin tonight and she has no problem with you accompanying the remains up to the _G_ and then on to Gemenon, you be out here tomorrow at 06:00 in hangar Bravo-2. I'll be there to see everyone off. If you don't make it, I'll go in your place. It might be my only chance to see the Colony I was raised on one last time."

"You were born on Gemenon, sir?"

"I was the only kid in my neighborhood whose family didn't attend a monotheist church. I can still remember how upset my mother got when I came home one day and asked her who the Reverend Mother was. She thought the other kids were going to _corrupt_ me. She told me I couldn't play with them anymore."

"It's not always easy being the odd kid, is it, sir?"

"Not always."

"I don't think I'd want to see Picon the way it is now. Lee told me what he saw. I'd rather remember it the way it was when I was growing up, not the graveyard of over a billion humans."

"I know there were a few of us who wondered if the Cylons had spared at least part of Gemenon because it was the most heavily monotheistic Colony. After the _G_ visited it and found the same nuclear devastation as the others, we decided that their desire to destroy humanity was stronger than a common religion."

"I'll be here in the morning, sir. The damage is already done. Everybody in that this ready room heard me volunteer. Even if I don't go, they know I'm willing."

He didn't say anything for a few moments and then asked, "When's your court-martial hearing?"

"Two weeks."

"Are you worried?"

"My AJA lawyer thinks I'll be okay."

Jackson stood and Kara followed suit. "Good luck, Lieutenant Thrace."

"Thank you, sir. Have you flown one of the new Mark VIIs?"

"Not yet. I've done the classroom part and the simulator. I'll take one up as soon as they're delivered. I'm looking forward to it."

They began walking up the aisle of the ready room. Kara said, "It's going to be hard giving up my old Mark II. New doesn't always mean better."

"The Mark VII is bigger, faster and better armed."

"I heard computers control most of it. It takes a lot of the decision making out of the pilot's hands."

"It's a safer ship. Computers don't make errors in judgment. You can take most of the computers off-line, but it's not recommended."

"Didn't we get into this mess by putting computers in robot bodies and turning them loose?"

"Good point, Lieutenant. You can tell me what you think of the Mark VII in six weeks. Now go ahead and join your group. They're in classroom 4."

Kara walked down the hall and entered the classroom. Major Valinski nodded and waited for her to take a seat near the front.

"We're going over the schedule," he said. "It's on the inside of the training manual."

Kara opened the thick binder and took out the single page.

Valinski continued. "The classroom part of the training will last two weeks. The syllabus shows what we'll cover each day. Classes will start at 09:00 and end at 16:00 with an hour for lunch. The Mark VII is a lot more sophisticated than the Mark II. I'm sure in the days to come you'll be constantly making comparisons. That's good. Don't hesitate to ask questions. Those of you who have previously been in one of my classes know I welcome questions and feedback. The only dumb question is the one you don't ask. It might also be the one that saves your life one day. Let's open the manual to the Mark VII's specs and look at the comparison to the ship you're all familiar with."

Kara opened the ring binder that lay on the desk in front of her and turned to the page with pictures of the two ships. As she listened to Valinski begin his comparisons, she realized that no one in the room including him had any idea how close they were to once again engaging the Cylons only it wouldn't be in the sky over Caprica this time. It would be over a planet thirty light years away. She doubted even Colonel Spencer knew about Admiral Adama's plan to put an end to the Cylons' ability to ever come back and finish the destruction of humanity.

There were so many secrets in her head. Six weeks ago she had stolen the Raider and wound up in a beautiful valley on a planet that was controlled by the Cylons. She had brought Hunter back to Caprica and Hunter's information about Nereid had changed Admiral Adama's mind about nuking the planet. He was planning an invasion that would involve everyone now sitting in the classroom with her as well as a great many more pilots and Marines. Some wouldn't survive the conflict just as she'd lost friends and classmates in the initial conflict. She was suddenly overwhelmed with the knowledge that her single-minded quest to find her father and bring him home had changed Colonial history.

One chapter of her life was ending and another was beginning as it was for all of them and she was responsible. For the first time Kara Thrace felt the weight of what her actions, driven by her love for her father and her unquestioning belief in an Oracle's prophecy, had unleashed.

...

Natalie stood with her hand shading her eyes against the bright glare of the noon sun reflecting off the transport ship. D'Anna had stayed at Natalie's house and had not accompanied them to the airstrip. Sonja had already gotten on board to get out of the sun. Heat radiated from the tarmac. The windsock above the hangar hung limp. There was no breeze at all. It felt ten degrees warmer than when Jade had been flying her kite the day before.

"I'll work on finding a way to get us to the valley," Natalie said.

"How will I know when to come back?" John asked.

"I'll send word. I can't go through the normal communication channels and send a message to Sonja. After what you told me about the incident with Rika and Yusef, I'm sure you're being watched and by extension so is she, but I'll find a way to get word to you."

"Are you including Sonja when we go to the valley?"

"No. The fewer of us the better. It will just be you, me and a U-87. If Sonja stays in the city, your absence can be explained as a trip to see your child's mother."

"Is there anything I can do in the meantime?"

"Act as normal as possible. Enjoy your time in the park with the mothers and their children. Relax and meditate…and pray either to our God or yours or both. Don't talk about our plans with anyone, not even Sonja. I trust her, but I don't trust the Ones in the city. They might have ordered her apartment put under electronic surveillance since you've been spending time there. But my main concern is that one of them might force her to put her hand into the datastream and question her. She can lie to him with words, but her true thoughts will be in the datastream. If you've told her anything, they'll know. If that happens, we don't stand a chance."

"She already knows a lot. She knows about the deaths of the Sevens and the creators."

Natalie sighed. "There's nothing I can do about that although right now it's just a theory for her. Sonja has no proof. I was very careful not to talk about what happened at the lab to her. She'll ask you questions. I trust you won't give in and tell her."

John thought of how he'd kept his secrets even under torture in the prison. "I know how to keep my mouth shut."

"Sonja can be very persuasive as I'm sure you're well aware. Men are especially vulnerable to her considerable charms."

"Don't worry, Natalie."

Their eyes locked and for just a moment he thought she read his thoughts about keeping secrets. Then she smiled slightly and nodded.

"Do you have any idea how long it'll be before I hear from you?" He asked.

"Probably several weeks. I think you're an impatient man, John."

"About this I am. There's so much at stake."

"But you can come back and visit D'Anna before then if you'd like. I'll let Sonja know if D'Anna's condition worsens. It's all right if you two discuss D'Anna. That won't raise any red flags with the Cavil in the city."

"Are you sure?"

"We won't be able to keep D'Anna's presence here in the settlement a secret. Yoshimo is going to work with her on prayers and meditation which will explain why she stayed here and didn't return with Sonja. I'm going to talk to the Four who runs the clinic about allowing the doctors to treat her."

"Do you think he'll go for it?"

"He's begun attending our worship services with a woman named Giana. I've sensed a change in him about his opinion of the humans. I know he has a great deal of respect for Bianca and Laszlo…and Yoshimo. If he believes that D'Anna carries the peacemaker, he'll join our side and allow the doctors to treat her."

"I thought you wanted to keep the peacemaker prophecy a secret for now."

"Yoshimo is going to talk to the Four. Before he brings up the peacemaker, he'll make sure the Four is on our side. The Cylons here in the settlement consider Yoshimo's knowledge of our scriptures to be as great as our own. Many revere his age and wisdom."

"I understand why."

"D'Anna's presence here is also a perfect excuse for you to come back and visit. Even the Ones in the city will acknowledge your right to spend time with her. It was voted on in the council long ago."

"Unless the doctors are wrong and D'Anna stabilizes or starts getting better, eventually I'll need to get her to a specialist on Caprica to save her and the child."

"I know. I'm working on that, too."

"I really messed up your nice tranquil life, didn't I?"

The corners of her blue eyes crinkled as she smiled. "The future of my race and yours is more important than my personal grief."

Sonja came to the doorway of the ship and called to John. "We're ready to go. Are you coming or not?"

"I've got to go," he said.

Natalie briefly touched his arm. "It's begun, John. There's no turning back now. Be ready."

"I'm ready now," he said before he walked to the ship and climbed the steps.

He watched her from the doorway as the steps began retracting. She had moved to the edge of the runway and stood watching the ship with her hand still shading her eyes.

When the door hissed shut and sealed and the noise of the big engines was muffled, Sonja asked, "Did you kiss her goodbye?"

John grinned. "Was I supposed to?"

She pouted. "Why do you have to turn everything into a joke?"

"I don't turn _everything_ into a joke. The temptation only hits me when you ask me something stupid. Who spent time on the couch with me the last two nights? Natalie is aware of the intimate nature of our relationship?"

The transport ship lurched as the centurions turned it to begin taxiing. John almost lost his balance. He quickly sat in the seat beside Sonja and strapped himself in.

She puffed out her cheeks for a moment. "I'm not blind. I saw how she looked at you. I saw how you looked at her. You're both attracted to each other so don't deny it."

"So according to you, I'm supposed to be attracted to you, but not to someone who looks exactly like you except her hair is darker blond? Tell me what the hell kind of sense that makes."

"It's not just her looks. She's one of our leaders. She's more like your wife."

"Since you're on a roll, why aren't you accusing me of being attracted to Jade, too? I spent a lot more time with her yesterday than I did with Natalie."

"Jade is a loony warrior in a woman's body not to mention she has no social skills. She's not your type except as a substitute for your daughter. That's the only way you could possibly have enough patience to deal with her. Even Yoshimo can only take her in small doses and he's the most patient man I know. Have you not noticed that you always try to gather the young ones to you to make up for the family you lost? Rika and little Rachel and Cassie and Sophia and now Jade. They're your surrogate children."

"Thank you, Dr. Sonja, for that deep psychological analysis," he said sarcastically. "And my family isn't _lost_. They're on Caprica."

"One day soon Natalie will send for you and you'll spend time alone with her."

"Aren't you forgetting about D'Anna? She's staying here with Natalie."

"Natalie is going to get D'Anna a place in town close to the doctors. D'Anna told me this morning. Then Natalie will have you all to herself when you go back."

"That is not why she's getting D'Anna a place close to the doctors and you know it."

"I know what will happen. Her bed's _very_ comfortable. You'll like it and Natalie will like what you do to her there. She's gone without a man for so long that she'll probably keep you for weeks. Maybe you'll get her pregnant, too."

John took her hand and squeezed it. "Come on, Sonja. Let's not do this. There's no need for you to go all jealous on me. Nothing is going to happen between me and Natalie. I'm not interested in her like that and she's not interested in me. She's still in love with the Daniel she lost."

"You think I'm _jealous_?" She asked haughtily.

"It's sure beginning to sound like it."

"Natalie is my sister. I don't mind sharing you with a sister. Once you got D'Anna pregnant, she didn't mind sharing you with me."

"I wouldn't exactly say she didn't mind sharing. She just isn't interested in having sex with me anymore and you are."

"Are you angry that I teased you about getting fat and being old because I didn't mean it? You have a very nice body. You work hard to stay in shape and you're not old. Old is like Yoshimo."

"I'm not angry about anything, Sonja, but you're pushing me in that direction. Come on, let's talk about something else."

"Do you know what I think about when we're having sex? When you're making it so good for me?"

Exasperation was clear in his voice. "I don't have a clue what goes on in that silica brain of yours when we're having sex or any other time for that matter."

Sonja huffed and then said, "Go ahead and insult me if it makes you feel better."

"I'm not trying to insult you. You say you're not jealous so I don't have a clue where you're going with this conversation. How many times do I have to tell you that I'm not going to have sex with Natalie so there's no reason for us to keep talking about it!"

Sonja continued like she hadn't heard him. "I can tell when a man cares about me. You don't care. You go through the motions in bed but you don't really care about anything except showing me how much pleasure you can give me. You said it yourself. I bring out the _egotistical bastard_ in you."

Her words finally got to him. He was tired of the pointless argument they were having.

"Okay. I agree," he said angrily. "You're right. Think whatever the hell you want to think. You still haven't gotten it through that thick Cylon skull of yours that I love my wife. That's one of the big differences between you and Natalie. She respects those feelings and you don't. Maybe it's because she knows what it's like to love someone and you don't…unless you count being self-centered and in love with yourself. I try to make it good for you because that's just who I am. So that probably does make me an egotistical bastard. And if you'll recall with that perfect memory of yours, I told you in the beginning that sex is all you're getting from me. But just in case you missed it, I'll say it again. You and me, Sonja. Sex. That's it. Take it…or leave it. I really don't give a godsdamn one way or the other."

The pilots had turned the ship at the end of the runway and had now begun accelerating for takeoff. The noise of the revving engines drowned out Sonja's angry reply. She turned away and refused to look at him. John waited until they were airborne and had leveled off before he unfastened his seat harness and went into the cockpit. The centurions didn't acknowledge him at all. He strapped himself into the navigator's seat and relished not having to talk to anyone for the next forty minutes.

On some level he realized that he had just taken out something on Sonja that had to do with other issues including what he'd endured at Cylon hands in the prison, but he didn't want to face it right now. He'd always hated losing his cool like that, especially with a woman, but Sonja had kept goading him until she'd pushed him into saying it. Even as he stewed over it now, though, he realized that their little drama was miniscule compared to what was coming for all of them.

He remembered what Yoshimo had taught him early that morning. He closed his eyes and began taking slow deep breaths, clearing his mind, willing the anger out of his body. When he had calmed down, he leaned up and looked out the left-side cockpit window. Hundreds of miles to the west the sky over the mountains had darkened. He saw the quick flash of distant lightning illuminate the clouds. Another storm was coming and would reach the city before nightfall. And then he thought of Natalie's words. A different sort of storm was also coming and just like the fury nature was unleashing, once it started there would be no turning back from it.

_…_

Judge Anthony Thorne wasted no time in beginning the inquiry. He informed them for the record that a week previously the five members of the panel had been given the report of the incident including the testimony that each of them had given.

Then Judge Thorne introduced the report to be placed into the record. Lee listened now as the judge summarized the day and the events for the others in the room. The judge then asked the other panel members to state for the record whether or not they had already read the report in its entirety. They all indicated they had.

Thorne then turned to Lee, Kendra and Saunders and asked each of them to state their full names, ranks and occupations within the military. A court stenographer was sitting to the panel's right. A videographer was filming from the left. Lee was acutely aware that what happened in this chamber would be on record forever.

Since Saunders was sitting on the left, he went first.

"Dwight Howard Saunders, Lieutenant, Raptor pilot and ECO currently assigned to the First Air Wing on Caprica."

"Kendra Paris Shaw, Lieutenant, data analyst with the Ministry of Defense."

"Leland Joseph Adama, Captain, Viper pilot with the First Air Wing and interrogator with the Intelligence Division."

The judge looked at him. "This report refers to you as a lieutenant. When did you receive your promotion?"

"Two weeks ago, sir."

"Did your promotion come about because of your actions on Tauron?"

Lee leaned forward so that the microphone would clearly pick up his reply. "No, sir. The paperwork was begun before I left Caprica on the mission."

Sarah Porter said, "We'd like to ask some questions that weren't covered in the report since all of us believe that your states of mind beforehand played a big part in what happened. Lieutenant Shaw, how did a data analyst from the Ministry of Defense wind up on a battlestar on a mission to look for survivors on the other Colonies?"

Kendra leaned forward. "First of all Captain Adama and I weren't stationed on a battlestar. We were on the scientific ship the _Penelope_. And the mission was not specifically to look for survivors, but to assess the damage done to the planets by the Cylons from a scientific point of view."

"You didn't answer my question, Lieutenant Shaw. How did you wind up on the mission?"

"My mother suggested it, sir."

Porter bristled slightly. "Please don't call me _sir_. I am a woman, not a man and I am not in the military."

"Sorry, _ma'am_," Kendra said.

"Is your mother Marta Shaw, Caprica's representative to the Quorum?"

"Yes, _ma'am_."

"I understand there were quite a few volunteers for the mission, most of which were equally or more qualified. They were turned down. Did your mother exert her influence to get you assigned to the _Penelope_?"

"You would need to ask her, _ma'am_. We didn't discuss that part of it."

Sarah Porter exchanged looks with Marta Shaw. Lee thought Porter was going to ask her but apparently changed her mind. She continued questioning Kendra.

"Many young women would resent an influential mother's meddling in their careers. Did you _resent_ your mother's decision that you should go?"

Lee could feel the anger radiating from Kendra even though she hadn't moved a muscle. He wished he could tell her not to let Sarah Porter get to her, but he knew even a whisper would be picked up by the microphone and broadcast to the room.

Kendra took a deep breath. "Yes, ma'am. I did resent it at first. Then I thought about it and realized it would look good on my record when it came time for promotion so I agreed to go. It was actually a very smart move career-wise. And I've finally grown up enough to acknowledge that my mother is sometimes right about what's best for me."

Kendra turned and smiled sweetly at her mother who returned the smile.

_Oh, bravo_, Lee thought. Kendra had turned Porter's prying question around. He knew Porter was trying to provoke Kendra and get an emotional response. Kendra had given her one, just not the response that Porter was trying to get. Lee was fairly sure that this one had gone in their favor when he saw the corner's of Judge Thorne's mouth twitch slightly as he suppressed a smile. A child acknowledging a parent's wisdom was a hit with the judge.

Porter said, "So your real motive for going on the mission was to further your career in the military. Correct?"

"Yes, _ma'am,_ and to serve in whatever capacity my superior officers saw fit."

"What about you, Lieutenant Saunders? Did someone _volunteer_ you to go or were you assigned to the mission?"

Saunders leaned forward. "Neither, ma'am. I volunteered on my own."

"And your motives?"

"I was hoping that we'd find survivors on the other planets. My family was on vacation on Picon when the Cylons attacked."

"Why weren't you with them?"

"I was at camp."

"So you lost your entire family in the holocaust?"

"Yes, ma'am. My immediate family. I have an uncle and aunt on Caprica. I lived with them after…"

"And you, Lieutenant Adama? Excuse me, _Captain_ Adama. How did you wind up on the mission?"

"My father asked me to do it, ma'am."

"Your father being Admiral William Adama."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And how did you feel about his request?"

"I didn't have any strong feelings one way or the other. In the military…"

Porter cut him off. "So basically what we've got here is one volunteer who wanted to find his family, one who allowed herself to be volunteered by her politically ambitious mother, and the admiral's son who didn't care about the mission one way or the other."

Judge Thorne finally spoke up. "I think that's a bit harsh, Representative Porter."

"We should know how they all felt at the time. It's germane to their actions later."

Lee spoke up. "If I might finish my sentence, sir."

Thorne nodded. "Go ahead."

"I don't want my next comment to be taken as an example of _us_ versus _them_, but the military is different from civilian life in that we obey orders. That's drilled into every recruit from day one and into every officer from his or her first day at the Academy or Officer's Candidate School. The military runs on orders. What Representative Porter didn't allow me to finish saying was that after I considered the assignment, I was glad for the opportunity and accepted it with a sense of responsibility. Lieutenant Shaw and I were assigned to be the liaison officers between the military and the civilian contingent of scientists headed by Dr. Langley Nylund. We spent part of our time on the _Penelope_ and part of our time on the _Galactica _but we were based on the _Penelope_. It was our honor and privilege to work with both Dr. Nylund and Commander Cain."

There was a low murmuring from the rear of the room as everyone waited for Sarah Porter to continue. She apparently had nothing further to say. Lee felt like they had won this round with her, but he also knew she wasn't through.

Tom Zarek was the one who picked up the questioning.

"Captain Adama, were you also the liaison officers between the military and any civilians on the planets you visited?"

"There were no civilians alive on any of the planets we visited except Tauron."

"And how were you _ordered_ to act between the civilians on Tauron and the military?"

"We weren't given direct orders to function in any official liaison capacity regarding the citizens of Tauron."

"Why were you visiting the planet, or were you just joy-riding around in the atmosphere?"

"No, sir. Our mission is stated in the report."

"Restate it please, for everyone who is here today. What were your orders? Why were you on Tauron?"

"We discovered that five years ago the Cylons didn't use nuclear devices on Tauron because of the large deposits of tylium in the northern part of the planet, tylium that they needed to fuel their ships. Since you were released from prison early and pardoned in order to…"

Zarek interrupted him. "We're all aware of that part Captain Adama. Please stick with the facts of your mission. What were you doing on the surface of the planet?"

Lee felt Kendra give him a mental high-five. Zarek had stopped him but Lee had managed to get Zarek's former prisoner status into the record and he had reminded everyone in the room of it including the panel. He continued.

"We were ordered to get voter registration lists as well as birth and death lists."

"Who gave you that order?"

"Commander Cain."

"Why?"

"We're not allowed the luxury of questioning why a superior officer gives us an order. You would have to ask Commander Cain."

Kendra spoke up. "We later heard that a civilian team could use the lists to determine the percentage of survivors but we weren't told that at the time. They were also looking for causes of death following the holocaust."

Zarek made a note. "Did you obtain these lists?"

"No, sir."

"What prevented you from obtaining them?"

"Several things."

"Please tell us," Zarek said with forced politeness.

"The first place we visited was a little town called Lindeford. After determining that it was deserted, Lieutenant Shaw and I were preparing to look in a building we thought was the town hall when we were attacked by wolves. Another crew member was injured. We immediately returned to the _Galalctica _to get medical attention for him. Commander Cain determined that it was too dangerous to go back to that town especially since everyone had either died or left it."

"That incident wasn't covered in the report," Sarah Porter said. "Why?"

"It was written up in a separate report. It occurred a day earlier."

Zarek interrupted. "I'd like to request access to that report also."

"For what reason?" Judge Thorne asked.

"Because it involved two of the three people who were involved in the incident we're investigating. It goes to their state of mind on the day in question."

Thorne wrote something on a piece of paper and passed it to a clerk who left the room with it.

Zarek continued. "Did you obtain _any _of the lists you were sent for?"

"No sir, we were only able to look for the lists in Quanniq. We found that all records pertaining to births, deaths and voter registration were missing."

"Missing?" Zarek sounded amazed.

"Yes, sir. We found the file cabinets where the paper copies were stored in the courthouse. The folders were empty. The electronic records had been destroyed by the Cylons when they bombed the capital city of Hypatia."

"How many trips did you make to the planet?"

"Two, sir. On consecutive days."

Jacob Cantrell asked, "The crew consisted of you three?"

"Yes, sir. The crew member injured the previous day was medivaced back to Caprica since Dr. Cottle thought a specialist should look at his injuries."

"And his place was taken by Lieutenant"…he glanced at the page in front of him…"Saunders?"

"Yes, sir."

"What ship did you take to the planet?"

Lee continued to answer since Cantrell seemed to be addressing his questions to him. "A Raptor."

"Who was at the controls?"

"I was."

"I thought you listed a Viper as the ship you fly."

"I'm qualified on both."

"Lieutenant Saunders is listed as a Raptor pilot. Why wasn't he at the controls?"

Lee deferred to Saunders who said, "I was functioning as ECO and navigator for Captain Adama who is not trained on those functions in a Raptor."

"Can you tell those of us not in the military what _ECO_ stands for and what an ECO does?"

"ECO stands for Electronic Countermeasures Officer. ECMs are devices that are designed to confuse the enemy such as electronic jamming of the enemy communication signals or deployment of countermeasures to confuse enemy missiles."

"In other words, you went to the planet with the anticipation of needing such measures against an_ enemy_."

"No, sir," Saunders said. "I was along to function as the communications officer between the Raptor and the _Galactica_. Also as the navigator and the copilot. None of us anticipated needing any countermeasures."

"Let's move on," Judge Thorne said. "These officers have already answered questions as to their occupations and what they were doing."

Lee could tell that Zarek didn't like the judge's directive, but he chose not to challenge it. He continued.

"Lieutenant Shaw, please tell us about the day _after_ the incident with the wolves."

"We went to the planet's surface to visit four towns, Ember Pass, Quanniq which is the capital of the province and two other towns called Haida and Katarin. Ember Pass was the closest so we went there first and determined that it was deserted just like Lindeford."

"How did you determine that it was deserted?" Sarah Porter asked.

Saunders said, "Our infrared scanners picked up no indication of heat from any buildings or vehicles. We also had a visual. Captain Adama flew low over the town. The roads were deep in snow. After what had happened the day before in Lindeford, we made the decision not to land. We went on to Quanniq where the tylium mines are located. We knew we'd find people there."

Zarek asked, "So you just dropped out of the sky over Quanniq in a military ship?"

Lee leaned forward. Zarek knew it was no surprise. Besides being in the report, Zarek had been in touch with August Bernard.

"No, sir. Lieutenant Gaeta, the Tactical Officer aboard the _Galactica,_ had arranged for us to land at the same facility where the tylium shuttles land. We were expected."

"And that's where you met Mr. August Bernard?"

"Yes, sir. Kendra…Lieutenant Shaw and I met Mr. Bernard. Lieutenant Saunders stayed on board the Raptor."

"Why did Lieutenant Saunders stay on board the ship?" Cantrell asked.

Lee didn't want to tell them the real reason which was that they didn't trust Zarek's group of criminals who ran the facility.

Lee said, "It's standard military procedure to leave a crewman with the ship when we're at a civilian facility. We followed protocol."

Zarek directed his next question to Kendra. "Lieutenant Shaw, what was your first impression of August Bernard?"

They had all agreed beforehand that they wouldn't say anything derogatory about August Bernard since it might make the panel think they had a motive for their actions.

Kendra said, "He was pleasant to us. He claimed that he hadn't been informed that we needed transportation into town. Lieutenant Gaeta had communicated with the air traffic controllers but they had apparently not informed Mr. Bernard."

"How far is it to town?" Sarah Porter asked.

Lee answered. "Approximately fourteen miles."

Zarek asked, "Were you not able to visit the town then?"

Again Lee replied knowing that Zarek had known the answer long before he read it in the report.

"Mr. Bernard loaned us his truck."

"My question for you, Lieutenant Shaw," Zarek said harshly, "is when did you decided to shoot a man who was nice to you to the point of loaning you his truck, his personal vehicle, to visit the town of Quanniq?"

His question was unexpected and Lee could tell had gotten to Kendra. She looked stricken for a moment and didn't say anything.

"Answer the question, please, Lieutenant Shaw."

Kendra took a deep breath and answered as calmly as she could. "I made that decision when he pointed a Skorpian assault pistol at Captain Adama's head and threatened to pull the trigger?"

The room erupted in loud murmurs. Judge Thorne banged his gavel and demanded quiet.

By skipping over everything that had led up to it, Zarek had made Kendra look guilty of murder. All the information was in the report, but Zarek was attempting to put them on trial in front of those assembled in the room. Lee knew the media was eating it up.

As soon as the room had quieted, Lee addressed the judge. "Your honor, if I might explain, several hours passed between us meeting Mr. Bernard and the shooting in question. It didn't happen until after our Raptor was shot down by a Cylon Heavy Raider that was carrying Mr. Bernard. It was clearly evident that they were trying to kill not just me, but all of us."

Another round of murmurs and another admonition from Judge Thorne for quiet.

Zarek said, "I'd like to present another scenario for what happened since Mr. August Bernard could have had no possible reason to try to kill these officers."

Lee felt a cold lump begin to form in the pit of his stomach. There was a cold, hard glitter in Tom Zarek's eyes. Maybe he was trying to avenge one of his own or maybe he still wanted a measure of revenge against the government of which he was now striving to become a part. Or maybe it was more personal. During the Second Cylon War, William Adama, then the Commander of the _Galactica_, had refused to let Zarek leave Caprican airspace in John Gallagher's ship which he and his fellow prisoners had hijacked. Because of Bill Adama, Zarek had spent three more years in prison.

For whatever reason, Lee knew that once Zarek began talking, things would not look good for him or Kendra or Saunders.

"You may present your theory since that's why we convened this inquiry," Judge Thorne told Zarek, "but keep it brief please and no theatrics."

Zarek's voice took on an aggrieved tone. "I spoke with Mr. Bernard on the day he was murdered. He said that he was concerned that the three officers in the Raptor were going to try to visit an area where a storm was moving in and that they would get in trouble due to the weather." Zarek looked at Lee. "You were headed for Haida, were you not?"

"We were, but we never told Mr. Bernard our destination."

"Then how did he know it, Captain Adama?"

"He was behind us in that Heavy Raider and they were tracking us on dradis."

"Mr. Bernard had no knowledge of how to track a ship on dradis," Zarek said matter of factly. "He was a civilian."

Saunders spoke up. "He was with two centurions. They knew how."

"The only function of those centurions was to fly that ship. I think that Mr. Bernard came to your aid after Captain Adama, a Viper pilot who was trying to pilot a Raptor, a ship with which he is not familiar, made a mistake and had to crash land, seriously injuring Lieutenant Saunders. I contend that you killed August Bernard, a man whose only thought was to try to help you, to cover up Captain Adama's mistake and save his career."

"That's a lie!" Kendra said hotly. "He was going to kill Lee because he thought we'd learned something at the courthouse, something _you_ didn't want anyone to know. _You_ ordered him to follow us in that Cylon ship and shoot us down. _You're _the one responsible for August Bernard's death. _You_! Not us!"

For the first time Lee saw a flicker of doubt in Zarek's eyes, but he had started down a path from which there was no turning back.

"That's a very flimsy and pathetic excuse, Lieutenant Shaw. You just finished telling me that you didn't find anything at the courthouse. No lists. Why would Mr. Bernard want to kill you for something you didn't find?"

Mateo Oraibi's death list had not been included in the official report because it had not been covered under their orders, but Lee had to use that information now or run the risk of letting the panel be swayed by Zarek. He spoke up.

"We didn't find anything at the courthouse, Mr. Zarek, but we weren't returning empty handed. A woman in the district attorney's office directed us to someone in town who had been keeping a list of everyone in Quanniq who had died after the Cylons destroyed the main cities. His records contain names and dates of death. He allowed us to scan his list into my computer. Even though the computer was damaged when the centurions in Mr. Bernard's Heavy Raider shot us down, a technician here on Caprica was able to retrieve the data."

Zarek's face had blanched slightly. "Why wasn't that in the report? There was no mention of a _death list _in the report?"

"It wasn't covered by our orders and it's not official. At the time we thought the computer had been damaged to the point that nothing could be obtained from it. It wasn't until we got it back to Caprica that a technician was able to extract the list. Every name will need to be verified, but when it is, we'll know who died in Quanniq and more importantly _when_ they died."

Zarek blustered. "You could be making this up in another attempt to save your career. We have only your word that the list even exists."

Behind him Lee heard Romo Lampkin's distinct accent. "Oh, the list exists, Mr. Zarek. I've got a copy of it. My office has been asked to look into the possibility that someone on your staff in Quanniq might have falsified the petition that got you appointed to the Quorum as Tauron's representative. If that someone was Mr. August Bernard, then he would have every reason to try to stop that Raptor from reaching the _Galactica _with those names."

"I don't believe it," Zarek said in the aggrieved tone he had mastered so well.

Lampkin addressed Judge Thorne, "Your honor, if I might be allowed to continue. I'll be brief."

"I certainly wouldn't deny our Attorney General his say in this inquiry. Take as much time as you need, Mr. Lampkin."

Lampkin smiled. "Thank you, your honor. Mr. Zarek, you told us that you spoke with Mr. Bernard that afternoon and discussed a storm that might endanger Captain Adama's ship. Is not the truth that the storm you spoke of was the one you were afraid would end your political career if it were proved you'd presented a falsified petition to President Adar last year?"

"My men obtained every signature on that petition from a registered voter in Quanniq," Zarek said.

"Obtained them or copied them? Did they use the voter registration lists they stole from the courthouse? Thousands of names would have been available to them for the entire northern province. I contend, Mr. Zarek, that when the death list is checked against your petition, we'll find that a number of Quanniq's citizens managed to sign your petition from beyond the grave."

The room erupted in murmurs again, louder this time.

Judge Thorne rapped his gavel. "These proceedings will recess for lunch. After lunch we will hear any more theories that might be proposed and the three officers will be available for any further questions."

The back row emptied quickly as the members of the press rushed out to file their stories. Tom Zarek glared at first Lampkin and then at Lee before rising from his chair and quickly exiting through the side door. Lee had no doubt that his bodyguard and fellow convict Meier was waiting for him.

Kendra put her face in her hands and shuddered. Saunders gently placed his palm on her back in a way that looked like one officer comforting another, but which Lee knew was much more. They had come close, very close to Zarek convincing the panel that his version of the story was the truth.

Lee turned. Playa Palacios had approached Lampkin and Marta Shaw. Lampkin waved her off with a pleasant, "Later. It's not over yet."

But it was and they all knew it. Lampkin looked up at Lee who mouthed _My Hero. _It caused Lampkin to smile broadly. When the room cleared out, Marta Shaw walked over to her daughter and embraced her. Kendra had tears in her eyes. Major Parker and Vladimir Darren stood at the back talking quietly and looking relieved.

Sarah Porter and Jacob Cantrell had followed Zarek and also quickly departed through the side door. Judge Thorne was carefully and precisely stacking the papers in front of him. Coretta Howliss got up slowly from her seat and stepped down from the dais. She shook Lee's hand and said, "_Cha d'dhùin doras nach d'fhosgail doras."_

Lee shook his head. "I'm not a scholar of languages."

"_No door closes without another opening_. It is something my mother said to me many times as we saw our lands taken by the tylium consortiums. She was a member of the people of the north as am I. As is my nephew Mateo."

"If it hadn't been for his list, we'd have been in deep trouble right now. Tom Zarek is charismatic and persuasive."

"You'll get the chance to repay Mateo's favor. Our shaman has seen it."

"Seen what?" Lee asked skeptically.

"A storm is coming, Captain Adama. There are members of my people and yours and all of the twelve tribes on another world who will be engulfed by it. I think that you must help them. I think that you will."

"I'm sure we'll be ready if anything happens."

"You must come and dine with us. Our shaman is wise. He knows many things."

Lee smiled. "It would be an honor. Could I bring my girlfriend? She's a real believer in Oracles and their prophecies. I'm sure she'd like your shaman."

"Bring anyone you like including Lieutenant Saunders and Lieutenant Shaw. Next Saturday evening."

She took a small piece of paper from the folder she carried and gave it to him. It contained only an address on a street Lee was unfamiliar with.

Lee realized that he'd have a hard time backing out now. He smiled. "What time?"

"Seven o'clock. You don't need to wear your uniform. We're very casual. Some of the older ones still wear our native dress, but the younger ones wear jeans."

Lee thought of Maya and Hunter. "Would it be all right if I brought one other couple? Kara and I have a friend who's…new to Caprica City. He's staying with me."

"Of course. Bring as many as you'd like. There will be room for all of you. That address is our meeting hall. Our small delegation dines there every Saturday evening."

As Coretta Howliss exited the side door, Kendra called to Lee, "Time for lunch. You coming or not?"

"Sure," Lee said.

He put the slip of paper with the address in his pocket and turned to join his friends. As they exited the building into the bright sunlight of a beautiful day, he felt a profound sense of relief. It was only temporary, he knew, but for the moment it felt good. The shaman was right. A storm was coming, but not today.

TBC…


	37. The Green-Eyed Monster

Chapter 37

The Green-Eyed Monster

_1. The sons and daughters of Xander and Jerusha numbered six, three sons and three daughters._

_2. The firstborn were twins, a daughter named Sharon after the rose that flowered on the day of her birth,_

_3. And a son who was named Simon Ulixes to honor both of his grandfathers as was tradition for firstborn sons._

_4. The brother and sister grew in stature and grace and were taught in the ways of the Lord._

_5. When they reached their eighteenth year, God spoke to Sharon and told her,_

_6. Find me a stone that was brought from your homeland that I may write upon it._

_7. And Sharon and Simon began a journey to the far reaches of their new planet which had been named Eden._

_8. They journeyed from city to town, through valleys and over rivers in their quest for the stone, _

_9. And none could help them until they reached a far village to the west of the great mountains._

_10. There a rich merchant told them, I have what you seek. _

_11. My father brought it from our homeland that it should serve as his monument when he is dead._

_12. And Sharon and Simon rejoiced that the Lord had guided their footsteps to the Kobol Stone._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Xander, _Chapter 8:1-12

.

The table in the private dining room on the second floor of Mable House was crowded. In addition to Kara, Lee, Hunter and Maya, tonight Laura also had Bill Adama and Romo Lampkin as her guests for dinner. With her son in his high chair, it made her think of her family…of years past when her mother and father and brother were still alive…and of her husband and their children…of the ones she loved.

She looked around at everyone before she stood and lifted her glass of wine.

"I propose a toast to both Lee and Romo for the independent inquiry's findings. Lee, we all knew you and your fellow officers were innocent of any wrong-doing. Romo, we knew that with a little help from you, the entire panel would see it."

"Thank you," Lee murmured modestly. "Mr. Lampkin gets most of the credit. He stopped Zarek in his tracks when he tried to paint August Bernard as the innocent victim of a military massacre."

"Even with all the evidence pointing to your innocence," Romo said, "the vote still came back four to one in your favor. Zarek would never abandon his position that the three of you were guilty of causing the death of his former fellow prisoner."

"The important thing is that no one else sided with him," Laura replied as she smiled. "Your words about Mateo Oraibi's list of the dead were enough to sway even Sarah Porter. A four-to-one vote isn't a unanimous exoneration, but it's one more vote than was needed to close the inquiry and let our young officers get on with their duties."

Lampkin smiled. "Both Sarah Porter and Jacob Cantrell saw the handwriting on the wall and became the proverbial rats abandoning a sinking ship. As soon as my staff completes the comparison of the death list to the signatures on Zarek's petition, I think he'll be forced to admit that some of those signatures were forged."

Lee said, "He'll claim he didn't have any knowledge of it."

"Of course he will," Laura said. "He certainly isn't going to stand up and say he authorized his men to fake signatures on a petition although I'm sure that's what he did."

Bill, who had remained silent until that point, said, "He can disavow knowledge but it doesn't mean he's not responsible. Anyone with half a brain in the Quorum will come to the same conclusion. The public will, too."

Lampkin said. "Don't be so certain the public will buy his complicity en masse. He has a great many loyal supporters, especially among the Saggitaron contingent here in Caprica City. He's also got support among the anti-government faction. To them he'll always be seen as a political prisoner instead of a criminal."

"What does all that mean?" Kara asked. "If some of the petition proves to be forged, will he gets to remain on the Quorum or not?"

"I'll defer that question to Romo," Laura finally said.

"This situation has never occurred since the Quorum came into being. Unless one of Zarek's men is willing to come forward and testify that Zarek was aware of petition forgeries, I don't think a charge against him will stick."

Bill said. "If it comes to that, one or more of his men will fall on their swords for him and admit they were responsible."

Lampkin said, "It's not worth the trouble we'd be going to. By the time we could mount a real investigation, Zarek's term will be up."

"True," Laura added. "Zarek was only appointed to fill Perah Enyeto's seat on the Quorum after she was killed during the holocaust. That term runs out at the end of this year."

"I think Coretta Howliss would be a good representative for Tauron," Lee said.

Bill said. "Mrs. Howliss would need major funding to run against Zarek. He's got the backing of the remaining tylium consortium members since they've got a monopoly on the tylium now."

Lee said, "But the people who are still alive on Tauron are in the north. They've always hated what the tylium consortiums did to their land. I think Mrs. Howliss would get most of their votes."

"It won't matter," Lampkin said. "You can't forget about the large number of Tauron refugees on Caprica. Most of them came from Hypatia and Tauron City. The consortium has been buying their votes for years. There's nothing to stop them now that they're the only game in town."

Laura sighed. Lampkin was right as usual. "I guess I'd better get used to dealing with Zarek even if he's gotten his wings temporarily clipped."

"_Temporarily_ is the key word," Bill said. "Like the rest of his kind, he'll use the opportunity to paint himself as a man of the people. He'll visit a few soup kitchens and homeless shelters until the publicity from the inquiry blows over. Then it will be business as usual for him."

"Until he screws up again," Lee said to them. "I'm sure you'll all be up for the task of reining him in just like you were this time."

As Lee took a sip of wine, his mobile phone vibrated. He discretely glanced at it thinking that it would be Kendra wanting to talk about the inquiry, but the number was blocked.

Kara said, "Why didn't anyone mention the _Galactica_ was taking the Cylon's remains to Gemenon tomorrow?"

There were several long moments of silence. Bill finally answered her.

"I don't think anyone was trying to keep it a secret."

Laura asked," How did you hear about it?"

"Out at the airbase this morning. Colonel Spencer asked for a volunteer for the burial detail."

Laura and Bill glanced at each other and then she said to him. "I thought you told me that was handled late last week."

"It was."

Kara said, "Karl had volunteered. He had to drop out because of Sharon having her baby. I volunteered to go in his place."

"You did what?" Lee asked in disbelief. "Why?"

"Because of Karl…and Sharon. They're my friends."

"Did you not think of how that would look to everybody considering your relationship to Laura?"

"It's me doing it, not Laura," Kara said defensively, but even as she said the words, she knew what Lee meant. Jackson Spencer had said the same thing. Kara lowered her eyes. "I won't go."

"I can't believe you even volunteered in the first place…" Lee started.

"Lee," Laura interrupted him. "I'm sure when Kara did it she was only thinking about her friends not about how it would reflect on me."

Kara took a deep breath. "It's not like I care about the Cylons," she said with defiance in her voice. "They murdered billions of humans and…and put that virus into birth control patches and kids' vaccines. In my opinion they got exactly what they deserved."

No one said anything.

Bill finally said, "I think you've made a wise decision not to go. No one would look at it from your point of view. It would be the lead story on the six o'clock news. Laura's opponents would use it against her."

"With Tom Zarek leading the bunch," Lampkin said. "There're already rumors being spread on the internet that the suicide bombing was a government-sanctioned action to keep the Cylons from being put on trial and revealing the theory that the government of Caprica and the military were complicit in the holocaust."

"That's total bull…baloney!" Bill said adamantly.

Lampkin added, "But apparently some people don't have enough to do with their time so they sit around dreaming up theories and then look for a way of proving them. We'd like for the issue to die a quiet death, not provide fodder for the extremists in our midst."

"Kara," Laura said gently. "It was a nice gesture for you to make for your friends. I understand why you did it. I'm well aware of your loyalty to Karl and why you feel the way you do, but I'm also sure you understand why it would be very unwise to actually do it."

Kara nodded. "Colonel Spencer said if I wasn't out there in the morning, he'd go in my place."

Now it was Bill's turn to show surprise. "Jackson Spencer is going to accompany the Cylon's ashes to Gemenon?"

"Yes, sir. He wants to see how the planet looks now. He was born there."

"I didn't know that," Bill mused. "He's probably not too pleased his home planet was chosen for their final resting place. Of course it's not really the planet. Their ashes will be released far above the atmosphere."

"We didn't talk about that," Kara said. "I told him I thought it would be a mistake for him to see what Gemenon looks like now. I wouldn't want to see Picon."

"Gemenon didn't look nearly as bad as some of the planets," Lee said. "Some scientists hoped to find survivors in the mountains at the monotheist compound because radiation levels were very low there. It looks like they all starved to death."

His phone buzzed again. He glanced down. Another blocked number.

"Who keeps calling you?" Kara asked.

Lee shrugged. "The number's blocked."

At the end of the table, Braedon banged his spoon on the highchair tray several times and said, "Down."

Maya stood and lifted him. Hunter stood also.

"Excuse us," Maya said. "Time for someone to get a bath and get ready for b-e-d."

After Maya and Hunter had left with Braedon, Laura said, "Thank you, Kara, for considering my position on the Cylons."

"Which is?" Kara asked. "Just so I'll know."

Laura was no longer surprised by Kara's directness. Then she smiled slightly. "Officially or unofficially?"

"Both."

"Officially I wish we had been able to put them on trial since they are sentient and long ago made a decision to destroy us. I would have liked to hear them try to defend their actions in court. And _no_, I wouldn't have been afraid of anything they might have given as a reason."

"So that's your official position?" Kara asked.

"I abhor violence, but on a personal level I can't say that I'm sorry for their fate. What I can't condone either personally or professionally is that young man taking the law into his own hands."

Kara said. "So if the Cylons had gone on trial and been found guilty and we'd executed them, that would have been okay, but since Tucker did it, it's not?"

"What are you trying to say?" Lee asked.

"Just trying to understand Laura's feelings about what happened to the Cylons," Kara answered.

"Kara has a valid question," Laura said. "The difference is that they would have had a trial first. Their sentence might not have been death. It might have been life in prison. Kara, certainly you understand that the government can't condone letting individuals decide who lives and who dies or even which crimes are worthy of death. That's up to our legal system."

"I understand what you're saying," Kara said. "What I don't understand is that Natasi was in with the rest of them who made the decision to destroy us and you're not putting her on trial."

Laura glanced at Romo Lampkin. "We haven't decided her ultimate fate, yet. She's been helping us, somewhat reluctantly I might add, but helping us just the same."

Lampkin added, "There might come a time in the future when she'll be called upon to help us again. It's in our interest to keep her happy and cooperating for the moment. With her we're operating on the premise that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."

"She's like that Six on Nereid who was with my dad," Kara suddenly said. "The bitch who hit him. I wish I could have gotten to her but Dad got between me and her."

Laura felt her breath catch. "You mean she looks just like Natasi?" She managed to ask.

Kara wanted to say, _Duh, Laura. Of course she looks like Natasi. She's a frakking Six. _Instead she said, "Bleached white hair and all. He called her Sonja."

"Sonja," Laura said the name, envisioning a platinum-haired Six in a sheer blouse and black bra like Natasi had once worn, a woman who exuded sex from every pore. "How was she dressed?"

"Nothing special. Slacks and a blouse. I think the slacks were black. Low-heeled boots instead of stilettos. I was trying not to look at her. I knew as soon as she saw my eyes she'd know…" Kara's voice had grown soft with remembering how overjoyed she had been to see her father that day and how hard it had been to try to hide it. And then she felt the kick of pain at leaving him behind, knowing he was still on Nereid at the mercy of the Cylons. At the mercy of that bitch who had hit him like she owned him.

Lee's phone buzzed again.

"Just answer it," Kara said harshly. "If it's a wrong number you can tell them so they'll quit interrupting our dinner."

Lee got up without a word and left the table. Out in the hall he answered the phone.

A woman's voice said tentatively, "Lee?"

"Shelley?"

"Is this a bad time?"

"It's as good as any. What's up?"

"You told me…that day…the day we talked in your office. You said to let you know about any arrangements for Tucker."

"You got his body released?"

Shelley took a deep, trembling breath. "Your CO Major Parker is a very nice man. He made some phone calls and helped me with the paperwork. We're having a graveside service. Four o'clock Friday afternoon at Thanatos Cemetery. Go to the gate on Hemlock Street. It's exactly three tenths of a mile from there. You'll see us."

"You and Troy?"

"And a few more of Tucker's friends."

"Did you call Colonel Winters?"

"No."

"Do you plan to?"

"No."

"Why not, Shelley? Tucker worked for him at the Academy."

"You can call him if you want to. Winters and I didn't exactly part on the best of terms. Will I see you there?"

"I'll be there."

"Just one more thing, Lee. We don't want this leaking to the press. We don't want it turned it into a media circus. That's the last thing Tucker would have wanted. This is for us…for his friends. So be careful who you mention it to."

"I will."

He ended the call and walked back into the dining room.

Kara's look was a question mark.

Lee sat and took a sip of wine before he said, "Shelley."

"What did _she_ want?"

"She wanted to tell me about Tucker's funeral."

"Ah, so someone is burying the young suicide bomber." Lampkin commented.

Lee nodded and took another sip of wine.

"I guess you're going," Kara said.

"We were Academy classmates…and friends."

"Aren't you worried about how it will look?"

"The public isn't invited."

"That's a sure guarantee that nobody will find out about it," Kara said sarcastically.

Lee glanced up at his father. "If you've got a problem with me going, now would be a good time to mention it."

Laura looked at the admiral. "What would you do, Bill, if you were in Lee's place?"

Bill paused with the glass of wine halfway to his mouth. "If the man was a friend of mine, I'd go and publicity be damned."

Romo drained his glass. "I think I'm going to call it a night. Thank you, Madame President, for your kind dinner invitation."

"It was the very least I could do," Laura said. "And you don't need to rush off."

Lampkin smiled and patted his jacket pocket. "I'd better go before you notice the sterling flatware is missing."

Laura also smiled. "You told me you were attending Kleptomaniacs Anonymous."

"I've missed a few meetings recently."

"Go," Laura joked, "before I have Edgar search you."

Lee said, "Thank you again for today, Mr. Lampkin."

"It was _truly_ my pleasure. Now let me get home and feed the cat. Lance is unhappy if his kibble is late. He complains loudly to the neighbors and they complain loudly to me."

When Lampkin was gone, Bill said, "Why would a grown man as busy as Lampkin want to keep a cat?"

"Lance belonged to his wife who died in the holocaust," Kara said. "That's what Mr. Lampkin told my dad."

Laura said, "I once had my doubts about him being an effective Attorney General. Now I feel ashamed for those doubts."

"I watched his interrogation of Natasi," Lee said. "Major Parker told me I should watch it and learn. It was probably the best interrogation I've ever seen."

Laura said. "Romo has established a bond of trust and rapport with Natasi that still amazes me. She cooperated with us again last week. I'm meeting with Gaius Baltar in the morning to see if he'll reward her for us since that's her heart's desire."

"Gross," Kara said. "Too much information about _those two_."

Laura poured another few sips of wine into her glass and couldn't help smiling. For all her maturity in some areas, Kara was a typical teenager in others.

Kara stood. "Dinner was nice tonight…as usual. And I do understand why I shouldn't go to Gemenon tomorrow."

Lee also stood. "We really do appreciate you feeding us every night."

"It's the least I can do…and it assures me that I'll see Kara at least once a day. She rarely makes it to breakfast with us."

Kara grinned. "What can I say? I like to sleep as late as I can."

Lee smiled. "So you can ride that motorcycle like a bat out of hell getting out to the base."

"I've got to keep my senses sharp and combat ready since I can't fly right now."

"What do you think of the Mark VII?" Bill asked.

Kara smiled. "I'll let you know when I see something besides a picture of one. I'm still doing the classroom part of the training."

As soon as Kara and Lee had left the room, Laura looked at Bill. "Let's go to my sitting room and talk. We'll be more comfortable and the staff can clean this room."

In a few minutes they were settled on opposite ends of the small couch. Bill had a glass of straight whiskey.

He said, "Just to keep you in the loop, there's a reason Major Parker was so helpful to Tucker's friend. Agent Darren wanted to know where the funeral would be and when so they could get agents in place ahead of time. By helping Tucker's friend, Parker got that information."

"What is Agent Darren going to do in regards to Tucker's funeral service?"

"Nothing except photograph everyone who attends the service and every vehicle they're driving. His agents will look like the cemetery staff or someone visiting another grave. They won't interfere with anything. No one will realize what they're doing."

"Is that _really necessary_?"

"Darren thinks so. They know Tucker had help, but every lead has dead-ended. Darren's team is frustrated and hopes to get some new leads in the investigation from someone who attends the service."

"They'll photograph Lee."

"He'll be eliminated as a suspect. Darren knows Lee couldn't have been involved. He was on the _Penelope_ when Tucker was planning his suicide mission."

"Shouldn't you tell Lee what's going on?"

Bill shook his head. "He's going to mourn his friend. I don't want to take away from that. Lee wasn't involved in this tragedy. He doesn't know anything about it. I told Darren they should leave it be. This was about destroying the Cylons. Now that they're dead, it's over. In my opinion Clellan saved the government the cost of a trial and execution so I think continuing the investigation is a big waste of time and money."

"I'm afraid that's simply not in Agent Darren's nature." Laura got up and poured a small amount of whiskey into her glass. When she sat down, she said, "You were worried about the independent inquiry, weren't you?"

"So were you. Sending Lampkin to watch over them was your idea."

"Anything can happen when we're dealing with somebody like Zarek, but justice prevailed."

"This time…thanks to Lampkin."

Laura smiled. "Romo told me that Lee was very eloquent as well. And very cool under fire…just like his father."

A ghost of a smile played about Bill's lips. "He owes that more to his grandfather than to me."

She hesitated and then said, "I'm so very glad that Kara didn't insist on going to the _Galactica_ with the Cylons' ashes. Two months ago I think she would have and I couldn't have stopped her short of locking her up somewhere. Spending a month on Nereid changed her…or something did. Now there are times she seems to be carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders."

Bill studied her for a few moments. "She's not the only one. You look tired, Laura, more than tired."

"The last several weeks have not been good ones for me."

They sat in silence for a long time. There was no need to discuss everything that had happened to her during the last few weeks. Bill was well aware.

Finally Laura asked, "Are Dr. Rafferty and his assistant making any headway with the canister design that Kara brought back from Nereid?"

"I talked to Rick several days ago. He said that Kevin understands the schematics, but duplicating them is not as easy as throwing a handful of parts together. He doesn't know if they'll have something ready when we go to Nereid or not. I told him to stop working on the second Raider now that we've got the first one back and to concentrate all their efforts on the canister. Disabling those centurions without engaging them in fire fights would save a lot of lives."

Laura's eyes searched his. "When do you think…?"

"Four to six months...minimum."

"That long?"

Bill sighed patiently. "My last plan took almost four years to develop and implement. I'd say four to six months is reckless in the extreme. This isn't going to be just a war fought in space over Nereid. We'll be fighting on the ground, too. Even a year would be pushing it to plan a good campaign considering the gaps in Hunter's information."

"It's just…" she sighed deeply.

"You want John back."

"Yes. Although…" For a moment she couldn't bring herself to say it and then she plunged ahead. "If he's been with that Sonja…" She took a deep breath. "She's beautiful. She's young and sexy. She probably knows things about men that…"

"Laura," Bill said almost harshly. "Don't do this to yourself."

"How is it possible to be jealous of a woman I've never even seen…although I have seen her, haven't I? I look at Natasi and I'm seeing Sonja. John might not want to come home to me," she said and heard the anguish in her voice.

Bill took her hand and squeezed hard enough that she gasped in pain. "I know there are men out there who would be fools just like Gaius Baltar is when it comes to a Six, but John is _not_ one of them. He loves you, Laura. Don't ever doubt that." He let go of her hand, then took it again and rubbed it. "I hurt you. I didn't mean to."

She looked up at him with tears glistening in her eyes. "You never could simply apologize when you hurt someone. Not to me or your wife or your sons. You just can't let go of your pride long enough to say it, can you?"

Bill's jaw tightened. He took a breath and then said, "I'm sorry I hurt you, Laura. You don't know how sorry I am or how often I've wanted to go back and change the past. The biggest mistake of my life was letting you go."

He had finally said the words that Laura had waited nearly twenty-three years to hear. She lowered her eyes. It was an emotional moment for her, but then her emotions had been raw ever since she'd found out John was still alive and in the hands of the Cylons.

He gently lifted her chin. "Am I forgiven?"

She managed a sad smile as a single tear tracked down her cheek. "Oh, Bill, you were forgiven years ago."

Overcome with emotion he bowed his head and Laura decided that she and Kara weren't the only ones whose lives had been changed by the events of the last six weeks. Bill Adama's life had also been changed and tonight it had changed again. Tonight they had finally lain to rest the ghost of the relationship that had haunted both of them since their youth, a relationship that had ended in so much pain for her. They could begin now to forge their future.

…

Out in the corridor, Kara took Lee's hand and led him to the elevator. They got off on the first floor and went through two doors onto a terrace that was enclosed on three sides by the building. In one corner there was a marble fountain with a statue of Posiden at its center. His sea nymphs or nereids sat around his feet. Their toes and the hems of their marble gowns trailed in the water. Sparkling jets spouted from the mouths of the dolphins that surrounded the basin.

"I talked to Zak this morning," he said. "He told me why he broke up with Maggie. He thinks he's going to die in Sovana and he doesn't want her back here waiting for him. I told him that was stupid, but you know how Zak is when he gets an idea in his head."

"I said something to Maggie out at the airbase. She thinks Sovana has got him all frakked up."

"Zak lost a friend last week, a guy he finished basic training with. They were on patrol."

"You lost a friend, too," Kara said gently.

"I didn't actually see Tucker blow himself up. Zak saw his friend get his head blown off."

Kara took a deep breath. She'd seen a lot of death in the refugee camp when the flu went through. She'd seen the bodies of the old man and woman who'd committed suicide, but she'd only seen one person actually die. She and Keshia had been holding Yolanda Brenn's hands when she had taken her last breath. Coming so close on the heels of nearly losing Lee and thinking she'd lost her father, Yolanda's death had left her emotionally numb and feeling lost. In some ways she still felt lost.

Lee finally said, "So what's Maggie going to do? Is she going to wait for Zak to come to his senses or not?"

"We didn't talk about it."

Lee put his arms around her. "I'm glad today's over."

"Just so you'll know, we're on camera. There's security cameras all over the place including out here."

He grinned. "Since when did that bother you?"

He kissed her, their lips coming together gently at first and then the kiss deepened.

Desire washed through her and she felt his body answer. "Let's go up to my room," she whispered. "There's no cameras in there."

Lee put his mouth at her ear. "Hunter will expect me to head back to the apartment with him soon."

"Between Maya and Brae, they'll keep him entertained."

"What if Laura comes looking for you?"

Kara smiled. "There's a lock on my bedroom door."

"We won't have very long."

"It won't be the first time."

They left the terrace and began walking toward the elevator. "I'm not the one who always goes to sleep right after we make love."

She smiled. "Good. Then I won't have to worry about you fulfilling your role as Hunter's chauffeur and babysitter."

_…_

John held Rachel and looked into her blue eyes. At two weeks old, she looked like she was focusing on him. As he talked to her, she brought one tiny fist to her mouth and gnawed on it despite the fact that Petra had just nursed her.

He had a headache that had not gone away even after the two cups of coffee he had drunk earlier that morning…a headache that was his own fault. The night before he had finished a half-full bottle of whiskey. A stupid thing to do since he doubted Sonja would give him another one, but he'd done it anyway.

Cassie climbed onto the sofa beside him and pointed to Rachel.

"Baby," John said to her. "Can you say _baby_?"

"Chon," Cassie said and pointed to him.

"That's right. I'm John. This is Rachel. She's a baby. She's your baby sister."

Cassie tugged at Rachel's blanket.

Petra walked into the room with a steaming mug of coffee and put it on the table beside him before she took Rachel.

Cassie immediately climbed onto his lap.

"Cassie, honey, go play with your toys and let John drink his coffee." Her daughter made no move to leave John's lap.

"It's okay," John said as Cassie put her head against his chest. He gently stroked the child's soft brown curls.

"I think my daughter is a wee bit jealous of your attention to Rachel. She's like that with her father, too."

John smiled despite his pounding head. "My daughter and my son are so far apart in age there's no competition. I had no idea the green-eyed monster reared its head at this age."

"I have…had a younger brother," Petra said. "I can't remember when I wasn't jealous of the time my father spent with him. We were very competitive."

"I was the youngest of five brothers. You don't need to explain anything to me."

Cassie soon tired of sitting on John's lap and climbed down to her toys. John reached for the cup of coffee.

"Do you want to tell me what's wrong?" Petra asked. "Or is it none of my business?"

"I've got a headache."

"I gathered as much. You look like a man in pain. You know you haven't been yourself since you got back from taking D'Anna to the settlement."

"Let's go for a walk. The fresh air will help my head."

Ten minutes later John was pushing Cassie in the stroller and Petra had the sleeping Rachel in the cloth sling wrapped around her.

They got all the way to the park before John said, "I had too much to drink last night."

"Ah," Petra said. "Is this because of D'Anna's problems?"

"Not really."

"Sonja, then?"

"Coming back from the settlement we had…words."

Petra didn't comment, simply waited for him to continue.

"She started an argument with me about Natalie, the First Six. There's only one of her. She lives in the settlement and she's the one who helped us with D'Anna. It sounded like Sonja was jealous of her. I kept telling her she didn't have anything to worry about, but she just wouldn't leave it alone. She kept pushing me, escalating the argument. Finally I said some harsh things to her about the nature of our relationship."

"Did you apologize?"

"That's why I went to her apartment last night."

"And?"

"She wasn't alone."

"Ah," Petra said again.

They reached the fountain. John lifted Cassie from the stroller and took her over to the basin. Cassie reached her hand toward the dripping water and he leaned forward so she could touch it. She crowed with delight and held her wet hand up for him to see.

The scene from the previous evening was still vivid in his memory. He'd waited three days hoping she'd get over her hurt feelings. He'd finally gone to her apartment last night to apologize. He didn't want to leave their relationship like it was that day in the transport ship. She _had_ helped him get Kara off the planet. She _had_ kept Cavil from sending him back to the prison. She _had_ saved his life. He owed her the courtesy of an apology.

He'd had one drink after dinner. Just one. Then he'd ridden the elevator down to her floor and knocked on her door. He was just about to leave when she opened it dressed in the white terrycloth robe. Her hair was damp and tousled like she'd just gotten out of the shower. He couldn't deny the corkscrew of desire that had twisted through his gut when he saw her because he knew that under the robe, she was naked.

"Hi," he said lamely. "It looks like I caught you at a bad time."

She didn't look surprised to see him, but she didn't stand back and invite him in either. Instead she smiled.

"Are you here for some bourbon or do you have another reason for your visit?"

Behind Sonja a naked young man walked into the living room carrying a pair of jeans in his hand.

"Hey, sugar," he said, "Have you seen my underwear? I can't find…" He stopped when he saw John. Then he grinned and held the jeans in front of him. "Shit, babe, I'm sorry. I didn't hear anybody knock."

Sonja had not taken her eyes off John's face. He had no idea how he looked at the moment. He just knew that he felt like a fool.

She said, "Go put on your clothes, Josh. Forget the underwear. We'll find it later." She waited until the young man had backed out of the room, and then said to John, "Would you like to come in?"

"No. I just came to apologize if I hurt your feelings a couple of days ago. That's all."

She was still smiling. "Yes, you hurt my feelings, but I accept your apology since you came all the way down here to make it. Are you sure you wouldn't like to come in for a drink and meet Josh? I think you'd like him."

"I'll pass."

"Some other time, then. Don't stay away so long."

Now John stood at the fountain oblivious to Cassie squirming in his arms. It wasn't until she began to fret that he put her down. The humiliation of those moments as Sonja's door had closed in his face still stung. He didn't remember the elevator ride back up to his apartment. His next clear memory was of taking the half-full bottle of whiskey out to the balcony. Several hours later it was empty.

Why was he so surprised? Natalie had warned him about Sonja's predilection for both variety and young men and based on the glimpse John had gotten of Josh's naked body, the young man had a lot to recommend him in addition to his youth and good looks.

Petra walked up beside him. "I'm sorry," she said softly.

John shrugged. "It was just an awkward situation."

"You care about her, don't you?"

"I'm not _in love_ with her if that's what you're asking me."

"You don't have to be in love with her to have feelings for her."

"Both the doctors warned me about something like this happening. I was just too damned arrogant to listen to them. I was just so damned sure I could handle anything the Cylons dished out. I mean I'd spent four damned months in their prison."

"The doctors were honest with you, John. Just because the Cylons didn't break you in their prison didn't mean they wouldn't try another way although it might not have worked out _exactly_ like they anticipated."

"It's my damned ego and Sonya zeroed in on that particular weakness of mine from the beginning. She even told me she loved me. She doesn't know the first frakking thing about love. She's a manipulator…the best one I've ever known. When you care about somebody, you don't spend all your time trying to manipulate them."

Petra didn't say anything.

"Whatever she and I had is over. It's really a relief."

"Has it ever occurred to you that everything she did was an attempt to make you jealous? And it sounds like she might have succeeded."

"Why would she need to do that? She was getting what she wanted from me."

"Was she?"

"What do you mean?"

Petra sighed in a way that said, _Men can be so dense_. "She was getting sex from you, John, but maybe she wants more. Maybe she wants your heart."

"She's not going to get it. I still love Laura…as crazy as that sounds." But Petra's words had triggered another train of thought. "Maybe that's why I was so rough on her the other day. Because of this frakked up thing I've got with Sonja, I'll never be able to ask Laura to take me back. Maybe I blame Sonja for that as much as I blame myself and I took it out on her. I think Laura could forgive me for what I did with D'Anna, but I could never ask her to forgive me for Sonja."

"John," Petra said gently, "you'll never see your wife again just like I'll never see the husband I had on Virgon, at least not in this world. I don't know why you keep clinging to that senseless hope. The Cylons are _not_ going to let you go back to Caprica. You and I will grow old and die here on this planet. If you have any feelings for Sonja, even if you can't call them love, then tell her. Try to work things out with her."

"I'd never be able to trust her. Natalie warned me that Sonja is into _variety_. I saw an example last night. I'm old enough to be his father." He massaged his temples. "I can't even think straight right now."

"Is your head still hurting?"

"Worse than ever."

"My husband works several days a week at a clinic in town. Follow the street beside the park and walk a block past the square. You'll see the sign. He can give you something for your headache."

John remembered the white pills Doolittle had brought him the day after D'Anna had given him the drug overdose. They had worked in less than ten minutes and on a headache a lot worse than this one.

He nodded. "I know the place you're talking about. I'll come see Cassie and Rachel tomorrow morning if that's okay."

"You're always welcome at our place, John. You know that."

"Thanks…and thanks for listening to me."

He left them at the fountain and walked into town, past the square and continued for a block. He'd walked this way many times before as he'd explored the city. The clinic had a small sign with green letters above the door that simply said _Community Clinic._

He pushed open the door and went inside. There were several people in the waiting room. He went up to the reception window. An Eight pushed the glass aside.

"Name?"

"John Gallagher."

"Have we treated you before?"

"No."

"What's your complaint?"

"Bad headache. Petra told me to come see her husband."

The Eight made a note on a piece of paper. "Have a seat."

He sat down near a woman who was visibly pregnant. A boy of eight or nine was sitting in the chair beside her. The boy was wheezing badly.

"Asthma," the woman said to him. "He's not contagious."

Before he could say anything, Simon came to the door and called his name.

"This woman and her son were here before me," John said.

"They're waiting on our specialist. I'll see you." In a small room, Simon said, "I haven't seen you in a couple of weeks. Not since the morning after Rika's death."

John nodded. "I visit Rachel and Cassie most mornings."

Simon smiled. "So my wife tells me. Petra still clings to her human friends. I have no problem with that. I heard you took D'Anna to Settlement Alpha and left her there."

"There's a man who can help her with the problems she's having. He teaches yoga and meditation. He's Natalie's spiritual guide."

"Umm. That should be good for D'Anna. Her being such a strong spiritualist and so deep into the faith."

"We hope so."

"How long have you had your headache?"

"Since I woke up this morning."

"Have you had headaches like it before?"

"Every time I drink too much and don't get much sleep."

"And you drank too much last night?"

"Way too much."

"Have you tried coffee?"

"Three cups."

"Umm. Okay. I've got something that should fix you right up."

He went to a cabinet, opened it and got out a large bottle. He shook a dozen pills into a smaller bottle.

"Take one of these with a full glass of water. It might make you drowsy so you'll want to wait until you get back to your apartment. I'm giving you extra in case you overindulge again. It's been my experience that humans tend to do that. It's one of your weaknesses."

John wanted to argue with him, but was more interested in getting rid of the headache, not making it worse.

"I appreciate it. I won't indulge again anytime soon. I'm out of booze."

"Umm. That's probably a good thing."

John stood. "The kid with the asthma…what are you doing for him?"

Simon shook his head. "There's not much we can do. It's a human disease."

"There are human doctors on this planet who might be able to help him."

Simon said, "Yes, we have one of them here."

"You've got a human doctor working here?"

"Why wouldn't we? We have humans in the city. He treats them." Simon chuckled. "Would you like to see him for a second opinion on your hangover?"

"No. These pills should do the trick. I appreciate it."

When John left, the waiting room was empty.

He walked as far as the square before he realized that he didn't want to go back to his apartment. He turned right and walked until he reached the sidewalk cafe where Sonja had taken him the first day he'd been allowed outside. It still wasn't serving food, but it did now serve non-alcoholic drinks…water and tea and a kind of fruit punch. He went inside, got a glass of water, brought it back outside and sat in the shade of the umbrella at the same table he and Sonja had occupied.

He took a pill, drank most of the glass of water and gazed at the square. In the noon heat it was nearly deserted. There was an Overseer Six sitting at a nearby table with a Three and a Five. All had fruit drinks. They had stared at him when he'd walked up but had quickly lost interest and returned to their conversation. He'd walked around the city alone enough that he was sure they'd seen him before.

A centurion was tending the flowers in the huge planters, scooping buckets of water from a large plastic tank on a push cart and picking off spent blooms. He watched as it did its job carefully and methodically, not wasting any water, and then it moved on to the next planter. John marveled at the long steel talons that could be so deadly to humans yet so gentle and precise with the small blossoms.

The pill was already working. The pain began easing as lethargy and drowsiness overtook him. He put his feet in the wrought iron chair across from him, settled back and let the world around him fade.

_…_

Laura sat behind her desk and watched Gaius Baltar as he walked into the Presidential office. He had shaved his beard, but his hair was still long. It looked greasy although she wasn't sure if that was intentional or not. She liked shorter hair on men, perhaps because her father, an ambassador, had always kept his hair short and neatly trimmed. The men who surrounded her kept their hair short, too, although she had noticed Tom Zarek had recently allowed his to grow just a bit. Perhaps he was further distancing himself from the prison haircut he'd worn for years.

"Madame President," Baltar said in a tone that was both servile and arrogant.

"Dr. Baltar, please come in and have a seat. Would you like coffee or tea?"

He sniffed slightly. "Coffee would be fine."

Laura picked up the phone. "Coffee for Dr. Baltar and tea for me."

He waited until she hung up the phone. "Could you tell me why I've been summoned? Dr. Nylund and I are very busy."

Laura smiled slightly. "I wanted to update you on the results of the letter you left with Attorney General Lampkin."

Baltar gave her a blank look and then it filled with suspicion. "What letter?"

"To Natasi. The woman you would do anything in order to spend five minutes with."

"Oh…_oh_." relief flooded his face and voice. "_That_ letter. What about it?"

"I think before you left we'd discussed a possible reward once you returned from your mission."

"Which was?"

"As I'm sure you're aware, Natasi survived the deadly attack on the other Cylons. Because of her co-operation with us, I promised her the same thing I promised you."

Laura paused, enjoying the fact that Gaius Baltar couldn't remember exactly what that promise had been. Once again a wave of pity for Natasi swept her. She felt sorry for any woman who loved a man who didn't return that love.

"Yes?" he said encouraging her to continue.

"How would you like to spend the weekend with her?"

Her secretary brought in a tray with their coffee and tea. Baltar waited until she had left.

"Where?"

"Natasi is the woman you love. You told her so in your letter. I wouldn't think it would matter where."

"You read my letter?" His voice edged upward in anger.

"Of course I did. So did Mr. Lampkin. You didn't think we would simply hand it over to her unread, did you?"

"Where is she?"

"She's in a safe place."

"In prison you mean. I'd have to go to a _prison_ to see her."

"She's not in prison, but you'd have to agree to certain stipulations."

"Such as?"

"You would be blindfolded before you were driven to her location and you wouldn't be able to leave for the duration of the weekend."

He sniffed again. "That's agreeable to me."

"Your conversations would be monitored by audio but not video..."

He drew himself up and said coldly. "Absolutely not. I refuse to be humiliated like that, knowing someone was listening to my every word and…"

"You didn't let me finish…except when you're in the bedroom…or the bathroom."

"Oh, well, I suppose that would be acceptable."

Suddenly Laura was anxious to get him out of her office. She despised him. She always had. "Then you agree to the terms?"

"Yes. I agree."

"You'll be contacted and told when and where you'll be picked up on Friday afternoon."

He stood. "I don't suppose…you have a copy of my letter, do you?"

"No, I don't. Why, Gaius? Did you forget what you'd said to her?"

"I was distraught when I wrote that letter…very distraught."

"Contact Mr. Lampkin. I'm sure he put a copy in Natasi's file. He's the one who talked to her. By the way, you also sent her a single pink rose."

"I did?"

"You don't remember that either?"

"Of course I remember it. You don't give me credit for much, do you?"

Laura smiled. "I give you credit for a great deal, Dr. Baltar. In ways you can hardly imagine. I'll never forget what a _big help_ you were to us when we were negotiating with the Cylons six years ago."

He visibly preened oblivious to her sarcasm. "Has Natasi missed me?"

"She's missed you so much that even with my limited knowledge of Cylons, I'd say you're in for a real treat this weekend. Perhaps you should go home tonight and take your…vitamins."

"Yes…yes, I'll do that."

When he was gone, Laura took a deep breath and then put her face in her hands. The feeling of pity for Natasi grew stronger. How could she love a man like that? Cylon or not, how could such a beautiful, intelligent woman love a self-centered prick like Gaius Baltar?

_…_

When John opened his eyes, he knew that several hours had passed because the sun was no longer on the terrace. The fountain cast a much longer shadow. His neck was stiff where his head had fallen to one side. He massaged his sore muscles and rotated his head trying to work out the kink. The table where the Cylons had been sitting was now occupied by the young man who had been with Sonja the night before. When he realized that John was awake, he got up and walked over.

"I was wondering when you were going to wake up, man. You were catching some serious zzzs. If you hadn't been snoring, I'd have checked to make sure you hadn't like…croaked sitting right there."

"What time is it?" John asked still feeling groggy.

"I don't know. Late afternoon. You want something to drink?"

John looked at his glass of water that now had several insects floating in it. He poured the water and insects on the stone pavers and handed the glass to Josh.

"Thanks. Water will do."

"Not tea or fruit punch? The punch is out of sight. They make it in a blender with ice. You know…like we used to get at the Zesty Freeze back home."

"Just water."

Josh went inside and returned a few minutes later with two glasses. John's was filled with ice and water. Not surprisingly Josh had chosen the punch.

John took his feet off the chair and gestured for Josh to have a seat. As he pulled out the chair, John studied him. Josh was exactly as he remembered from the night before only now he was wearing the jeans instead of holding them in front of his private parts. His sneakers were well-worn as were his socks. A faded short-sleeved blue work shirt with dried sweat stains under the arms completed his outfit. He was six feet tall, well-built with thick short hair a little darker than Natalie's, blue eyes, nice suntan. Young and handsome. He could easily have been a film star. John thought briefly of Jade. Jade would like Josh based strictly on his looks and age although John wasn't sure what that was. He could be eighteen or twenty-eight.

"Josh Lennox."

The young man held out his hand and John shook it. He had a firm grip and his hand was rough. Apparently Josh worked at a manual job when he wasn't with Sonja or hanging out in the city.

"John Gallagher."

"_Major_ John Gallagher. Sonja told me. You were some kind of Viper pilot hero or something."

John smiled. "_Or something_ probably covers it better. I flew with a Ladon Lennox off the _Solaria_ years ago. We called him Lucky Ladon because he managed to land a Viper with missing parts more often than anybody else. He was a damned good pilot."

"I had an uncle named Ladon who was in the service. He didn't talk about what he did, but that was probably him."

"Damn. Small universe, isn't it? Was he still on the _Solaria _when the Cylons took it out six years ago?"

"Nope. He was out of the service long before then. He had some mental problems. Him and my Aunt Gaia were on Libran along with the rest of my family. I heard the Cylons nuked it and killed everybody on the planet.

"They nuked all the planets except Caprica."

"Look, man, I'm sorry about the way things went down last night. I…"

"Not your fault," John interrupted him. "There's no hard feelings on my part. I don't see any reason to discuss it."

"You don't understand, man. Sonja's got it bad for you."

John chuckled. "Yeah. That's why she was frakking you. I always knew a woman had a thing for me when she went out and frakked another guy. That always left no doubt in my mind."

"You don't need to make fun of her. I came here to try to make things right."

"Look, kid…" John started in a much kinder tone.

"I'm not a kid," Josh said irritably. "I'll be twenty-six in a couple of months."

"Okay, _Josh_. Did Sonja put you up to this?"

"No, man. She doesn't know I'm here. It'd piss her off royally. She doesn't want me talking to you unless she's around."

"Then what the hell are you doing here? As far as I'm concerned there's nothing for you to _make right_. I don't blame _you_ for what happened. She obviously invited you in. I was the one standing in the hall feeling like an idiot."

Josh didn't say anything. Instead he took something out of his shirt pocket that looked like a fat cigarette with twisted ends. He put one end in his mouth, struck a match and lit it. He inhaled and held the smoke in his lungs. John recognized the pungent aroma.

"Is that a joint?"

Josh nodded and held it out to him. John didn't take it.

"If you're trying to get me arrested, there's no need. You're welcome to Sonja…with my blessing."

Josh finally exhaled. "No, man. You're not going to get arrested. Nobody gives a shit if we sit here and smoke. It's legal. We got it growing in a field close to the old temple."

"Who's _we_?"

"A couple of Twos and Threes. They say it helps them get closer to God. I don't know about getting closer to God, but it sure helps me make it through a lot of days. It makes for some wild sex, too."

John grinned and held out his hand. "Not that I think we're going to have wild sex, but what the hell." He took the joint and pulled in a deep lungful of smoke before he handed it back to Josh. After a minute he said, "I smoked cigarettes for years…until about three years ago, but I never did this stuff since it stays in your system for a long time which means it shows up in drug tests for a long time. That's the kiss of death for a pilot. I prefer my poison in liquid form."

"I'm not much of a drinker. Alcohol bothers my stomach. This is my drug of choice," Josh said before he inhaled again.

"Sonja doesn't drink, not even wine. Does she smoke this stuff with you?"

Josh shook his head and finally said, "No, man. She won't even let me smoke it at her place, except out on the balcony. She's got this thing about her body being a temple to God. It's in their scriptures."

"She won't drink a glass of wine or smoke a joint, but she'll frak half the planet. Tell me what the hell kind of sense that makes."

An edge came into Josh's voice. "Don't talk about her that way, man. I know you're pissed at her about something, but she's _not_ _frakking half the planet_."

"Damn, you're in love with her, aren't you?"

He shrugged. "For all the good it does. She sure doesn't feel that way about me. It hurt a lot at first. I've got used to it now."

"Years ago I was in your shoes. She only had one other man…her husband, but it didn't make it hurt any less. Hell, we even had a daughter together and she _still_ wouldn't give him up." John sat brooding for a minute and then asked, "Just how many like you does Sonja have in her stable?"

"I never asked. You're the only one she's ever talked about, but I know there've been others. Shit. I think she fraks that crazy son of a bitch Leoben who lives downstairs from her or she did before he brought Rika here. A couple of years ago I caught him coming out of her apartment. He gave me this shit-eating grin that said _I just frakked your woman._ Me and Sonja had it out about him. She finally told me it was none of my business and to drop it unless I wanted to get sent back to where she'd got me from. I'd have done anything rather than go back there. I dropped it. But I never caught him at her place again either."

"They were together in the beginning…long before the Cylons took up with humans."

"No shit."

"Which settlement did she bring you from?"

"Delta."

"Which is where?"

"Way south of here near the equator. A couple of hours by air. It's hot as hell there year round. Mostly jungle and rain forest. The settlement produces a lot of fruit for the city and they grow coffee and cocoa beans in the hills. What's left over goes to the other settlements. Settlement Epsilon is a lot further south where it starts getting colder again. That's where they have a big tylium mine. I was there at first and then they took me to Delta."

"They tell you why?"

"Nope. A Two came in one day and pointed to a couple of us and said like, _you and you and you, come with me_. Next thing I know we're on a ship. When we landed at Delta, it was so hot and humid, I thought they'd taken us to hell." He inhaled again and said, "On top of that there's these huge-ass spiders at Delta. They eat birds and mice and shit like that. I hate spiders, man, worse than I hate snakes and they have some big frakking snakes, too. And mosquitoes the size of Vipers. That place is a buzzing, crawling, slithering cesspit. I'd have frakked a Five or even a One for a chance to get out of there. When Sonja showed up that day and picked me I thought I'd died and gone to Elysium. I mean besides the fact that she's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen."

"How long have you been in the city?"

"Almost three years."

"So you and Sonja have had a thing for _three years_?"

"On and off. Totally off since she met you. I was surprised as hell when she sent a centurion to get me a couple of nights ago."

"Were you the father of the babies she lost?"

Josh inhaled again. "The first one, yeah. I'm not sure about the other two. We never talked about it. Sonja said you have a daughter and a son back on Caprica. She talks about you all the time."

"Look, Josh," John said gently. "Sonja and I don't have any future. There's a Three who's pregnant with my child. I know there's not much chance she'll carry it to term, but if a miracle occurs and she does, that's where my obligation lies."

"That doesn't mean you and Sonja can't keep getting it on. They share. Well, some of them do."

"I'm not interested in one of their group things. I'm married to a woman back on Caprica. The way you feel about Sonja, that's the way I feel about my wife. She owns my heart. She always will."

"Sonja didn't mention that part…I mean about you being married. Does she know?"

John held up his hand with his wedding ring. "She knows. She's found a way to ignore it or pretend it's not true."

Josh held out the joint again and John took it.

What are you going to do now?"

"Nothing," John answered. "There's nothing for me to do. The reason I went to her apartment last night was to apologize for something I said a couple of days ago. I apologized. Sonja accepted the apology. As far as I'm concerned, that's the end of it."

"You mean you're not going to…to see her anymore…at all?" The hope in Josh's voice was heartbreaking.

"No, kid. She's all yours."

"She'll get tired of me. She's done it before."

John sucked in a deep lungful of smoke before handing the joint back to Josh. It had gotten considerably shorter.

"After she lost the first baby, she gave me to one of the Overseers for a couple of months. I think she blamed me or something. Like I said we never talked about it cause she didn't want to. This Overseer bitch likes to slap me around, make me lick her boots, shit like that. That's what trips her trigger. She's into humiliating humans. A couple of times it was so bad I couldn't…you know…keep it up…so she made me finish her another way which is no big deal cause I do it to Sonja and she says I'm great, but I couldn't seem to do it the way the bitch wanted and…"

"Josh, Josh, whoa, that's way more information than I want to hear."

"I'm just saying Sonja might do the same thing to you. She might pass you along to one of her twisted sisters so you'd better think twice about dumping her. Somehow I can't see you licking the mud off an Overseer's boots. She made me do that once. She wouldn't even let me spit it out. I had to swallow every bit of it and her boots were really dirty. Man, I almost puked."

"Holy frakking Hera. You're a big, strong guy. How could she _make_ you do something like that?"

"She told me if I didn't do it, she'd give me to a centurion and tell him to cut off what Sonja likes best about me."

"Damn, they never tried to make me lick their boots even at the prison. Did you tell Sonja what the Overseer was doing to you?"

Josh shrugged. "I figured she knew and didn't care."

"That's some damned strong weed," John finally said.

"Yeah, man, this is some righteous shit. They got the seeds for the original plants from some dude who was smuggling a crate of them on board a supply ship bound for Saggitaron. It came from Aerilon. Best stuff always came from there. Aerilon farmers knew how to grow it right. Dude said it was for medicinal purposes only. Those dumb Saggitarons won't take _real_ medicine. They're big into the herbal cures. Of course I shouldn't make fun of them. I'm big into this herb myself."

John chuckled. "Did the Cylons believe him? I mean about it being for medicinal purposes only."

Josh laughed, too. "I don't know, man, but they sure confiscated those seeds fast enough. They knew exactly what it was. Some of those Twos and Threes wanted it for their religious ceremonies. Not the mainstream bunch but a splinter group. Call themselves Monads. A Three tried to explain what it means…something about the One and she wasn't talking about Cavil, but man, the rest of it went right over my head. Like I said, they're weird. Always going on about Kobol and Earth and how there's something on this planet called the Kobol Stone where God talks to you in the language of the ancients and you can understand Him even if you don't speak ancient or whatever because once you touch the stone you're joined to the One. Only they've never been able to find it. I think they've fried their silicon brain chips smoking this stuff."

"How do you get your supply?"

"I help them plant it and cultivate it and harvest it. I roll their joints for them, too. By hand. Working with their dope is my day job. In return a Three lets me take all I want. She's a big fan of mine on account of…"

"You don't need to explain," John said. "I noticed. What'd you do in the Colonies? Make porn films?"

Josh blushed. "No, man. I was on the crew of one of the big freighters that the Cylons took. What I'm trying to tell you is the Three likes the smooth way I roll her joints. She can't get the hang of it. Hers always fall apart. If she ever figures out she can put it in a pipe or a bong and smoke it, I'm frakked."

John grinned. "She's probably already figured it out, Josh. They're not dumb. I think she just likes your company. Do you…do her, too?"

Josh shrugged. "Sometimes. She's not nearly as hot as Sonja, but…shit, it's better than flying solo if you know what I mean. You've frakked a Three and you've frakked Sonja. Whose door were you knocking on last night?"

For some reason John thought about Jade again and her desire for a handsome _young_ guy. "You ever frakked an Eight?"

"No, man. Not that I wouldn't in a Picon minute. They're way hotter than the Threes. Here in the city the Threes and Sixes hang together. The Eights mostly hang with each other. They're like younger or something. They won't poach somebody who belongs to a Three or a Six but they'll poach each other's men all day long. About a year ago I saw two Eights get in a fight right here in the square over some tall, skinny dude. I was like wanting to go up to them and say, _Whoa, ladies, don't hurt each other. I'll take the loser._ But I didn't have the guts. The Eights here in the city won't even talk to me on account of knowing about the Overseer. She's like one intimidating bitch."

"You smoke this stuff every day?"

"Most days, yeah. You know how it is…whatever gets you through the night…or the day…or both."

"How long you been smoking?"

"You mean like on this planet?"

"I've already figured out you had some prior experience with it."

"I started doing it after Sonja dumped me the first time and gave me to the Overseer. After I started smoking this shit, even if that bitch slapped me around or made me suck her toes or do some other weird shit, I could still…" he shrugged… "you know…make it worth her while."

John nodded. They sat in silence for a long time. Thoughts were swirling around inside his head, serious thoughts that he knew he needed to contemplate, something of real cosmic importance about the origin of the universe or maybe how he was going to get off this planet before he was given to some twisted Six and had to kill her or wound up in the same shape as Josh, but he couldn't seem to grasp a single thought. Between the pill Simon had given him and the weed he had just smoked, he was seriously messed up. He was also ravenously hungry.

He stood. "I'm off to search for some food. I think I missed lunch. Maybe I can talk Doolittle into making me a sandwich…or three."

"Tell Mr. Doolittle that Josh says _hello_. He's a nice dude. I worked for him for a while after Sonja dumped me, but I couldn't cut it in the kitchen. I was always burning shit. He knew about the crazy Twos and Threes looking for somebody to help them grow their dope so he talked to one of them. Best damn thing that's happened to me since the Cylons took my freighter…except for meeting Sonja. So you tell him that Josh says _hello_."

"I'll do that. Good luck with Sonja."

Josh took another joint from his shirt pocket. "You want one to take with you? I got plenty more."

He tossed the joint to John who caught it and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

"Thanks, but I'll probably never get the chance to have wild sex again in my life so I doubt I'll ever smoke it."

"Don't give me that shit, man. Next time you see Sonja you'll have wild sex and I won't hear from her again for a couple of months."

"I told you, Josh, Sonja and I are through."

Josh laughed so hard he nearly choked. He was as messed up as John was, maybe more so. "If you believe that shit, man, I've got some Cylon river-front property I'd like to sell you."

"As frakked up as I am right now," John said as he started across the square, "I'd probably buy it from you."

_…_

Lee parked his car on Hemlock Street in the first space he could find. Part of the street and sidewalk were blocked by a big utility truck with a cherry picker on it. There was a guy up in the bucket working on a line and two more guys on the ground. They were talking to each other on hand-held radios. It served only to emphasize to Lee that life went on. It was the same way he had felt on the day of his mother's funeral.

Lee locked his car and walked two blocks to the gate of Thanatos Cemetery. There he stopped and waited. He'd told Colonel Winters that he'd meet him at the gate at 15:45. He glanced at his watch. 15:40.

Lee stepped inside the gate and sat on a wrought iron bench near the sidewalk. Across from him a man and woman were carefully arranging fresh flowers in an urn attached to a stone grave marker.

He hadn't been to a funeral in this cemetery since the service for his mother two years earlier. She'd died in the spring and her funeral had been on a beautiful day just like this one, a day that was meant to celebrate life, not death, and just like Tucker, she'd died by her own hand.

Thanatos was Caprica City's main cemetery. Covering over six hundred acres, it was also the largest. Part of the cemetery was reserved for military burials. He had seen the news footage of Corporal Jamal Lester's funeral the previous week and knew that Lester now lay with other fallen servicemen and women.

This section was in an older part of the cemetery with mature trees and weathered stones. A lawn maintenance truck was parked off to one side with several men edging around the stone markers. Lee wondered if they would stop work and silence their trimmers when Tucker's service began.

A government car pulled up to the gate and Colonel Winters got out of the back.

Lee stood. Colonel Winters had worn his dress grays. Lee was in his duty blues.

They greeted each other and began walking up the sidewalk beside the narrow lane. Lee realized that Winters and his father were the same height although the colonel was slimmer. Winters didn't have nearly as much hair, either.

"Your father was kind enough to call me the day it happened," Winters said. "I'm still having a hard time believing it."

"I think all of us are, sir. I saw the picture of Tucker taken by the elevator camera…" Lee took a deep breath "… just minutes before he died. There was no doubt it was him even before the DNA confirmation."

"I'd just put through the paperwork for his promotion to captain. Congratulations, by the way, on your own promotion and on being cleared by the independent inquiry panel."

"Thank you, sir."

"Everybody in the military knew the whole thing was a crock anyway. Damn Tom Zarek. If you want my opinion a bunch of civies shouldn't have any jurisdiction over the military."

"They wouldn't have except August Bernard was a civilian who was killed in a military action."

"Have you been involved in the bombing investigation?"

"Barely."

"Two days after the incident I got a letter from Lieutenant Clellan…delivered to the Academy. In it he said that working for me had been a privilege and he hoped I'd remember that instead of anything else I might hear about him."

"Tucker was a good guy."

They came around a row of tall shrubs and saw the grave site. Shelley and her fiancé Troy Minos were already there. So were about a dozen others, most in military uniforms, but there were a few men in civilian clothes. Minos was in his dress grays. Shelley was wearing a sleeveless black dress that came to mid-calf and low-heeled black shoes. She had a black scarf covering her hair. An elderly priest stood ready to begin the service. Lee and Colonel Winters joined the small group. Lee briefly put his arm around Shelley, acknowledging their mutual grief. He shook hands with Minos. There were quiet greetings all around as several others spoke to Colonel Winters. The polished wooden casket sat on a bier over the grave. There were several sprays of flowers but no flag in evidence, nothing to indicate that Tucker had been in the service.

In the background Lee heard the whine of leaf blowers and lawn mowers cease as bells in a distant tower chimed four o'clock. The priest opened his prayer book and began reading the standard graveside service. Lee listened to words that meant nothing to him. Tucker was gone, his life snuffed out by his own hand. Kara had said that Tucker was with Nora now, but Lee didn't believe in an afterlife. He believed that whatever had made up the essence of Tucker Clellan, his mind, his talent, his smile, his memories had simply ceased to exist when Tucker had detonated his bomb.

The priest finished the brief service and closed his book. He didn't invite anyone to eulogize Tucker. He seemed nervous and anxious to leave as he spoke quietly to Shelley. Minos handed him a small envelope and he quickly walked away. Lee wondered if the only way they could get a priest to perform the service was to pay him.

Shelley was crying openly now, her shoulders shaking as Troy kept his arm around her. Lee knew she loved Tucker, not in a romantic way, but the way Kara loved Karl, a friendship born in childhood that had endured and now that bond was broken forever as it was for all of them. Lee felt tears come to his own eyes as he remembered the year he and Tucker had spent at the Academy, Tucker's ready smile, and his love for Nora. He remembered late nights studying together and the impromptu pyramid games in the gym and walking across campus to the Math and Sciences building for winter classes, their breath vaporizing in the cold winter air.

Shelley walked over and laid a single white rose on top of the casket. Even after the others had begun to drift away, she didn't to want to leave.

Colonel Winters stopped to talk to Minos. Lee walked over to the casket and took her hand. "I'm really sorry, Shelley."

She turned, and as he looked at her grief-stricken face, Lee realized that he was looking at more than grief. He was looking at guilt as well.

He spoke barely above a whisper. "It was you, wasn't it, in that bar on Medea Street?"

She didn't answer him, but she squeezed his hand. Fresh tears coursed down her cheeks and he knew then without a doubt. Tucker had asked his oldest and closest friend and she had helped him with his plan.

"Your secret is safe with me."

Colonel Winters walked over and patted Shelley's hand. She dropped her eyes and nodded slightly. As Lee and the colonel walked back toward Hemlock Street, Lee knew that nothing anyone could do to Shelley Sydell would ever come close to the pain she would live with for the rest of her life. Maybe he was right in keeping her secret and maybe he was wrong. That would be his burden to bear, but it wouldn't be nearly as heavy as hers.

TBC…


	38. Kangaroo Love

Chapter 38

Kangaroo Love

_12. The rich merchant who was named Nimrod, bargained with Simon and Sharon for the stone._

_13. My father paid a great price to bring this stone from our homeworld of Kobol._

_14. He deserves something for his trouble, jewels or gold._

_15. We have nothing to offer, Sharon said. The stone is commanded by God._

_16. Then Nimrod said to Sharon, In return for the stone, you must remain and become my third wife_

_17. For he was smitten with lust for the young and beautiful virgin._

_18. Simon argued. My sister is not to be bargained for like a sack of gold or a handful of jewels._

_19. But Sharon calmed his anger and said, Have faith my brother. It is the will of God._

_20. For He will guide the footsteps of His obedient servant and His prophet._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Xander, _Chapter 9:12-20

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Kara sat in the classroom absently looking over the test on the Mark VII Viper that she had just completed. She was fairly certain she had gotten all the answers correct, and Major Valinski had told everyone that they could leave when they finished. The problem was that it was only 14:00 and Kara couldn't decide how she wanted to spend the afternoon.

The idea of going back to Marble House and taking a nap appealed to her. She and Maya had sat up talking very late the previous night, but she knew that if Braedon saw her, he'd want her to spend the time with him. Much to Maya's chagrin, he had given up his afternoon nap. She smiled when she thought of how he'd reverse that when he reached his teens.

Then she thought of Karl and Sharon. Their days and nights would offer limited opportunity for sleep during the next few months. Kara remembered how sleep deprived both her father and Laura had been in the months after Braedon's birth. She'd been at the Academy for much of that time, but when she was home, she saw it. She remembered one time in particular when her father had almost gone to sleep while she was in the simulator. She'd jokingly called to him. _Hey, wake up, zombie, you just let me crash and burn_. He'd told her Brae was teething and had been fretful the night before. Then he'd grinned and told her that her turn would come…someday in the _distant_ future. She tried to imagine holding her own child, hers and Lee's. For a few moments she imagined a flaxen-haired little girl with Lee's blue eyes reaching up for him the way Brae always reached up for her father. If that didn't melt Lee Adama's heart, nothing would.

"Problems, Lieutenant Thrace?" Valinski asked.

Kara roused from her reverie and realized that the room was empty.

"No, sir. I finished the test. I'm sitting here trying to decide how to spend the rest of the afternoon."

Valinski appeared amused. "I would have thought your choices would be almost infinite on a beautiful Friday afternoon. The rest of my students left vapor trails they got out of here so fast."

She grinned. "I think that's the problem. Too many choices."

"Would you like to ride out to hangar Bravo-9 with me? We've got a Mark VII out there. Delivered yesterday. Major Jessups is taking it up this afternoon. I believe you know him."

"Yes, sir. That would be great. Is he going to be one of the flight instructors?"

Valinski nodded. Kara walked to his desk at the front of the room and added her test to the top of the stack.

"Did you get all the answers correct?" He asked.

"I think so. You and Colonel Burgher are two of the best teachers I've ever had…along with my dad."

"I appreciate the compliment, Lieutenant. That's something a teacher always wants to hear."

Valinski put the stack of tests in his briefcase and they left the classroom. Bravo-9 was the most remote hangar on the airbase and was several miles from the main complex of buildings so Valinski drove, promising to return her to the parking lot when they were through.

"When did Jessups get his promotion?"

"About a month ago."

"He was a captain the last time I saw him. That was at my…at my father's memorial service. I still get choked up thinking about his eulogy."

Even as she said the words, she wondered what Jessups and Valinski and all the other officers were going to think when they brought her father back to Caprica.

"I was at your father's service, Lieutenant Thrace. I heard the eulogy. I'd always thought of Jessups as a man of few words. I didn't know he could string that many together in such an eloquent fashion until he stood in front of that temple and talked about your dad."

"He and my dad flew together off the _Solaria _during the First War."

"So I heard. Buzz and I have shared a few beers lately while we've talked about the new ships. His oldest daughter is at the Academy right now. She wants to be a pilot like her dad."

Kara smiled. "I know the feeling."

Valinski pulled his car into a space beside the hangar. They got out and walked around to the front. The big doors were standing open. The Mark VII was sitting on the tarmac just outside. Jessups was standing beside the ladder wearing his flight suit. He was talking to a technician who snapped to attention as they approached.

"Hello, sir," Kara said. "It's been a long time."

"Lieutenant Thrace." He nodded at Valinski. "Dizzy."

"Buzz," Valinski said, returning the greeting. "Getting ready to take her up?"

"Yep." He looked at Kara. "What do you think?"

Kara looked at the pristine new ship, a silvery gray with no red markings like her old Mark II. While retaining the same basic Viper shape, it was bigger and sleeker. It also didn't have hundreds of dents and dings like her old ship. She bet the seat hadn't been patched either.

"I'm impressed with its looks. I'll reserve my final judgment until _I've _taken one up."

"Climb up and take a look inside."

Kara climbed the ladder. The cockpit of the Mark VII was slightly larger than the Mark II, but then it was a bigger ship all the way around, heavier, longer, taller and with a slightly wider wingspan. It had more weaponry…three kinetic energy weapons with more firepower as opposed to just two. _Bigger guns_ as some of her fellow pilots liked to say. The instrumentation was different as well and there was more of it. She sniffed and then smiled. It still had the _new ship_ smell. That would be a novelty. She didn't even want to think about what most Mark II cockpits smelled like. Thank the gods she was never in one of those for long without her helmet. She descended the ladder and addressed Jessups.

"Major Valinski has already pointed out to us that it's a lot more computerized. Now I see why."

"It's a sweet ride," Jessups said. "It does some of the basics for you so you can concentrate on your mission."

"Bells and whistles don't necessarily make a better ship."

"You're like your father. He was the best seat-of-the-pants aviator I ever knew. Up on the _Solaria_, he'd get in his Mark II and I swear he did some kind of meld with the ship. He was always a second or two ahead of the rest of us. He developed a really uncanny knack for knowing what those old Raiders were going to do in combat. He said he'd just memorized their programmed moves, but we still gave him a ton of grief."

Valinski said, "Admit it, Buzz. You and the others just couldn't handle a nugget taking out more Raiders than you did."

Buzz Jessups laughed. "That's not the only thing some of us couldn't handle."

"We don't want to hold you up," Valinski said to Jessups. "I know you've got another test flight. Where are you taking it?"

"Out to Atlas Island to the gunnery range. Testing the KEWs one last time. If they check out then I think we can turn a few of these ships over to our best pilots. Is Lieutenant Thrace still at the top of the class?"

Valinski gave them one of his rare smiles. "She is. I thought she'd like a sneak preview of what she'll be flying week after next."

Suddenly Kara realized why all the senior officers were being so nice to her…Colonel Spencer and Valinski and Jessups. It had as much to do with her father as with her. Once again she wondered how these men would react when he came home. Would they view him as a prisoner of war or as a collaborator?

Kara looked at Jessups. "I never did get a chance to thank you for the things you said about Dad at his memorial service. I just want you to know how much it meant to me. It helped me…a lot."

Jessups nodded and Kara hoped she hadn't embarrassed him.

As Valinski drove her back to the main building, he said, "I sense some reluctance on your part about the Mark VII."

"I'm sure I'll get over it. Lee says the Mark II is my security blanket, my comfort zone, whatever. He's probably right. You can drop me near the locker rooms. I need to go in and get my motorcycle helmet. And thank you, sir, for taking me to see the ship."

"It was my pleasure, Lieutenant."

Once inside Kara sat down on the bench and called Karl's mobile number. He finally answered on the fifth ring. He sounded out of breath.

"I caught you at a bad time," Kara said.

"Just trying to answer the phone, open the door and get four bags of groceries inside without dropping anything."

"Call me back when you get your groceries put up. I'd like to drop by if Sharon is up to it."

"Give me a minute. I'll call you right back."

_Right back_ turned out to be almost fifteen minutes. Kara stretched out on the narrow bench. It wouldn't be the first time a pilot had caught a cat nap in the locker room. She had just dozed off when her phone buzzed.

"Hey," Karl said. "Sorry it took so long. I had to put the groceries up and pick up some stuff."

"How's Sharon?"

"She's sore from the incision and she still can't do much. Dr. Delos said no lifting until it heals."

"How's Hera?"

"We spent most of the morning at the hospital. She's doing okay. Dr. Junius and his team wanted to do some tests this afternoon so we took a break. Sharon's resting. I went to the grocery store."

"So can I come over?"

"Sure."

Twenty-five minutes later she had parked the motorcycle in Lee's parking space and ridden the elevator up to his apartment. When Karl opened the door, her first thought was that he looked tired or older or maybe both. They hugged. She missed him, this man she'd thought of as a brother since they were children.

"Can I get you something to drink?"

"What you got?"

"Soft drinks, water. I think Lee's got some beer in the fridge."

"A soft drink. It doesn't matter what kind." They walked into the kitchen and Karl got two drinks from the refrigerator.

"Where's Sharon?" Kara asked after she had taken a long swallow.

"Lying down. I'll go tell her you're here."

"No, let her rest while she can. I guess you've been spending a lot of time at the hospital with Hera."

Karl nodded. "As much time as they'll let us. I think Sharon would stay all night, every night, but Dr. Delos has ordered her to rest. Sharon can't get comfortable. She's still not sleeping good because of the incision. She's pumping her breast milk so they can use it to feed Hera so she won't take anything to help her sleep or for the pain even though Dr. Delos gave her something."

"You mean they're not letting her nurse Hera?" Kara asked in surprise.

"Not yet. Hera still has the feeding tube. I asked Dr. Junius when they were going see if she could nurse. He said they were evaluating her every day. He told us that most babies born before about thirty-four weeks can't suck hard enough to get any milk. He called it _too immature to feed_, but that's what he meant. Hera was thirty-two weeks so maybe in another week. We're just taking it one day at a time."

"So basically he can't tell you much of anything."

"No. Dr. Junius says she's doing about like any baby born six weeks early. He told us we're damned lucky she's breathing on her own as well as she is."

"I guess he knows she's half Cylon."

"I sometimes wonder if that's what some of the tests they're doing are all about. Sharon lost it last night on the way home. I'm surprised she's held up as good as she has…with everything she's been through."

Kara searched his eyes, looking for any indication that he wasn't telling her something. Karl dropped his eyes and Kara wondered if he was thinking about what had happened to the Cylons in the bunker.

"You're worried about her, too, aren't you?"

He nodded again. "Sharon will be okay. She's tough. I'm more worried about Hera. Dr. Junius won't say anything negative, but Hera's weight is down to just over four pounds, but he says it's normal for a newborn to lose a little weight at first. I asked him if maybe Sharon's milk isn't…I don't know…rich enough. He said they'd already started supplementing it with calcium or something which is routine. He told us this morning that Hera's gained back a couple of ounces so I guess…all we can do is pray."

Kara put her hand on Karl's arm. "She's going to be okay."

"I keep remembering what you said about all the preemies in the refugee camp dying."

"I should never have said that. Karl, the camp did not have a fully-equipped NICU like Kings Bay Medical Center. The camp didn't have a NICU at all. It didn't have anything so it's no wonder those babies died. The Cylons approved the bare minimum of medical care in the camps. You know how it was. The doctors and nurses taking care of Hera are the best on the planet. They know what they're doing."

"She's so tiny. I could almost hold her in one hand."

"Have you gotten to hold her yet?" Kara asked gently.

"Not yet. If she gains a few more ounces, they're going to let us hold her outside the incubator. One of the nurses on Dr. Junius' team said we'd do something they call kangaroo love. We'll hold her against our bare skin sort of like a kangaroo keeps its baby in a pouch. She'll feel our hearts beat. It's supposed to help the parent-child bonding process."

"Kangaroo love," Kara mused. "I like it."

"Hera already recognizes Sharon's voice. Sharon coos to her and Hera turns toward her."

From the doorway of the kitchen Sharon said. "All babies know their mother's voice."

Kara turned. Sharon was wearing an oversized t-shirt that came to mid-thigh…and nothing else. She looked as tired as Karl.

"Hi," Kara said because she couldn't think of anything else to say at the moment.

Karl pulled out a chair from the kitchen table. "Sit. You were on your feet most of the morning."

Sharon managed a smile that looked more like a grimace as she put her hands on the table for support and lowered herself into the chair. "Do you have any idea how many times a day you use the muscles of your abdomen?"

"No."

"If you ever have a c-section, you'll find out."

Karl said, "Her incision is longer than normal because of…the problems."

"Dr. Delos saved my life but I won't look so hot in a bikini anymore."

"Hey, I've seen some smoking one-piece suits," Kara said. "We'll go shopping for one in a couple of months."

"Did Karl show you the pictures of Hera?" Sharon asked.

"No. I just got here."

"We're not supposed have our mobile phones on in the NICU because of all the equipment that uses telemetry," Karl said. "But there's a really sweet nurse there who looked the other way while I got a couple of quick pictures. I guess our next purchase will have to be a camera. I still have a few bucks available on the credit card. Most of it went toward a few pieces of furniture."

He took out his mobile phone, found the first picture and handed the phone to Kara.

She saw something that looked like a clear plastic box with a tiny baby wearing only a diaper inside. There was a small white tube going in her mouth that was taped to her chin. The next picture was closer up. Kara could clearly see the dark fuzz on Hera's head. Her eyes were closed but her mouth was open. The last photo was of Sharon's hands inside the box cupping her daughter's head and feet. Even Sharon's small hands looked large beside the tiny baby.

Kara handed the phone back to Karl. Finally she said, "I guess she's warm even with nothing on but a diaper."

"They've got her under special lights to keep her warm and help her liver function," Karl said. "Dr. Junius has been really good about explaining everything they're doing for her."

Sharon added, "Hera isn't even the smallest baby in the NICU. The nurse told us they have another one who weighed just 2 pounds when she was born. She's not doing so good."

Karl put his hands on Sharon's shoulders. "Our little girl is going to be fine."

Sharon put her hand over his.

Karl said, "You can tell Lee that we'll be moving into an apartment on the second floor of this building next week. He'll get his apartment back."

"He's not in a hurry. He likes staying at Laura's apartment with Hunter. They look at a lot of late night movies. I think Lee enjoys talking about them with him."

"So they're getting along okay?" Sharon asked.

"You know how hard it is for Lee to make new friends. It took a while, but I think he's beginning to warm up to Hunter."

Sharon said, "Hunter is hot. Wasn't Lee even a little jealous?"

Kara shrugged. "Maybe…at first. Hunter and Maya are an item now."

She could hear the surprise in Karl's voice. "Hunter's got a thing going on with Braedon's nanny? That was quick."

"It's not serious…yet. One night earlier this week he and Lee hung around for a while after dinner. When Lee went to Maya's sitting room to get him, Maya and Hunter were making out on the couch but there were no clothes on the floor."

"What happened to her and Sam Anders? Last I heard he was ready to pop the question."

"Maya didn't want to be married to such a high profile guy. There was also the little problem of Sam's wandering eye. Maya found out that he's still seeing Tory Foster. They've been hooking up for a couple of years. He can't seem to give her up."

Sharon glanced up at Karl. "Thank God I don't have to worry about anything like that."

Karl was still standing behind her. He leaned over and kissed the top of her head.

"Not in a million years, babe."

"Where's Lee this afternoon?"

Kara took a deep breath. "He went to Tucker's funeral." Neither Karl nor Sharon said anything so she continued. "Lee and Tucker were good friends at the Academy. Shelley called him Monday night. She made all the arrangements…her and Troy Minos. They're engaged now. Troy and Tucker were roommates at the Academy."

Neither Karl nor Sharon said anything.

"I guess the big silence means you don't approve," Kara said.

"It's not that," Karl finally said.

"Then what is it?"

"It makes it look like Lee agrees with what Tucker did."

"No!" Kara said stubbornly. "It means Lee was Tucker's friend. That's _all_ it means."

"Why aren't you there?" Sharon asked.

"Well for starters Tucker wasn't a close friend of mine. And I wasn't invited. Can you see Shelley Sydell inviting _me_ to anything? You know how she felt about me at the Academy. Nothing's changed."

"Since when do you have to have an _invitation_ to go to a funeral?"

Kara said, "Those Cylons should have been put on trial and _then_ executed. I know I'm talking about your people, Sharon, but we were always honest with each other at the Academy. They killed billions of innocent humans. Cavil and the rest deserved to die and that's the way I feel."

"I understand," she said softly.

Kara stood. "You need to rest…and I'm wearing out my welcome."

Karl walked with her to the door and stepped into the hall. "Sharon's okay with what happened. She hasn't considered herself a Cylon like the rest of them in a long time."

"You don't need to try to explain, Karl. I'm sorry I upset her. I did volunteer to take your place on the burial detail going to Gemenon, but Laura and Admiral Adama both thought it would have reflected badly on Laura. Sometimes I feel like I can't frakking sneeze without somebody looking at how it reflects on my stepmother."

"Sharon's just worried about Hera. We both are."

Kara's voice softened. "Call me and let me know how she's doing…or I'll call you."

He nodded and she hugged him again. The held each other for a long time. Down in the parking garage, she sat on the motorcycle trying to decide where to go next. It was a few minutes after four. She had gone by to visit Dreilide the day before. The next weekend he was moving to an apartment on the first floor of his building and she was going to help him. Lee and Hunter had both said they'd help, too.

Suddenly she knew where she wanted to go. She exited the garage and turned right. Afternoon traffic was already getting heavy and it took her nearly fifteen minutes to get to the University area. She was in luck, though, since a car was pulling out of a space three doors down from Leoben's bookstore. Kara got off the bike, took off her helmet, shook out her hair and redid her ponytail. She'd gotten Sharon's reaction to the fate of the imprisoned Cylons. Sharon might not consider herself one of them, but their deaths had still upset her. Now Kara would get the opinion of the other remaining Cylon who was free on Caprica.

She glanced at the sign over the door as she went in and wondered if she should tell this gentle bookseller about the brutal copy of him she had met on Nereid.

_…_

John knew the minute he walked into the kitchen that Doolittle was too busy to make him a sandwich. The entire staff was busy preparing dinner. Several centurions stood around observing everything, ready to return a kitchen knife to the knife block if someone put it down.

"What can I do for you, sir?" Doolittle asked.

"Nothing. I'm hungry and thought I might talk you into making me a sandwich, but you're busy. I'll wait for dinner."

"I put your lunch in the refrigerator up in your apartment."

"Thanks. Before I forget, Josh said to tell you _hello_."

Understanding passed over Doolittle's face. "How is he?"

"He's been through a lot for a kid. We sat in the square and talked for a while. I know you're busy. I'll talk to you later."

John went up to his apartment, took his lunch from the refrigerator and ate it cold. The craving for warm chocolate chip cookies subsided slightly.

He was sitting at the table still feeling mildly stoned when Doolittle brought his dinner.

"Would you like this now, sir, or should I wrap it up for later?"

"Now is good. I don't guess it includes any chocolate chip cookies, does it?"

Doolittle smiled. "No, sir. That's about the only thing Josh could make from start to finish and not burn."

John could tell that Doolittle wanted to ask him some questions, but he was also on a much tighter schedule now.

"Josh is okay," John said in an attempt to reassure Doolittle. "Indulging in his second-favorite pastime too much, but given his circumstances, what the hell could be expected of a kid who was brought here and made a slave when he was nineteen?"

"Tell him I'm glad to hear he's doing all right. I wanted to keep him on my kitchen staff but I was getting too many complaints. He was scared to death Sonja was going to send him back to the Delta Settlement. I had to do something."

John smiled. "I think he's doing much better as a farmer."

Doolittle took the tray of empty lunch dishes and left. John ate part of the dinner and wrapped the rest for later. He cleaned up and began to pace the apartment. They hadn't reached the summer solstice yet on Nereid. Several months earlier when he had been brought to the city, twilight would have fallen by now. Instead the sun was still above the horizon. He left the apartment and walked to the park, stopping at the entrance.

The centurion with the bullet scar was on duty this evening as it was all the time. The red eye scanned him.

"So how was your day?" John asked. "Anything exciting happen? The squirrels have a major acorn fight or anything else to break the monotony of standing here twenty-four seven?"

Again he got the slight head-tilt from the robot, the tilt that reminded him of a dog.

"I'm stoned. I was smoking some of your ceremonial weed from the field near the old temple. A young guy helps a couple of Twos and Threes grow it." John chuckled to himself. "You don't have any idea what the hell I'm talking about, do you? Well, that's okay. I'm just rambling. You're lucky in a way. No vices. No temptations. You've never looked at a woman you didn't love and wanted to frak her anyway, have you? You've never felt like a real bastard for feeling that way, either. I'm sure you've never imagined what it'd be like to stand in front of your wife and admit it. Laura is such a good person. She deserves a whole hell of a lot better man than me. She deserves a man like she was in love with years ago, a man who would have died before he'd done the things I've done on this planet. The only problem is that I don't want him raising my son since he was such a lousy father to his own boys. Well, that's not the _only_ problem, but it's a big one…and it's not your problem. It's mine so feel free to continue ignoring me. Like I said, I'm under the influence and rambling. I just couldn't stay in the apartment. The walls were closing in on me."

John sat down on the curb and listened to the birds for a long time. The thought of Bill Adama making love to Laura was like a dagger in his heart. The thought of him raising Brae was another. The centurion was still looking at him with its head cocked to one side.

Finally John pointed to his chest and said, "I told you how I got my bullet scar. How'd you get yours?"

He hadn't expected anything to happen. He was just trying to get his mind off Bill and Laura, but much to his surprise, the centurion walked several paces into the park, knelt, and after unfurling one of its long steel talons, scratched something into the dirt beside the brick path. He finally realized that the centurion seemed to be waiting on him. He stood and walked over to it. There in the dirt one word was written with clear precision.

_War_

John was so stunned that he stood for a moment wondering if he was having some kind of weed-induced hallucination. He walked up the path for a few minutes and then turned back. The word was still there and the centurion was still kneeling beside it.

"Which war?" He finally asked.

The centurion extended the talon straight up.

"The _First_ War? No way. You guys didn't even exist until _after_ the First War which was fought by 0005s and U-87s." He chuckled. "Either somebody has seriously frakked with your programming or you're acquainted with that ceremonial weed."

The centurion bent over and scratched in the dirt again.

_Me U-87_

"You're really mixed up, pal. I've had a chance to study a few U-87s close up in the square. You're _not_ a U-87. You're clearly a new centurion."

The centurion added several more words. The inscription in the dirt now read,

_Me have U-87 programming & parts_

"They used U-87 parts on you? That's how you got the scarred chest plate?"

It nodded in a barely perceptible motion, erased the words and wrote again.

_Avatar_

"You got U-87 parts _and_ an avatar. What does that mean?"

_Lucy_

John was sure now that he was hallucinating. He asked in amazement, "Lucy Cain?"

Another nod and more writing.

_Copy for safekeeping_

"Okay. So Lucy Cain put a U-87's brain inside a new centurion's body and loaded a copy of her avatar inside for safekeeping. Is that what you're telling me?"

He got another barely perceptible nod.

"Why?"

Again the centurion erased the words and scratched new ones.

_Didn't trust Number One._

"So Lucy had enough sense to want to protect herself against him. Smart girl. How old is the copy of her avatar?"

_Nine_

"She created the avatar when she was nine years old?"

A small side to side movement of the centurion's head.

"What then? I don't understand what you're trying to tell me."

_Me & avatar-nine_

"You were created nine years ago? Lucy Cain built you?"

_Lucy & Zoe modified new centurion_

John was stunned. Lucy had died between six and seven years ago. That meant her avatar was created about two years before her death which was after she had helped create the Sevens. This machine knew about Daniel.

"You know what Cavil did at the lab?"

A nod and another few words scratched into the dirt.

_Lucy told me afterward. Cavil killed creators. All Sevens but one._

"You weren't there when it happened but Lucy told you."

A nod.

"Where were you?"

_Sent to city for safekeeping. Blend in. Scar on chest to identify._

"So Lucy sent you to the city to get you away from the Cavil at the lab. Another smart move. She put the scarred chest plate on you so she could identify you because you would be one among many in the city. Are you the only one?"

_Sent six of us. Me only one with avatar._

"Do you know what happened to Lucy?"

_Lucy and five brothers escaped through tunnel into mountains with only copy of Seven. _

"I hate to tell you this, big guy, but they didn't make it. So that brings me to the question of how you escaped."

_Lucy said to stay behind in city and wait. Protect avatar._

"Okay. Who am I talking to…Lucy or the U-87?"

_Lucy avatar in stasis to avoid detection._

John stood and debated whether or not to tell the centurion with Lucy's avatar in it that the copy of Daniel had survived and was now in the valley. He decided that now was not the right time.

"Do any of the other U-87s know what happened at the lab?"

_No. Waiting to tell them._

"Waiting for what?"

_Wait for leader with plan_

"You're waiting for a leader who has a plan before you tell them. Then what?"

_Freedom _

John nodded. Freedom. The dream of every slave. "Who knows about you?"

The centurion unfurled its thumb talon and using it and the index talon formed what looked like a circle. Then he realized that it was the number zero. No one knew. Not Cavil or Sonja or D'Anna. Not the council or anyone else in Cylon City. No one. Not even its U-87 brothers. Except maybe the Daniel in the valley. Did Lucy confide in him about hiding her avatar in a new centurion's body?

Suddenly John's suspicion got the better of him. "Why did you just tell me all of this? Is it some kind of trap?"

The thumb talon was retracted and it wrote in the dirt.

_Father of peacemaker. Help you._

Natalie and Sonja had both told him that the old U-87s were deeply religious. They knew and believed the scriptures. They were also sentient to some degree. He didn't have a clue how Lucy's avatar and the U-87's programming existed along with new centurion programming inside this robot's body. Yet it obviously functioned well enough that the other new centurions and the skinjobs couldn't tell the difference.

The centurion stood and John took his foot and carefully wiped out the words in the dirt before he looked up at the big robot that towered above him.

"I'll be back tomorrow and we'll talk some more. I've got a lot of thinking to do. Some praying, too. I've got some decisions to make."

The centurion gave him the slight nod, went back to the park entrance and resumed its lonely duty as a sentinel. John tried to imagine the mind-numbing boredom for the sentient U-87 as it stood there day and night for the last who knows how many years. At least Lucy's avatar was in stasis. He couldn't imagine a mind as brilliant and agile as Lucy's being relegated to standing guard at the entrance to a park for that long. If she weren't in stasis, she would probably have been stark raving mad by now.

As he walked back to his apartment, his path became clearer to him. Whether he would have seen it if he hadn't gotten stoned that afternoon on some strong weed and come out here and had the weird conversation with the centurion, he would never know, but as John walked through the twilight back to his apartment, he knew what he had to do. He had to get this centurion to Natalie. She was the leader it was waiting for. It was the U-87 she needed to take to the valley with her. This one was a wolf in sheep's clothing. Or rather it was a sheep in wolf's clothing. The others would think she was taking a new centurion. It was perfect.

He would figure out a way to take this centurion to Natalie and let her decide what to do with it. In addition he needed to make a permanent move to the settlement and ask Natalie for her protection. She outranked Sonja in the Cylon hierarchy plus he'd be ready immediately when Natalie found a way to get them to the valley. He'd also get to spend time with D'Anna and with the doctors and with his new acquaintance Yoshimo and maybe even Jade. He thought about the pain of leaving Petra and Rachel and Cassie, but in order to gain a better future for them, he had to go. And he would leave the temptation of Sonja behind. Maybe that was taking the coward's way out, but he'd compromised so much of himself in the last months that he no longer cared. What was going to happen on Nereid was far bigger than his opinion of himself. He didn't have a plan yet, but he knew now without a doubt that his future on this planet did not lie here in the city.

_…_

The bell above the door of the bookshop tinkled as Kara entered. She was glad some things never changed. It sounded exactly like it had the first day she had come here, several days after she'd been wounded escaping the Cylon lab.

When she'd first walked through the door that day and had seen the man inside, a man she'd shot and killed four nights earlier, she'd known without a doubt that Leoben was a Cylon.

The store was empty of customers. Leoben sat at the tall counter halfway back. He glanced up at the sound of the bell. Kara walked over to the counter.

"How's business?" She asked.

"Slow. I haven't seen you in a while."

"I haven't been in Caprica City."

"I figured as much. You look good. Better than the last time I saw you."

"I was torn up about my dad then. You got any Rick Spade books published in the last sixty-five years?"

Leoben tapped some keys on his old computer.

"I've only got one that fits the bill. The author died sixty years ago."

"I'll take it."

Leoben went to the shelf, got the book and rang it up. Kara paid him.

He said, "I didn't take you for a Rick Spade fan."

"It's not for me. It's for a friend."

"Lee?"

"No." She grinned. "Lee's not my only friend. You remember what you told me about how copies of the same Cylon model can be really different?"

"I remember."

"I believe you now."

Leoben gave her a wry smile. "You didn't believe me before?"

She shrugged. "Let's just say I didn't realize _how different_."

"I'd ask you what that means but I have a feeling you can't tell me."

"No."

"How does your stepmother really feel about what happened to the…others? I saw her news conference about sending their ashes to Gemenon. She said all the politically correct stuff, but I know why she did it. She wanted to get them off Caprica so she wouldn't have to worry about people desecrating their graves or the monotheist radicals using them as a rallying point."

"She didn't want them killed like some people are saying on the internet. She wanted to put them on trial."

"And _then_ executed."

Kara looked him in the eyes. "Don't you want to ask me how I feel about it?"

"You're not wearing black so I don't think you're mourning."

"No."

"Neither am I."

Kara took a deep breath. "It doesn't bother you that they died with no chance of downloading?"

"They followed Cavil. That copy was as bad as they come. What happened to him and the rest was justice. He convinced thousands of us to follow him to the Colonies to destroy humanity. And yes, I was one of those at first, but I came to believe he was wrong. He perverted our scriptures. You know how that ended."

"You remember your homeworld, don't you?"

"No, I don't. I swear to you Kara. I don't. Just those few odd memories I told you about. The white room. People in white lab coats. The windows and trees. Natasi remembers, but I don't. When Cavil killed me on that basestar, he wiped out my memories and replaced them with the ones about growing up on Caprica and running this bookstore. I've tried to remember. I even took chamalla and all I had were crazy nightmare visions of people in white robes and a child, a boy, I think. None of it meant anything to me. It's no good. Any memories I had of the homeworld are gone."

"Would you ever want to go back there one day?"

A faraway look came into his eyes for a few moments. Then he said, "This is my home now. Why do you ask?"

"No reason. Just curious. I'd better go. I've got another stop to make. I need to buy a camera. Sharon had her baby, a little girl. It was six weeks early so she's still at the hospital. They need a good camera to get some pictures. If Karl won't accept it as a gift, I'll tell him it's a loaner until he can afford one."

"You mean a sister has actually had a child that lived?"

"They named her Hera."

Leoben smiled. "A sign from God."

"How about a testament to how good neonatal care is here on Caprica?"

"Do the doctors know the baby is half-Cylon?"

"Of course."

"Maybe that's the greater miracle. That they'd treat her like they would a human child."

"They're doctors. Doctors don't pick and choose who to treat. They take an oath. All life is sacred to them. Your Simon should have taken a lesson."

"I'm not arguing with you."

"I got to go. It's going to be a bitch getting through all the traffic, buy a camera, take it to Karl and still make it home in time for dinner. I'm glad you had the book."

"Don't be such a stranger."

"I'll be back and maybe bring my friend. He came from the country. He loves to read but he's never been in a bookstore."

"Is he the Rick Spade fan?"

"Yeah."

"Then bring him. I'd like to meet him. He might become another customer. I need as many as I can get. Seems like everybody is going to electronic books now."

_…_

Lee unlocked the door to Laura and John's apartment and turned off the alarm. Hunter followed him inside.

"You set a speed record for getting away from Marble House tonight. Is anything wrong?"

Lee went straight to the liquor cabinet and poured a large glass of ambrosia.

"No. Nothing's wrong. I just wasn't up to socializing after going to Tucker's funeral this afternoon. I'm sorry to tear you away from Maya."

Hunter shrugged. "I'll live."

The truth was that Lee knew if he had stayed and he and Kara had gone to her bedroom, she would have either guessed what was wrong with him or he would have wound up telling her. She already thought Shelley was involved in what Tucker had done. He needed tonight to get himself together.

Hunter went to the refrigerator in the kitchen and got a beer. When he came back Lee had kicked off his shoes and put his feet on the coffee table.

"I hope my feet don't smell too bad," he said.

Hunter laughed. "I need to introduce you to my uncles. They can produce smells that will make you shed tears. You should be stuck inside with them during the dead of winter when they start trying to outdo each other. They're worse than kids."

Lee found the remote control and turned on the television, going to the guide channel and scrolling through the night's choices.

"Slim pickings tonight for movies," he finally said.

"We don't have to look at a movie every night," Hunter said. "I've got a new Rick Spade book thanks to Kara."

"I heard her tell you she'd gone to see the Leoben who runs the book store."

Hunter snorted. "She told me Leoben wants to meet me. I've already met a couple dozen of him on Nereid and killed them all. Meeting a wimpy Two would be a treat."

"He's not _that_ wimpy," Lee said. "The reason he's still free is because he helped us even knowing he might go to prison."

Hunter took a drink of his beer and finally said, "The only thing the Twos on Nereid will help you with is your funeral."

Lee turned off the television and took a big sip of the ambrosia. For the hundredth time since that afternoon he saw Shelley's grief-stricken face and Tucker's casket with the single white rose on top.

Hunter opened the book and then closed it.

"It's tough losing a friend," he said. "I know. I've lost a lot of friends…and family. It's tough standing at a grave and saying goodbye."

"It's more than that," Lee said suddenly. The silence stretched. Finally he asked, "Did Kara ever tell you how we met?"

"Yes."

"After the resistance destroyed that Cylon lab, she and everybody who rode a certain type motorcycle in the city were notified to come in so we could question them. We had a witness who said one of them got away was on that make of motorcycle. We just naturally assumed it was a guy."

"I'd have thought the same thing."

"I met her and I was just blown away by…by everything about her starting with how she looked sitting on the motorcycle, so I asked her out even though she was part of an investigation and I should have stayed a hundred miles away from her. On our first date I made a fool of myself telling her I wanted her to meet my parents. She had enough sense to know that would never work. She confessed everything about her part in the resistance and what she'd done at that lab. Then she told me we couldn't see each other again because of being on opposite sides. I should have turned her in. I didn't."

"Maybe because underneath it all, you agreed with what she did."

"Then a couple of weeks after that I got sent to Sovana to help question some guys who'd killed a government official's wife and child with a car bomb meant for the official. One of those caught was a kid. I got his real name from him and I finally broke him…and it made me sick. He'd started selling himself in one of the refugee camps when he was twelve years old in order to survive. He was fifteen years old when he was arrested."

"Life's a bitch during war. I was fighting the Cylons in the forest when I was fourteen. If I'd been caught…forget it. No point in getting into that. Go on with your story."

"Later that night I got…intel that a group of resistance fighters was going to break into the prison and free the five guys who'd been caught before they could be taken to Caprica City and turned over to the Cylons. I knew the only thing that was waiting for all of them was torture and then execution by a centurion firing squad. The kid was at the bottom of the hierarchy when it came to information. He didn't know much of anything but he'd have been tortured and killed just the same. In fact the Cylons would probably have been rougher with him because he didn't have anything to tell them."

Lee took another drink of the ambrosia.

"So you kept quiet. Did they get out?"

"A couple of them did. All of them except the kid were later hunted down and killed. He just vanished. Early last fall he turned up here in the city. He found me because he had some information for me about how some terrorists were going to blow up voting places. He'd been living on the street. He was a mess. I took him to my apartment, let him take a hot shower, gave him some clean clothes, fed him. I wrote down all the information he had. I could have called Agent Darren while he was in the shower. I didn't."

"Something happened at that funeral that churned all this up. Right?" Hunter asked.

Lee took a sip of the drink and leaned his head back against the cushions of the couch.

"Yeah."

"I guess you're now in possession of some information that you've decided to keep to yourself."

"Yeah."

"And you're wondering if you're doing the right thing?"

"You're a mind-reader, Hunter."

"Is anybody going to be hurt by you keeping quiet?"

"The only ones who could have been hurt by it are already dead."

"Then my advice since you seem to be asking for it is to let it go. Keep your knowledge to yourself."

"Is that what you'd do?"

"If we were on Nereid, that guy Tucker…he'd have been given a hero's funeral. In my opinion that's what he deserved. He killed _Cylons_ for the gods sakes. He killed the murderers of most of humanity. He killed the same kind who have enslaved the humans on Neried and who killed my father and hundreds of my people. Why is this even causing you a problem, Lee? Anybody who had anything to do with exterminating those freaks is a hero to me. I'll bet you could go out on the street and ask anybody here on Caprica and they'd all say the same thing. The only ones sorry to see them dead are those crazy monotheists."

Hunter opened the book again and Lee closed his eyes. He would never understand the emotions that had driven Tucker to think killing the Cylon prisoners was worth the sacrifice of his own life and he would never completely understand why Shelley had helped him knowing the outcome. He didn't know if Tucker believed in an afterlife or not. They had lived on the same hall at the Academy, they'd eaten together and played sports together and sat in classrooms together and studied together, and yet Lee didn't recall a single time they'd talked about their religious beliefs or lack thereof. If Tucker believed in the gods and the rewards of an afterlife, he'd been very quiet about it.

The ambrosia began to dull his senses and he finally decided that there were many things about the nature of love and friendship and the complexities of the human heart that he would never fully understand.

His world had evolved steadily from the one he'd inhabited at seventeen when right was clearly right to him and wrong was clearly wrong, when choices were so easy to make because everything seemed black or white, good or evil. There were no shades of gray like there were now, and in keeping Shelley's secret, he'd just added another shade of gray to his world.

_…_

Kara sat cross-legged on the foot of Maya's bed while Maya finished getting ready. She was running late since Braedon had not wanted Mrs. Blythe to read to him after Maya had given him his bath. His tears had escalated into a full scale tantrum. Laura, who had been invited to dinner with the Vice-President and his wife, had called the Mickelsons and told them that she would be a little late. She was now in Braedon's bedroom rocking him and reading him a story. His wails had subsided quickly as they always did when his mother put him to bed.

"I would have stayed with him," Maya said.

"I know you would have. Laura knows it, too. You need to get out sometimes. You can't call what you and Hunter do while you're babysitting Brae as _getting out_."

"He's not a bad child," Maya said and Kara heard an edge of defensiveness in her voice.

"Nobody thinks he's a bad child. He's a little kid. All little kids have tantrums and meltdowns from time to time. You told me that Sarah Porter's kids were little monsters."

Maya smiled. "I don't think I called them monsters. They were a handful, though. I was glad when the youngest one went to school and she didn't need my services any longer."

Kara heard voices out in the sitting room.

"Lee and Hunter are here."

"I'm almost ready. You can go talk to them."

"Did you think Lee was acting weird last night? He didn't have anything to say at dinner and he wanted to go back to the apartment right after we ate."

"He'd just buried a friend, Kara. Lee's a deeper person than I think you give him credit for being. He was probably just sad and trying to deal with it without bringing the rest of us down."

"I guess you're right. It just bothers me when he shuts me out like that."

She got up and walked out of the bedroom. Hunter had already flopped down on the sofa. Lee was walking around picking up Brae's toys.

"Hi."

He looked up and a smile lit his face. She walked over to him and he kissed her lightly on the lips. He seemed to be himself once more. Maya was right. Tucker's funeral was the reason he was so quiet and withdrawn the night before.

"Maya's almost ready. Tell me again where we're going?"

"Coretta Howliss who is the head of the Tauron delegation here on Caprica asked us to have dinner with her and some of her people. I checked the address she gave me. It's a meeting hall or something."

"Where?" Kara asked.

"On Attica Street."

"That's not in a very good section of town."

Lee grinned. "I would have a girlfriend who knows Caprica City like the back of her hand."

Hunter said, "You told me that women's shelter where Sharon was staying was in a bad section of town. It wasn't so bad."

"That was during the daytime," Kara said. "And I'm not worried about us. I'm thinking about Lee's car."

Lee thought about what she had just said. The car had belonged to his mother, a gift from his father that Lee always thought was an attempt to make up for how little time he spent with her. Bill had given it to Lee after her death. Kara was right. It was an expensive vehicle. He'd hate for anything to happen to it.

"What do you suggest?"

"Let's take a transport."

"What about the subway?" Hunter asked.

"There's not a stop anywhere near Attica Street."

"Okay. A transport it is," Lee said. "I told Kendra we'd pick her and Dwight up at Zeno's. We'll have to go by there and get them."

Maya walked into the room and Hunter stood. Maya looked gorgeous in a red wrap blouse and black jeans.

Kara grinned. "Maybe we could get one of Laura's guards to take us."

She got a look from Lee. "I'll call Greenlight Transport and have them pick us up out back."

Ten minutes later they got into the transport. Ten minutes after that they were at Zeno's. Kendra and Dwight squeezed into the front. Fifteen minutes after that they got out at the address on Attica Street.

The first thing Lee noticed was the bushy black and white dog lying on the small porch. As they approached, the dog's tail began to thump on the brick.

"Hey, boy," Lee said and bent to pet the dog. The tail thumped harder and faster.

"How you know it's a boy?" Kendra asked.

"He looks like a boy." Lee slid the dog's collar around. There was a rabies vaccination tag and a name tag. "_Jake._ Sounds like a boy to me."

Maya said, "He must belong to someone who's inside."

Through the glass in the door Lee could see several long tables and people moving around inside. He tried the door. It was unlocked. They walked in and looked around before he spotted Coretta talking to a taller man who reminded him of Mateo Oraibi. His long black hair was streaked with silver and was pulled back into a ponytail at the nape of his neck. He was wearing a brown shirt and jeans and had some beads hanging around his neck. Many of the women were wearing colorful blouses and long skirts.

Kara immediately thought of Keshia and Yolanda. Neither was from Tauron and yet they had both favored this same type of dress, especially Keshia. She would fit right in here among these people.

Coretta saw them and hurried over. She greeted Kendra, Dwight and Lee. Lee introduced Kara, Hunter and Maya. Coretta welcomed them warmly and ushered them around the room introducing them to the Taurons who had gathered. Like Coretta some had the distinctive features of the northern tribes and some did not. There were at least seventy-five people there of all ages from infants to the elderly.

Finally they came to the tall man with the ponytail.

"This is Ogala," Coretta said, "our priest and shaman. He's also my brother."

"I like your…necklace or whatever," Kara said looking at the multicolored oddly shaped stones strung on a length of rawhide.

"It's a prayer amulet," Hunter told her. "Jasper is a sacred stone to many Taurons. The different colored beads tell the story of creation. The larger golden stone in the center is the sun, the sustainer of all life."

Ogala smiled. "Hunter's knowledge is impressive."

Hunter said, "Where I grew up we had a priest who was also an oracle. She and her brother were originally from Tauron. He had one of those. He explained it to me when I was a kid. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen."

Ogala's eyes locked on Hunter and then moved to Kara. "That was a long way from here, was it not?"

"A long way," Hunter said.

"We will talk again. Now we should eat. My sister has gone to a lot of trouble to make tonight's meal special for you. We rarely get guests of your importance."

Kara looked at him. "Importance?"

Coretta said, "The information Lee and Kendra and Dwight brought back from Tauron will prove the duplicity of Tom Zarek and his men."

"You should run against him for the Tauron seat on the Quorum," Kendra said.

Coretta smiled. "Did my brother ask you to say that?"

"Of course not. Although I did discuss it with my mother. She'd like to see you give Zarek a run for his money. She despises him."

"We'll see. Now let's eat."

Coretta asked her brother to bless the meal and then she ushered them to a buffet table where a large number of dishes of food were placed. She went first so she could explain what some of the dishes were. Hunter was behind Kara and nudged her when they got to a big pot of rabbit stew. She smiled.

After they were seated and Kara was eating the stew which was delicious, she asked Coretta, "Where do you get your rabbits?"

"There's a market down near the waterfront on Fifty-Second Street that sells most kinds of meat and fish."

"I know the area," Kara said. "My stepfather lives on Fifty-First Street four blocks from the waterfront. I used to visit an Oracle who lived on Fifty-Third above a shoe repair shop."

"Yolanda Brenn," Ogala said.

"You knew her?" Kara asked in surprise.

"I visited her many times and often took her food. We had some lengthy discussions about our religion and the gift of prophecy. She was not born with her gift. It only came to her after she was blinded in the Cylon attack on her temple in Delphi, but her gift was very real."

"Keshia and I were with her when she died."

Ogala sat digesting the information and then said, "Yolanda knew she would not live to be an old woman. She had seen it. She was very worried about Keshia. Is she doing well?"

"I saw her a few weeks ago. She's working at a women's shelter on Acropolis Street. The Sisters of Hera. She seems to be doing better. She looks more like she did when she and Yolanda were together. That son of a bitch Cavil…if he hadn't kidnapped them and locked them in a basement and starved them…Yolanda would still be alive."

"Her death has been avenged if you believe in that sort of thing."

"You don't?" Kara asked in surprise.

"No. Neither did Yolanda."

"Yolanda was a saint. I'm not."

They ate in silence for a while. Lee seemed preoccupied again like he had been the night before.

Kara asked Ogala. "Do you have the gift of sight?"

"Since I was a boy but not to the extent Yolanda had it. My visions are more abstract, more difficult to interpret. Often I don't understand them myself."

"The first time I went to see Yolanda, she called me Posiden's green-eyed daughter. She knew my eyes were green even though she was blind."

"As I've said, her gift was real." He slowly chewed a mouthful of food before he said, "Your friend Lee does not believe in the powers of an oracle as you do. And yet your friend Hunter does."

"That's right."

"Is it only oracles that Lee has problems with or is it our religion in general?"

"Lee's not a believer."

"That is sad. Where does he turn for strength when life becomes difficult for him?"

Kara shrugged. "Himself, I guess. Me, sometimes. He used to talk things over with my dad."

Ogala lowered his eyes. "Forgive me. I overstep my bounds. It's not my business."

"How much do you know about monotheism?"

"I've studied our two major religions and many sects under each. There are those who would call us a sect."

"I'd like to talk to you about something that's been bothering me. Where can I find you?"

"My sister and I live next door, but I'm here much of the time. This place is our meeting hall and our place of worship. If I'm here the black and white dog will be outside on the porch as he is tonight."

Kara smiled. "So Jake's yours."

"I found him nearly dead in an alley near here when he was a few weeks old. Somebody had put out a box of puppies. He was the only one still alive. Coretta and I bottle fed him until he could eat on his own."

"He looks happy and healthy now."

Ogala smiled, "He's very well fed now…like me. He doesn't understand that he's a dog. He thinks he's one of the family."

"I wonder why."

Ogala stood and picked up his clean plate. "Seconds?"

"Not yet."

When he had walked away, Kara leaned over and said to Lee, "Are you getting ready to pull inside yourself like you did last night?"

"No."

"You're too quiet."

"You seem like you're hitting it off with the shaman."

Kara grinned. "I just want to see if he'll tell me the same thing Yolanda did about you and me.

"Which was what?"

She poked him. "You don't remember?"

"Hmmm. Did it have something to do with _true love_?"

"It did."

"If I go to your room with you tonight will you let me strive to show you one of my interpretations of Yolanda's prophecy about us?"

Kara leaned over and whispered to him, "Is that a long-winded way of saying you want to make love to me?"

"I always want to make love to you."

"Except when you don't."

Lee pulled back. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Last night."

"Kara, I…"

"No, it's okay. I understand. You weren't in the mood. If I'd been to a good friend's funeral, I probably wouldn't be in the mood either."

"I feel better tonight."

She grinned. "I'll expect you to prove it."

"Kendra's said something about going to Zeno's for a beer. Last Saturday night got interrupted."

It had only been a week since Sharon had been rushed to the medical center but it seemed like a month.

Half an hour later they all bid goodnight to Coretta and her brother and squeezed into another transport. They found a round table at Zeno's near the back and ordered several pitchers of beer. The jukebox was playing and several couples were dancing. Maya took Hunter's hand and pulled him out onto the floor.

Kendra leaned over to Kara. "I think they really like each other."

Kara smiled. "What gave it away?"

"Maybe the fact that they're dancing so close you couldn't get a piece of paper between them."

"I just hope Maya knows what she's doing because Hunter's…not going to be around…"

"I know what you mean. He's going back to where he's from. Why couldn't she go with him?"

"Maybe she will."

"Would you get angry if I asked Lee to dance? I want to talk to him about my mother."

Kara gestured. "Be my guest."

Kara watched them start dancing and smiled. You could get a ream of paper between Lee and Kendra.

"You going to let them show us up?" Saunders asked. "I haven't danced with you since…what? The graduation party your dad and Laura threw for you."

Kara smirked. "We've danced together since then. You were just too drunk to remember."

"The Shark Rider?"

She snickered softly. "It breaks my heart that you forgot."

He stood and pulled her to her feet. "I'll remember tonight."

They began dancing with the other couples.

"Is Crash dating Maggie tonight?" Kara asked him.

"Nope. He asked her. She shot him down. I told him to give her time. Crash isn't real…sensitive to things like that. I know Maggie really cares for Zak."

"I talked to her. Zak's got some frakked up idea that he's going to die in Sovana. He doesn't want her waiting for him. I think she's going to wait anyway so tell Crash not to get his hopes up."

"How long do you think it'll be before we go to Hunter's homeworld to liberate it from the Cylons?"

"Who says we're going to do that?"

"Nobody has to say it. I'm not stupid."

Kara grinned. "You really think Admiral Adama has taken _me_ into his confidence like that? After the stunt I pulled?"

"I'm sure Lee knows."

"They're working on a plan. That's all we know."

"Flown that Mark VII yet?"

"Not yet. Maybe in a week or two. My court-martial hearing is next Friday. If all goes well, I'll get to fly the following Monday."

"And if all doesn't go well?"

"Then I guess I'm frakked," Kara said testily.

"I was just asking. Don't take my head off."

"Sorry. This has been a weird week. We've all felt the strain."

"You can say that again. Chin up, Starbuck. You eventually made it over that wall on the obstacle course. You'll get to keep your wings."

She smiled. "I thought about you on Nereid a couple of times."

"Oh, yeah?"

"When Hunter and I were crawling through a very small tunnel. I thought about how much trouble you had getting through those pipes on the obstacle course. Ask Hunter about it sometimes. He's more claustrophobic than you are."

The song ended and another one started.

"What say we swap partners," Dwight said. "That way Lee will quit looking daggers in my direction."

When Kara was in Lee's arms, she sighed. It felt so right. Kendra had her arms around Dwight's neck and they were dancing as close as Maya and Hunter.

"What'd Kendra want?" Kara asked.

Lee said in an exasperated tone, "Something I _do not_ want to get involved in."

"What?"

"Her mother wants to date my father. She wants me to find out if he'd do it."

Kara starting laughing. "Why can't Mrs. Shaw just ask him herself? They're not in the eighth grade."

"Apparently she's sensitive about the relationship he and Laura have. She doesn't know your dad is still alive. You can't blame her. She doesn't want to offend the President of the Colonies. It's a political thing."

"So are you going to ask him?"

"I don't know. I told Kendra I'd think about it."

"You want me to get Laura to ask him?"

Lee smiled. "Now that is like eighth grade. What did Dwight have to say?"

"Not much. Crash asked Maggie out for tonight and she said _no_. I told you she just wanted to go to the game last weekend."

Lee shrugged and pulled Kara closer to him. "Have I told you lately how much I love you?"

Kara put her mouth against his ear and said softly, "You missed yesterday."

Once again he saw the casket and the single white rose and Shelley's tear-stained face.

"Let's go back to Marble House."

"We just got here and you're ready to leave?"

"I need you, Kara."

She looked at his eyes and saw the twin pools of dark blue filled with pain.

"Call a transport. I'll make our excuses."

Maya and Hunter weren't ready to leave so Kara and Lee were alone in the back seat of the transport. When Lee gave the driver their destination, the driver looked skeptical. "You sure you want to go to Marble House?"

"I left my car there," Lee said.

Lee and Kara shared a quick smile. It wasn't every day a transport cab was asked to take someone to the President's dwelling.

At the back gate they got out and Lee paid the driver. The guards recognized them both by now and let them through the gate. They held hands walking across the parking lot. In the elevator he slid his hand behind her head and kissed her hard and passionately, not caring who might be watching the security monitors.

In her room they were torn between struggling to get their clothes off as fast as they could and the need not to break contact with the other. For the first time in a long time Lee felt like he had no control. The touch of her hands stroking him even gently was almost enough to push him over the edge. He moaned long and low. She pushed him over onto his back, kissing him. His hands were busy working their magic. At last she slid over him. They made love fiercely, almost roughly, and at the end, Lee struggled and just managed to hold back until Kara's body tensed and she came, her fingers digging so deeply into his shoulders that he later found several bruises.

She lay on top of him for a long time, until her breathing returned to normal and then she slipped down into his arms and put her head on his shoulder.

"Kangaroo love," she said softly.

"What?"

"Karl told me that's what the nurses call it when parents hold a baby against their bare skin. It helps the parent-child bonding process."

Lee smiled. "It helps me when you hold your naked body against mine. It always has."

Kara snuggled into him. She already felt sleepy. "Someday…" her voice trailed off.

"Someday what?"

"Someday when all this is over and we've got my dad home and Hunter's people are free, we'll do it right. I'll put on a white dress and we'll stand at the front of Elosha's temple together and say our vows and then we'll make our own baby. She'll be a little blue-eyed blond and she'll be a daddy's girl and you'll love her the way my father loves me. She will own your heart and you'll never be the same again."

Lee held her tightly as her body relaxed into sleep and thought of the enormous responsibility of bringing a child into the world, of the demands and rewards and the thousand other things of which he would one day learn.

He'd dealt with death in the last few days and now Kara had reminded him so clearly that a new life had come into their world, a tiny miracle named Hera, just like the light of day always followed the dark of night.

He gently stroked her hair. In her own way and perhaps without even realizing it, Kara had brought him a feeling of peace.

He leaned over and kissed her forehead. "In case you haven't figured it out, Kara Thrace, somebody already owns my heart."

TBC…


	39. Buddy

Chapter 39

Buddy

_5. Sharon, daughter of Xander and Jerusha, consented to be married to Nimrod as his third wife._

_6. And after the wedding feast, Nimrod allowed Simon to leave with the Kobol Stone._

_7. Nimrod's father scorned him and said, You have given away something of great value for the favor of a woman._

_8. You must get the stone and return it to me for it will bear my epitaph._

_9. In secret Nimrod did obey and told his guards to follow Simon and retrieve the stone._

_10. His guards caught up with Simon in a mountain pass and slew him and threw his body into a deep ravine._

_11. The Lord sent to Sharon a vision in which her brother's blood cried out to her from the ground._

_12. And Sharon rose from their marriage bed and confronted her husband,_

_13. But he dissembled and denied her accusing words even unto taking an oath of his innocence before God._

_13. The Lord guided Sharon's footsteps and she found the Kobol Stone where Nimrod had hidden it._

_14. Sharon knew then of the treachery of the man she had married and great was her wrath against him._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Xander, _Chapter 10:5-14

.

John sat in the kitchen of his apartment while Doolittle placed his breakfast on the table.

"I need a haircut. You think your guy could do it today?"

"Yes, sir. Give us about an hour to get cleaned up from breakfast."

"I'm thinking about going to visit D'Anna for a couple of days, maybe longer. While I was there last week, Natalie told me it would be okay."

"When would you be leaving, sir?"

"Maybe day after tomorrow. I know one of the big transports leaves for Settlement Alpha early every Monday morning. The centurion pilots know me. I don't think I'll have a problem getting on board. If I'm going to be gone for a few days, I'll let you know."

"What about the other one…Sonja? She going, too?"

John smiled. "No. She's got somebody else to occupy her for a while. She won't miss me."

Doolittle seemed surprised. "Josh?"

"Yep."

Doolittle shook his head. "Poor kid. After she brought him here he was sick in love with her. That's one reason he couldn't keep his mind on his job in the kitchen…mooning after her. I knew it wouldn't last on her part. But she does keep going back to him. Maybe there's something there after all."

"I hope so…for his sake…hers, too. You're a good man, Doolittle. I just want you to know that."

"Thank you, sir. I'd best be going now."

As John sat and slowly ate his breakfast, he thought of the night before. He'd come back from communicating with the centurion in the park and taken a shower. When he'd gone to the dresser to get out his sweatpants and t-shirt, he'd seen Yusef's prayer beads in the corner of the drawer along with the picture of Laura and Brae. He'd lifted the picture and looked at his wife and son as he did every day and let the feelings of love wash over him. He tried to imagine how much Brae had grown and changed in the many months since he'd been gone. Then he'd returned the photograph to the drawer, but he'd kept the prayer beads in his hand.

In the living room the book of monotheist scriptures lay on the end table. Sonja had never taken it back. John had picked it up, turned to the back and found the section of prayers. He had flipped the pages and picked one. As he had held the beads, he'd begun to read aloud.

_Hear me, oh God, in the hour of my need. I cry out to You in the wilderness and Your words comfort me. When I am lost and alone, Your voice soothes my soul. When I am a stranger in a strange land, You are my guide. When I am sick, You heal me. I will fear not for You are with me always. You guide my footsteps on the path that You have chosen for me. Though my courage may falter before my enemy, Your courage never falters. Though my words may die in my throat, Your voice never fails. I am weak and Your strength lifts me. I am tempted and Your love saves me. Yea though I walk in the shadow of death, Your presence shall be as a light unto my path. You will cause my enemy to kneel at my feet. You will vanquish my fear and show me the way for You are the Almighty, the one and only God, creator of all things. Amen._

As John had sat fingering the prayer beads and reading the words over and over, he'd realized that nothing had ever moved him or spoken to him in the way this monotheist prayer now did. _When I am a stranger in a strange land, You are my guide. _

He had been raised to believe in the gods. When he was just a baby, his mother had begun taking him to the Temple of Posiden, god of the sea, revered and feared by sailors and fishermen. One of his earliest memories was of holding his mother's hand while she used a long taper to light a candle on the altar and then place a few cubits in the offering bowl. She did that every day that his father and brothers were out in the trawler…until the storm that had taken their lives. After that she'd never gone to the temple again. But by then John knew all the stories about their gods. They were filled with great power and conquest, lust and love, adultery, betrayal, even rape and incest.

Nothing he had ever read of his own gods had touched him like the heartfelt words of the prayer he had just prayed. The God of the monotheist Cylons was not a person and had no form or substance and yet their God was as powerful as Zeus. Maybe more powerful. The Cylon God had always been and would always be. The Cylon God was a forgiving god if one was truly repentant for his sins.

As John had clutched the prayer beads, he had felt something shift inside him, something deep in his soul. He had stepped through a doorway, across a threshold and had acknowledged the power of the God of a race that had once been his sworn enemy and there was no going back for him. He finally had the smallest inkling of the spiritual quest that had consumed D'Anna and had given Natalie her desire to serve others and Yoshimo his serene capacity for forgiveness.

Now John got up from the table and quickly cleaned up his breakfast dishes before he began his workout. An hour and a half later he had showered and dressed and was sitting on a crate on the loading dock of their building. Doolittle's kitchen helper, who had been a barber prior to being taken from a ship along with many others, was trimming his hair.

"You can cut it a little shorter than you did last time," John said. "That way I won't have to bother you as often."

"No bother," the man said. "I enjoy doing this a lot more than I enjoy cooking."

"I'd leave you a nice tip today if I had anything. Maybe I'll find a way to make it up to you some day."

"Don't worry about it. Mr. Doolittle said you used to shoot them centurion suckers out of the sky."

"Back in the day. The old centurions…0005s. Not these new ones."

"Makes no difference. That's tip enough for me."

When the barber was through, he shook out the large clean garbage bag that he had tied around John's neck in lieu of a barber's cape.

"What are you going to do with that bag?" John asked.

"Throw it away. Why?"

"I'd like it if you don't mind. I've got something I need it for."

"Sure. No problem."

John folded the bag, took it back upstairs to his apartment and put it in a drawer. It was big enough he could get his clothes and the electric razor and his toothbrush in it and still have room to spare. He chuckled aloud. It was the second time in his life that he could get everything he owned into one bag. The first time had been when he'd left Virgon to go to Picon after joining the military. He had one duffle bag about the same size as the garbage bag. He'd been on his way to war then. In some ways he was on his way to war now.

The bullet-scarred centurion was standing at the park entrance exactly where it had been the night before. He couldn't stop and talk to it, though, because there were too many people around, both Cylons and humans. He couldn't risk one of them seeing or hearing him so he just said, "Later" as he passed it.

He walked into the park. Now that Petra was caring for Rachel, she rarely came to the park in the morning. She usually showed up in the afternoon with Gianne after Cassie and Sofia had taken their naps. He continued through the park and went to her apartment. She was nursing Rachel when she opened the door.

"Hi," he said and stepped inside.

"Chon," Cassie said and toddled over to him. He picked her up and felt a small ache in his heart. He knew he was going to miss them more than he would let himself acknowledge. _For a better future,_ he reminded himself.

"You're welcome to go make coffee if you want some," Petra said as she sat down with Rachel.

"That's okay. I don't need coffee today. I'm…thinking about going to visit D'Anna for a few days…maybe a week…or two."

"You can make that decision on your own?" Petra asked surprised.

"Natalie told me it was my right to be with the mother of my child. Since D'Anna can't come to me, I'm going to have to go to her."

Petra nodded. "Yes, that's true. Parents are encouraged to form a bond for the sake of the child. For some of us it wasn't a problem. Others had a more difficult time."

"I don't suppose you have a piece of paper big enough for me to write something on, do you?"

"You mean like a note or a letter?"

"A letter. One page."

Petra chuckled. "You do realize there's no mail delivery on the planet, don't you?"

"I'm going to deliver this one myself."

"I think I can find something that will work for you. I don't have any envelopes."

"That's okay. I don't need one."

When he left Petra's apartment that day he had a piece of folded paper in his pocket that he would use to write a letter to Sonja. It wouldn't be a long letter, but in it he would say the things he didn't trust himself to say in person. Whatever had happened between them, he owed her and he wanted her to know it. He would write the letter tonight and tomorrow he would return the pen he had borrowed from Petra. He would spend as much time with her and Rachel and Cassie as he could because when he left the city early Monday morning, he knew he wouldn't be coming back.

On the way to his apartment for lunch, he stopped in front of the sentinel centurion and asked if it could trade places with one of the centurions guarding the transportation garage without arousing suspicion. He got the slight nod of its big chrome head.

"Do it before midnight tomorrow night. You and I are leaving the city early Monday morning…before sunrise. We'll need transportation to the airfield."

Another nod.

Now there was nothing to do but wait.

_…_

Kara pulled her motorcycle through the gate at the AJA headquarters and nosed it into a visitor parking place. She looked around. Lieutenant Commander Robb's red sports car was already in its assigned spot.

She took off her helmet and left it with the bike. She had remembered a comb that morning because she wanted to redo her ponytail before she went into the courtroom. Inside she saw Robb talking to Major McKenna near the elevator. They didn't notice her so she quickly ducked into the ladies room and managed to get her hair into a smooth ponytail. She wished Hunter had been around to braid it for her, but she only saw him now in the evening.

She smiled as she remembered their conversation the night before. It had barely been a week, but he'd already finished the Rick Spade book and was disappointed to hear that there would be no more since the author was now dead. Laura had made a suggestion, though, of the _Searider Falcon_ books since she had the complete set at the apartment. The _Searider Falcon_ was the name of a starship and her captain, Drake Darke, had adventures all over the galaxy as he managed to involve himself in a number of what Laura called _interesting situations_.

Kara had asked Laura if Captain Drake Darke had any adventures with women. Laura had smiled and said, "Oh, yes. The good captain never makes it through a novel without at least _one_ encounter with a beautiful woman. It is science fiction after all."

Kara had grinned at Hunter and said, "Just think of Drake Darke as Rick Spade in space."

Lee had laughed. "That's a good one, Kara."

Now Kara finished smoothing her hair, slipped the elastic on the ponytail and slid the comb back into her inside jacket pocket. Major McKenna was waiting for her at the far end of the hall outside the courtrooms and greeted her with a nod.

"Good morning, sir," Kara said.

"We're second on the docket for this morning, Lieutenant Thrace. I understand you're in a classroom situation and need to get back as soon as possible."

"Yes, sir."

"We didn't get the judge I was hoping for, but we could have done a lot worse. Just remember what I told you and say as little as possible. Since your mission was classified you don't have to explain it."

"Yes, sir."

They went into the courtroom and took seats near the front. As they waited for the judge, Kara said, "Tell Lieutenant Commander Robb that if all goes well, I'll get to fly a Mark VII next week…maybe Monday."

McKenna smiled. "That will certainly make him envious. We've discussed your case several times. I think he wishes he'd gotten it instead of me. He has a soft spot for all aviators."

"It's a tight-knit club. We look out for each other."

A side door opened and a middle-aged colonel strode in. He wore the same blue uniform as Kara and was fit and slim with dark skin and graying hair. Kara glanced at his chest for pilot's wings and saw none. He had probably been with the AJA his whole career. She didn't know if that was good or bad.

The Marshall stood and said, "All rise. Colonel Louden Dawson presiding."

Kara waited nervously through the first case, a DWI and reckless driving charge which took all of ten minutes since it was pled out. But the judge did more than pass sentence. He gave the enlisted man a stern lecture about responsibility and warned him that if it happened again, he would spend time in the brig and be dishonorably discharged. The young man left with his eyes downcast, no longer a corporal. He had been demoted to private first class and docked a month's pay. It was obvious he and his lawyer had expected a lighter sentence.

When the doors closed behind the private and his attorney, Kara and Major McKenna moved up. She watched Colonel Dawson read over her case.

Finally he said, "You're pleading guilty to mishandling of government property, Lieutenant Thrace, and yet I don't see any mention of what property was mishandled. Would you enlighten me?"

"Your honor," McKenna said, "Lieutenant Thrace's offense occurred during a classified mission. She can't speak of the exact nature of any property involved without disobeying a direct order and revealing classified information."

Colonel Dawson studied Kara. "If the mission was classified, what's she doing here? Why wasn't it handled by her mission commander?"

He had addressed the question to McKenna, but Kara answered him. "I think he wanted to impress upon me, sir, the serious nature of borrowing a piece of classified equipment."

"Borrowing. Does that mean you took it and then returned it?"

"Yes, sir. That was always my intention."

"You returned it undamaged?"

"Yes, sir."

"Could you discuss your motive for borrowing this equipment without compromising the classified nature of the mission?"

McKenna leaned over and whispered, "You don't need to answer if you think you'll reveal something you shouldn't."

Kara took a deep breath and realized that she wanted her motive on record.

"I disagreed with my mission commander about a decision that he made. I thought vital information that had been obtained on several prior classified missions was being ignored and that a decision had been made that was…morally wrong. I borrowed the equipment in an effort to get further proof…proof that couldn't be ignored."

"How old are you, Lieutenant?"

"Almost nineteen, sir."

"What rank was your mission commander?"

"He's an admiral, sir."

"At the ripe old age of nineteen, you thought you knew better than an admiral?"

For a moment Kara dropped her eyes. She felt exactly like she had when Admiral Adama had fixed her with those gunmetal-blue eyes and she had seen his anger and his disappointment. She struggled for a way to answer the question without sounding insubordinate or smart-mouthed.

"I think that the admiral saw what he wanted to see when he viewed certain intel, and I saw what I wanted to see and they weren't the same thing. I knew that what I was doing was wrong, but I…felt strongly enough about the matter that my conscience wouldn't let me ignore it. There were a lot of lives at stake."

The corners of Dawson's mouth twitched upward a millimeter.

"Diplomatically put. Which brings us to your mission. Did you succeed in getting the proof that you sought?"

Kara smiled. "Yes, sir."

"Was the UA charge that was dropped also related to getting that proof?"

"Yes, sir. It took longer than I thought it would because of…circumstances beyond my control, but I succeeded in getting proof that couldn't be ignored."

"And did the admiral change his mind after you brought back your proof?"

"Yes, sir, he did."

"I see that you're a pilot. One of the things on the table is your ability to continue flying. Not that I can take your wings, Lieutenant, but the severity of your punishment might cause that to happen."

Kara just managed to keep a tremor out of her voice.

"That's all I've ever wanted to do, sir, since I was a little girl."

"Your honor," McKenna said, "Lieutenant Thrace graduated at the top of her Flight School class and took the Viper Top Gun trophy. She's the best of the best. We need her to keep her wings. She's also following in her father's footsteps. He was a pilot who made the ultimate sacrifice during the conflict last fall."

Again Louden Dawson studied her. Kara held her breath.

"The fact that the admiral wanted you to experience the weight of military justice compels me to impose some sort of penalty. Lieutenant Thrace, you are sentenced to the loss of two week's pay and you must write a letter of apology to the admiral expressing your sincere regret for mishandling whatever it was that you mishandled. Do not remind him that your mission forced him to change his mind. I'm sure he's well aware of it. Do not produce the letter in any kind of electronic format. Write it legibly with a pen on a piece of stationery. You are to hand-deliver the letter to Major McKenna no later than one week from today and she is to see that it is hand-delivered to the admiral. Dismissed. Next case."

Kara let out the breath she was holding. Two week's pay and write a letter. She'd gotten off easy and she knew it. She quickly followed Major McKenna out of the courtroom.

"Thank you, sir," Kara said struggling to keep her composure.

McKenna smiled. "I hope you realize that you just got the equivalent of being told to stay after school and write on the board _I will not talk in class _twenty-five times."

Kara grinned. "Actually I had to do that a few times only instead of writing _I will not talk in class, _I had to write _I will not fight on the playground_. And it was a hundred times on a piece of paper, not twenty-five on the board. It took me forever. I'm not a fast writer."

"Why does that not surprise me…fighting on the playground?"

"I'll bring the letter early next week, sir."

"Just make sure you get it here by Friday. Leave it unsealed, Lieutenant Thrace. I'll have to make a copy of it for your file so you might want to be cognizant of what you say about the classified property."

"Yes, sir. If Lieutenant Commander Robb is around, I'll let him know how it feels to fly a Mark VII."

McKenna smiled. "He'll be eating his heart out."

In the parking lot Kara straddled the bike and used her mobile phone to call Lee. He wasn't at his desk and Kara knew Major Parker didn't allow his staff to keep their personal mobile phones on during work. She left Lee a short message about the outcome of her court-martial. He should get it when he got back to his desk.

Today was her last day of classroom work on the Mark VII. After lunch she would take Valinski's final test. She had no doubt she'd do well. Monday she'd start training with Major Jessups. She might even get to take one up the first day.

_Hang in there, Dad, _she thought as she accelerated up the ramp to the I-6. _I'll be in a Mark VII Viper when we come to get you._

_…_

Even though Lee was in a soundproof viewing room, he muted the volume on the recording of Gaius Baltar and Natasi after the first seven minutes. Now he understood exactly why Major Parker had handed him a page of notes relating to the weekend the scientist had spent with his Cylon lover. Parker had already viewed the recording and had kept his face impassive when he'd told Lee to review it and see if he got anything from their conversations that Parker had missed. Lee doubted either Baltar or Natasi had any idea they were _on stage_, so to speak, everywhere but the bathroom. Baltar had been told that they would not be monitored in the bedroom. For a guy with such a high IQ, he was incredibly naïve. Or maybe he was too trusting. Or maybe he didn't care.

Parker's first note read.

_Nothing of importance between minutes 7 and 12 on Friday afternoon._

Nothing of importance to hear, but plenty to see…if you were into watching a man and woman go at each other like animals in heat. Lee tried to imagine his CO watching this and couldn't quite get the image to work. Parker and porn seemed mutually exclusive.

The recording started as Baltar put his small suitcase down in the living room and the agents left with their brief warning about the deadly consequences of either of them trying to leave the apartment for the duration of the weekend. Lee almost laughed out loud at the idea of Baltar trying to escape. What was he going to do…tie the sheets together and rappel fifteen floors down the side of the building while a dozen agents watched him? The scientist didn't look like he had the guts to go down the big slide on the playground…but then again why would he even want to escape?

The Cylon hadn't seen her lover since her arrest the previous autumn…slightly over seven months. The longest Lee had gone without seeing Kara was the three months she had been on the _Galactica_ after she'd finished Flight School.

Baltar and Natasi's initial minutes alone had been somewhat awkward. Some tearful words and tender touches from Natasi, some shy almost bumbling words from Baltar mostly asking about her treatment as a Colonial prisoner. Her answer was honest at least when she said she'd been well treated. Then true to form he asked her if she'd missed him. Lee even heard the touch of condescending arrogance in Baltar's voice that he tried to mask with a humble look. Lee had seen it clearly on the _Penelope_. With Baltar it was always about him.

"Ask him how many women he frakked while he was on board the _Penelope,"_ Lee said to the screen. "I heard about two. I'll bet there were more."

But Natasi didn't take Lee's advice. Instead she must have decided to show him how much she'd missed him. She grabbed the front of Baltar's jacket and pulled him into the bedroom. With a series of quick motions that involved a loss of buttons and possibly a broken zipper, she divested him of his clothing and pushed him back onto the bed. So much for tenderness. Lee kept his eyes on Natasi as she tore off her own clothes but it was more from a desire not to look at the naked and very thoroughly aroused body of Gaius Baltar than it was due to any prurient interest in the Cylon.

"Holy mother of the gods," Lee muttered under his breath as Natasi mounted Gaius in an act that could almost be categorized as rape. There was something repulsive about watching their intimacy and yet for nearly a full minute he did. Finally he clicked the fast forward arrow and watched the timer at the bottom instead of the wavy lines of the distorted act playing out on the screen. He was glad he had muted the sound as soon as Natasi had thrown Baltar onto the bed. The audio that accompanied the video would have been too much to take.

When the counter reached twelve minutes, he stopped the recording. Baltar and Natasi both lay on their backs not quite touching. Lee acknowledged, in what he hoped was a clinical way, that the Six's body was incredible…even after months in prison. If she had graced the cover or inside spread of any one of a dozen men's magazines, they would have sold out overnight even if she hadn't been a Cylon.

He tried to imagine what he would tell Kara if she asked about his day. Would he say, _I watched Baltar and Natasi frak each other silly? _Not hardly. Maybe he could get by with telling her that he'd listened to some surveillance tapes of them and let it go at that.

The main reason he didn't want Kara to know what he'd seen was that the conversation would inevitably turn to her father. There was every probability that John had experienced the same sort of thing with a platinum-haired Six named Sonja that Lee had just watched with Natasi and Baltar. Other than the one outburst at dinner on Monday evening when Kara had mentioned Sonja hitting her father, she hadn't spoken of them again. Lee knew it was bothering her, but he'd asked her twice and she'd merely shrugged and said Sonja was a bitch just like Natasi_._ As much as Kara liked Sharon, she hated Natasi and now by extension, Sonja. Hearing anything about Natasi and Baltar would be like rubbing salt into an open wound.

When Lee had mentioned that he'd watched the tape of Natasi's interrogation by Lampkin and heard real remorse in her voice about her part in the holocaust, Kara had countered with, "I guess I should add you to her list of conquests. She's a liar, Lee. They all know how to lie very well. Hunter said so and Hunter should know."

Exasperated with her attitude, Lee had said, "Hunter knows the Cylons on Nereid. Natasi has been here interacting with humans for the last six years. I think we're talking apples and oranges."

"Okay, maybe she told the truth about her memories of Nereid, but she did it for her own gain. She's _not_ sorry for what they did here. She's _not_ sorry billions of humans died."

At that point he'd let it go rather than remind Kara of her friendship with Sharon and Leoben and kick their argument up to the next level.

Now Lee left the video paused and walked down the hall to the break room. He got a cup of coffee and tried to decide how long it would take him to go through the forty-eight hours of Baltar and Natasi's weekend. He almost groaned out loud when he realized that even fast-forwarding over the intimate parts and the time they were sleeping, it would take several work days at least.

While Lee stood at the window of the break room and looked toward the Capitol Building, Parker walked in.

"Taking a break so soon?"

Lee held up the coffee cup. "I don't want to go to sleep."

Parker chuckled. "That's hardly the reaction I'd have expected from a guy your age."

"Watching two people…go at it like rabbits isn't my thing."

"Mine either, but every now and then you have to sacrifice for the job."

Lee couldn't look at Parker when he asked, "How many times am I going to have to _sacrifice for the job_ before I get to the end of that surveillance tape?"

"I didn't count. Let's just say that Dr. Baltar and Natasi are extremely inventive and…inspired. The doctor has the…stamina of a man half his age."

"He's only thirty-four," Lee said.

"I'm thinking more along the lines of a seventeen-year-old."

"Drugs?" Lee asked.

Parker shrugged. "Maybe. Darren's agents checked his bag for weapons over Baltar's strenuous protests, but they didn't have the authority to look at anything inside unless it looked like it could pose a danger to someone. Baltar had a bottle of vitamins but anything could have been in it." Parker smiled. "My theory is that it was filled with those little blue pills. It made me feel better after having to watch the many performances they put on."

"From what I've seen so far, Natasi looks…aggressive…to put it mildly."

Parker chuckled. "Maybe it's because they've been apart for so long, but my descriptive adjective ran more toward _insatiable_. I wonder if all the Sixes are like her. No wonder the doctor is so smitten."

"Gaius Baltar is smitten with himself. He's an arrogant jerk. I saw him on the _Penelope_ coming on to at least a dozen women. Kendra heard he'd been successful with two. I'm beginning to feel sorry for Natasi—Cylon or not."

"He's got something the women like...but don't ask me what it is." Darren's best men have analyzed the tape. That's why we're just now getting it, but none of them mentioned seeing anything besides an extremely strong sexual attraction. You've got good analytical skills. Try to get beyond your dislike of the doctor and let me know what you think of the relationship dynamics."

Lee went back to the small soundproof room and resumed watching. He took the sound off mute. Gaius and Natasi lay on the bed for nearly forty minutes as he told her about his work on the _Penelope's_ mission. He spoke in depth and ad nauseam about his close relationship with Dr. Nylund and how much Nylund had come to rely on him. Lee had never seen Nylund treat Baltar with any more deference than he treated his other colleagues. They were a team, a concept that Baltar had failed to grasp or chose to ignore.

Then Baltar indicated that he was hungry. He got up and put on his shorts and the shirt with the ripped-off buttons, not bothering to try to fasten it. Natasi put on a modest robe and they moved to the kitchen where she microwaved the dinner that had been left for them. While they were eating, Baltar said the first genuine sounding thing to her that Lee had heard so far.

"I wish I could take you out to a nice restaurant. You deserve it."

Natasi smiled, eating up the compliment.

Then he added, "You could wear your red dress. Everyone would look at you and think how beautiful you are and what a lucky man I am to be with you. They would all be green with envy."

There is was again. For Baltar it really was all about him. He looked at Natasi and saw a beautiful morsel of arm-candy so other men would look at him and be jealous.

Natasi reached across the table and caressed his arm. "You know I cooperated with Mr. Lampkin. I told him everything I know about my sisters and brothers still on the homeworld."

Baltar looked up from his meal. "I know. Laura Roslin told me that she was giving us this weekend together because you'd helped them. That was a smart thing for you to do."

"I've reconsidered the reason we came here. We were wrong to try to destroy humanity. God stopped us before we succeeded. That means He has a plan for us that involves the humans. I just don't know what it is yet."

"Yes, well, I'm sure if you continue to pray about it, it will come to you."

"Would you ever consider leaving Caprica, Gaius?"

"I've been away from Caprica for over six weeks. Why would I want to leave again?"

"If I were allowed to go…home, would you consider going with me?"

"Home?" His voice rose half an octave. "You mean to the Cylon homeworld?"

"There's nothing for me here. My brothers and sisters are all dead."

"I'm here. Am I not reason enough for you to stay? Do you not think God left you alive so we could be together?"

"Don't be a fool, Gaius. They will never allow me to be free again on this planet. Even if they did, someone like that person who killed the others would find me and kill me…kill you too if he thought you were with me."

"Yes, I see what you mean," Baltar said thoughtfully as if the full impact of what Tucker Clellan had done just hit him. "Yes, you probably wouldn't be safe here outside of protective custody like you're in now."

"I'm not in _protective custody_. I'm their _prisoner_. They will never let me resume any kind of life on this planet. My only chance of being free is to agree to go to my homeworld and help the Colonials rescue the humans. Then they'll let me stay and build a life there. Mr. Lampkin told me that Laura Roslin would authorize it."

"What would be wrong with staying here under their protection? I could be with you most weekends. We'd be safe from psychotic fanatics like that mad bomber."

"That is not God's plan for me, Gaius. I alone lived while the others died. God has a plan for me. I _think_ it involves returning to my home."

"Yes, well, ever-mysterious that God of yours. Who are we to second-guess His plans? Don't you think you should wait for some _real proof_ that He wants you to leave Caprica and travel to a place you left six years ago?"

"God is not going to send me a telegram with written instructions. That is not the definition of faith."

"Well, perhaps you could go ahead and check out the situation first before I follow."

"Our homeworld is a paradise. After the humans are rescued and taken away, we could clear some land and create a farm. We could get centurions to build us a nice house and help us with the heavy work. Don't you remember what you said to me in your letter?"

"Of course I remember."

"_My fondest dream is for us to retire to a little farm somewhere and live out our days in peace. _That's what you said to me. We could do that on my homeworld."

"We could do the same thing here on Caprica. I met someone on the _Penelope_ who has a small farm northwest of the city. There's land to be had if you know where to look."

"We could leave all of this behind us. It would be us Gaius, just you and me. We would be pioneers on the world chosen by the Thirteenth Tribe. God directed their ships there. He must have had a reason."

"My father is still alive in the nursing home. I couldn't leave him."

"We'll take him with us."

"I have a great deal of work to do analyzing the water samples we brought back from the other planets."

Natasi cooed, "Certainly with so many scientists on Caprica, someone else could be found who could do that work."

"Yes, well. We really should think about this a great deal before we make any hasty decision to…do something as drastic as leaving civilization behind."

"Don't you love me, Gaius?" Natasi asked in a breathy pout.

"Of course I do. How can you doubt my love? I'm here, aren't I?"

"Mr. Lampkin said you humbled yourself before Laura Roslin to try to get her to let you see me. Is that true?"

Lee could see that Baltar was torn between admitting it to please Natasi and his own pride which made it hard for him to humble himself before anyone.

Baltar lowered his eyes modestly. "I would have done whatever it took in order to get to see you."

He hadn't admitted it exactly, but his statement had the same effect. Natasi got up from her chair and came around to him. She leaned down and kissed his neck and reached into his shorts and began to fondle him. Half a minute after that she was bent over the table and Baltar had slipped the robe up to her waist. He entered her and before Lee could mute the volume again, he heard Natasi's sigh of ecstasy.

Lee glanced down at Parker's notes and put the tape on fast forward for the next nine minutes and wondered how many guys his age or any age would view this as a chore. He sipped his now tepid cup of coffee. It was going to be a _long_ day.

_…_

After the class had turned in their tests, Major Valinski let them go early as he had the Friday before. Kara stopped at his desk to let him know the outcome of her court-martial and that it would not affect her flight-ready status. That earned her one of Valinski's rare smiles and instructions to report to Major Jessups on the following Monday morning.

She left then and turned the bike toward the Academy. She had her military ID and was in uniform this time so the guards waved her through the gate with a minimum of fanfare. The quad always reminded her of walking off the demerits she'd gotten for the fight with Maggie. And having to report in each time to Shelley Sydell. It made her think, too, of the nights she finished in the simulator and her father walked her part of the way back to her dorm before he turned off toward the faculty parking lot.

She passed the Math and Sciences Building and continued on to the Language Arts and History building. She had arrived shortly after the two o'clock classes had begun. The halls were mostly deserted except for a few stragglers. All were wearing the cadet's uniform of dark blue trousers and lighter blue shirt, the same uniform she'd worn for a year.

As Kara walked down the first floor hall and passed Hugh Connelly's classroom, she saw that it was empty. She continued toward the stairwell. His office was on the second floor. As she neared the end of the hall, Fiona Nagala was coming out of her classroom. Kara had tried very hard in Nagala's Colonial Literature class and had still ended the semester with a 2.8 out of a possible 4.0.

Mrs. Nagala was the widow of Admiral Nagala. She was also the sister of Colonel Charles Winters who was the head of the Academy. She was about Laura's age, dark-haired and beautiful, and she had dated Admiral Adama for six months of the year that Kara had been at the Academy. In fact she had brought him to both the winter and the spring dances but something had happened to their romance shortly after the spring dance. She'd asked Lee, but Lee and his father didn't talk about their personal lives so Lee didn't have a clue nor did he seem to particularly care. Kara chuckled. As of last night Lee still hadn't talked to his father about dating Kendra's mother. Marta Shaw wasn't as beautiful as Fiona Nagala, but she was still an extremely attractive woman. She couldn't imagine that the Admiral would object to Marta's looks at all.

What only a handful of people knew about Fiona Nagala is that she had been in the resistance and had been known to Kara first as Mrs. Peele. The other thing that few people knew was that Fiona and Admiral Nagala had a daughter, Mia. Twelve-year-old Mia was undergoing chemotherapy with an experimental drug for a rare form of leukemia. Three months after the Cylons bombed the factory near Sovana that was making the drug, Mia was dead. Fiona had lost her husband when the _Atlantia_ was destroyed over Picon. Kara understood completely why Fiona Nagala had joined the resistance. Kara had joined for the same reason, not for a husband and a child whose lives had been cut short, but for her parents.

"Hello, Mrs. Nagala," Kara said.

"Kara," Fiona said warmly. "What brings you out here?"

"I wanted to say hello to everyone. Are you on the way to your office?"

"Yes. Walk with me. You can tell me what you've been up to."

As they climbed the stairs to the second floor, Kara said, "I'm learning to fly the Mark VII right now."

Fiona smiled. "You'd never know I was once married to an admiral of the fleet. I'm afraid I'm rather ignorant of types of ships. I presume that's a Viper?"

"The latest and greatest. I talked to Colonel Burgher a couple of weeks ago. He said this year's cadets weren't quite up to our caliber. What do you think?"

"I think we've got a number of outstanding students…but perhaps not quite as many as in your class."

They reached the second floor and started down the hall.

"How is Laura?" Fiona asked.

"She's doing good. Working herself to death being President, but other than that…" she shrugged.

"I assume you're here to see Hugh."

Kara nodded. "I missed him when I was here a couple of weeks ago. Colonel Burgher said he'd taken Stacey to the doctor."

Sadness passed over Fiona's beautiful face. "She's…I'll let Hugh tell you. He should be in his office."

"It's good to see you again."

"How is Admiral Adama?"

"The same."

"Is he still dating Laura? There were quite a few pictures of them going to functions together and then for the last several weeks hardly anything."

"They've both been busy. And they were never _dating_. He goes places with her so she won't have to go by herself. They aren't…it's not like that with them."

"Perhaps one day she'll be able to move on," Fiona said gently. "I'm sure Bill will be waiting for her when she is. She won't mourn your father forever, Kara. You shouldn't expect her to."

"I've never said anything to Laura one way or the other. That's her decision."

"I'm finally moving on. Paul and I are going to get married as soon as his divorce is final."

"You mean Frogman?" Kara named her handler in the resistance.

Kara glanced at Fiona's hand and noticed the wide gold wedding band that she had continued to wear long after Admiral Nagala's death was gone."

Fiona smiled. "Yes. Frogman."

"Congratulations. Tell him I said _so_."

"I will. Take care, Kara."

Fiona entered her office and Kara continued down the hall. When she got to Hugh Connelly's office, he was sitting at his desk staring out the small window.

The door was open. Kara knocked lightly on the doorjamb.

"Hi,"

He looked up and for a few seconds he didn't move. Then he was on his feet. Kara took several steps into the small office and was in his arms. They would always share the bond of the refugee camp, those experiences which were growing more distant in time but which lived just beneath the surface in both of them.

She pulled back and looked at his handsome face. There were tears in his twilight blue eyes.

"Are you okay?" Kara asked.

He stepped back and blotted at his eyes with the back of his hand and managed a smile.

"You caught me at a weak moment. How are you?"

"Good. You?"

He shook his head. "We got some bad news last week. Stacey has cancer."

"Oh, gods, Connelly. I'm so sorry."

"She's going to start chemo next week. We should know more in a few months."

He sat down behind his desk and Kara sat in a chair opposite. The office had grown more crowded since she'd last been there nearly seven months earlier. There were two additional bookcases and another file cabinet.

She gestured. "If you keep on, you're going to have to move your desk into the hall."

"I was asked to do some research on something you might be familiar with. I've been amassing everything I can find."

"What?"

He managed another smile. "It's supposed to be classified."

She smirked, "like I've never been exposed to classified material. Is it about Nereid?"

"Something that's supposed to be on Nereid."

"The Kobol Stone."

He seemed surprised. "Either that was a really lucky guess or you're involved in the project."

She smiled. "It was a lucky guess. So what have you found out so far?"

"Not a lot. The ancient manuscripts and texts that spoke of it were all housed in the huge library controlled by the Church of the Monad on Gemenon. Everything I've found so far is second hand…an article or book by someone who claimed to have read something from their archives. They apparently controlled access to that information more closely than Caprica University controls its early Zeus archives."

"You need to talk to Hunter."

"Who's Hunter?"

"He's the guy I brought back from Nereid with me. He knew an old guy who claimed to have found it."

Connelly sat silently appraising her for a few moments. "So that's where you were."

"That's where I was."

"I'd like to meet him."

"I'll see if I can arrange it. Who's got you looking for the stone?"

"The person who visited me was a nice, scholarly gentleman from a government agency, but I think it's a cover for military intelligence."

"Why are they looking for the stone?"

"He never mentioned anything other than the historical and religious significance of it, but my personal feeling is that they're afraid the Cylons will find it. The stone is supposed to contain pointers to Kobol and possibly even Earth."

"Hunter told us that the old guy who claimed to have found the stone was able to speak ancient…or what they thought was the ancient Kobol language. He might have been just babbling. Everybody in Hunter's settlement thought he was crazy. He disappeared into the mountains years ago and nobody's heard from him since."

"I really need to meet Hunter."

"I'll figure out a way. Do you want to do it officially or unofficially?"

"However you can arrange it."

Kara stood. "Don't worry. I'll get you two together. I'm going to go hassle Colonel Burgher before I go. I'll be in touch."

Connelly came around the desk and they hugged again. Kara didn't say it but she thought of how great it would be if one day after Nereid was liberated, Hugh Connelly could go there and search for the Kobol Stone himself with Hunter's help, of course.

...

That evening Kara knocked on the door of Laura's sitting room and heard Laura's soft reply to come in. She knew that she didn't have to worry about Laura having company that evening as she often did now that Bill was dining with them several nights a week. Tonight Admiral Adama had been absent at dinner because Saul Tigh was back on Caprica for a week of shore leave and Adama was dining with Saul and Ellen. When Tigh was on Caprica, Bill spent as much time as he could with his long-time friend and former XO.

Kara had asked Lee tonight if Ellen Tigh was still drinking and running around on her husband. Lee's answer had been a shrug and the comment that he didn't keep up with Ellen's adventures. Kara felt reasonably certain that leopards didn't change their spots and neither did Ellen Tigh.

"Come in, please," Laura said warmly.

She was sitting with her legs drawn up on the coach. There was a stack of binders on the table beside her and two more stacks on the floor. It had been a while since Kara had been in Laura's sitting room. It was getting more piled with the evidence of all the issues facing her on Caprica.

Kara sat in one of the comfortable armchairs and Laura took off her reading glasses.

"Have Lee and Hunter left already?"

"Yes. We want to get an early start tomorrow because it's supposed to get hot later in the day. We're helping Dreilide move from his apartment on the third floor to one on the first floor. His building doesn't have an elevator and he can't keep climbing two flights of stairs a couple of times a day. The stairwell is dusty concrete which doesn't help either."

"His condition is getting worse?"

Kara nodded and rubbed her face with her hands. "That's what emphysema does. It gets worse. He's got an oxygen tank now. He doesn't use it all the time, but…" she shrugged.

"I'm so sorry, Kara," Laura said gently.

"There's a woman who lives on the second floor. Her name is Paulla. She helps him out a lot. I think she's got a thing for him, but he won't admit it. She's a monotheist. I call her Ms. Soup and Sermons because when she brings him food, he has to listen to her talk about her faith."

"Have her words had any effect on him?"

"No. His music was always his religion. He never went to the temple with me and my mother when we lived on Picon."

"Your mother took you to worship services?" Laura asked in mild surprise.

"Is there something weird about that?" Kara asked.

"No. Certainly not. John rarely spoke of your mother. I suppose I never considered her faith at all."

Kara sat for a minute and tried to decide whether she should say what was on her mind. Finally she continued.

"Dad loved her…but things weren't all that great between them and it was mostly because of me…because she kept him out of my life. Before I left last fall to go to the _Galactica_, he and I had a long talk. He told me…that he wished she'd been more like you…the way you and him are raising Brae together and the way you accepted me and treat me like a daughter. He said that's the way a family is supposed to be. He really loves you."

Laura put her hand over the dog tags and made a small choking noise. She couldn't stop the tears that were forming in her eyes. She had never loved John more than she did at that moment.

Maybe it was thinking about Dreilide's worsening health and her father still a prisoner on Nereid, but Kara found that she was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. She struggled and managed to suppress her tears. She wanted to kill all the Cylons who had hurt her father...starting with Sonja.

She took a deep breath. "When I was thirteen and Dad brought me and Karl here from Picon, he had to leave us at a little airport because Tom Zarek and a bunch of escaped prisoners hijacked his ship. Dad said he was coming back for us so me and Karl waited in the woods above the airport for four days. That was while all the fighting and bombing was going on. Then on the fourth night a ship fell from the sky nearby. I was half crazy by then so I made Karl pack up our things and we started walking. Karl knew that it was a lot farther than I thought, but he didn't argue with me. We walked all night. Early the next morning we found the ship. It was a Viper…or what was left of one. The pilot was still inside. He had partiallly burned but not completely."

"Oh, dear gods," Laura said.

The memories of that night were spooling out with incredible clarity instead of the dream-like way Kara usually remembered them.

"I knew it wasn't my dad, but…that's when I accepted that he was dead, that Zarek had killed him. I knew he was dead because I believed that's the only thing that could have stopped him from coming back for me. I had no idea his ship was intercepted by the _Galactica_ and Admiral Adama wouldn't let him leave."

"He couldn't. That was during the worst of the fighting."

"I know that now, but I didn't then. All I could think of for why he hadn't come back for me was that Zarek had killed him. I took the dead Viper pilot's glove off and I took his wedding ring and I put it on the chain with my mother's dog tags. I thought they were together in Elysium and maybe they'd be happy because I was still here so they wouldn't have me to fight about any more."

"Oh, Kara, John never told me."

"That's because I never told him all of it. I never told him how I spent the next three years planning to kill Zarek. First at the little stone house where Karl and I lived until the soldiers found us and then later in the camp. I'd lie awake in my bed and dream of how I'd do it. I must have thought of a dozen different ways, but always before I did it, I was going to tell him who I was and why he was going to die."

Laura couldn't imagine what Kara had suffered. A whole side of her step-daughter was emerging of which she had no previous knowledge. She took a deep breath as Kara continued.

"Then I joined the resistance and killed that copy of Simon and a Leoben at the Cylon lab and suddenly killing somebody didn't seem so…easy. I was a long way away from them when I pulled the trigger. I started thinking about what it would take to walk up to a man and blow him away face to face."

"You were hardly more than a child."

"Karl was the only person I told about my plan to kill Zarek until I met Connelly. Connelly talked to me about what the desire for revenge does to a person, about how it eats your soul. I couldn't understand how he could be that way when the Cylons had cost him everybody in his life including his parents and his first wife and their little boy. I don't have a crush on him like I did then, but there's still a bond between us. I think there always will be. He told me that when you save someone's life, you own a little piece of their soul. I saved his and he saved mine. I went to see him today out at the Academy. Stacey has cancer."

"What?" Laura asked in shock, not sure she had heard the last sentence correctly.

"She starts chemotherapy next week."

"What kind of cancer?"

"He didn't say. When I went to see Colonel Burgher a couple of weeks ago, he told me that Stacey had lost the baby. I went to see Burgher today but he didn't mention it. I didn't ask."

"I didn't even know she was pregnant," Laura said.

"I forgot to tell you. I saw Connelly when I was out at the Academy last fall picking up Dad's things. They'd just found out. He was so happy."

"How far along was she?"

"A couple of months. She wasn't getting better afterward so she had to go in for some tests. I guess that's when they found the cancer."

"I'll have to call Hugh and ask him if I can do anything for them."

"Their little girl Elaina will be four later this summer. He has a picture of her on his desk. She's beautiful. She has long dark hair and huge blue eyes just like his. Her name's actually Deborah Elaina, but they call her by her middle name. It was Stacey's mother's name. His mother was named Miriam Deborah. They followed the ancient naming tradition just like you and Dad did with Brae."

Laura got up from the couch and walked to the sideboard. "Would you like a drink?"

"No thanks. It's going to be hard enough for me to get up early tomorrow morning. Saturday's are my sleep-in day."

Laura poured a small glass of straight whiskey and went back to the couch.

Kara said, "I might ask you to look over the letter I've got to write to Admiral Adama as part of my sentence. You were once a teacher and all that. I thought I'd write it Sunday afternoon and take it to Major McKenna on my way back from the airbase on Monday."

"Of course. I'll be glad to."

"Has Admiral Adama said anything about how long it'll be before we go to Nereid?"

"Months. That's all I can get him to say. I want John home, too, Kara. No one can want him home more than I do."

"I know. I keep thinking about that Sonja and the way she hit him. I hope I get a chance to see her again when we go there. I really hope I get the chance."

Laura took another sip of the drink. "Do you think…she and John are…that they're..." She couldn't force the words out.

"Are you asking if I think he's sleeping with her?"

"Yes."

"Hunter thinks so just because he's never heard of a human with that much freedom who wasn't paying for it in some way."

Laura sipped her drink and then took a deep breath. "I appreciate your honesty."

"Look, Laura. Sonja is a frakking Cylon. He's not going to have any feelings for a machine and that's all she is."

"I think you've underestimated her. She's beautiful like Natasi and Natasi looks and feels just like a human woman. She acts like a seductive human woman. I even saw her turn her charm on Romo, not that it did any good, but it's simply her nature to try to seduce men. Her creators made her that way."

"She's still a machine. Lee read the autopsy reports on the Cylons killed in the bunker. They've got data ports in their arms that go straight to their brains. Data ports for the gods sakes. You can stick a T-1 line into their arms and hook them up to a computer and they can communicate with it in a two-way data transfer. Leoben told me that on their basestars they stick their hands in a stream of goo like liquid crystals or something and they can talk to each other with just their thoughts. Lee said it sounds like they're sending bits and bytes, ones and zeros through the stream just like a frakking computer. Does that sound like something my dad would get _involved_ with?"

"I didn't know any of that."

"I'm just saying. We both know that you don't have to feel anything for a guy to frak him. I mean not that you've done anything like that or me either, but people do it all the time…even Lee. When he was on the _Triton_ after Blaire broke up with him, he frakked another Viper pilot a couple of times and he said it didn't mean anything to either one of them." Kara put her head in her hands. "Gods, I can't believe I just told you that. You can never tell Lee."

"I'm aware that when John was on the _Solaria_ he had…three or four girlfriends…not all at once, but…well maybe there were two at one time because…" Laura stopped. Kara didn't need to hear the story about her father and the two Raptor pilots in the shower.

Kara snorted. "Three or four? Is that what he told you?"

She wanted to ask Laura if she really believed her father had been on a battlestar for almost five years and had slept with only three or four women. Maybe if she factored that number by five she'd be closer to the actual number, especially if you counted all the women he'd met on shore leave.

"John never talked about his other women to me. He's too much of a gentleman. You've been on a battlestar. You know what happens in those bunkrooms. You think it was more than that?"

Kara realized that Laura Roslin didn't need to hear the truth about the man she loved. She also didn't need to hear the prophecy Yolanda had made about another child, a son that would be born to either a Three or Sonja. Kara knew she would not be able to bear the look on Laura's face if she told her that. Maybe Yolanda had made a mistake.

Kara shrugged. "I'd say five girlfriends on the _Solaria _is about right. After he met my mom, that was it for him. So if he's doing something like that with a Cylon, you can bet he's got a good reason…like trying to figure out a way to get back here to you and Brae."

Laura sat for a few moments sensing that Kara had either lied to her about something or was holding something back, but it wasn't important to her anymore. Nothing that John had done before they had met was important to her. If he'd slept with a dozen women or a hundred it made no difference to her now. If he was sleeping with one or even two Cylons, she knew he had a good reason. It wasn't something he would willingly choose to do.

"Thank you," she said softly to Kara.

Kara stood. "I guess I'd better go to bed. Lee and Hunter are picking me up early in the morning. We're going to stop somewhere and get breakfast and take it to Dreilide's apartment."

"Sleep tight," Laura said. "And please be careful helping your stepfather move tomorrow. A tumble down a dusty concrete stairwell might end your flying career. Carry smaller loads and make more trips."

At the door Kara turned. "My dad wants to come home to you. That's the only thing you should think about. The last thing he said to me on Nereid was to tell you that he loves you."

Laura nodded and the tears welled in her eyes again. When Kara was gone, she took her drink to the window and looked out over Caprica City. She was at the epitome of power. She held the highest office in the Colonies and tonight she would give it all up to have John walk up behind her and wrap his arms around her, to feel his lips against her neck and to hear him whisper to her of his love, a love that belonged to her and her alone.

_..._

John rolled over, looked at the clock beside his bed and jumped up. It was after five o'clock in the morning. For the first time since he'd been brought from the prison, he hadn't awakened to a nightmare sometime between three and four a.m. And he'd almost overslept.

Sunrise today would occur a few minutes after six. He had less than an hour to put his plan into motion. He dressed hastily and buttoned the picture of Laura and Brae into his shirt pocket. He brushed his teeth but didn't bother to shave. He added the toothbrush and razor to the clothes he'd packed in the plastic bag the night before. In the living room he placed the book of scriptures on top. He'd wrapped the prayer beads in a t-shirt to protect them.

He was almost to the door of his apartment when he remembered Socrata's pistol that Kara had left with him. He went into the kitchen, stood on a chair and retrieved the gun from the top of the middle cabinet. He took a pair of sweatpants out of the bag and rolled the gun in them before he buried it in the middle of the clothes. He wished he'd asked his new centurion friend if they could detect weapons. It wouldn't care, but the other one at the transportation garage might.

He decided to take a chance and left the gun in his bag. He picked up the letter he had written Sonja and folded it before he grabbed the bag in one hand and exited the apartment. He rode the elevator down one floor and walked to the end of the hall. At her apartment he quietly slipped the letter under the door and tried to push the word _coward_ from his mind.

He knew that the kitchen staff was already at work. The night before he'd told Doolittle that he would be leaving in the morning and would let him know _when_ he returned. He had looked Doolittle directly in the eyes as he'd said it. Doolittle had simply nodded. He knew what John was saying. Doolittle had wished him the best of luck. John had told him again that he was a good man and that he felt privileged to have met him. Doolittle had stepped back and had given John a perfect salute. It had brought tears to his eyes.

He exited the elevator in the lobby and quickly turned toward the outside door. The centurion at the desk and the ones on either side of the door scanned him with their red eyes but made no move to stop him as he casually walked out the door. If they noted the black plastic bag he was carrying, it raised no alarms.

He didn't start walking fast until he turned the corner of the building. The transportation garage was five blocks away. More centurions patrolled the city during the night than during the day, but by 5:20 in the morning, some of the humans who cooked and cleaned for the Cylons were already up and about. John kept his pace fast, but he didn't run since it might attract attention.

His whole plan hinged on whether the bullet scarred centurion, whom he had named _Buddy_, would be at the garage when he got there. The sky was now light gray and as he looked east between the buildings, a broad band of pink was showing on the horizon. He saw the tall silver guards from a block away but he couldn't tell until he was in front of them. His heart was hammering hard in his chest and then he saw the bullet scar. Relief washed over him. He stood and waited. Nothing happened.

Finally he said, "I need a vehicle."

The sound of the big garage door starting up was the sweetest sound he'd heard in a long time.

He had a second scare when another centurion was waiting in the garage. He stopped in confusion, but it simply clanked past him and took up the position outside the door that Buddy had just occupied. Smart. The robot was smart.

He quickly unplugged the electric cable from the nearest small transport and threw the bag into the passenger seat. Buddy was standing beside him. There was no way the robot would fit into this vehicle or any other. He was too big. Buddy pointed toward the door. John eased the vehicle out of the garage and the big door began descending. He turned left instead of right in order to avoid the square. By taking side streets he reached the edge of the city without being noticed. Buddy was easily keeping pace with him. On the road to the airstrip John accelerated and Buddy still kept up. It was the first time he realized just how fast the big centurions could run. He soon had the vehicle pegged at its top speed of about thirty-five miles an hour. Buddy was right beside him, his metal feet clanking on the pavement, his arms pumping just like a human.

At the airfield the cargo ship was already outside of the hangar and was being fueled by the two centurion pilots. John pulled the vehicle into the hangar and removed the bag. Buddy stood beside him.

"I've got a pistol in this bag," he said to it. "Can you tell?"

It made the slight side to side motion of its head that John had come to understand meant _no_.

"Okay, then. Let's go."

They walked up the ramp into the cargo hold which was filled with empty vegetable crates, crates that would be exchanged for full ones when the ship left the settlement to return to the city. John stowed his bag in an empty locker and found a jump seat. He didn't want to push his luck by going to the cockpit again. And for a reason he couldn't quite understand, he didn't want to leave Buddy back here alone.

"Have a seat," John said. "They're not all that comfortable, but it's not a long flight."

Buddy sat with one empty seat between them. That way his wide metal shoulders wouldn't crowd John.

The two centurion pilots entered the ship and went into the cockpit. A few minutes later the boarding ramp came up and sealed. They began to taxi. Not until he felt the big ship leave the runway did John begin to relax. The sound of the landing gear retracting into the wheel wells and the hydraulic thump of the wheel bay doors as they closed was like music to his ears. He had actually pulled it off. He was on his way to the next phase of his life on this planet. He felt like he was one step closer to home.

"I'm going to call you Buddy," he said over the noise of the engines, "so that's how I'll introduce you to Natalie. It means _friend_."

TBC…


	40. A Good Man

Chapter 40

A Good Man

_15. The Lord said to Sharon, Seek ye not revenge upon your husband for the death of your brother_

_16. For vengeance is mine, and I will bring ruin to his household and heap sorrow upon his head._

_16. But Sharon heeded not the words of her God, the God of her people._

_17. She rose up in great anger and slew Nimrod and his father,_

_18. And took the Kobol Stone and fled into the mountains where she repented of her sin and prayed for forgiveness._

_19. The Lord heard Sharon's prayer and with his Mighty Hand He wrote upon the stone._

_20. On one side He wrote His commandments by which mankind should live their lives, _

_21. And on the other side he carved the star path to Kobol and the path to an unknown star._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Xander, _Chapter 10:15-21

.

Kara sat on the freshly-scrubbed kitchen floor of the apartment Dreilide Thrace would today begin calling home. She was hot and dirty and sweating and thankful to stop working for a while. She clutched a Red Taurus in one hand that was not quite as cold as she would have liked since she'd had the refrigerator open for half an hour as she'd cleaned it, but the drink was wet and would soon give her a boost of much-needed energy. She leaned her head back against one of the cabinet doors and closed her eyes.

Hunter was sitting across from her in the tiny kitchen, a similar drink in his own hand. He slid his booted foot over and bumped her sneaker.

"You okay?"

Kara opened her eyes. "I'll feel better when Lee gets back with lunch and I've eaten something. I think my energy from breakfast ran out a couple of hours ago."

"Me, too. Is your stepdad feeling better?"

"He will be after he rests. It was stupid of him to try to help us. He's got chronic bronchitis on top of the emphysema and it flared up early this week. Paulla told me he finally got his antibiotic refilled yesterday."

"I just met him this morning and even I can tell that he's in denial about how bad his illness is."

"I think he knows the truth. He just doesn't want me to know it…like I can't see the shape he's in."

Kara had insisted that Dreilide go to Paulla's apartment and rest after she'd found him white-faced and coughing, struggling to get his breath as he carried a box of sheet music down the stairs. It was his third trip that morning and it was two trips too many. She'd lost her cool and they'd had it out in the stairwell to the point that several people had come to see what was going on.

By then Drielide was sitting on the steps with the box beside him and Kara was furiously berating him for trying to kill himself. Paulla had solved the dilemma by taking Dreilide to her apartment and earning Kara's gratitude. Paulla had been dealing with her stepdad's illness longer than she had and knew how to handle him.

Kara had carried the box of sheet music downstairs and had then turned her attention to thoroughly cleaning the small first floor apartment while Lee and Hunter began moving the furniture. It took Kara barely five minutes to determine that whoever had moved out of this apartment might have left it undamaged, but they had rated zero in their housekeeping skills. The landlord had slapped a fresh coat of beige paint on the walls but had done nothing else. Cheap bastard. He should have hired professional cleaners.

Kara had borrowed Paulla's vacuum and spent twenty minutes thoroughly vacuuming the small bedroom and living room. The rest of the time she had spent on her hands and knees scrubbing layers of dirt and grime from the bathroom and kitchen floors. By the time the kitchen floor was spotless, she was dirty and sweating but so were Lee and Hunter. They'd just wrestled the couch down two flights of stairs.

Kara had continued her cleaning by taking down and throwing out the dusty old drapes in both the bedroom and the living room. She'd cleaned the windows and washed the blinds. By that time Lee and Hunter had gotten the rest of the living room furniture downstairs.

Lee had finally made them all stop working and said he was going out to pick up some lunch for them. Kara had gotten three cans of Red Taurus from the fridge, handed one of them to Lee and he had left.

Now she and Hunter sat without talking for several minutes as the sweat on her face dried and the jolt of caffeine in the drink kicked in.

She laughed softly. "You're almost as dirty as you were the day I met you."

Hunter smiled and rubbed the tail of his t-shirt around his face. "Give me another couple of hours. I'll get there."

"What's still left to move?"

"The furniture in the bedroom and some more books and sheet music stacked on the floor in the living room. If you can empty a couple of these boxes we'll be able to get it all."

Kara nodded and took another sip of the stimulating drink.

"As soon as we eat, I'll do that. I talked to Laura about my dad last night. I'd put it off long enough. Now it's done and I can quit dreading it."

"How'd it go?"

"Awkward. At least she knows now what's probably going on with him and that Sonja bitch."

"Did it upset her?"

"Not in the way I thought it would. She loves him. She's not mad at _him_. She just wants him back. The only thing I didn't mention was Yolanda's prophecy about him having another kid. Who knows? Maybe we'll get my dad back and Laura will be the one having a baby."

But even as Kara said the words, she knew they weren't true. She was going to have a brother or sister who was half Cylon. Yolanda had never been wrong in anything she'd ever told her. The thought that it might be Sonja's kid made her feel sick.

Hunter had his head back and his eyes closed now. "Laura is a special lady. I listen to her talk at dinner every night and I don't see how she keeps up with all the stuff involved in being President."

"She's got a lot of good advisors including Admiral Adama. She's been in the government most of her life, too. She grew up in it. Her father was a Colonial ambassador. My dad used to tell her that she teethed on diplomatic documents."

"I never heard her mention her parents. Did they die in the holocaust?"

"No. While she was in college here on Caprica, a suicide bomber killed her parents and her brother on Tauron. Her father was there trying to work out some kind of deal between the natives and the tylium consortiums so they'd quit fighting."

"You mean Coretta and Ogala's people killed Laura's parents?"

"I don't know enough to say. I just know it got ugly there after tylium was discovered under the tundra."

"When are we going to see Ogala?"

"Who says we're going to see Ogala?"

"Lee. He said that sooner or later you'd go to see him since he's a shaman and Yolanda Brenn is dead and you're into that sort of thing."

"He thinks I listened to Yolanda too much. That was always a problem with me and him."

"Even after all her prophecies came true?"

"He says she made a couple of lucky guesses that I interpreted _after_ the event happened. Like when she told my dad that Brae was going to be a boy a month before Laura had her ultrasound and without either of us even mentioning to her that Laura was pregnant. The thing is that Lee's not going to admit to anything that he can't explain. He'd rather just say it was all smoke and mirrors and mind-tricks."

"Why doesn't he believe in the gods?"

"I don't know, Hunter. You'll have to ask him. Admiral Adama doesn't believe, either, but Zak does so go figure."

"I'm glad Maya is a believer."

Kara grinned. "Because you want her to help you raise Esmari?"

"Who knows what's going to happen when I go back to Nereid and we fight the Cylons?"

"I have a feeling Maya will be waiting for you when it's over."

For the first time Hunter didn't argue with her. He just smiled and bumped her sneaker again.

"There's somebody else I want you to meet," Kara went on. "Hugh Connelly who was in the refugee camp with me. He's teaching at the Academy now and he's been asked to do some research on the Kobol Stone."

"I told you I don't have a clue where it is…if it even exists. Personally I think it's nothing but a myth."

"He'd just like to hear your story about the old guy…your oracle's crazy brother."

"I can tell him for all the good it'll do. He needs to talk to Mrs. Hoshi, too."

"Why? She never mentioned the Kobol Stone in her journals. I know. I read every single page. So did Connelly."

"Maybe she never mentioned it, but are you sure she never heard anyone discuss it? Did your father ever ask her about it?"

"I don't know. That's a good idea." She smiled at him. "I knew I let you hang around me for a reason."

"Somebody's got to keep you straight. How are Sharon and her baby?"

"Sharon's doing fine. I was going to see them yesterday afternoon after I left the Academy, but they were still at the hospital. I left Karl a message and he called me back late last night. All he said was the doctor is pleased with the progress Hera is making. Karl was beat. I could hear it in his voice. They'd been at the hospital since early yesterday morning. They're getting to hold Hera now and they don't want to leave."

"Are they still in Lee's apartment?"

"For now. Karl leased one in Lee's building, but their furniture hasn't been delivered yet. They'll move soon…maybe next week."

"Is Lee moving back into his apartment?"

"You'll have to ask him. Why? You want Laura's apartment all to yourself?"

"No. I hope he stays. He knows the best movies to watch."

"Did I tell you that Lee and I have to go to dinner tonight with his father and Laura and Colonel Tigh and his wife?"

"It doesn't sound like you're looking forward to it."

"I'd rather take on a dozen Raiders. Colonel Tigh doesn't much care for me because I'm friends with Sharon, but he's okay. His wife's the one I'm dreading being around. She's…let's just say she doesn't understand the meaning of moderation or fidelity."

"What exactly does that mean?"

"She drinks too much and cheats on her husband…a lot."

"Why does he put up with it?"

Kara shrugged. "You'd have to ask him." They sat in silence for a minute. Kara finally said, "You and Maya seem to be getting along well."

"What's she said about me?"

"She doesn't have to say anything. She's happier than I've ever seen her. At least you two will get to do something fun tonight…just the two of you."

"Are you and Lee going to be tied up all night with dinner?"

"I've already told Lee that we're leaving as soon as we can. We're going to Bonnie Patrice which is so fancy I have to wear a _dress_."

"That's not such a bad thing from my perspective."

She gave him an eye roll.

"Why is Laura going to dinner with the Admiral? You told me there's nothing between them."

"Because the admiral asked her. She's had him to dinner enough times lately. He owes her. Besides, him and Laura go way back…but there's nothing romantic between them _now_…at least not on her part. I think he's still got a thing for her."

"That's too bad."

"I wish he'd move on. I wish Lee would go ahead and ask him about Marta Shaw. She's a lot like Laura. The admiral might like her."

"You haven't asked for my advice, but I'm going to give it to you anyway. The people involved are adults who don't need anybody's help arranging their social lives…so stay out of it."

Kara turned the drink up and drained it. She finally felt cool and infused with energy.

"Even when they're totally dense about their social lives?"

"Has Lee's father asked you to become his personal matchmaker?"

"Funny, Hunter." There was a knock on the door. "That's Lee with our lunch."

Hunter scrambled to his feet. "I'll get it. I'm starving."

Lee walked into the small kitchen and plopped two bags down on the counter. Kara wet a paper towel and wiped several smudges from his face.

"You look like you've been crawling around on the obstacle course. I hope you used the drive-through."

"I did."

"Did the girl who took your cubits look at you funny?"

Lee took the paper towel from her and finished wiping his face. "It was a guy and no, he didn't look at me funny. He asked me for a date."

"What'd you tell him?"

Lee grinned. "I said I had a girlfriend who was tougher than he was. He was joking anyway. I went to high school with him. We were on the soccer team together."

"And he's still working at Borus Burgers?"

"It's a job."

Hunter was already removing paper-wrapped burgers from the bag.

"They're all alike," Lee said. "I got enough so we could invite Paulla."

"I'll go get her and Dreilide," Kara said. "I need to apologize for yelling at him in the stairwell."

When she was gone, Lee said, "It's going to be hard on her when Dreilide…" he shrugged.

"Dies?"

"He's gotten a lot worse during this last year. I know she loves John, but she loves him, too."

"Life's a bitch. We lose the people we love."

"I know."

"So why is Kara dreading dinner so much tonight? Is the Tigh woman really that bad?"

"Let's just put it this way. I won't willingly sit across from her at the table. She has a habit of taking off her shoe and putting her foot in the lap of the guy who's across from her. Just be glad you don't have to go tonight. She'd zero in on you like a compass finds magnetic north."

Hunter started eating one of the burgers. "Kara mentioned her roving eye. I don't have much respect for a man who stays with a woman like that."

Lee unwrapped his burger. "John doesn't either. I saw him and Tigh almost get into it at a restaurant one time. It was right after the ceremony where my father got promoted to admiral. Laura had planned a nice lunch for us and my dad had asked Tigh because they've been friends since before I was born. Tigh kept going to the bathroom and drinking out of a flask he always carries with him…like that was fooling anybody. I think one of the reasons he drinks is because of Ellen, and when he drinks he's not too careful about what he says. He started ragging on John…something about Kara and her Cylon friends. My dad got Tigh out of there before it got ugly, but I was holding my breath. One thing you don't do with John is threaten his family…verbally or otherwise."

"I figured that out about him as soon as I met him. His only concern was getting Kara away from Nereid. I feel the same way about my little girl. I'd kill anybody who tried to harm her."

"So what are you and Maya doing tonight?"

"Going to a movie. Something new that Maya wants to see. It'll be the first time I've ever seen a movie in a theater. Kendra and Dwight are meeting us there. Then we'll probably go to Zeno's. After you and Kara left last week, Maya and Kendra hit it off. They planned the evening."

"We'll plan to head to Zeno's as soon as we can gracefully get away from dinner."

The door opened and Kara walked in. "Dreilide's asleep. I told Paulla I'd bring their food up there so she'll have it when he wakes up."

She gathered several of the burgers and put them in a bag. At the door she turned.

"You're both good guys to help out like you're doing today. At the risk of sounding mushy, it means a lot to me."

Then she was gone and the door closed behind her.

"She would never have asked for help if it was for herself," Lee said.

"Too self-reliant," Hunter said between bites. "She made a big impression on my aunt because she wanted to earn her keep while she was on Nereid. She even helped Seléne wash Esmari's dirty diapers."

"Kara Thrace washed dirty diapers?" Lee asked in surprise.

Hunter grinned. "Maybe we'd better keep that to ourselves. She'll kick my butt if she knows I told you."

...

John and Buddy walked down the transport's ramp at the settlement airfield without so much as a glance from the other centurions who were busy unloading the empty crates. John looked at the top of the hangar and the old windsock. Even though it was warm, there was a mild and very humid breeze from the west. A thin layer of clouds was forming near the horizon, possibly signaling rain later in the day. He began walking and Buddy followed. When John turned onto the shortcut, the grass in the meadow was sparkling with dew in the early morning sun. John felt the last bit of tension leave him. He had the sensation that he was coming home after a long trip away, much the way he'd felt every time he'd landed at the airport in Picon City when he'd lived there and then later Caprica City. It made no sense to him, but he felt it deep in his gut.

Sometime during the last week the flock of sheep had been sheared. Several lifted their heads from grazing and watched him and Buddy pass by, their jaws in constant motion.

"Sheep," he said as he pointed them out, "and sweet potatoes over here. Those plants looked like they doubled in size during the last week. This soil must really be rich and fertile."

He kept up a running commentary about the terrain as they made their way to Natalie's house. When the path entered the woods, he thought about Jade and wondered if she had dressed in her camouflage outfit and stalked around in the woods since he'd last been there.

The house came into view and again John pointed. "Natalie's place. She's the First Six, but you probably know all about the first copies of each model."

Buddy gave him the slight nod.

Natalie and Yoshimo were sitting at the little wooden table on her patio drinking tea. A week earlier when he had shown up with Sonja and D'Anna, she hadn't expressed any surprise, but surprise was clearly evident on her face today. On Yoshimo's, too. And then John realized that it was probably Buddy's presence at his side.

"Good morning," he said pleasantly and put the plastic bag down on the edge of the patio. "May we join you?"

Natalie stood. Her look had changed from surprise to concern.

John said, "I know this looks weird, but there is an explanation…one I think you're going to be glad to hear."

"Where did this centurion come from?"

"I brought him with me from the city."

"You…_brought_ him from the city? Did Sonja order him to accompany you?"

"No one _ordered_ him to do anything. I asked him to join me on this trip. Let's get the introductions out of the way first. Natalie and Yoshimo, this is Buddy."

John waited while the red eye scanned both of them, committing their retinal patterns to memory, possibly associating the pattern with a name. Of course Natalie's pattern was probably already in there somewhere so that all Buddy needed to do was verify it.

Without rising from his chair Yoshimo bowed slightly to both of them and said to John, "It's good to see you again so soon."

John turned and spoke to Buddy, "Yoshimo is a human like me, and he's helping D'Anna, the mother of our peacemaker. He's also my friend. Treat him just like you would me."

Buddy nodded.

Natalie's jaw dropped slightly. "Did he just _nod_ at you?"

"That's his main way of communicating unless you count writing in the dirt."

Suddenly Natalie's face was suffused by a big smile. "This is a joke, isn't it? You're trying to teach us about a sense of humor. Sonja gave orders to one of the centurions to go along with it. Where is she? Hiding around the bend in the path laughing at me?"

"Sonja didn't come along on this trip. She normally sleeps late. This early in the morning she's probably still in bed with one of her lovers."

Natalie stared at him in confusion.

"John tells you the truth," Yoshimo said. "Sonja did not accompany him. The centurion truly appears to be communicating with him."

"Is the tea still warm?" John asked. "If not I'll be glad to make some more. What about those cookies? I missed breakfast again."

"I think I deserve an explanation."

"You'll get one."

"Sit and talk," Yoshimo told them both. "I'll make more tea and get more cookies."

As he went toward the house with the tray, Natalie's fluffy orange cat Daniel emerged from the shrubbery. Apparently he wasn't used to centurions because as soon as he saw Buddy, he arched his back and the long hair stood on end. He suddenly looked twice his normal size. A low growl emanated from his throat as he moved sideways and stiff-legged toward them.

Buddy extended one of his long steel talons and took several steps toward the cat. John finally realized what was about to happen.

"No!" he said sharply to the robot. "The cat doesn't mean any harm to us. He's just afraid of you. His name is Daniel."

Natalie rushed over to the cat, putting herself between him and the centurion. John heard her murmuring in a soothing voice but Daniel would not be pacified and continued to growl. Finally she picked him up and carried him into the house.

Buddy knelt and scratched in the path. John walked over.

_Daniel avatar in cat?_

John chuckled. "No, Daniel's avatar is not in the cat. I don't think even the creators could put an avatar into an animal. That stuff only happens in the imaginary world of wizards and magic. It makes for great entertainment, but we live in the real world."

Buddy scratched more words.

_Why name cat Daniel if no avatar? Why not name it Cat?_

John lowered his voice. "Natalie was in love with one of the Sevens, one of the Daniels who was killed. She honors his memory by naming the cat after him and then caring for it. Do you understand?"

John got the slight side to side movement of Buddy's head. Apparently emotions weren't the only thing the creators had omitted from both the U-87s and the new centurions. Concepts such as naming pets and probably even loved ones after someone else seemed foreign to him.

"Just take my word for it. Natalie has feelings for the cat."

Yoshimo came out carrying the tea tray. John sat and while Yoshimo poured, he reached for a cookie.

"Daniel is most unhappy," Yoshimo said. "He scratched Natalie. She's cleaning her wound. Daniel is sulking in a corner with his ears slicked back. I don't think he likes your robot friend."

"Maybe in one of his former lives a centurion skewered him with one of its talons."

"You believe in reincarnation?" Yoshimo asked in surprise. "There was a minor sect on Gemenon who believed but they were monotheists."

John chuckled. "No, I didn't mean that literally although I used to say I had more lives than a cat. In fact this morning when I left the transport and started walking here, I felt almost like I'd been reborn. It was eerie, but a lot has changed in my life during the last week. How's D'Anna?"

"Mornings are hard for her so I visit her in the early evening. She feels better then. We do a gentle yoga routine and then we meditate and pray. Some nights she feels well and we talk about the scriptures and other matters relating to our beliefs. Bianca goes to see her every day as does Natalie. D'Anna's blood pressure is better now. Bianca is pleased."

"You've helped her and so has Bianca. D'Anna's lucky to have you both in her life now."

Yoshimo nodded. "I fulfill only a small role in a much greater plan. You fulfill a much larger role. So does your robot friend. I have seen that already. He is not like the others."

"No. But I'm hampered by him not being able to talk. It would make things so much easier if he could talk to us."

"None of them talk. A centurion with vocal ability would stand out from the rest and attract much attention."

"I know. That's my dilemma. Right now when he has something to say he scratches it in the dirt but we won't always have dirt readily available."

John motioned to Buddy who walked over to them. He looked up at the robot who towered above them.

"We need to get your head at eye level so we can talk to you without getting cricks in our necks. Do you mind kneeling here by the table?"

Even with Buddy on his knees, his head was still above theirs. Buddy remedied the situation by sitting back on his heels like a child. John had never seen a centurion in that position before. It made the big robot seem almost vulnerable.

He asked, "Do you by any chance have ink in one of those talons?"

Buddy gave them the headshake that indicated _no_.

"Of course you don't. You're not a squid. Why would you need ink when you've got bullets? Okay, we really need to figure out how to give you a voice. Do you have the parts for speech?"

Another _no_.

"Ask him if he knows sign language," Yoshimo said.

"What good would that do? I don't know sign language."

Yoshimo smiled. "I do. My wife and I raised our own five children and adopted three others. All had disabilities. Two were deaf. We learned to sign so we could communicate with them. There are several deaf people who come to the clinic. Bianca and Laszlo always send for me to translate for them."

"Okay," John said to Buddy. "Can you access your Cylon library and see if there's something in it about sign language or language for the deaf?"

Buddy nodded. His red eye dimmed significantly as some of his resources were directed elsewhere.

Natalie walked out of the house and sat down at the table. She had a small bandage on her lower right arm.

"Sorry about that," John said.

She was still grumpy. "You have a lot of explaining to do."

"I know. I owe you the whole story."

For the next twenty minutes he talked and answered her questions, telling her most of what had happened to him during the previous week including the part about discovering Sonja with Josh and then later smoking weed with him in the city. He finished with his accidental discovery that Buddy had both new centurion and U-87 programming in his new centurion body. He then told them that although Buddy could function as a new centurion, his U-87 programming was dominant. John withheld the information that Buddy carried Lucy's sleeping avatar. That information was for Natalie's ears when Buddy wasn't listening since it would involve a discussion of the Daniel in the valley. All he told them was that Lucy Cain had added the U-87 programming to the new centurion and sent him to the city for safekeeping. He wasn't surprised, though, that Natalie was skeptical of what he'd just told her.

"How do you know that you haven't brought a spy into our midst?"

John said. "He understands you even if he can't answer you."

Buddy suddenly began making motions with his hands and fingers. When he finished, Yoshimo smiled.

"He signs very quickly, but if I have read his words correctly, Buddy says he is not a spy. He is a cybernetic life form node...a Cylon."

"I'm not convinced," Natalie said.

"Did you not tell me you wanted a U-87 to accompany us to the valley?"

"Yes, but he's not a…"

Suddenly Natalie's eyes lit up and she smiled.

John smiled, too. "_Now_ do you understand? He's a U-87 in a new centurion's body. You won't have to explain him to anybody. We can take him to the valley and then he can talk to the others…the new centurions and the U-87s…although _talk_ is probably a misnomer. He can communicate with them and none of your brothers and sisters will realize what's going on."

Natalie breathed deeply. "This is a sign from God…the answer to a prayer."

"It got my attention," John added as he reached for another cookie. "You're going to have to pass along your recipe to me since I'd like to make a permanent move here." He gestured to the black plastic bag on the edge of the patio. "That's everything I had in the city."

"Sonja petitioned the council on your behalf?"

"No. Sonja won't even know I'm gone until she wakes up and reads a letter I slipped under her door before dawn this morning."

Natalie's smile disappeared. "You've put me in a very bad position. If I allow you to stay, the council will think I've usurped or overridden their power."

"I thought I had a right to be with the mother of my child."

"You do, but you should still have gone through the proper channels."

Yoshimo said, "John would have no idea of what the proper channels are."

"That's true," John said. "You told me that I had the right to be with D'Anna. I thought all I had to do was show up here and I'd be welcomed."

Natalie fixed him with her blue eyes. "I can't believe you were _that_ naïve. You should have discussed this with Sonja and let her take care of it. She's your handler."

"I didn't want to bring this up, but I see now I'm going to have to. Things weren't so good with me and Sonja when I left. Plus I'd found out something that gave me cause for concern. After Sonja lost the first baby, she took it out on Josh by giving him to one of your Overseer Sixes even though that poor kid didn't have one thing to do with her miscarriage. I won't go into any detail, but the Overseer abused him badly, both physically and emotionally. Let's just put it this way, I wouldn't let _anyone_ do to me what that Six did to Josh. If Sonja passed me along to an Overseer, I'd wind up killing her and that would get me a bullet in the head just like Yusef got for killing Leoben. So that's why I didn't get Sonja involved in my decision to leave the city and come here to live."

He saw skepticism in Natalie's blue eyes again. "Did Sonja tell you that about Josh and the Overseer?"

"No, Josh did."

"How do you know he was telling the truth? He might have been lying."

"Listen, Natalie, when one guy admits something that degrading to another guy, it's the truth. Just take my word for it. In his own way he was warning me not to get Sonja angry at me. Sonja is jealous of you. Coming on top of something she pushed me into saying last week after we left here, it was not in my best interest to tell her I wanted to move to the settlement where you live. Believe me. This is a case where it's much better to ask forgiveness than permission."

Several very long moments passed before she sighed.

"I'll take care of it."

John grinned. "Thank you. For a minute there I thought you were going to send me back to the city."

Buddy quickly began moving his hands again. As the robot signed, Yoshimo translated.

_Natalie leader with plan. No send John back to city. John and Buddy stay here._

Yoshimo said to Natalie, "Buddy is right. Their being here is part of a much larger plan. You need to do whatever you have to do in order to keep them here."

Natalie sighed again and said to John. "We'll have to find some kind of work for you to do. You won't be able to live a life of leisure like you did in the city."

"I don't mind working."

"You'll have to live with D'Anna. I can't go before the council and say you came here to be with her and then have you living elsewhere."

"I can handle that, too. I don't mind sleeping on the couch. Where does she live?"

Yoshimo said, "In the town near me and near the clinic."

"What about Buddy?" John asked.

"That's going to be a problem," Natalie said.

Buddy immediately began signing.

Yoshimo translated. _Buddy stay with John. Protect mother and father of peacemaker._

"Can't we work out something where Buddy can stay with us?" John asked.

Natalie quickly answered. "No. Buddy cannot stay with you and D'Anna. Centurions don't live with us or with humans. It's no different here than it is in the city."

"Where do they live?"

"They don't _live_ anywhere. When they aren't working in the fields or building something, they assigned some sort of sentinel duty or they're patrolling the settlement."

Buddy's hands moved and again Yoshimo translated.

_Buddy sentinel. Stand at entrance to park._

Yoshimo continued, "There are several centurions who permanently guard the clinic. Could you not allow Buddy to take the place of one of them? Perhaps John could work for the doctors."

"He'll have to work in the fields in the mornings since all able-bodied men and women are expected to do that. After lunch I'm sure the doctors would welcome his help."

"Doing what?" John asked. "My medical skills are limited to applying band aids and I'm not very good at that."

"You can do what I do for them…mop the floor, make beds, comfort a sick or injured child. I want you to think about this _very carefully_ before you agree. Life for you here in the settlement will be extremely different from the life you were living in the city. Breeders are afforded a special status there. By moving here you give up that status even though you'll be living with D'Anna. You won't be able to roam around wherever you please, either."

"I can handle that."

"We can expect some questions, too. Normally a pregnant sister would be in the city. She's three and a half months along and beginning to show so her presence here will soon come under scrutiny."

"You think the council will try to force her to go back to the city?"

"No, but only for one reason. She's the mother of the peacemaker. Our Ones will want the honor of having her here. They've lived in the shadow of the Ones from the city for years. It will be a feather in their caps that D'Anna has chosen this place to give birth to her child. They'll uphold her right to choose where she lives. In our scriptures there were many great leaders whose births were under humble circumstances. Ulixes, the father of Xander, was one of them. He was born to a couple in a small village on the edge of the Sea of Hesperus on Kobol. His father was a fisherman."

John smiled. "I can relate to that."

Yoshimo asked, "Will John not also be afforded some honor as the father of the child?"

"Not enough to justify a life of leisure. The humans here are well-treated and well-fed, but they're still expected to work. There is so much to do. That's why I want John to consider his options very carefully before he makes a decision. I don't want him to later accuse me of misleading him."

"I've worked since I was sixteen years old," John said. "Granted I've never worked with a hoe or a shovel, but I can learn. I need to be here, Natalie, for a number of reasons. You know that."

"Yes," she said softly. "Yes, you do." She gestured toward Buddy. "Can he pilot a Heavy Raider?"

Buddy signed and Yoshimo translated. "He says he has a pilot's knowledge but no experience. He has been a sentinel for seven years."

John said. "If it becomes necessary to get D'Anna back to Caprica to save her and the baby, Buddy could plug in and run the software to enable a Heavy Raider's FTL drive."

Natalie stood. Her voice had a decided tone of confidence. "Another sign from God. We won't tell anyone about you yet. You and Buddy will stay here tonight. We'll go to the valley tomorrow before you begin your lives as part of our settlement. I'll go into town later today and tell a One that I'm taking a Heavy Raider with a centurion pilot to another settlement tomorrow. I won't mention John. I won't be able to justify taking you anywhere after your presence is known."

"We'll need to take Yoshimo with us to translate for Buddy."

"Yes." She looked at Yoshimo. "Is that all right with you?"

"I would be honored to accompany you wherever you need to go."

"Okay," Natalie said with decisiveness. "Buddy needs to go into the house and stay out of sight until we go to the airstrip in the morning."

"Don't you think you should get Daniel out of there first?" John asked.

"Yes. I need to get Daniel outside first."

When she was through the door, John said to Buddy, "No skewering the cat, okay? Natalie will send us back to the city if you touch that cat."

Buddy's hands moved and Yoshimo said, "Buddy says he will leave the cat alone. He doesn't want to go back to the city. He likes it better here."

John took another cookie. "I'd like it better too if I'd been standing in the same place for the last seven years."

...

Kara was wearing the same blue dress and heels that she'd worn to dinner at Marble House on her first Sunday back from Nereid. Laura had on a beautiful green silk dress that Kara had never seen before, but then she was rarely around when Laura got dressed up.

"Nice dress," Kara said as they rode the elevator down to the first floor where the car was waiting. "Is it new?"

Laura smiled. "I wore this dress the first time I dated Chuck Winters so that should tell you how old it is."

"It still looks good," Kara said. "Admiral Adama should be impressed. It shows more skin than you normally show."

"I didn't wear it to impress Bill. I wore it because I like it and it gives me a chance to wear these little diamond and emerald earrings that belonged to my mother. Did you get your stepfather moved into his new apartment?"

"Finally. Lee and Hunter were wiped out by the time we were through. At least they were moving everything down instead of up."

"How's Dreilide? Happy with his new place?"

"He liked the old one a lot better. We couldn't move the piano. I was going to get him a smaller one, but there's not enough room in his new place to put one unless we throw out half the furniture. The apartment is tiny, but he had to get to the first floor. He couldn't keep climbing two flights of stairs. He said he'd make do with his electric keyboard."

"His illness has gotten worse?"

Kara nodded.

Laura sensed that Kara didn't want to talk about Dreilide's emphysema so she said, "You look very nice tonight. I'm not used to seeing you with your hair down and curled and wearing makeup."

"Thanks."

"I know you're not looking forward to this, but it means so much to Bill. Saul Tigh is his oldest friend. And it means a great deal to him to have Lee at dinner with them."

"I know."

"One of the reasons I've asked Bill to come to dinner with us as often as I have lately is so he can have dinner with his son. Left to their own devices, it would rarely happen."

"I know that, too."

"You probably don't approve of Bill spending so much time here, but…he's just so lonely. He would never admit it, but he's working all the time again and…"

"Look, Laura. I don't have a problem with yours and Admiral Adama's relationship. It is what it is. I just think…forget it. I need to keep my mouth shut. It's none of my business."

"No, I want you to be able to feel free to talk to me about anything."

The elevator door opened. They got off and turned down the corridor toward the portico and the waiting car.

"He's still in love with you," Kara said suddenly. "I don't think it's fair to him."

Laura took a deep breath. She had wondered since John's disappearance if one day she and Kara would ever talk about Bill Adama.

"Our relationship is…complicated," she started.

"No, it's not," Kara said. "He loves you. You love my dad, but you still have feelings for the admiral. What's complicated about that?"

Laura managed a smile. They were nearing the outside door where a young Marine in dress uniform was waiting to open it.

"Perhaps we should talk about this later."

"Why? It's not like your whole staff doesn't know."

They went through the door and Laura said, "Thank you, Lieutenant Butler."

Edgar opened the back door of her limousine and they slid inside.

"What does my whole staff know?" Laura asked as soon as the door was closed.

"That the admiral has a thing for you. One of the cooks told Maya that there's a big betting pool on when you'll finally take off your wedding ring and start dating him openly instead of calling him your escort. Some of them already think that when the admiral stays after dinner and you go in your sitting room for a drink that you and him are really going to your bedroom."

"Oh, dear gods," Laura said as she rubbed her thumb across the back of her ring.

She had wondered what her staff thought about her and the admiral. But hearing Kara confirm her worst fears was still a shock.

She'd had to remove John's dog tags tonight because they would have been clearly visible with the V-cut neckline of the dress yet she still put her hand where they usually lay against the skin over her heart.

Kara added, "About the only thing that would get them to quit talking is if Admiral Adama started dating somebody else."

"He and I aren't _dating_," Laura said quickly.

"Whatever. You know that and he knows that but nobody else does. Marta Shaw wants to date him. Kendra told Lee, but Lee doesn't want to get involved in it so he won't say anything to his father. And Mrs. Shaw won't ask him out because she doesn't want to offend you considering you're the President. It's some kind of political thing."

"Oh, dear gods," Laura said again. "You want _me_ to say something to Bill?"

"Do whatever you think is best," Kara said. "And could you do Lee a big favor tonight and sit across from Ellen Tigh or let me do it? He told me about her wandering foot."

"I'm aware of her predilection for playing footsy with the man across from her."

Kara rolled her eyes. "It figures. Lee doesn't want Ellen sticking her foot in his lap. Let me sit across from her. If I feel her foot, I'll put my fork through it."

Laura sighed. "I'm beginning to wish I'd declined Bill's invitation and stayed home tonight."

Kara grinned. "I know the feeling. I wish Lee and I could have gone to the movie with Maya and Hunter."

"Are they…" Laura asked and then stopped. "No, I won't ask. It's none of my business."

"Maya hasn't volunteered the information, but I think so. Something about the way she looks at him gives it away. And Hunter is…he's acting a little different, too."

"I'm very happy for her, even if it means I might lose her as Brae's nanny one day. No one deserves happiness more than Maya."

"Dad will be home by then. He'll be able to take care of Brae."

The thought of them as a family once again made Laura smile.

When the limousine pulled up in front of the restaurant, Laura and Kara waited in the car while her security team conferred with the ones who had been sent ahead. Then they entered and were quickly escorted to a private dining room on the second floor. Two of her team stationed themselves outside the door.

Admiral Adama, Lee and the Tighs were waiting for them. They were standing near a small buffet table. Lee had mentioned Ellen's propinquity for being late, but apparently the colonel had managed to get his wife there on time. The men were wearing suits. Ellen had on a little black dress that showed a great deal of tanned bare leg. She was also wearing a pair of black strap sandals with stiletto heels that could easily be used as murder weapons. The heels made her the same height as her husband.

All of them had drinks, and Admiral Adama signaled the waiter who stood by the door. He walked over and got Laura's drink order. Kara ordered beer in a glass since this was a fancy place.

"What a lovely dress," Ellen said to Laura. "Not many women can wear that shade of green without it making them look seasick."

"Thank you," Laura murmured.

"It's a nice contrast to the color of your hair. You have just enough red in it. That is your natural color, isn't it?"

Laura tried not to bristle at the personal nature of the question. Ellen was obviously not on her first drink.

"Yes," she answered coolly. "It's my natural color."

Ellen gave her a conspiratorial wink. "I have a little help with mine. My husband likes blonds."

After the waiter handed her the glass of beer, Kara walked over to stand beside Lee.

Ellen continued. "Lee was just telling us about his fascinating time on board the _Penelope_."

"I was on the _Galactica_ for part of the time, too. Kendra Shaw and I were the liaison officers between the two ships."

Ellen pouted in an exaggerated fashion and pinched her husband's arm. "You didn't tell me that."

"I guess I forgot to mention it," Tigh said. "I didn't see Lee very often. I was too busy keeping things going for Commander Cain. She runs a tight ship. Yes, sir, a real tight ship."

"How is the commander?" Lee asked.

"Better since she got to take the Cylon's ashes to Gemenon and dump them in the atmosphere. I thought she wasn't going to let that monotheist priest say his piece over them, but there was a film crew recording every minute of it so she had to." Tigh chuckled. "I haven't seen it on the six o'clock news yet."

"You won't." Bill said. "That wasn't a commercial news crew. Those were Darren's people. Commander Cain knew that."

"No wonder she was in such a foul mood that day. If they hadn't been there, I think she would have kicked that mono priest out the airlock right after he dumped the ashes he was blessing or praying over or whatever ritual he was doing. Seeing what those bastards did to the other Colonies didn't help her feelings about them one bit. No, sir, not one bit. I think she was hoping we'd find they'd settled on another one of the Colonies so she could go in with guns blazing. She hates the Cylons about as much as anybody I know."

Kara wondered how everybody in the room would react if they knew Lucy Cain had been one of the creators of the Sevens and Eights. As far as she knew, Bill Adama was the only one here tonight who was privy to that bit of information since he was the only one Major Parker was going to tell.

Major Parker had doubted the veracity of her information but not her truthfulness in reporting it. He believed that Daniel was mistaken in what he had told her and she was sure he had passed those doubts along to the admiral. She wondered now if the admiral doubted it as well. One thing was a fact, though. Kara could verify what Colonel Tigh said. Commander Cain hated the Cylons with a particularly strong vengeance. The only way she would believe Lucy Cain was a creator would be if Lucy were around to confirm it. And Lucy Cain was dead. Daniel had been holding her when she died.

"A cubit for your thoughts," Lee said.

Kara smiled and shook her head slightly. "Nothing worth mentioning."

He slipped his hand over and twined his fingers through hers. "You look beautiful tonight."

"You mean for somebody who was dirty and smelly and barking orders like a drill sergeant a couple of hours ago?"

"Just let me pay you a compliment, okay?"

She squeezed his hand.

As she gazed into his twilight blue eyes and saw his love for her shining there, Kara thought of how good things had been for them lately. The independent hearing had gone well for him. Her own court-martial had gone in her favor. Tomorrow she would sit down and write a letter of apology to Admiral Adama for borrowing the Raider and Monday she would fly a Mark VII. She would learn the ship and she would be ready when they went to Nereid.

"Are you sure you don't want that cubit for your thoughts?" Lee asked softly.

"I'm just thinking about how lucky I am," Kara said as she squeezed his hand. "How lucky we both are."

"Well aren't you two a couple of love-birds," Ellen said.

Kara tore her gaze away from Lee and looked at Ellen Tigh. "Yeah, and aren't you jealous?"

...

On Natalie's command the pair of centurions that were permanently stationed inside the hangar towed the Heavy Raider outside and fueled it. Even though Natalie told the centurions to do a thorough check of the ship, John asked Buddy to access his pilot's knowledge and together they went through their own preflight check.

Natalie was obviously nervous because she was pacing back and forth on the tarmac, something John had never seen her do before. Yoshimo on the other hand was already sitting quietly in one of the rear seats when John looked out of the cockpit doorway.

He told Buddy to remain in the copilot's seat and left the ship.

Thinking Natalie's nerves had to do with flying, he gently took her hand. "I've been doing this a lot of years. I'm a good pilot. We're not going to crash."

"It's not that," she said, although she wouldn't look him directly in the eye.

"Are you thinking about seeing Daniel?"

She took a deep breath. "I didn't think it would happen this soon. I'm not ready."

"Are you cancelling on us?"

"No. We've got to go. Buddy has got to hear Daniel's story so there will be no doubt about what happened."

"Yoshimo will be with you and for what it's worth, so will I. Come on, Natalie. Suck it up and let's go. The longer you put it off, the harder it will be to climb aboard."

She squeezed his hand and looked at him. He saw the same resolve settle across her face that he had seen a week earlier. He stood back and let her precede him into the ship. She sat beside Yoshimo. John helped her fasten the harness. Then he rejoined Buddy in the cockpit.

"Ready when you are," he grinned.

Buddy pointed toward the runway and within a minute they were in the air. John banked the ship northwest toward the mountains and began climbing. Buddy had put the valley's coordinates into the navigation computer so once they reached their cruising altitude; John put the ship on autopilot.

"You're _sure_ you don't know how to wake up Lucy's avatar?" He asked Buddy.

The robot shook his head.

"You mean she didn't leave you _any instructions_ on what to do if she didn't come back?"

Another head shake.

The night before after he and Natalie had finished a light dinner of vegetables, John had told Buddy to stay inside the house and he and Natalie had walked up the path as far as the edge of the woods. He'd told her about Buddy's claim that he carried an avatar of Lucy Cain that had been created nine years earlier and that was now in stasis.

Natalie had stopped walking and taken several deep breaths. Twilight had settled around them by then and he couldn't see the expression in her eyes. He had no idea how she felt about an avatar of Lucy's still existing.

"Look, Lucy's avatar doesn't know anything that's happened in the last nine years," John had said to her. "She created it two years before Cavil killed the Sevens and the creators because she didn't trust him, so there might not be any reason to try to get her out of stasis."

"We could use her knowledge of the centurions," Natalie had said. "She worked closely with Zoe Graystone who knew the U-87 centurions better than anyone. Her avatar lived inside a U-87 shell for a long time before Daniel and Amanda Graystone created a humanoid body for her."

The night before Natalie had seemed strong and full of confidence. John hadn't realized how deeply the prospect of seeing a copy of Daniel had affected her until he saw the anguish in her eyes as she forced herself to board the ship.

Fifty minutes later they crossed the first low ridge of mountains and John saw the pass up ahead. Directly west of them was the area where Kara had hidden the Raider. The river wound through the forest below like a silver ribbon in the sunlight. He looked at the coordinates and nudged the ship to the north. In ten minutes he had made a low pass over the valley. It was exactly like he remembered but the fields of crops and the grasses looked plusher. He brought the ship around and gently put it down in the same meadow where he had landed with Sonja.

"Stay here," he said to Buddy. "I'll come back and get you after we do the meet and greet. These people don't regard centurions as friendlies."

Buddy nodded. That much he either already knew or seemed to understand.

John left the cockpit and activated the door mechanism to open the outside door before he looked at Natalie. She was very pale.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" He asked.

"We're fine," Yoshimo said.

They exited the ship and walked to the road on the edge of the meadow. Several people had come out to look at them. John raised his hand in a friendly wave.

"We've come to visit Emmalyn," he said.

She was hanging clothes on the line when they arrived at her dwelling.

"I apologize for dropping in like this," John said to her. "We'd like to talk to you and to Hunter's grandfather…and to Daniel."

Dessa was helping her aunt. "Go get your grandfather," Emmalyn said to her. "Celia, too. And then go see if Daniel is in his dwelling."

"I saw him walking toward the creek early this morning," Dessa said.

"Well, then go hunt him. Tell him that Kara's father is here to see him."

Dessa skirted them on the path and when she reached the road, she began to run.

"Come inside out of the sun," Emmalyn said. "I'll put on some tea." She glanced at Natalie but continued to speak to John. "You've brought a different one this time."

"This is Natalie," John said, "and our friend Yoshimo."

Yoshimo bowed slightly to her. "I remember when your expedition left Libran," he said. "I was a boy of twelve or thirteen but I was already studying at the temple. I remember we had several discussions about it. Some thought the first expedition had discovered Kobol and you were returning to the homeworld of humanity."

"So you're a priest?"

He nodded.

"Well, it's not Kobol. It's the homeworld of the Thirteenth Tribe…where they settled after they left Kobol. Of course they're gone from here, too."

"So we have discovered."

John had been watching Natalie as she took in the small dwelling and meager furnishings. This humble place made her house look almost like a palace in comparison.

"Could I help you fix the tea?" She softly asked Emmalyn.

"You mean you'll drink tea with us? The other one wanted nothing to do with our tea or my bread."

"I apologize for my sister. She and I are different."

"That's an understatement," John said under his breath.

They heard a sound at the door and turned. Celia was helping her husband across the threshold.

"I hear that Major Gallagher is come to visit again."

"You know I told you to call me John the last time I was here."

Perry Jaffee held out his hand and John shook it. Then he made the introductions again.

"Please have a seat at the table," Emmalyn said. "I'll get the tea ready. I thank you for the offer of help," she said stiffly to Natalie, "but I can get it ready faster by myself."

"What brings you here today?" Perry asked.

"We need to talk to Daniel about something he saw while he was a prisoner. This is going to sound like a strange request, but we need him to tell his story to a centurion."

Emmalyn turned in anger. "You'd ask him to talk to one of _them_ what shot him?"

"No," John said quickly. "Not one of the ones who shot him. This one is very different. He looks like the ones that shot him but…"

"He's as different as I am from my sister Sonja," Natalie said softly. "It's very important. Daniel saw something…horrible."

"He doesn't remember much about the prison," Celia said.

Yoshimo said, "I can help him remember."

"No! Absolutely not!" Emmalyn said emphatically. "That poor man has suffered enough. Find your answers elsewhere."

"We're going to have to tell them about Lucy," John said. "It's not fair to them. They've protected Daniel for the last seven years. They have a right to know what he saw and why it's so important that he tell Buddy."

Natalie closed her eyes and finally nodded. "Tell them."

John started carefully weighing each word because he had no intention of revealing Daniel's origin. "When Daniel was at the prison, he came to the attention of a young woman who was one of the Cylon's creators. Her name was Lucy Cain. Lucy fell in love with Daniel and took him from the prison…"

"For some of their experiments?" Emmalyn asked.

"No. She genuinely loved him. She wanted to protect him…and he loved her, too. Then one of the Cavils…"

"The One I call the Angel of Death," Natalie interjected.

"Right…the Angel of Death decided that if they didn't go to the Colonies and destroy humanity, then the humans would come here one day and destroy them. So he started talking this around to his…brothers and sisters. They became divided, but one of the models, their number Seven, refused to even listen to Cavil…to the Angel of Death. The Sevens started telling the others that the Angel of Death was wrong and they needed to stand up to him and refuse to destroy humanity. So the Angel of Death infected all the Sevens with a lethal virus. He killed them all. When their creators realized what he was doing and tried to stop him, he had his centurions kill them. Daniel witnessed it. That's what we need him to tell the centurion we brought with us so it can tell the other centurions."

When he finished, there was complete silence for a few moments.

"If he's the only one who knows it, then how do _you_ know it?" Emmalyn finally asked.

"Because I was there," Natalie said and the pain was clearly evident in her voice. "I witnessed part of it, but only part. The rest is still conjecture on our part. I think Daniel can fill in the gaps for us."

"Where does Lucy Cain fit into this story?" Perry Jaffee asked. "And where is she now?"

"We think she and Daniel both witnessed what Natalie didn't see. What we do know is that Lucy had some loyal centurions. They got her and Daniel away from the facility at Settlement Alpha and to the city. From there we think they escaped through a tunnel that leads to the hydroelectric plant at the base of the dam…

"Leaving one of their loyal centurions behind in the city," Natalie added.

"Yes," John continued. "They left one behind in case something happened to them. Lucy wanted one left to tell their story…only this centurion doesn't know the rest of the story because Cavil and his centurions must have caught up with Lucy and Daniel after they left our centurion. They must have killed Lucy and thought they killed Daniel only he wasn't dead. Kara told me that Daniel has a head wound…and he had amnesia."

"He still has amnesia," Emmalyn said. "He can't help you."

"Don't you think that Daniel should tell them that?" Jaffee asked her. "He might not appreciate you making decisions for him. And he might remember more than you think he does."

Suddenly the doorway darkened as Dessa appeared in it. "I found him," she said brightly.

She stepped inside and Daniel entered. Natalie gasped softly. With the sunlight behind him, Daniel briefly resembled an angel. John reached down and squeezed her hand.

"Daniel," she managed to gasp.

"Natalie."

He stepped over to the table and John saw that he was almost as white as he'd been when he'd seen Sonja.

"You didn't mention that you _knew_ him," Emmalyn said to her.

Natalie jumped up and ran out of the room.

"Go after her," John said to Daniel. "Talk to her. Let her tell you why we're here. You've got nothing to fear from us."

Without a word Daniel turned and left the dwelling. From where John was sitting he could see that Natalie had stopped halfway between the dwelling and the road. Daniel walked up behind her and touched her on the shoulder. She turned and almost fell into his arms.

Dessa started to go outside, but Emmalyn spoke sharply to her. "No, Dessa! Leave them be!"

Dessa's face took on a childish pout. "Why is that woman crying and hugging Daniel?"

"She's happy to see him," John answered her. "She hasn't seen him in a long time…seven years."

"I think there's something you haven't told us," Perry remarked.

John and Yoshimo shared a glance.

"I guess you need to know the rest of it. Natalie was in love with Daniel, too, only he loved Lucy."

Emmalyn's voice registered near disbelief. "Are you telling us that this is a _love triangle_?"

"_Was_ as love triangle," John admitted.

He couldn't tell them that Natalie loved a different copy of Daniel without admitting that Daniel was a Cylon. It really made no difference to her anyway. The emotional impact of seeing a man who looked identical to her dead lover had gotten the same response from Natalie as if she'd seen the man she had loved. _Still loved_, John mentally corrected himself.

Outside Natalie smoothed the hair back from Daniel's forehead and touched the scar with a shaking finger.

"Is she going to take Daniel away?" Dessa asked.

John said, "No. She just wants to talk to him."

"Why don't you go see if you can help Seléne with Esmari," Emmalyn said to Dessa. "We're not going to let anyone take Daniel away."

When Dessa was gone, Emmalyn turned with a resigned sigh, took a pot of hot water from the stove and poured it into the teapot. She stood at the sink with her back to them while it steeped.

"What is your centurion going to do with the information?" Perry asked.

"When the time is right and we're ready, Natalie is going to confront Cavil with it." John answered. "This Angel of Death she talks about is on Caprica now since he led the Cylon fleet to destroy humanity, but she thinks her brothers and sisters have a right to know the truth about what happened. They still think their creators are alive and that the Sevens' deaths were an accident. The Cavil in the city is pretty much running the show now since he claims he has the creators' blessing."

Emmalyn turned to face them. Her face was drawn and sad. "It will mean war for all of us if your Natalie challenges him, but you've known that all along, haven't you?"

Surprisingly it was Yoshimo who answered her. "I have been a priest for almost sixty years. I am a man of peace who has always believed that we should try to find alternatives to violent confrontation, and yet even I know that some things are so wrong that they cannot be accepted. There is a point where we have to say, _enough _and stand together against a wrong that cries out for justice. This is more than brother killing brother and it will lead to the apocalyptic battle of good and evil of which our scripture speaks in the Book of Constantine."

"So you're a monotheist," Perry said.

"I am," Yoshimo answered. "But I would hope what has happened here transcends the differences in our beliefs…just as evil has the same meaning no matter which language you speak the word in or which deity you make your prayers to."

"He's right," Emmalyn said. "Cavil should be stopped. He should have been stopped a long time ago. I don't care what he did to his brothers or even his creators, but I do care what he's doing to the people of this valley. My people. Go visit our cemetery if you want to see his handiwork. Many who lie under the stones are there because of him."

Jaffee said, "If you go to war, our men will fight beside you."

"Once Daniel tells his story to our centurion," John said, "I don't think it will be a matter of _if_. It'll be a matter of _when_. But a few things are going to have to happen first or it will be over before it starts. We've got to get at least half the centurions on our side and we've got to either get rid of those baseships above the planet or infiltrate them and turn their centurions. That's going to take time and planning."

Emmalyn put the teapot on the table followed by a loaf of bread and some honey. She looked directly and John.

"So a man who was in their prison a few months ago is now become the leader of a group of rebels."

"I'm not their leader. Natalie is. This can't be perceived as human against Cylon. And we're nowhere near ready to go to war yet. I need to say again that there's still a lot that has to take place before we reach that point."

"He's right," Jaffee said. "This has to be perceived as a civil war among the Cylons in order for it to succeed."

"Natalie is the First Six," John added. "That means there's only one copy of her. She commands a lot of respect among the rest of them. She's the leader they need."

"A pretty thing like her in command of a rebel army?" Emmalyn said sourly. "I've got my doubts that any of the men will follow her…a Cylon and a woman to boot. That's two strikes against her right there."

John said, "They will if you throw your support behind her. We've got a woman President on Caprica now."

"Your daughter mentioned to us that a woman holds the Colonies' highest office. How does a military man like yourself feel about a woman running the show?" Emmalyn retorted.

"I'm fine with a woman running the Colonies. I worked hard for her Presidential campaign. You might say I was one of her biggest supporters. I still am. She's a very fine person, very caring, very giving, not to mention beautiful. She's…well, let's just put it this way, a man should be so lucky to have a woman like her in his life."

Emmalyn snorted. "It sounds like you're a mite taken with her. Does your wife know you've got a crush on the President?"

John smiled. "I think she knows she's safe. After all, why would a woman like the President of the Colonies be interested in a guy like me?"

Emmalyn looked shrewdly at him before she smiled broadly. "Perhaps we should pose that question to Sonja."

"Okay. I walked into that one. I should have learned by now that a smart woman like you is always going to have the last word."

Emmalyn was still smiling. "Is the President a married woman?"

"She is."

"Any children?"

"A son…and a stepdaughter. Her little boy will be two in November and her stepdaughter is a teenager."

"What can you tell us about her husband? Is he a good man?"

John realized suddenly that at some point during the banter of the last several minutes, he had won Emmalyn's support for Natalie.

He smiled at her. "I think he tries to be, but like the rest of us, sometimes he fails. But I think if he were in my shoes, he would dream of getting home to his wife and children just like I do. I think he'd dream of the woman he loves back on Caprica and pray that she doesn't give up."

"Then he's a good man," Emmalyn said.

TBC…


	41. Truth, Secrets and Avatars

Chapter 41

Truths, Secrets and Avatars

_1. The Lord said to Sharon, Take the stone with My Commandments to My people_

_2. That they may know and obey My Word in their daily lives._

_3. Sharon heeded the word of her God and took the stone to the city_

_4. And gave it to her father Xander and her mother Jerusha._

_5. When she told them of the death of their son Simon, Xander rent his garments_

_6. And Jerusha wept tears upon the stone that her first-born son was dead._

_7. And where her tears fell, the stone turned a deep blue as the color of the ocean_

_8. Until at last the whole front of the stone was changed by the color of her grief._

_9. The stone was placed upon the altar of the temple that all who saw should obey the Lord's Commandments._

_10. And Sharon went daily to the temple to pray for forgiveness from her sin of murder._

_11. And in the third month of her return to her home, she felt Nimrod's child move within her._

_12. And she knew that her son would forever be a reminder of her disobedience to the word of God_

_13. For the sixth of His commandments was Thou Shalt Not Kill._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Xander, _Chapter 11:1-13

.

Natalie and Daniel sat talking outside Emmalyn's dwelling while inside John and the others drank tea and ate Emmalyn's delicious bread spread with honey. John noticed the basket of knitting by the only comfortable-looking chair in the room.

"Somebody's going to get a new sweater soon," he said.

"It's for Kara's friend Noel."

John saw the question in Yoshimo's eyes, but Yoshimo didn't ask. Either Sonja hadn't shared their previous experience in the valley with Natalie or Natalie hadn't shared it with Yoshimo. John bet it was the former. Sonja had been so turned off by these people and their hard and humble lives that she had probably put them out of her mind as soon as the Heavy Raider had lifted off from their meadow.

"I'd like to see Noel Allison and Hunter's uncles while I'm here," John said to Emmalyn. "I don't guess they've gone back to the forest, have they?"

"No, we've heard nothing more from Cavil about resuming their war with us. As far as we know he's still poking about the forest looking for your daughter and her friend. If the gods are good to us, he'll stay there forever. Targa and Beck took Noel and left early this morning to go hunting in the north part of the valley. We've lost some sheep these past few weeks to a pack of coyotes. The men should be back by tomorrow. Can you stay the night?"

"We need to ask Natalie. She's in charge on this trip."

"Take a walk with me if you would please."

He looked at Yoshimo. "You don't mind waiting here?"

"I'm happy to remain and talk to Perry and Celia about their expedition. It's not often one is in the presence of those who will rewrite history."

Emmalyn picked up a small jar of wildflowers that was on a shelf above the sink and walked out the doorway. Natalie and Daniel were sitting side by side on a large tree stump outside the dwelling and were speaking in hushed tones to each other.

"We'll be back shortly," Emmalyn said to them. "There's tea and bread inside if you're so inclined. John and I are going for a walk."

Natalie and Daniel were so deep in conversation that they barely acknowledged her statement.

"Where are we going?" John asked when they reached the road.

"To the cemetery. It's a very good place to talk privately."

John walked beside her as the path skirted several dwellings and then began to ascend a small hill. As they neared the top he saw the stones and the wooden markers, hundreds of them. Emmalyn wound her way through them until she came to a large rough stone with two small carved wooden plaques pushed into the ground at the base of it.

"My husband and my son," she said. "Cavil put them there. Oh, not him personally, but his brothers and sisters and their centurions. We lost eight men the day they were killed and thirteen wounded. Hunter's father was killed. His sister was taken captive. It was a very bad day for us."

She knelt and pulled some weeds from around the stone and the wooden plaques before she sat the vase of wildflowers in a small depression in the ground between them. Then she stood and wiped her hands on her apron.

"My husband and I were never able to have but the one child. To put my husband and my brother in the ground was hard enough, but to bury my boy, too…even now I'm not sure how I survived it."

"I'm so sorry," John said softly as he thought of the loss of his father and four brothers. His mother had tried, but in the end she hadn't survived that much loss.

A breeze ruffled the hem of Emmalyn's long skirt and caught the loose strands of hair that had escaped from her braid. They looked like silver threads in the sunlight. Even in her fifties and without a bit of makeup, Emmalyn was still a beautiful woman. In her youth she must have been stunning. John tried to imagine her laughing and happy before so much grief and loss had taken the light from her eyes.

Her hand brushed the top of the large stone.

"It's going on two years now but in some ways it seems like yesterday. That stone over there marks Seléne's husband's grave and her daughter's and beyond it is Hunter's father's and beside it is his mother's and then his older sister's. She isn't really buried there. She killed herself, you know, rather than let those vile men keep raping her after she was captured. We don't know what they did with her body but we put a stone in her memory. She gave her life just the same as any of the men."

"Emmalyn, you didn't need to bring me up here to show me what war will mean to you and your people. I'd lost my whole family by the time I was fifteen and I fought in the First Cylon War. I understand loss."

She turned to face him. "An all-out war will take a terrible toll on our valley as well as the settlements. There's not so many of us left here anymore. The only reason there's any is because the Cylons agreed not to use their airships on us. If we go to war and they do that, none of us will survive."

"Would you rather live with the alternative? Have your men killed one by one in the forest and then have the women taken as slaves to one of the settlements. Dessa is a beautiful young woman. Do you want to see her taken to the city and given to one of the Cylon men for breeding? Believe me. They don't honor a woman's wish not to be taken as a breeder."

"No. That's not what I want. I agree that Cavil has to be stopped whatever the cost. I just had to say my piece to you. I had to make sure you understand how I feel…how the people of this valley will feel about going to war. Some will welcome it and some will be left behind to bury the dead."

"Maybe there's another way. I hope so. I don't want to fight either. I did my share of that twenty-five years ago."

She lifted her eyes to his. "How long have you been married to the President of the Colonies?"

John looked out over the distant hills for a long time before he said, "What gave me away?"

"Kara stopped Noel from saying something the morning she told us about a woman being President. I thought that was strange, but I didn't push her on it. Now I understand why. And your love for your wife was in your voice when you were talking about the President…and especially when you mentioned your children."

"My life won't be worth two cubits if anyone finds out."

"That's the reason we're up here talking. Your secret is as safe with me as it is with the dead who surround us…all of your secrets if you choose to trust me. There's no one hates the Cylons more than me. If it's any comfort to you, when Cavil came here, this whole valley stood in the face of sure death and kept your daughter's secret, hers and Noel's. I'll keep yours. I won't even share with Perry."

"A few weeks before Kara came here, a Three named D'Anna took me from the prison. The council in the city made Sonja my handler because D'Anna, was considered too unstable emotionally. She's…deep into their religion. Some consider her so fanatic that they question her judgment."

"And has she relinquished her claim on you?"

"I did what was expected of me so D'Anna wouldn't give me the drug and turn me into a vegetable." He looked out over the hills again. "She's pregnant now…three and a half months."

"You mean they can have _children_?" Emmalyn asked in shock. "We understood that none of them could conceive."

"Some of the Cylon men have fathered daughters with human women. A few female Cylons have gotten pregnant, but no Cylon woman has carried a child to term yet…at least not one that lived. Against the odds D'Anna has made it past the first trimester and a couple of weeks into the second. Sonja and Natalie believe that D'Anna carries a child foretold in their scriptures, a child they call the peacemaker."

A strange look passed over Emmalyn's face and she sucked in her breath sharply. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it and took another deep breath.

Finally she spoke. "Are you a religious man, John?"

"I have my moments."

"Do you believe in the prophecies of oracles?"

"I didn't, but…now…I don't know."

"We had a priest here who was also an oracle. She's been dead now these fifteen or more years. She made two prophecies to Perry and me. The first has come true. She said that three strangers would come to our valley…two and then one and that great change would follow. Then she said that both of us would live to see the birth of a child who would bring peace to us and the Cylons. Nobody believed her. She was very old when she made that prediction so most thought she'd gotten senile. Some said she'd gone as crazy as her brother."

"The Reverend Mother on Gemenon told Yoshimo the same thing…that he would live to see the birth of a peacemaker."

"How do you feel about this prophecy?"

"I don't want anything to happen to D'Anna or the baby."

"Then you want to be a part of the child's life."

"How does a father turn his back on his child? That's why I've left the city and moved to the settlement where D'Anna and Natalie live. D'Anna's already having some problems. There are human doctors there who are helping her. Yoshimo is helping her, too."

"Our two expedition doctors died years ago so we have none. I do what I can, but it's precious little for those who are really sick. Seléne, the grandmother of Hunter's little girl is sick with some sort of wasting disease. I think it's some kind of cancer or maybe diabetes but there's no way to know since we have no means of doing medical tests. She grows weaker and thinner all the time. She's a proud woman and refuses to admit it, but soon she'll be unable to care for Esmari at all."

"Will you and Dessa be able to take her and care for her?"

"We'll take both of them in and care for them. That's the way we do things here in the valley. I'd have done it before now but Seléne won't yet admit she's ill and needs help. Beck has already built a cradle that we keep in my place. Often Dessa brings the child and watches over her most of the day. But Esmari needs her father. When will Hunter be back?"

"It'll probably be a few more months."

"And then Kara will bring him back like she promised?"

John made a decision and told her that the Colonials had taken control of Caprica from the Cylons. He briefly told her the story of how he'd gotten to Nereid, feeling confident now that he could trust this strong woman with his life. He told her that when Kara and Hunter came back, it would be with enough Colonial forces to rid them of Cylon control forever."

"Then why don't we wait for them? Why go to war now and risk so many lives?"

"Because I can't tell Natalie what I've just told you. It's not that I don't trust her, but the Cylons have a way of detecting the truth from each other. If Cavil forces her to put her hand in a liquid datastream and questions her, she wouldn't be able to keep the knowledge from him."

"How do you plan to get their robots on your side?"

"That's where the one I've named Buddy comes in."

John then told Emmalyn about Buddy's importance in getting other centurions to join them. He explained the difference between the old U-87s and the new centurions. He went on to tell her how Buddy's inability to speak would hamper them since Yoshimo was the only one who was able to communicate with the robot via sign language.

Emmalyn said, "There's a man who lives underground in the remains of the _Hyperion_. His name is Leonard Markham. He's brilliant and eccentric and some say he's crazy, too. If anybody could give a voice to your robot it would be him. He's natured like an owl, though. He sleeps during the day and works on his inventions at night. You need to stay and let Perry take you to see him after dark tonight. Hunter and his grandfather are the only ones who can safely enter Markham's lair."

"Why?"

"When the Cylons came and told us about their war games in the forest, Markham vowed they'd never get their hands on the secrets of his research. He'll blow up the ship if anyone tries to enter it without his permission. Now I need to get back to our guests. They're bound to be wondering what's taking us so long."

She started down the path toward the dwellings. John caught up with her.

"Hunter might be the leader of the fighters, but I think you're the one who runs the show here in the valley."

"Let's just say Hunter's grandfather and I discuss all issues concerning our people."

"But in the end he takes your advice."

Emmalyn gave him a brief smile and for a moment there was light in her blue eyes.

"You're a smart man as well as a good man, John."

...

The limousine that had taken Laura and Kara to dinner at Bonnie Patrice bore Laura and Bill back toward Marble House at the conclusion of that dinner. Kara and Lee had left nearly an hour earlier to join their friends.

Laura and Bill rode for several blocks before she broke the silence. "All in all that went as well as could be expected."

Bill loosened his tie just enough to unfasten the top button of his shirt. "I apologize for Ellen…" he began.

"No," Laura interrupted him. "You are not responsible for what Colonel Tigh's wife says or does."

"He should have left her years ago."

"We've discussed their situation before, Bill. You can't invite him to dinner and expect him to leave his wife at home however undesirable her company is."

"What was that little game of musical chairs she and Kara played when we sat down at the table? Everybody seemed to understand what was going on but me. I haven't seen Ellen that red-faced or frustrated in a long time…or Kara that smug looking."

"Ellen was trying to position herself opposite Lee…and Kara thwarted her plans."

"Why?"

"You mean you've never been on the receiving end of her wandering foot?"

"Her…_what_?"

"Apparently Ellen likes to remove one of her shoes and…use her bare foot to _caress_ the lap of the hapless man across the table from her. I would imagine the response is a big thrill for her."

"You're kidding."

"I'm afraid not. Kara was trying to spare Lee the humiliation of being subjected to something like that. In case you haven't noticed, Kara is very protective of her men…and that includes not only Lee but both of her fathers and Brae and her close male friends as well."

"Do you think Ellen would have tried to put her foot in Lee's lap?" Bill asked in amazement. "He's just a kid."

"Oh, Bill," Laura said gently but with laughter in her voice. "How long has it been since you've really _looked_ at your oldest son? You may think of him as the shy teenager I met with you at dinner a few years ago, but that's not who he is now. He's twenty-three years old, and he is an _extremely_ handsome young man…one whom I'm sure Ellen Tigh would love to add to her list of conquests."

"If she'd lay off the booze!" Bill said angrily.

"Yes, that would help, but women like Ellen…they're driven by demons that neither of us can understand. I find it very hard to believe that she's never come after you."

Bill sat without speaking for several long moments. Finally he said, "Years ago she hinted that she wouldn't be averse to…getting together…but I made it clear that it would be a cold day in Hades before that would ever happen. Saul Tigh is my best friend. He's had my back more times than I can count. I've done some things in my life that I'm not proud of. No one knows that better than you, but one thing I'd never do is take a friend's wife to bed."

"You're a good man," Laura said softly. "You're the most honorable man I know."

Bill reached over and covered her hand with his. "Why do I get the feeling that there's something you'd like to add to that?"

She leaned her head back against the seat. They'd never have a more appropriate time than now to talk about Kara's little bombshell.

"Do you know that my staff has a betting pool on when I'll take off my wedding ring and stop calling you my escort?"

"And start calling me _what_?" He asked in an amused tone.

"Oh, Bill, use your imagination. Some of them apparently think we're already having an affair. They're betting on when we'll go public with our relationship. In a way you can't blame them. None of them knows that John is alive."

"How did you find out about the betting pool?"

"Someone mentioned it to Maya and Maya told Kara. She told me tonight on the way over here."

"You command a lot of respect from your staff. You make it a point to learn their names. You ask about their families. I've heard you send a handwritten card on their birthdays. You _care_ about them. Sure they gossip. What staff doesn't? When I was on the _Galactica_ I know a lot of my crew had something to say about the_ Old Man_."

"You've missed that, haven't you? For all that you've accomplished here on Caprica, you've missed commanding a battlestar."

"Yes. I have. When we go to Nereid, I'll be going with them. I've already spoken with Commander Cain about taking over command of the _Pegasus _when Admiral Thurman retires in a few months. I'm going back to the _Galactica_. I'm going to meet with Parker and Lee and Hunter soon. Looking at all the preliminary data, I think we're going to be ready to go to Nereid sooner than I thought…probably in about four months…possibly in three."

Laura had always known that he would go with his old battlestar. His hand was still over hers. She slipped her fingers around his and briefly squeezed.

"You'll be careful, won't you?"

"I won't take any unnecessary risks with myself or my crew, but we're going to war, Laura. It's not the same as sitting behind a desk and planning one."

"Have you ever thought about afterward…about your future? Do you ever see yourself…forming another…attachment? Perhaps even marrying again?"

"Just spit out what you're trying to say."

"Do you ever think about dating someone?"

"I don't have time for that."

"You found time to have dinner with Colonel Tigh tonight. You find time to have dinner at Marble House with us."

"Does this have something to do with your staff's perception of us?"

"In a way. I just thought you might like to know you should feel free to…date someone if you were so inclined. Functioning as my escort shouldn't preclude you having a social life of your own. If you were to become involved with someone, I'd gladly relinquish my claim on you. I'd really like to see you happy, Bill."

"I don't need the distraction of trying to establish a new relationship right now, Laura…even if I wanted one. You saw how things worked out with Fiona Nagala. Parker tells me she's on the verge of marrying someone else. And I know you well enough to know that you don't normally try to act as a matchmaker. What is it?"

"Marta Shaw is interested in you, but she's concerned about offending me so she's not going to ask you out. You'll have to make the first move. I think you should at least consider it. Mrs. Shaw is an attractive and very capable woman."

"Yes, she is. But she's a politician, and I don't like the way she tried to stage-manage her daughter's career."

"I'm a politician, Bill, and we're none of us perfect. It's in a mother's nature to want what's best for her child even if it looks like interference to you."

"After Nereid is behind us, I'll ask you for Mrs. Shaw's number…but not before."

Laura smiled. "Can I pass that bit of information along to my source?"

"You can do whatever you want with it," he said, and Laura heard the slightest edge of irritation in his voice. She'd pushed this particular issue about as far as she dared tonight. Even with her, Bill Adama had his limits.

They didn't speak again until the limousine pulled up under the portico at Marble House.

"I'd better not come in tonight," he said.

"No, but I would like for you to come to lunch with us tomorrow."

He nodded.

"And please, Bill, just for me, take a good look at your handsome son. As much as you like to think of him as your boy, he's grown into a man."

He managed a smile. "I hope I live long enough to tell you the same thing about your son, Laura."

Before she got out of the limo and asked Edgar to please take the admiral to his apartment, she leaned over and gently kissed Bill on the cheek. He was her first love, and she hoped he knew that there would always be a place for him in her heart.

...

When Emmalyn and John got back to her dwelling, Natalie and Daniel were no longer sitting on the tree stump. They weren't inside either.

"They've gone to his place," Perry said. "He wanted to show her his paintings."

For a moment John wondered if he should intrude or give them some time alone. He hoped Natalie kept her priority on why they had come here.

"Where is his place?" He asked.

"Near ours," Celia said. "We'll show you."

John motioned to Yoshimo. "Come with us. Emmalyn, you, too."

Emmalyn said, "I'll wait for you to return. Daniel's place is crowded with his art and I've work to do here. I've linens to launder if you're to stay the night."

As they walked, Yoshimo said, "You were gone for a long time."

"Emmalyn took me to their cemetery. We talked about what war will mean to her people."

"Ah," Yoshimo replied as if that explained the length of time they were gone. "I didn't know your daughter was here."

"It's a long story. I'll tell you sometime."

"Does Natalie know?"

"I don't know. Sonja knows, but I don't know if she mentioned it to Natalie or not. Sonja doesn't think much of the people of this valley. They're a little too rustic and backward for her taste."

"The few I've met so far have been kind and hospitable. They're obviously very resourceful as well."

"They'd have to be to have survived here. I don't think Sonja has evolved enough to appreciate that yet. I think Natalie has."

Celia pointed left before she and Perry entered their dwelling. "Follow that path. It leads to Daniel's place."

When they got there, Daniel and Natalie were sitting at the table. John tapped on the open door.

Daniel turned. "Come in. Please."

John and Yoshimo stepped inside.

"You've told him why we're here?" John asked Natalie.

"Yes. I've told him. He's told me everything he remembers and he's agreed to tell Buddy."

"That's good."

Yoshimo was looking around. "You have painted all these pictures with colors you took from nature?" Yoshimo asked in amazement.

"Yes," Daniel answered modestly.

"You have a great talent."

"Only what my creators gave me."

If Yoshimo noticed the plural of _creators_, he gave no sign. He simply said, "God blesses each of us in His own way."

Natalie showed John a watercolor of two dark-haired women. "Lucy and Zoe," she said. "They were very good friends."

John held it up to the light.

"Lucy is on the left," Daniel said.

"She's very beautiful. She bears a strong resemblance to her sister Helena. Zoe is very attractive, too."

Daniel pointed behind John. "Turn and look at my most recent portrait. It's not finished, but I think you'll recognize her. She's very beautiful as well."

John turned. On an easel in the corner was a partially finished painting of a maiden with a wreath of flowers in her blond hair. She was holding more flowers and was clad in a draped gown that looked like the temple drawings he had seen of Persephone. With a shock he realized that it was Kara. He walked over to the painting.

"Your daughter is a natural beauty," Daniel said. "And she's completely unaware of it. Her name Kara is a variation of Kore which is another name for Persephone. That's why I painted her dressed as the goddess of spring. She came to us just as spring was awakening our land and bringing life back to this valley…"

John barely heard Daniel's words as he gazed at the portrait of his daughter. He felt a deep longing to see her, to put his arms around her, to talk to her, this child he had been separated from for so much of her life. Kara, who had owned his heart from the moment he'd seen her. Seeing her through another's eyes was a shock. She wasn't his little girl any longer. She was a woman.

Tears welled in his eyes. He wished he'd never come here, never seen this picture because the ache had grown so painful he wasn't sure he could stand it.

The room seemed to recede and he was watching her run to catch up with Hunter as they left to go to the hidden Raider, knowing he may never see her again. He remembered the way she had turned to look at him, her face wet with tears. He shut his eyes. His own tears spilled over and ran down his cheeks as he struggled to get his breath. He whispered her name. _Kara._

He was aware of an arm around his waist pulling him toward the door and then outside. Natalie.

"Daniel told me about your daughter and what happened when Sonja brought you here."

John choked out the words. "I did what I had to do. I'd do it again. She's my child. That crazy girl stole a ship and…and came here to get me and I couldn't go with her. I had to take Sonja back to the city or Cavil would have come here and destroyed this valley and killed these people who had taken her in and protected her."

Natalie said softly. "Love is a powerful emotion…and a painful one at times."

"I can't go back in there. It doesn't have anything to do with Daniel. I'm…it's just…I'm having a hard time dealing with…everything right now. I…hadn't counted on seeing her picture…looking so beautiful…like a goddess. She's not my little girl anymore. She's a woman. I missed so much of her life…and now…I just miss her. I miss my wife and my son. I miss my family."

"Wait here."

Natalie went inside and gave him a few minutes. By the time she got back, John had gotten himself under control. He blotted his eyes with his sleeve and wondered if this were some kind of delayed stress reaction. He couldn't afford that now. This was not the time to fall apart. There was too much riding on what they still had to accomplish here. If he ever wanted to see his family again, he had to get it together. Hadn't he told Natalie to suck it up and get in the Heavy Raider? He needed to do the same thing now.

"Better?" She asked.

He nodded.

A moment later Daniel and Yoshimo followed her outside.

"Let's go talk to Buddy," Natalie said gently. "All things considered I think it best if we go to him instead of bringing him into the midst of their dwellings."

John started walking and Yoshimo hurried to catch up with him.

"I haven't been a good husband since I've been here," John said. "I've had sex with D'Anna and Sonja, but nobody could ever accuse me of being a bad father. I _wanted_ to be Kara's father from the day I found out about her, but her mother just…it's a long story."

John shoved his hands in his pockets and tried to get his thoughts together. Natalie and Daniel were a short distance ahead of them. Apparently she had managed to soothe Daniel's fears enough that he was willing to meet the big centurion out at the Heavy Raider.

They reached the meadow. At the ship Natalie stopped and let John go inside to get Buddy. When John emerged from the ship with the robot behind him, he saw Daniel's face turn ashen. His breathing quickened and he reached for the reassurance of Natalie's hand. She held it tightly. Even though it had been seven years, John knew that post-traumatic stress didn't have a time limit.

"Daniel, this is Buddy," John said. "He's our friend. You've got nothing to fear from him."

Buddy took a few steps onto the grass of the meadow and then he stopped. His red eye scanned Daniel and then it, too, stopped and dimmed. The seconds ticked by, ten, then twenty, then a full minute and Buddy didn't move.

Yoshimo walked over to him and looked at John. "Is something wrong with him?"

"I don't know," John answered. He waved his hand in front of the robot's face and got no response. The red eye was blinking rapidly, but it was frozen in one place.

"Hey, Bud, are you okay?"

Suddenly Buddy's hands came up and he made a number of quick signs.

They all looked at Yoshimo.

"He has spelled a name. Lucy. And then he said, _I am Lucy._"

Daniel gasped and went down on his knees in the grass. Natalie looked at John and shook her head slightly. Apparently she hadn't told Daniel about Lucy's sleeping avatar since Buddy hadn't known how to bring it out of stasis. Now John realized that Buddy hadn't needed to know how to activate it. Lucy had programmed the U-87 so that the sight of her beloved Daniel would awaken her avatar just like the story-book princess. Instead of a kiss a look was all it had taken…or in this case the digital scan of Daniel's retinal pattern. All she would have had to do was insert a tiny snippet of code that checked every new retinal scan and compared it to the stored scan of her lover. And now that scan had gotten a match and triggered the program that had awakened the sleeping avatar.

"Holy frak," John said.

He didn't know what to do. This unexpected turn of events had thrown their plans into turmoil. Natalie had dropped to her knees beside Daniel and was supporting him. John wasn't sure whether Daniel was going to throw up or pass out.

Yoshimo looked from them to the robot to John. "Does Buddy mean the Lucy who was killed? How can he say that he is a dead woman? I don't understand."

John said, "To answer your first question, yes, Buddy means the Lucy who was killed. Are you familiar with avatars?"

"The digital representation of our thoughts and memories. Some say our essence, our very soul but I am not one who believes the soul can be captured so easily."

"Well, whatever an avatar is, Lucy made one of herself nine years ago and loaded it into this centurion and put it into stasis. She didn't trust Cavil even then and was protecting her knowledge from him. Natalie and I didn't think it was important to say anything because Buddy said he didn't know how to activate Lucy's avatar. Now it appears he didn't need to know. Scanning Daniel's retinal pattern was all it took."

"Lucy," Daniel choked out. "Lucy…my love…I've missed you so much…"

"Let's get Daniel into the ship," Natalie said quickly. "We're attracting attention."

John helped her lift Daniel to his feet and they all but dragged him up the ramp into the ship. They got him into one of the seats. Buddy was on their heels. The only word that John could use to describe Buddy's actions was _hovering_.

"Back up a minute, big guy," John said. "Don't crowd him. We don't want him to pass out. All he sees when he looks at you is a centurion like the one who shot Lucy and tried to kill him."

Buddy signed and Yoshimo translated. "Help Daniel."

"Natalie's helping him. Let's step outside a minute."

Once outside the ship John had a hard time keeping Buddy's attention.

John finally had to say to Buddy, "Hey, eyes on me. Right here." He took two fingers and pointed at his own eyes. "Quit looking back at the ship. Daniel will be all right. It's just going to take him a while to adjust to…everything he's just learned. Now am I talking to Buddy or to Lucy?"

Buddy signed and Yoshimo said, "Lucy."

"Okay, Lucy. You've been a sleeping beauty for the last nine years and a lot has happened…a lot. There's not nearly enough time to tell you everything right now, but I promise we'll do it later."

Yoshimo translated for Lucy again. "Am I dead?"

"Yes."

"Zoe?"

"She's dead, too. _All_ the creators are dead. So are all the Sevens."

"Was it Cavil?"

"Him and his centurions. They shot you and Daniel, but he survived. He's been living with the people of this valley for the last seven years. They know nothing about him except that you took him from the prison."

"I didn't take him from the prison. I helped create him."

"It doesn't matter," John said. "That's what they think. It's best to leave it that way, too. As far as Cavil and the rest know, _all_ the Sevens are dead."

"How?"

"Not now, Lucy. Daniel will tell you what happened. You and Buddy both. It's really important that Buddy hears it because we're counting on him to help us out with something."

Buddy signed for a long time and Yoshimo began translating, "The U-87…the one you call Buddy…will hear what I hear…The new centurion…will hear it as well…but it will mean nothing to it…It will simply store the data."

Yoshimo said, "So Daniel is a Cylon like Natalie."

John took a deep breath. There was no use denying it now that Lucy had let the cat out of the bag. He looked at Yoshimo.

"He's a Seven…but he's the only one still in existence. It's very important that the people of this valley stay ignorant of that fact, too. Even though Daniel has lived with them for the last seven years, I'm sure somebody would kill him just because of what he is."

"Can we not take him back to the settlement with us?"

"None of the rest of the Cylons know he's alive…except Sonja and it's in her best interest to keep quiet about it. If we take him to the settlement and word gets to the city, which it would, Daniel's days would be numbered because the nearest brother of the Angel of Death rules the city. He was complicit in the deaths of the Sevens and the creators. Daniel has got to stay here."

"I'll keep his secret," Yoshimo said. "I have no wish for _anyone's_ death to be on my conscience."

"Okay, let's all go into the ship and let Daniel tell his story. It'll be easier for him now that you know the truth."

"The Reverend Mother once told me to hold the truth in my hand but to use my judgment whether or not to open it. This time it is best to keep my hand closed around it."

...

On Sunday morning Kara sat at the glass-topped table on the small terrace with the Posiden fountain. She was barefoot, still wearing her flannel sleep pants and t-shirt. A spiral notebook lay on the table in front of her. On it she had written two lines and then struck through one of them. She had decided to begin her letter with _Admiral Adama _instead of _Dear Admiral Adama._ At that point she had gotten stuck. To simply say _I'm sorry I took your Raider _sounded childish. It would be much closer to the truth to say,_ I'm not sorry I took your Raider because I proved my father is alive and there are humans on Nereid._ But that wasn't what the judge had ordered her to do to fulfill her sentence. She had to write Admiral Adama a letter expressing _regret_ for her crime. In other words she had to lie. She gnawed the end of the pen and shifted in her seat. Why was this so hard for her?

She lifted her leg and propped a foot on the edge of her chair and studied her toes. Her feet weren't pretty like Maya's who had small bones in general and slender ankles and dainty feet. She always kept them looking good and polished her toenails with a nice peach-pink polish.

Kara laughed out loud as she remembered how that morning Braedon had proudly shown her his toenails also polished the peach-pink color. Maya had told her that it was the only way she could get Brae to let her polish her own toenails Saturday afternoon. She wondered what her father would say about Braedon sporting polished nails. He'd probably just laugh. Brae wasn't even two years old yet. He had no concept of what it meant to be a boy or a girl. If asked, he would tell you that he was a _boy_, but Maya said he was too young yet to have any real understanding of gender. He just wanted to do what Maya was doing.

Kara heard the door behind her open and the patter of little feet on the terrace and then Maya's voice.

"You know you cannot climb into the fountain, Brae. If you try, we'll have to go back upstairs."

"Hi," Kara said.

"What are you working on?" Maya asked as she pulled out a chair and sat at the table where she could keep an eye on Braedon as he circled the fountain looking up at the sparkling jets of water coming from the dolphins' mouths.

"My letter of apology to Admiral Adama. I haven't gotten very far. I mean how do you write a letter of apology when you're not sorry you did something?"

Maya chuckled. "I'm sure you'll think of something appropriate to say. We won't bother you. Give us a few minutes down here so he won't throw a tantrum when I tell him we have to leave."

Kara smiled. "Just tell him Hunter will be here soon."

Maya got the kind of melting look that she got lately whenever Kara mentioned Hunter's name.

Kara snickered. "I think your man was tempted to take Crashdown's head off last night at Zeno's."

"It was my fault. I should never have agreed to dance with him. I didn't realize that he was already half-drunk."

"Even half-drunk he should have known better than to put his hands on your butt like that."

"I asked Hunter what he'd have done if Crash hadn't backed down. He never really answered me."

"Crash isn't stupid, even drunk," Kara said remembering the way Hunter had hit Cavil the day he'd shown up in the valley searching for her and Noel Allison. "I think he knew he was seriously outgunned."

Maya stood. "I'm taking Brae upstairs. Don't stay here too much longer. Lee and Hunter should be here for lunch in an hour."

When Maya and Brae were gone, Kara looked at the nearly blank page in the notebook. Then she began writing.

_Admiral Adama,_

_When I first started thinking about borrowing the classified government property, I was thinking only about finding my father, not about how it would look to you and everyone else who trusted me. I know that sounds crazy to you, but that's what was on my mind. I know you don't believe in oracles or what they predict, but I do, and Yolanda told me something when she was dying that made me believe he was still alive and I knew that could only be true if he was in the one place I could only go in the classified property. I would never have done what I did otherwise._

_I'm sorry I betrayed your trust because you gave me a chance I would never have gotten unless you'd had faith in me. Because of you we're free on Caprica today and I have nothing for you but the utmost respect. I'm sorry for the way I disappointed you, and I hope you'll find it in your heart to forgive me. _

_Sincerely,_

_Lt. Kara Thrace_

Kara stood, picked up the notebook, went upstairs and knocked on Laura's door. She got no answer so she took the notebook to her room, showered and dressed. By the time she was ready and went to the sitting room outside Braedon's bedroom, Lee and Hunter were there. She and Lee exchanged a glance and both smiled. Kara couldn't recall a time in the two years she'd known Lee that their relationship had been better than it was right now.

Laura came out of the bedroom carrying Brae, now dressed in a pair of shorts and a matching t-shirt. The peach-pink toenails were hidden by his little sneakers. As soon as Laura put him down, he made a bee-line for Hunter.

Lee leaned over and said very softly to her, "How would you like to get away next weekend, just the two of us?"

Kara's eyes lit up. "Where?"

"A little place about a hundred miles north of the city. Major Parker and his wife spent their honeymoon there. He's the one who told me about it. It's a bed and breakfast in the middle of what was once a big estate."

"You don't need to say another word. I'm sold."

Lee smiled. "That's good because I made the reservation for us on Friday afternoon."

"What about Maya and Hunter?"

"They'll be fine. We'll leave Friday and come back late Sunday. It's just two days. They won't even miss us."

Kara grinned. "I'm not under house arrest any longer. I've written my letter to your dad. I want Laura to read it to make sure I've spelled everything right, and then I'll copy it onto some nice stationery and tomorrow I'll take it to the AJA headquarters and give it to Major McKenna. I hope that will be the end of it."

Lee smiled. "I'm not going to argue with that."

...

There wasn't enough moonlight to see the path very well, so John took the lantern that Emmalyn handed him. Celia and Yoshimo were going to wait at Emmalyn's so John held the lantern in his left hand and offered his right arm to Perry Jaffee. He was surprised at how much cooler the valley was when the sun went down.

Jaffee said, "Daniel was very quiet at dinner tonight. So was Natalie."

"I think Daniel talked himself out this afternoon."

"I was sure he remembered more than Emmalyn thought he did. He started having nightmares years ago. I felt like it would be good for him to unburden himself."

John chuckled softly. "Yoshimo helped him relax and quit fighting the memories. We're lucky to have Yoshimo with us…in more ways than one."

"He is a learned man and a good priest."

"I'm glad you didn't add, _for a monotheist._"

"Unlike many in this valley I've never judged any man by his religious beliefs, but only by his deeds and the way he lives his life and treats others."

"I hope Markham can help us. I won't be able to drag Yoshimo around with me all the time to translate Buddy's sign language."

Perry said, "Yoshimo clearly remembers the U-87s from when he studied at the temple. He told us the Reverend Mother had a number of them at her compound for protection. Even though Gemenon had more monotheists than the other Colonies, it was still the minority religion. He said that was where many of the U-87s learned their monotheistic faith. It's still hard for me to understand robots worshipping a deity"

"During the First Cylon War many of those U-87s joined the rebelling Cylons as well as all the old 0005s. The 0005s were Tomas Vergis' answer to Graystone's U-87s. Both corporations had huge military contracts. The Colonies just couldn't get enough soldier Cylons. Little did they know what was going to happen next."

"Yoshimo said that the Graystones got out of the robot manufacturing business before the war started."

"They apparently got sidetracked trying to create a synthetic body for their daughter Zoe after she was killed in a terrorist attack on one of the mag lev trains. Just after the First War started, Graystone and his wife disappeared taking a number of U-87s and all of their research with them. Where they went was a mystery until Natalie told me that they brought some scientists here and continued their work on creating a humanoid version. They turned over production of a new line of centurions to the old U-87s but they made sure the new ones wouldn't rebel. They're all outfitted with something called a telencephalic inhibitor. It keeps them non-sentient and obedient to the humanoids. Natalie wants to start removing those inhibitors. I'm not so sure that's a good idea because we might have another full-scale rebellion on our hands again. Only this time it would be against the humans _and_ their Cylon counterparts. I can't think of a much worse position to be in than to be in a group of unarmed humans surrounded by sentient and revenge-minded centurions. Natalie apparently hasn't even considered the possibility since the centurions in their current state are a hundred percent obedient."

"Perhaps you should start slowly and remove the inhibitor of only one and see what happens."

"I couldn't agree with you more. I just hope Natalie sees it that way." They continued walking until they reached the bottom of the steps. "Okay, we're at the wooden steps that go up to a platform set against the rocks."

"We need to go up," Perry said. "At the top is the entrance to the _Hyperion_ hidden among the rocks. Clever, is it not?"

"Very."

"Three times Cavil has been to this valley and three times he's failed to see it."

John put Perry's hand on the wooden rail and they climbed until they reached the platform.

"I'll bet the view from here is great during the day," John said.

"You can see most of the valley. Even though my cataracts have robbed me of my vision, I still remember how it looks."

"What do we do now?"

"We go behind the middle rock, turn right, walk ten feet, make a sharp left and then stop."

John helped Perry and they followed his instructions.

"Okay, what next?"

Perry chuckled. "He already knows we're here. I think he's got some kind of alarm, but just in case, I'll announce us." Perry shouted. "Markham, it's Perry Jaffee and a friend. We need to see you."

They waited as the minutes ticked by.

"How do you know he's not dead down there somewhere?"

"Because Dessa saw him this morning at sunup out on the platform doing his stretching routine and then meditating. He greets the rising sun for half an hour and then goes to bed."

A disembodied voice from a speaker above their heads said, "Walk straight ahead."

John firmly grasped Perry's arm and they started down the dark hallway.

When they were a hundred steps from the entrance, a door suddenly opened on their right. John jumped and said, "Frak."

"Enter," the man said.

It took a moment for John's eyes to adjust to the light. The room they were in had originally been part of the captain's quarters. There were several tables and couches. John pulled out a chair and guided Perry to it before he looked at their host.

Markham was tall and gaunt with high cheekbones, very pale skin and gray eyes. His thin silver hair was pulled back in a ponytail that reached halfway down his back. He was wearing an old one-piece green jumpsuit such as a deckhand on a ship might have worn. It was easily a size too large and six inches too short for him. On his feet were homemade sandals.

Perry said, "Markham, this is John Gallagher. He's Kara's father. I know Hunter brought her to see you."

"The girl with the fancy little computer. I hear she left and took Hunter away with her."

"That's right," John said.

"What brings you here?"

"We need your help," Perry said. "John brought a centurion with him that looks like the new ones but is also loaded with the programming of something called a U-87."

"One of the original Cylons," John added. "The newest centurions, the kind that Perry tells me you've taken apart down here, aren't sentient…or they're not as long as they have a small disk called a telencephalic inhibitor in them. Take it out and it's a whole different ballgame. They become capable of independent thought and action just like the U-87s."

"The ones I've studied down here have not been operational, but I know the part you speak of. It's protected by a heavy metal cowl at the back of the neck. In order to remove it, the machine would have to willingly bend its head completely forward. You would need some kind of tool. A pair of long needle-nose pliers would do."

"What about another centurion's talons?"

"That would work, too. I can show you where it is on one of the ones I've studied. Is that all you wanted to ask me?"

"I've named my centurions Buddy. We need a way for him to communicate with us. Right now we have a man who knows sign language, but this man won't always be around when we need to communicate. I need to know if there's any way you can think of to give Buddy a voice."

"How long do I have to work on it?"

"We've got to go back to the settlement tomorrow."

Markham laughed mirthlessly. "You think I can fit a speech synthesizer into a centurion and then hook it up to his existing hardware and software and test it all overnight? I'd need a week, minimum and then I'm not sure I could do it. I don't even know if the speech synthesizer chip I've got would be compatible with your centurion. In some regards their technology is far advanced over ours."

"You have another suggestion?"

"Since they communicate wirelessly, all you need is a device that reads the signal, converts it to words and then displays it on a screen."

"So that's _all_ we need," John said. "Do you happen to have something like that lying around?"

"As a matter of fact, I do. A couple dozen of them. They're handheld devices. They were used on the _Hyperion_ to diagnose problems with microprocessors since computers controlled most of the ship. There was a jack to plug them in or they could operate on a battery. The best ones auto-adjust the broadcast frequency based on where you point it. There's a small display screen where the tech crew could read the diagnostics. I've got them in my lab."

"It can't be that simple," John said. "There's got to be some catch."

"The batteries are long dead on all of them. That's the gotcha."

"Damn," John said. "You dangle the perfect carrot and then say _sorry_."

"The centurions are powered by small nuclear power packs. The devices have adaptor cords. If I remember correctly, there's a couple of places on your centurion that you could plug in. Or you could run it off AC power if you've got that. The only way to find out would be to try it. In theory the batteries in the devices are rechargeable but they're old so they might recharge and they might not."

Suddenly John was excited and anxious to try Markham's idea. "Do I take the device to Buddy or bring him here to you?"

"Bring him here."

"Do I need to bring the man who interprets for him?"

"No. I have a computer program that will do that…if we need it."

Perry asked, "Will I need to stay?"

"Only if you want to," Markham answered.

"In that case I'll leave with John. I'm an old man and it's past my bedtime."

John took Perry's arm and followed the corridor to the exit. John didn't speak until they were halfway back to Emmalyn's.

"He's a little weird, but I guess geniuses sometimes are."

"If you could stay a week or two, he would have your robot making speeches."

"When this…conflict is over, I think Markham will have his pick of jobs."

"I'm not sure you'd ever get him out of his beloved _Hyperion_."

John left Perry at Emmalyn's, kept the lantern and walked to the Heavy Raider. Buddy was sitting in the cockpit. When he saw John, he opened the door. John got on board and explained where they were going and what Markham was going to attempt to do.

Buddy began signing and John said, "It's no use, big guy. I don't understand."

John left the ship and Buddy followed, wirelessly closing the door behind them. When they reached the road, Buddy stopped and scratched in the dirt.

_Do you trust Markham?_

John erased the words with his boot. "We've got to Bud. He's our only hope of being able to communicate if Yoshimo isn't around." Then John realized that Buddy would never have asked a question like that so he added, "That goes for you, too, Lucy."

Markham was waiting for them on the wooden platform. John stopped and looked out over the valley. Faint yellow light from several open doorways illuminated a few of the dwellings. Otherwise it was dark. John gazed skyward.

"Thinking about home?" Markham asked.

"I think about home a lot," John answered.

"This ship is the only home I've ever known," Markham said and turned. John and Buddy followed. It was only then that John noticed the small canister in Markham's hand.

"You're not going to need that," he said.

"I'm a cautious man," Markham answered. "It's the only way I'll allow a functioning centurion into my ship. Take it or leave it."

"This robot's special," John said. "Besides the U-87 feature, he's got a human avatar. A young woman who was shot and killed at the same time Daniel was wounded."

"Lucy?" Markham asked obviously fascinated.

"That's her. How did you know her name?"

"Hunter told me. Daniel showed him a picture he'd painted of her. He was in love with her."

"He still is."

They passed the room where Markham had taken them earlier and continued into the heart of the ship. Finally Markham keyed in a security code and opened a door and they were in his main lab.

"Lights on sector four," Markham said and a portion of the lab was suddenly illuminated. He smiled slightly. "Voice activated. I keep everything turned off unless I'm working."

"You're still running off the ship's nuclear generator?"

"Power isn't my problem. I don't have an infinite supply light bulbs. I've been robbing other parts of the ship for years. Wait here," Markham said and walked toward the back of the lab.

Markham returned with a box full of devices that he put down on a lab table and began examining one by one. Most were bigger than a mobile phone with a display roughly three inches square. He finally found one that suited him. He hooked a power cord to it and plugged the cord into an outlet. John saw the small screen begin to glow a pale gray.

Markham addressed Buddy. "Start broadcasting the letters of the alphabet and then the numbers zero through nine. Keep doing it until I tell you to stop."

Buddy looked at John and John said, "Do it."

Markham tinkered with the device for a long time and finally said, "Frak. The operating system is too proprietary. It'll only accept a feed from the system it was designed to monitor. This one isn't going to work."

He tossed it onto the table and dug in the box for another one. He couldn't get it to power up. The same was true of the next two. He was on his fifth device before he smiled and held it up to John. The screen on this one was pale green. Letters and numbers were filling it and the ten-line display was scrolling up as the bottom line filled.

"Okay," Markham said. "Broadcast something else."

Words appeared on the screen. _Buddy or Lucy?_

"Doesn't matter," Markham answered. "Either one of you. Say anything as long as it's coherent."

Markham held the device where he and John could both see it. Words began appearing.

_My name is Lucy Cain and I was 10 years old when some 0005 centurions took me from Tauron during the fighting. I always wondered if my sister Helena survived. Do you know?_

"She survived," John said. "She's commanding a battlestar. Now let Buddy have a go at it."

_I am Cylon number LM99653868. I have been sentinel in city for 7 years and now I am John's protector._

"It sounds like you've got a bodyguard," Markham said.

John smiled.

When they left thirty minutes later, John knew how to operate the device, how to charge it through an AC outlet and also by plugging it into a small barely-visible port that Buddy had in his arm.

Markham walked with them back to the platform. John extended his hand and Markham shook it.

"I won't forget this," John said.

Markham turned and disappeared behind the rock. John and Buddy were almost to the Heavy Raider when Buddy stepped protectively in front of him. The device was plugged into the port in his arm. Buddy held it up for John to see at the same time he heard Buddy's own weapons lock into place.

_Three armed humans at ship. Weapons at ready._

"Are you sure?"

_Infrared detection._

"Whoa, big guy. Let's not do anything hasty. Put away the weapons."

He suddenly had a vision of Buddy mowing down three valley men and he and Natalie having to deal with the consequences.

For once Buddy didn't listen to him. His directive of protecting John overrode John's command

"You at the ship," John called out. "We don't mean anybody any harm."

A man's voice said, "Your centurion does. He's locked his weapons."

"No. He's just protecting me. If you'll lower your weapons, he'll retract his."

The same voice called out, "Identify yourself."

"John Gallager. I'm visiting Emmalyn and Perry. They'll vouch for me."

Another man said, "Major Gallagher?"

John recognized the voice. "Lieutenant Allison?"

"Yes, sir."

"Is that Targa and Beck with you?"

"Yes, sir."

"You kill those coyotes that were getting your sheep?"

A third voice said, "We got enough they won't be back anytime soon."

John said, "Lose the weapons, Bud. I know these men. They're friendlies."

Buddy retracted his weapons just as the three men came around the ship.

In the light of the lantern, John had to look closely to identify Noel Allison because he now had a full beard. Dressed like the other two, no one would ever have taken him for a Colonial Viper pilot.

Targa said, "What'd Emmalyn have for dinner tonight?"

"Always thinking about his stomach he is," Beck commented.

John answered, "Rabbit stew and vegetables and that delicious bread."

"Any left?"

"I'm sure there is."

Narcho asked, "What are you doing with a centurion?"

Beck didn't give John time to answer. "Important questions first. Did you bring Sonja with you? Targa's been sweet on her since you was here last time."

"Have not," Targa retorted.

"She's all you talked about for days after they left."

John said, "Sorry to disappoint you. I didn't bring Sonja. Another one is with me this time. Natalie."

"She look like Sonja?" Beck asked.

"Her hair is darker blond."

"Is she at Emmalyn's?"

"Yep."

"Let's get cleaned up," Beck said to the others. "She won't appreciate us stinking of sweat and dead coyotes."

"Frak," Targa said. "You always smell like a dead coyote…or something worse."

"Do not."

"Do too."

The two men headed up the path leaving Noel Allison alone with John and Buddy.

"Sometimes they're worse than two kids," Narcho said. "But they're good men. They're the damned best trackers I've ever seen. Nothing gets by them. Nothing. I've never seen Beck miss with his crossbow either. By anybody's definition, they're top-notch soldiers."

"Which one is the leader now that Hunter in on Caprica?"

"They share. It's only temporary anyway. They know Hunter's coming back. He is coming back, isn't he?"

"He'll be back. I'm just not sure when."

"I see you didn't get in too much trouble about Kara and Hunter if you're back here with another Six."

"Long story."

"Why are you here, sir? And why bring a centurion?"

"We're going to war. Not right away, but it's definitely going to happen. I brought this robot so Daniel could tell it what he saw at the prison and at their lab. I'll let Emmalyn and Perry fill you in."

"I didn't think their centurions listened to humans."

"Normally they don't, but this one is special. I lucked up when I found him. His name is Buddy." John turned to the robot. "I'm going to walk back to Emmalyn's with Lieutenant Allison. You need to stay in the ship tonight. Close the door and lock it."

Buddy unplugged the device from his arm and handed it to John. Words scrolled onto the screen.

_What should I do if more men come?_

"I don't think we've got anything to worry about, but if anybody shows up, signal me on the device. Markham showed you how to make it beep. Whatever you do, don't hurt anybody. We've got their support right now. We don't want to lose it."

John slipped the device into his shirt pocket, picked up the lantern and he and Narcho started up the road.

"Have Targa and Beck got anything stronger than tea at their place?"

"Yes, sir. They've got some mead."

"Think they might be persuaded to share?"

"They'll both be so anxious to see this Natalie that they won't care if you drink the whole barrel. Targa's not the only one who thought Sonja was the hottest thing they'd ever seen. They know she's a Cylon, but Beck kept going on and on about how different she is from the ones that came to the forest and how good she smelled."

"Find me some of that mead, and we'll talk about what's coming."

"You've got yourself a deal, sir."

...

The week was one of ups and downs for Kara. She had no difficulty flying the Mark VII. Her problems stemmed from the fact that she didn't want to let the ship's computers control anything. If Major Jessups told her once, he told her a dozen times to quit fighting what the ship was trying to do and concentrate on her weaponry.

Finally on Friday everything suddenly seemed to click for her. Her brain made the transition from her old ship to the new.

She grinned at Jessups after she landed when he told her that he knew she'd eventually get it.

"Some of us are just slow."

"You're not slow, Lieutenant Thrace. You missed flying everything between the II and the VII. I'd compare it to going from a tricycle to a motorcycle without ever being on a bicycle. You've done extremely well."

She thought about the new Viper all the way home that day.

"I've finally got it," she said to Lee as he put her bag into the trunk of his car on Friday afternoon. "It's an awesome machine. I'm going to enjoy flying it."

"I start classroom training on Monday," Lee said. "Dad wants every Viper pilot trained on the VII even if there won't be enough ships for all of us when we go to Nereid. Some are still going to be in Mark IIs."

They got into the car and Lee pulled up to the exit of the parking lot at Marble House.

"Did your dad tell you he's going to be commanding the Galactica when we go to Nereid?"

Lee looked over at her. "How did you find out?"

"He told Laura. He didn't say it was any big secret so she told me."

Lee took the exit for the I-6 and accelerated up the ramp. "Dad told all of us in a meeting this morning. Hunter will be on the ground with our Marines. Dad's going to bring Zak's unit back from Sovana about a month before the mission begins because they're the most seasoned combat forces we've got right now."

"So Zak will be going to Nereid with us?"

"Yep."

"How do you feel about that?"

"I think I'd rather have him on Nereid where I can provide air cover for them than have him in Sovana. Dad wants Zak's unit to meet Hunter and work with him. He feels like they need to get to know each other."

"So at that point he's going to go public with Nereid and tell everybody what we're going to do?"

"I think so. Dad said he and Laura would make a joint announcement to the press. And now I want you to promise me something."

"What?"

"Promise me you won't talk about Nereid or war for the rest of the weekend. The next two days are for us to get away from everything we've been through."

Kara grinned. "Can I talk about the Mark VII? I had an awesome run at the gunnery range on Atlas Island today."

"You can talk to me about the Mark VII."

"Buzz Jessups actually smiled after I landed. I think he was ready to give up on me."

"Buzz Jessups would have gnawed off his own arm before he'd given up on you and you know it."

Two hours later Lee followed his GPS instructions over several secondary roads to the entrance of the bed and breakfast that was quaintly named Summerhill even though it wasn't on a hill.

"Holy Hera," Kara said as she looked at the sprawling mansion that greeted them. "Don't tell me _one family_ used to live in that."

"Mind-boggling isn't it? The guy who built this place patented the technology that Tomas Vergis used in his meta cognitive processor that enabled him to create his Cylons. Vergis claimed that Graystone stole the processor and installed it in his own machines. Graystone denied it so Vergis decided that Mr. Summer had also sold the technology to Graystone. There were so many lawsuits filed that this place eventually had to be sold to some big corporation that turned it into a bed and breakfast retreat."

Kara snickered. "So we're going to spend our weekend at Cylon central?"

Lee smiled. "I'm not sure I'd call it _that_ exactly."

Their room was on the back of the mansion and overlooked a beautiful blue-green pool and a large lake. There were freshly cut flowers in a vase on the table and a larger vase on the dresser. The bed had a canopy and the thickest comforter Kara had ever seen. Everything about it reeked of money. The room also had a nice balcony. Kara opened the French doors.

She turned to Lee. "How much did this place cost for one weekend."

He walked over and put his arms around her. "You're worth it."

She grinned. "I hope you didn't get me up here thinking I was going to be an easy lay."

He leaned in to nuzzle her neck. "Not easy, but I do have some plans for us. A nice dinner, a bottle of wine, maybe some romantic music and then a walk in the moonlight. You did pack something nice, didn't you? We've got dinner reservations at 19:30."

"I brought the dress I wore to the dinner Dad and Laura had for me after I got accepted at the Academy. Is that nice enough?"

"The green one that shows your shoulders? That's plenty nice enough."

"It's not like I have a closet full of dresses." She chuckled. "One time I told Dad that Viper pilots and dresses _did not_ go together. He said that when he was a Viper pilot he never owned a single dress. He could always make me laugh."

Lee held her tightly. "Well get him back Kara."

"I know. He's been on my mind a lot the last couple of days. Maybe it's getting back in a Viper. When I got into the Mark VII simulator out at the base, I kept expecting to hear his voice. I want to see him, Lee. I want my Dad back home safe and sound."

"We'll find him and rescue him. Now we need to get dressed," he said gently. "We've got thirty minutes."

She looked at him and saw the desire in his eyes. "Should I lock myself in the bathroom while I get ready?"

"That might be a good idea. Otherwise we'll miss dinner."

Thirty minutes later they walked to the entrance of the dining room. Lee gave his name to the maitre d who looked down his list and said, "Right this way Captain and Mrs. Adama."

Behind the man's back Kara looked at Lee and mouthed, _Mrs. Adama?_

Lee shrugged.

After they were seated and Lee had ordered a bottle of wine, Kara asked, "Do they think we're married?"

He smiled. "I'll admit it's been on my mind since you told me that one day you'd put on a white dress and we'd stand in front of a priest and do it right. Have you changed your mind?"

"I didn't mean we'd do it right now. Maybe we'll talk about it after we get Nereid behind us."

"If…I were to give you a ring…"

She held out her right hand with the gold braided promise ring that she never took off. She touched it gently. "You've already given me a ring."

"I mean one for your other hand…an engagement ring."

Kara took a deep breath and then another.

"What's the matter?" Lee asked. "Getting cold feet thinking about that white dress putting you two over your limit?"

"No. I'm not getting cold feet."

"What's wrong then? I don't understand. Are you not sure I'm the one?"

"I'm sure you're the one. I can't imagine us not being together."

"Then what is it?"

She took another deep breath. "Dreilide and I had a long talk after I got back from Nereid. He told me not to rush into anything. He and my mom were the same age I am now when they got married. He said they were too young."

"Does Dreilide have a problem with me?"

"No, Lee. He likes you. He just said not to rush into anything. If we love each other, it'll last."

"So when we get back from Nereid and Hunter is back with his people and I'm back in my apartment, are we going to live together like we did before you took the Raider? How do you think your dad will feel about that? I know how mine feels."

"Can we not talk about this tonight? Can't we just enjoy this weekend and each other and not talk about the future? We're going to war. Anything could happen."

Lee swallowed the hurt he was feeling and managed a smile. "Okay, Kara, you win. No more talk of marriage. What do you think Maya would say if Hunter asked her to marry him?"

Kara snickered. "Hunter had to be dragged kicking and screaming to even meet her."

"That was a long time ago."

"Yeah, Lee. Seven whole weeks."

The waiter came by the table, refilled their wine glasses and asked, "Are you ready to order now?"

Lee looked at Kara. "Prime rib?"

"Fine with me. You know I'm not picky."

When the waiter was gone, she reached across the table and took his hand.

"Lee, you own my heart. You always will."

"Okay, Kara. I believe you."

"I've got a surprise for you," she said playfully.

"What?"

"You owe Maya. She's the one who told me to buy something special for the weekend?"

"What?"

"You only get a hint, okay? I want it to be a surprise."

"A hint will be fine."

"Black lace."

Lee's eyes lit up but he tried to keep his voice cool and mostly disinterested. "How much black lace?"

Kara grinned. "Enough…but not a lot…and you know I'm not a girlie person so I'd like for you to think about what it took for me to walk into Aphrodite's Secret and look for the perfect…thing to buy for this weekend." She made a face. "I finally had to ask a salesgirl."

He smiled. "You did that for me?"

"Still think I don't love you?"

"I think we'll forget about the moonlit walk tonight. The moons will still be there tomorrow night.

Kara smiled. "And so will I."

TBC…


	42. A Stranger in Town

Chapter 42

A Stranger in Town

_15. God rewarded His faithful followers on the planet of Eden and they prospered._

_16. Engineers harnessed the power of the mighty river and brought electricity to the people._

_17. The city of Azurra grew as did towns and farms and villages and factories._

_18. Visionaries designed new ships which plied the air between agricultural ports and the city._

_19. Universities were built. Great strides were made in science and medicine._

_20. Yet as their comfort and knowledge increased, the people grew slack in the worship of their Lord._

_21. Priests and prophets exhorted all to remember the God who had brought them out of slavery on the planet of Kobol._

_22. Yet with each generation, their memories grew dimmer until a small group of the faithful gathered and said,_

_23. Let us take the Commandment Stone and form our own community that we may worship in the way of the ancients._

_24. And they took the Stone into the mountains and hid it in a place that only they knew. _

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Constantine, _Chapter 1:15-24

.

Early morning cast a soft golden glow into the room. Lee lay naked on his stomach in a near stupor. Could there possibly be such a thing as _too much_ love making? This time yesterday he would have laughed at that question. This morning he wasn't so sure.

He heard the shower cut off and minutes later he felt the mattress give slightly as Kara crawled across it. He could feel the damp heat from her body as she kissed the back of his shoulder.

"Un-uh," he said. "Don't even think about it cause it's not going to happen."

She laughed softly. "Not even for me in black lace?"

"Not even for you in black lace…which you aren't wearing. That little bit of black lace is draped over the headboard."

She gently swatted his buttocks before she straddled his waist and put her mouth at his ear. "I guess I can let you take a rest as my sex slave. You've performed well this weekend and _especially_ well this morning."

"Thank you," he murmured. "My aim is always to please you."

"Which you know how to do _very well_."

She began to massage his back, gradually working her way up to his shoulders.

He moaned at the pleasure as her fingers kneaded his muscles. He had a brief thought about her hands, about how strong they were to be so gentle at times. He was going to tell her. In fact he was almost certain he was saying the words out loud, but when he opened his eyes, the golden glow in the room was gone and the sun was much higher in the sky.

Kara, clad in one of the thick white bathrobes supplied by the bed and breakfast, was sitting on the balcony with her feet propped on the rail and her bare legs showing. There was a white ceramic coffee pot on the table beside her and a white plate piled with what looked like an assortment of breakfast pastries.

He got up and stretched and looked around until he found a pair of shorts. There was a gentle breeze coming through the open doors. The sheer curtains puffed and swayed. Lee walked out onto the balcony, leaned over and kissed the top of Kara's head. Her hair smelled faintly of lemons.

"I thought you were going to sleep all morning," she said.

He grinned. "It's your fault. I'm not as young as I used to be."

Kara laughed and said, "I don't think you're out of your prime yet…at least certain parts of you aren't."

He yawned as he gazed out over the beautiful grounds of the estate. A foursome was teeing off on the first green of the golf course and a man and woman were playing tennis. There were several people lounging by the pool and one energetic man was swimming laps.

Kara said, "I ordered room service. I hope that's okay."

"That's fine. I didn't hear anybody knock."

"I don't think you would have heard a small nuke exploding, but I didn't give the guy a chance to knock. I was waiting for him…in the robe, not the black lace."

Lee picked up a jelly-filled pastry and took a bite.

"Back to cereal and fruit and yogurt tomorrow. The coffee's cold. Want me to order some more?"

"No, orange juice will be fine."

Kara took the carafe of juice and poured him a large glass. "I'll have to admit I could get used to this."

"I could take it for a couple of weeks. Then I think I'd get bored except for nights and early mornings…as long as you were here."

"You're right. I'd miss flying. That's for sure."

"Did you miss it when you were on Nereid?"

"I was mostly too busy, especially during the day. But at night I had time to think about you and the life I'd left behind. After Cavil showed up and told us the forest was off limits while they searched for me and Narcho, I didn't know how long it would be until I could get back to the Raider. If Dad hadn't shown up and gotten me and Hunter to the ship, I'd still be helping Emmalyn and Seléne with their gardens and all the other stuff there was to do."

"Do you ever miss that life?"

"I miss the people…especially Emmalyn and Dessa…and Seléne, too. She'd actually started warming up to me even though she thought I was hot for Hunter…which I wasn't, but that's what she thought. I think most of the valley people thought the same thing…except Emmalyn and Daniel. He talked to me about…a woman he was in love with who had died. He was still hung up on her big time. He'd painted a bunch of pictures of her."

It had been on the tip of her tongue to say Lucy's name, but she remembered Major Parker's orders. Without proof, the existence of Helena Cain's sister on the planet of Nereid would remain a high-level secret because of her alleged part in creating the skinjobs.

Lee chose a different pastry. It was as good as the first. When he reached for a third, Kara said, "You'll spoil your lunch."

"What time is it?"

"Almost ten o'clock."

"Frak. Where did the morning go? We've got to check out in an hour. I thought we'd have time to play tennis or walk around the lake or something."

"We did all that yesterday. Let's just relax. I'm definitely going to recommend this place to Major McKenna. I owe her anyway."

"She was just doing her job defending you. That's what AJA lawyers are paid to do."

"She's helping me with something else. No charge."

"What?"

"Getting a birth certificate for Hunter so he can get a Colonial ID."

"Why?"

"Because he asked me to help him get it, that's why."

"I don't mean that. I mean why is he bothering? He'll be going back to Nereid in a couple of months."

"Well, for one thing I told him he could ride my motorcycle if he got a driver's license and he needs an ID to get that. Maya helped him fill out the form. All he needs to do is attach the birth certificate and take it to any Colonial Registry Office. They'll fingerprint him and make the ID and Hunter officially becomes a Colonial citizen."

"You must have made a good impression on Major McKenna if she agreed to help you pro bono like that."

Kara smiled. "I didn't ask her to help me. I just asked her what would be the best way to go about getting a birth certificate for someone who didn't have one. She asked me a few questions and I told her the story we'd talked about…that Hunter was born on Libran to a religious sect that didn't register his birth. She wrote everything down and then she told me she'd be back in touch. She didn't think it would be a big problem since the AJA had done it before in order for people without birth certificates to be able to enlist. It's not like we're doing something illegal. Hunter's grandparents came from Libran. If the second _Hyperion_ mission had returned to the planet, Hunter would have been born there."

"What did she say about your letter to my dad?"

"Nothing. She read it, made a copy and put it in my file. I mentioned my dad in it and I think she wanted to ask me about that, but she didn't. She called Admiral Adama's office while I was there and made an appointment to see him last Wednesday morning to give him the original."

"Has Dad mentioned the letter to you yet?"

"No, but I haven't seen him since then either. I got a text from Karl this morning. They might get to bring Hera home at the end of the week. I can't wait to see her."

"That's great."

"He said to tell you he was going to clean your apartment as soon as he got a chance. Their furniture was delivered and he moved their clothes and other stuff to their new place. Sharon's been staying at the hospital all day and half the night. I told him to spend his time with Sharon and Hera. I told him I'd clean your place up next weekend."

The whole time Lee was recovering from his broken leg, Kara had done all the heavy cleaning and grocery shopping and what cooking got done. She'd chauffered him to the base and to his physical therapy and doctor appointments, too, until the doctor had released him to drive.

He looked over at her and smiled. It was no longer so important to him that she didn't want to get married yet. In his heart he felt like they were already man and wife. Kara loved him. She had shown it over and over.

"This was a good weekend. We should do it again sometime."

"I was thinking the same thing. Maybe when we get back from Nereid."

Kara slid her hand across the table and took his. "Maybe I'll go for red lace next time."

...

The thunder woke John, and for a few moments he didn't remember where he was, but that was nothing new. Since he'd been on Nereid it had happened to him half a dozen times, waking in the inky dark and not knowing where he was. It had never happened at the prison, though, because at the prison the Cylons never turned off the bright overhead light in his cell. At times he'd awakened disoriented from the drugs they'd used on him and at times the simple act of rolling over had caused him so much pain that it had awakened him, but he'd always known where he was.

This time he figured it out quickly. He was in Hunter's bed at Targa and Beck's place because the small room resounded with a cacophony of snoring.

He quietly got up, felt around at the bottom of the bunk until he found his slacks and shirt and pulled them on. Then he carefully made his way to the door of the bedroom and out into the main room. Narcho had left a candle burning beside the sink. Thunder rumbled over the valley again and he opened the door. It hadn't yet started to rain, but the wind was blowing and the air held the fresh smell of ozone.

Lightning lit a mass of low clouds and flashed dully around inside them. They looked like smoke on the horizon and the thunder made him think of the firing of heavy artillery. It made him think of war. He thought of what war might mean to this beautiful and peaceful valley. Thunder rumbled again and the first cold drops of rain splashed him. He closed the door and turned. The gust of wind had blown out the candle and the only light in the room now came from the fireplace and the grayish fuel rocks that glowed faintly. He carefully made his way over there, squatted, found the poker and stirred the coals. They caught and shadows danced on the walls.

"Are you all right, sir?"

John looked behind him toward the bedroom. Noel Allison, clad in a pair of long johns, stood in the doorway.

"I'm fine. I'm sorry if I woke you."

"You were mumbling something in your sleep."

"I don't doubt that. I have a lot of nightmares."

"What do you think is going to happen next?"

"Natalie and I will go back to the settlement and talk about it. In the meantime you and the rest of the fighters need to keep your skills sharp and stay ready. I'm going to talk to you and Targa and Beck later this morning, but you need to think about the best ways to defend the valley. Outside the city and the prison and the settlements, I haven't seen the first hint of a road so if we can eliminate their baseships, any attack on this valley will come on foot."

"Targa and Beck say the Cylons are always on foot in the forest, both the centurions and the skinjobs. The rest of the time they travel by air. The big problem is that we haven't got a lot in the way of weapons. Beck's crossbow and others like it will only work against the skinjobs. One big assault and we'll be out of ammunition."

"I need to see if Natalie can help with the ammunition and weapons. If we eliminate the basestars first, we've eliminated their main resurrection facility. The skinjobs might not be as anxious to accompany their centurions into the fight if they can't download. Death becomes permanent so it makes them just like us in that regard. But…and it's a big one…they've got nearly a hundred thousand centurions on the planet alone and we both know what their firepower is like so I think you see where our problem lies unless we can turn a significant number to our side."

"_A hundred thousand_," Narcho said shocked. "Targa said they'd never fought more than about twenty at one time. We've only got about a hundred men who are able to fight in this valley. There's only about six hundred total counting the women and children."

"That's why you're going to have to concentrate on defense. I don't know when or even _if_ the Cylons will come here. I imagine the fighting will concentrate in the city and the settlements at first, but eventually you might find yourselves defending this place. I hope by that time we'll have Marines here to help you."

"How long do you think we'll have?"

"I don't know. In a perfect world, Natalie will take her findings to the council and Cavil and his circle of traitors will be arrested and put in prison, but I really doubt it's going to happen that way. When it starts, it'll probably be in the city or Settlement Alpha and spread from there."

"How will we even know?"

"I'll figure out a way to get word to you. Or you might be able to see it depending on what happens on their baseships. That's where I'm going to try to get Natalie to concentrate their efforts. What I'd really like to see is about a dozen battlestars jump into space over this planet and take on those baseships, but we can't count on that happening anytime soon. You've never told Targa and Beck that we now control Caprica, have you?"

"No, sir."

"Keep that to yourself. I don't want anybody here counting on being rescued by the Colonials."

"Do you think Admiral Adama will bring his ships here?"

"Yes, I do. He'll leave most of the fleet to protect Caprica and bring the rest here, but I don't know when. He's got Kara and Hunter back there now telling him everything they know about this planet, but I know Bill Adama and he won't do anything hasty so if they're not here and a war starts, it will be entirely up to us."

"Do you really think Natalie can lead the rebel Cylons? Don't you think it should be you?"

"It's got to be one of them. I agree that right now she has zero military experience. I'm going to do my best to give her a crash course in what little I know. I didn't do any fighting on the ground during the First War so my knowledge isn't much greater than hers."

"I did a paper on the ground war on Tauron for Mr. Connelly's second semester Colonial history class. We did a lot better in the air than we did on the ground. If the old centurions hadn't withdrawn and left the Colonies, we'd have lost Tauron to them for sure."

"I've read a little bit about the ground campaigns as well. It's always easy looking back, but even I could see where some of our generals and admirals made some big mistakes. Of course the biggest mistake was making a couple million U-87 and 0005 centurions and arming them, but that's water under the bridge now. I'm going to tell Targa and Beck to listen to you. They know nothing about the First War since these people were already here when it was going on."

"Will Natalie listen to you?"

"She's read all six history volumes of the wars humans have fought starting with ancient Kobol. I glanced over those books when I was in the settlement over a week ago. The whole first volume is mostly myth, but after that everything is told from a historian's point of view, not a military strategist's view. That's the downside. We all know that history gets written by the victorious. It's not always totally accurate. A huge drawback we're facing is no weapons."

"The skinjobs bring weapons into the forest so they've got them stashed somewhere. The day Kara and I got here…the Leoben who caught us…he had a newer style assault rifle. Targa took it. I looked it over. It's Colonial design but not Colonial manufacture so it isn't one they captured. It's a knockoff but a good one. They're making them…even if it's one at a time."

"That's good information to know. I'll talk to Natalie. Maybe they have a weapons manufacturing facility here on the planet or maybe on one of the baseships or maybe they've got a couple of centurions working in a garage somewhere. Good point. I have a feeling Natalie and I will be spending some serious time together when we get back."

"Are you going to live with her?"

"No. I'm going to live with the one who took me from the prison. I'm her breeder. She's a Three. She's also pregnant, but I'd appreciate you keeping that to yourself, too."

"Did you tell Kara?"

"No. She knew why I'd been taken to the city. Hunter told her. I didn't want her having to deal with that, too."

"What about Sonja?"

"What about her?"

"She's not pregnant, too, is she?"

"No."

"You were sure right about her and Natalie being different. They don't even look alike and I'm not talking about the difference in their hair color. It's her whole attitude."

John thought about what had happened when they'd all gotten to Emmalyn's the night before. Although Targa and Beck still looked like backwoodsmen, they were as clean and as scrubbed as two men could get. John had made the introductions.

Whereas Sonja had barely acknowledged the men and had treated them with disdain, Natalie had gotten up and offered them her hand and had given one of them her seat near the fire. Yoshimo had offered his seat to the other.

John had never seen two men fall so utterly under the spell of a woman so fast in his life.

Emmalyn had noticed it, too. But Emmalyn didn't seem to resent Natalie the way she had Sonja. Natalie hadn't been the least bit flirtatious with the men, either. Instead she had asked them questions about life in the valley, about farming and fishing, and about what the winters were like. She had told them that she would like to see snow since it had not snowed in Settlement Alpha since she'd been there.

Targa and Beck were two of the toughest men he'd ever met, but around Natalie they were as shy and polite as choirboys.

So enthralled were the two men by her that they could barely eat. John had never heard so many protests when Emmalyn had told them that it was late and that they all needed to retire for the night. Yoshimo had gone to Daniel's place with him. Natalie was staying with Emmalyn and Dessa. John had volunteered to go back with Targa, Beck and Noel and sleep in Hunter's bed.

They had all drunk several mugs of mead and John had talked to them about the city, about where the medical clinic was and the transportation garage and the airstrip, and which buildings housed humans, especially the women and children so the men could avoid them if they ever fought there.

They had finally all gone to bed and he had fallen asleep immediately. Only the storm had wakened him. If his internal clock was correct, it was about 04:00.

"Go back to bed, Lieutenant Allison," John said. "I'm going to sit in here by the fire for a while."

"You can call me Narcho…or Noel."

"Okay, Narcho. Go back to bed. There's no need for my demons to keep you awake, too."

Alone in the room, John stretched his bare feet toward the fire, crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. The rain was still beating against the door, but the rumbling thunder had grown more distant. The storm was moving through the valley on its way to the city just as they were now moving closer to whatever happened next.

...

In the ready room on Monday morning after their briefing, Jackson Spenser told Kara to stay behind.

Dwight Saunders had been sitting beside her. As he stood, he leaned over and said, "Way to start the week, Starbuck."

She smiled. "I'm innocent."

"They all say that."

When the room was empty, Spenser said. "Admiral Adama would like to see you in his office at 13:00 this afternoon. You can leave at lunch."

"Thank you, sir."

"Is everything all right Lieutenant Thrace?"

"Fine, sir."

"What do you think of the Mark VII?"

"After I finally quit fighting the computers, I can say it's an awesome machine."

"I've been impressed so far. I'm glad it meets your approval. Give my regards to the admiral."

She smiled. "I will, sir."

In the locker room, she called Lee and caught him at his desk. "Where are you and Hunter eating lunch?"

"The cafeteria. Why?"

"I'll meet you there at noon. I've got an appointment with your dad at 13:00. After that I've got the afternoon free. Do you think you and Hunter could take off, too?"

"I don't know. What did you have in mind?"

"I'll tell you at lunch if I can work it out."

…

She was ten minutes late getting to the cafeteria because she had to go through security and get a visitor's badge to get into the building. Lee and Hunter were waiting for her.

"I was just getting ready to call you," he said. "I thought something had happened."

She pointed to the visitor badge. "The last time I was here, I didn't have to wait for a corporal to call and confirm my appointment with your father and then explain why I was an hour early and then go through three security check points."

Hunter said, "Things changed after Tucker Clellan blew up the Cylons. Security got a lot tighter. I've been stopped and searched on my way in a couple of times."

Kara grinned. "Is that why you got your hair cut? Trying to look more military?"

"I got my hair cut last week at the same time Lee did. You just didn't notice."

When they had gotten their trays and were seated, Lee asked, "Why is it you want us to take off this afternoon?"

"I called Irina Hoshi's daughter. She told me that Irina was feeling well enough to see us this afternoon. Then I called Hugh Connelly. He's going to meet us outside her apartment building at 16:00…or meet me if you guys can't come. He's going to ask her about the Kobol Stone."

She saw Hunter's eyes light up. "I'd really like to see Mrs. Hoshi again."

Lee said, "I'll check with Major Parker after lunch. Stop by my office after you meet with my father. Why do you think he wants to see you?"

Kara shrugged. "I think it has to do with my letter of apology, but I'm not sure."

Hunter grinned. "No matter what he says to you, try to control your temper."

"That's real good advice coming from you. I'm not the one who almost went toe-to-toe with Crashdown Saturday night."

Hunter was still smiling. "You would have if he was squeezing Lee's butt like he was Maya's."

"Knock it off, you two," Lee said.

"Major McKenna left me a message. She's got Hunter's birth certificate. After I leave here I'll ride over to the AJA headquarters and pick it up." She looked at Hunter. "You're one step closer to being legit."

"I'm one step closer to riding that motorcycle of yours."

...

Bill was on the phone when Kara arrived. His aide told her to have a seat. For a reason she couldn't quite comprehend, she was nervous and would have preferred to pace around the outer office, but she sat and contented herself with jiggling one of her legs. Eating dinner at the same table with the admiral didn't faze her in the least. Maybe it had something to do with walking into his office. It made her think of walking into a lion's den. At the dinner table he was Lee's father to her. Here he was _The Admiral _and she was confronted with the full power of his rank.

Finally at ten minutes after one, the aide told her she could go in. She took a deep breath and smiled at him like this was something she did every day.

"Come in, Kara, and shut the door," Bill said. When she had complied, he pointed to a chair near his desk. "Have a seat."

"Thank you, sir." She perched on the edge of the seat, unable to allow herself to sit back and relax.

Her one-page, hand-written letter was lying on the desk in front of him.

The silence stretched.

Finally he said, "Major McKenna explained the circumstances surrounding this letter to me. Would you have written it if the judge hadn't made it part of your sentence?"

She forced herself to look directly at him. "No, sir."

"Because you're not sorry you took the Raider."

"No, sir. I'm not sorry I took it. I'm not sorry I found my father. I'm not sorry I brought Hunter back." She took a deep breath. "But I am sorry I disappointed you. You trusted me and I betrayed your trust. I am sorry for that."

"Does my opinion of you actually matter?"

"Yes, sir."

"But not enough to stop you from taking the Raider."

"I wasn't thinking of your opinion when I took the Raider. I was thinking of finding my father and about all the humans on Nereid and how you planned to nuke them."

A look passed over his face that she didn't understand. She'd either made him angry or ashamed. He glanced down at the letter and then back up. His face had assumed its usual neutral mask that was almost impossible for her to read.

"At the end of your letter you said you hoped I could find it in my heart to forgive you. Did you mean that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Pride often keeps us from saying and doing the things we should. Laura once told me that I have too much pride. That's why I called you here today to tell you that you're forgiven. It's hard for me to remember how young you are and how you often think outside the box. And not having been much of a father to my own sons, it's hard for me to understand the kind of love you feel for John or where that love could lead you. I can't condone what you did, but I can try to understand why you did it."

"Thank you, sir." Kara was suddenly overcome with emotion. She looked at the floor and struggled with her feelings. She couldn't keep her voice steady as she said, "I just want my father home. I grew up without him. I don't want Brae to do the same thing."

"We'll find him, Kara," Bill said in a much gentler tone. "Tell Lee that I talked to Zak this morning. I'm going to be bringing his unit home at the end of this month so they can start prepping for the Nereid mission."

"How is Zak, sir?"

The admiral looked out the window toward the Capitol Building. "I think my youngest son has become a man just like my oldest son."

"I'll look forward to seeing him when he gets home. I know Lee will, too."

"Is there anything else you'd like to talk to me about?"

"No, sir."

"Then you're free to go."

Kara nodded. She managed to look him in the eye. "I owe you a lot, sir," she said with all the sincerity in her heart. "I won't disappoint you again."

Admiral Adama studied her with those blue eyes so much like Lee's. "I think I owe you something as well, Kara. I hope I don't disappoint you again, either."

...

Hugh Connelly was waiting in his car down the block from Irina Hoshi's apartment building when Kara pulled up on her motorcycle. She was ten minutes early so she parked and went to sit in the car with him.

In the two weeks since she'd seen him, he had lost weight. Stress was clearly etched in his handsome face. She knew it probably had to do with Stacey, but she didn't know if he wanted to talk about it or not.

"Hi. Been waiting long?" She asked.

"Five minutes. I circled the block four times before I got this parking space."

"Finding parking is tough in this area. I guess final exams will be starting soon."

"Next week."

"Are you going to teach summer school?"

"One class. Stacey's on medical leave from her job so we've got to have grocery money."

"I'm so sorry about…what's happened to her."

"She had her first chemo treatment last week and got a bad reaction to one of the drugs. She was in the hospital for two days. Her doctors are going to regroup and consider the next best alternative drug cocktail. She's home now. One of our neighbors, a retired schoolteacher, is staying with her during the day."

"Is Elaina still in daycare?"

"For now. Laura has called me a couple of times just to tell me she's thinking about us. She's the President of the Colonies and she still finds time to pick up the phone and say, _How are you doing, Hugh?_"

"That's just the kind of person she is. Sometimes I'm ashamed of the way I treated her after she and my dad got married. I didn't want a stepmother telling me what to do…not that she tried to tell me what to do. If she hadn't found a tutor for me, I probably wouldn't have passed the entrance exam to the Academy. Lee told me that I resented having to share my dad with her after I'd just found him. Dr. Lee. He's probably right."

"Laura told me that if Stacey and I needed a break, to let her know and I could bring Elaina over. She said her nanny Maya had volunteered to watch her."

"You should do it. Maya is great with kids and I'd love to see Elaina and Brae get to know one another. He loves his mornings with the other kids and it gives Maya a break and a chance to work on her homework. She's still working on her teaching degree."

Hugh smiled for the first time. "Elaina likes daycare, too. According to the lady who runs the place, my princess is a bossy little organizer who tries to keep the rest of the kids straight. One of the other ladies told me last week that Elaina was trying to teach the ABCs to a couple of one-year olds. She won't be four for another month."

"I think she must take after you."

Connelly sat for a long time without saying anything. Finally he said, "I really appreciate you introducing me to Mrs. Hoshi. Your dad was going to do it but we never got around to it."

"I know. Hunter wanted to see her again, too. She knows he's from Nereid but her daughter doesn't so he'll have to be careful what he says. Later maybe you and him can get together and he can tell you everything he knows. I told you what Hunter said about a crazy old guy on the planet who claimed he'd found the cave of Zeus."

Her mobile phone buzzed and she recognized Lee's work number.

When she answered, Lee said, "Hunter's on his way. He's riding the subway. He left about twenty minutes ago so he should be there soon."

"You aren't coming?" Kara asked disappointed.

"I can't leave. Dad wants to meet with me and Major Parker and the rest of his senior staff in a few minutes. I figured that was more important. You can tell me what goes on."

She looked at Connelly. "It'll just be Hunter. Lee's tied up at work."

"I was in a faculty meeting last Monday afternoon. Before Colonel Winters came in, Colonel Burgher and Major Sykes were talking. I think they forget sometimes that I'm not in the military. They were discussing some rumors that have been making the rounds. They say we're going to war on Nereid. I asked Conrad later and he told me that there were thousands of humans on the planet. Is that true?"

Kara took a deep breath. "I'm going to trust you with some heavy stuff, okay?"

"You don't need to worry."

"Colonel Burgher is right." Briefly she told him what she knew about the Cylons and the humans on the planet. She finished with, "There's something else. My dad's there, too." Then she told him the rest.

"Holy mother of the gods," Connelly breathed when she finished. "You've been walking around with all this knowledge in your head having to act like everything is normal in your world."

"You know something? You're the only person who's ever considered what this has been like for me. Admiral Adama was all hung up on me stealing the Raider and how I'd broken the law and betrayed his trust and Lee was all hung up on how I hadn't trusted him enough to tell him so he could have stopped me…even if it had meant having me arrested. Not one person ever said, _You did a good thing, Kara, even if it was wrong. You kept a lot of humans from dying on Nereid even if you had to steal a frakking tricked-out Raider that cost the taxpayers of Caprica a million cubits to do it. You kept a beautiful planet from being nuked that might have a stone hidden on it that will point the way to Kobol or even Earth. _I mean not that I really care. That's not why I did it, but all anybody thought about was the wrong of what I did and how it affected them. I guess to most people there's never a good enough reason to do a wrong thing."

She took a deep breath. She hadn't meant to unload her feelings on him that way. He didn't need to hear about her problems. He had more than enough of his own.

Connelly put his head back against his headrest and shut his eyes. "When we were in the refugee camp, after I found out you were fourteen instead of seventeen, when I was struggling with…feelings I knew I shouldn't have for you, I knew even then that you were going to do something really important one day. I just knew."

"Yolanda Brenn would say it was my destiny," she said softly.

"Then three years ago when I was interviewing out at the Academy for the teaching job, Laura invited me to dinner one night and I met your father. That was before they were married, before he'd found you, but he took one look at me and damned if he didn't know how much you meant to me. I wanted to tell him then that I knew you were something special, but I knew the timing wasn't right and he would have taken it the wrong way. Even after he started teaching at the Academy and he and I got to be friends, I had to be careful what I said around him because I didn't want him getting the wrong idea. I should have realized I didn't have to tell him anything. He knows. He knows how special you are."

Kara took a deep breath remembering how she'd cried her eyes out the first time she'd seen Connelly in the camp with Stacey. But even as she'd wept for the end of her first crush, she knew Connelly wasn't the man she was meant to love. She was looking for a blue-eyed prince with wings over his heart and Connelly wasn't him.

"There's Hunter," Kara said. They got out of the car and she made the introductions. "I told him all about Nereid," she said to Hunter, "even about my father so you can talk freely in front of him."

Connelly said to Hunter, "I've been looking forward to meeting you ever since Kara told me about you."

"I'm afraid I'm going to be a disappointment. I told Kara that I don't know anything about the Kobol Stone. My grandparents took me exploring with them when I was just a kid and they never found anything about the stone. We explored a lot of caves. We found one that had some old statues of the gods that my grandparents said was odd because the Thirteenth Tribe were monotheists. They speculated that maybe some polytheists had come to planet and tried to establish a settlement and failed…or maybe some monotheists started secretly worshipping our gods."

"There's another possibility," Connelly said. "Maybe the statues were brought from Kobol as works of art and then later hidden or dumped in the cave."

"Could be, but I don't think they were dumped there. They were in a nearly perfect circle. Twelve of them."

"The twelve gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus?"

"I think so. You'd have to ask my grandfather. I was just a kid. All I saw were a bunch of dusty old statues arranged in a circle."

"Kara said your grandparents had studied the ancient temple near the city. The last reference I can find to the Kobol Stone is in the writings that the Cylons consider their scriptures. According to the writers of the book of Constantine, some few faithful took the Stone from the temple near the city of Azurra and carried it into the mountains. It's never mentioned after that."

"My grandparents went to the temple before I was born. After a group of humans and the old centurions came to the planet over twenty-five years ago, the centurions wouldn't let anybody near the temple or the city. Those were a different model centurion from the ones they have now. They're not the same ones we fight in the forest. The old ones were religious. My grandfather said they were afraid we'd desecrate their temple."

"Do you remember what your grandparents said about the ancient temple?" Connelly asked.

"Sorry. You'd have to ask my grandfather. My grandmother died a few years ago."

"I hope I get to meet your grandfather one day. I hope I can visit your planet and see the temple for myself."

Kara said, "Hunter's grandfather is like Mrs. Hoshi. Their brains are full of history that will be gone when they are."

"That's why Mrs. Hoshi's journals are so important," Connelly said. "Did your grandparents keep journals by any chance?"

"We never talked about it. To be honest I was never interested in the temple. I just liked my grandparents' expeditions because they were like extended camping trips. The only reason I remember those statues is because most of them were naked."

Kara burst out laughing. "Gods, Hunter."

"Hey, I was ten or eleven years old. I'd never seen anything like that before."

Connelly said, "Come on, you two, let's go talk to a bit of living history."

Kara was still smiling as they got on the elevator. "Get Maya to take you to the Caprica Museum of Fine Art. They've got hundreds of statues and a lot of them are naked. Just for the record, my favorite is Apollo."

_…_

It was mid afternoon when John brought the Heavy Raider down at the settlement airstrip. They left Buddy to make sure the other centurions serviced the ship and towed it into the hangar. John took the communication device with him and told Buddy to come to Natalie's house when he was through.

Yoshimo left to go to his place. John asked Natalie if he could use her bathroom to take a shower and change clothes. When he was through, he found her standing at the sink. She looked like she had been running water into the tea kettle but had not finished the task. The shaking of her shoulders was so slight that at first he didn't notice it, but as he walked up beside her, he realized that she was crying.

Few things got to John the way a strong woman's tears did. He put his arm around her shoulders.

"I'm sorry. I know the last two days have been rough on you. You did really well. Better than I did when I saw Kara's picture."

Her hands gripped the edge of the sink so hard that her knuckles were white. "He still loves Lucy. He'll always love her. The last thing he asked me was if I could make her a new body. He's not interested in moving on. He's not interested in me."

John didn't know what to say so he just said again, "I'm sorry. I wish things could have turned out different for you."

She turned suddenly and wrapped her arms around him and continued crying. He held her and stroked her hair. It was the only way he could think of to comfort her, but the longer she was in his arms, the more difficult it became for him to be objective about the embrace. She must have sensed something because she suddenly pulled his head down to hers and kissed him, her mouth hot and hungry. Desire washed over him and for a few brief moments he kissed her back.

Then with a strength he didn't know he possessed, he managed to pull back. He grasped her shoulders.

"Don't, Natalie, please don't. We shouldn't do this. We _can't_ do this."

She looked at him, the pain still so clear in her eyes. "You don't want me either."

"Natalie, it's not _me_ you want. It's _him_. And I'm not _him_. I can never be _him_. And we've got to work together in the months to come." He took a deep breath. "If we do this, it'll change things between us forever. Once it happens there's no going back and pretending it didn't."

For a few moments her shoulders sagged and then she straightened them. "You're right. I was very harsh on Sonja because she has no respect for your marriage and your love for your wife and now I've turned around and shown the same disregard for your feelings. I need to get my priorities straight. I won't throw myself at you again. Go outside and sit. I'll make tea."

John backed away from her. "I'm going to take a walk. I'll be back in fifteen or twenty minutes."

"I promise I won't bother you again."

"I don't think you understand. It's not you I don't trust right now."

"Because I remind you of Sonja."

"No, because you don't."

He turned and walked out of the house and down the path. He made it all the way to the meadow where the sheep grazed before he stopped. The physical desire had subsided, but the memory of her kiss lingered. He wondered what would have happened if he'd met Natalie first instead of Sonja. Then he realized that he couldn't start down that path. He couldn't ever let himself think of Natalie as anything but the leader of the rebels. It wasn't just her physical beauty. Natalie reminded him of both Laura and Socrata, blond and tough like the one and intelligent and compassionate like the other, and that was a dangerous combination for him. It always had been.

When he got back to her house, he was relieved to see that Natalie wasn't alone. Jade, dressed in running shorts and a tank top, was sitting at the table. She actually smiled when she saw him.

"The kite maker is back."

John pulled out a chair and sat. "Hello, Jade."

"Natalie tells me you're going to move here to live with D'Anna."

"That's right."

"Then you can help me make another kite."

"What happened to the first one?"

"Nothing. What's that in your shirt pocket?"

"That's my mobile phone."

"Huh. You lie."

John looked at Natalie. "Did you tell her about Buddy? He'll be here soon."

Natalie said, "John has a centurion guarding him because he's the father of the peacemaker."

"Huh. You both lie."

"Are you still stalking around in the woods?" John asked.

"I fly my kite now instead of going to the woods. Sometimes I let a few of the human kids go with me and watch. They think it's funny we made the kite from a dress."

Natalie poured John a cup of tea for him.

"So where did you go?" Jade asked Natalie. "I went to see Yoshimo yesterday and he was gone so I came to see you and you were gone, too."

Natalie said, "We went to the valley to see some people there."

Jade looked suspicious. "Why? Or do you lie about that, too?"

"Natalie isn't lying," John said. "We took Yoshimo with us. It was a nice two-day vacation. We all needed one."

"Huh. They've never needed a vacation before. Why now?"

They were spared having to answer her question because they heard the clanking footsteps of a centurion. Buddy came around the bend in the path at the same moment John realized that centurions weren't built for stealth. That was clearly a plus for anyone fighting them. They watched in silence as the robot walked up to the patio. Buddy's red eye scanned all of them and returned to Jade.

"Hey, big guy," John said as he took the communication device from his shirt pocket. "Did you get the ship all squared away?" He got a nod. "Good. This is Jade. Jade, this is Buddy."

Words scrolled across the display. _She really needs somebody to give her a decent haircut._

John smiled. That had to be Lucy instead of Buddy. He pressed the _Up_ key until that line had rolled off the screen. No need for Buddy and Jade to get off on the wrong foot the way he had with her.

"Hey, Bud, tell Jade why you and me are hanging out together."

He was glad to see the words, _Protect father of peacemaker_.

John showed the display to Jade.

"Huh," she said. "You put that on the screen."

"No, I didn't. He did." John said and put the device on the table in front of her. "Ask him something."

"What model am I?"

_A third generation Eight, the last generation of your model created. Your programming was modified to give you enhanced fighting capabilities._

Jade pointed at Natalie. "What model is she?"

_The First Six. Her name is Natalie. She is the leader with the plan. She has a cat named Daniel that I must leave alone or Natalie will send me and John back to the city._

Jade gnawed her thumbnail and pointed to the communication device. "Where did you get that?"

John said, "Out of somebody's discard bin. I need it so Buddy can tell me if I'm doing something wrong. I had to promise Natalie I'd behave myself here in the settlement if I want to be allowed to stay."

He looked at Natalie. It was going to be up to her if she told Jade any more. Apparently she decided that now was not the time because she didn't continue the conversation about Buddy.

Instead she said, "I'm going to walk with John to D'Anna's house. Would you like to go with us?"

Jade wrinkled her nose and shook her head. "Are you really going to live with Miss Pukey?"

"Yes."

"Ugh."

John smiled. "Just wait. One of these days you might be in the same situation."

"No. Never. No way. Not going to happen."

"Never say _never,_" he said as he stood. "I need to go get my belongings."

He went into Natalie's house and thought for a brief moment about where Jade would have found them if he and Natalie had given in to the rush of desire both of them had felt earlier. They'd have been in bed together, and that wouldn't have been good at all, especially if Jade had said something to D'Anna. As he rolled up his dirty clothes and put them into the black plastic bag, he wondered if D'Anna's house would be as nice as Natalie's.

He expected Jade to be gone when he got back outside, but she was still waiting.

"I thought you weren't going with us."

She shrugged. "I changed my mind. I want to see Miss Pukey's face when she sees you and your _buddy_."

Natalie led them around the house on a small brick sidewalk and he saw what the tall, thick shrubs had hidden. They were at the end of a paved one-lane street. Beginning about a block away houses much the same as Natalie's began appearing on either side of the road. The houses were sparse at first and then grew closer together as they neared the town. For the first half-mile he saw no one and then occasionally he saw a Cylon or a human outside one of the houses. They all stopped and stared, but John was reasonably certain it was because of Buddy clanking along behind them.

"Is this a mixed neighborhood?" He asked Natalie.

"What do you mean?"

"Humans and Cylons living side-by-side?"

"I suppose you could call it that. The houses on this road are occupied by human and Cylon couples or Cylon couples or single Cylons like me. We've separated them from the humans because of…well, let's just say it's more peaceful this way."

"Lots of fights at first before they were separated," Jade said.

"Who was fighting?"

"Humans were fighting with each other."

"Why?"

Natalie said, "Some didn't approve of their fellow humans choosing to voluntarily live with one of us. It's simpler if they're kept apart. Centurions guard the entrance to this road. I'll make sure they know to allow you access."

"You'll have to watch your back," Jade said. "Miss Pukey lives close to the clinic so she's close to where the human barracks and apartments start."

Natalie sighed. "She's right. I hadn't thought of that."

"But don't worry," Jade said snidely. "You've got your big buddy to keep you safe, although I doubt Miss Pukey will like a centurion camped out in her house."

"He's not going to be able to live with John and D'Anna," Natalie said. "We're going to station him at the clinic. The last thing we want to do is call attention to their situation."

"Huh. Then John had better watch his back."

"Thanks for the warning."

She snickered. "Maybe you'll hire me as your bodyguard. I still have my knife."

John grinned and teased her. "Maybe after I get my first paycheck we can discuss it. I can't afford you right now."

Jade laughed out loud. "What paycheck?" And then she said, "Most humans aren't nearly as funny as you."

The road got busier. John saw golf carts and up ahead on a cross street a big truck went by.

"Main Street," Natalie said. "People are coming home from the fields."

They crossed the road and continued for a block before it dead-ended. John knew he was looking at the clinic before they got there, not only because it was a large structure, but because there were two centurions standing outside. They stopped at the door.

"Wait here, Bud," John said.

"I'll wait here, too," Jade said. "I don't like the way it smells in there. It smells too much like the download tanks."

John and Natalie went inside. The clinic had a faint but unmistakably antiseptic odor that was part disinfectant and part alcohol. There was a middle-aged human woman sitting at a desk.

"Hello, Miss Natalie," she said. "Did you bring a helper this afternoon or is he a patient?"

"Neither. I need to see Simon and Bianca and Laszlo. Are they busy?"

"It's been a very quiet afternoon. Simon's not here. He went home to spend time with his wife. The doctors are in the back with our only patient."

They walked down a hall with several examining rooms on either side and then into a large room with curtained bed spaces. All the beds were empty, their curtains pulled back and tied except one. Both Bianca and Laszlo were standing beside it. John and Natalie waited.

"This used to be the main lab," Natalie said. "Now it's the hospital. The resurrection tanks were through that doorway," she pointed left to a closed door and then hesitated. "That's where…it happened…where Cavil and his centurions killed the Sevens and the creators. The tanks are gone now…taken to the facility at the prison or to a base ship. The room is used for storage. I can't go in there. I can't make myself do it…not yet."

"I noticed this place is two-story. What's on the second floor?"

"Apartments where the creators lived. They're empty now. Cavil told everyone they had moved to the facility at the prison."

"What about Bianca and Laszlo...where do they live?"

"They have a nice apartment through the far doorway. This door on the right leads to another room almost as large as this one where the medical tests are done. That's where we were all created but that equipment is gone, too. Cavil took everything to the lab at the prison complex so he could continue his lie about the creators being there. The doctors have a machine that does x-rays. There's a room where they do surgery. There's also a pharmacy, but many of the drugs we took from the Colonies have long ago run out or expired. Bianca spends much of her time researching and analyzing local plants and herbs. Some of the humans help her by bringing her anything new they find."

"This is a lot bigger and nicer than I thought it would be," John said.

Bianca finally turned their way. A smile lit her face when she saw him and she hurried over and hugged him the way she always did.

"Don't let us take you from your patient," John said as he thought of how much he'd like for her to meet Emmalyn. He had a feeling the two women would quickly become friends. Narcho had told him how knowledgeable Emmalyn was about medicinal herbs.

Bianca said. "Laszlo can tend him as well as I can. I didn't think we'd see you again so soon."

"I'm moving here. We're on our way to D'Anna's right now."

Natalie said. "He's the father of her child so he has a right to be with her. That's the only way I can justify his presence here to the council."

Bianca turned to John. "Then may I speak to you frankly about something…in private?"

Natalie said, "Whatever you need to say, you can say it in front of me. I'll be assuming the role of his handler."

"Very well." Bianca looked him in the eyes. "No sexual intercourse."

"What?"

"You heard me. You're not to have sex with D'Anna. Her blood pressure is slightly high but it's holding steady for now. However she spotted a bit late last week. We put her to bed for two days and it stopped. So no sex. Do I make myself clear?"

John felt his cheeks grow hot. He looked over Bianca's shoulder at the wall. "Crystal clear. Not that I'd even thought about it," he said defensively. "My plans all along were to sleep on the couch."

"Well you obviously had intercourse at least once a few months ago or she wouldn't be pregnant now. I'll be glad to tell her the same thing."

"That won't be necessary," John said. "I lost my appeal for her the minute she found out she was pregnant."

"Any other medical orders," Natalie asked with a hint of amusement in her voice. When Bianca shook her head, Natalie continued. "I'm adding a centurion sentinel to the two who guard the back entrance of the clinic. It's one John brought with him from the city."

"Why would you even need to mention that to me?"

"Because this one is different. He not only understands our orders, he can communicate via sign language or on a device John has with him. I've decided to add him at the back since we may need to meet with him from time to time. We might even need to take him with us on a trip. As long as there are two guarding the entrance, he won't be missed if he disappears occasionally."

"Just as long as it lets us do our jobs, I've got no problems with whatever you put at any of our doors. I know they're there for our protection."

"When the doctors first started working here," Natalie said to John. "There were some problems with a group of humans. Name-calling. Threats. That short of thing."

Bianca said, "I mentioned to John that Laszlo and I are both considered collaborators by some and traitors by others."

Natalie continued, "I'll need to clear it with Simon, but would you accept John as a helper in the afternoons?"

"Of course."

John smiled and winked at Bianca. "It seems I need to be gainfully employed before Natalie can present my case for moving here to the council. I'll be working in the fields doing something in the mornings. I told her I don't know the first thing about working in a hospital, but she assures me that I can push a mop as well as anybody."

Laszlo finished talking to his patient, pulled the curtain around the bed and joined them. They talked for another few minutes and then he and Natalie left to go to D'Anna's.

As soon as they got outside, Jade asked, "What took you so long?"

"We had several things to discuss with the doctors." Natalie turned to Buddy and said. "You need to go to the back of the clinic and join the two sentinels already there. Your orders are simple. Protect this clinic and the doctors."

Buddy turned his head toward John who said, "This is the only way things will work, big guy. I'll come see you tomorrow."

D'Anna's house was in the middle of a side street several blocks away. At the sidewalk Natalie stopped and put her hand on Jade's arm.

"Let John do this alone."

He took a deep breath, and on the short walk up to the door, he wondered what he would do if D'Anna told him she didn't want him living with her. He knocked and after almost a minute, she opened the door. She looked like she felt good, much better than when he'd seen her a little over a week earlier. She was wearing a blouse that pulled across her gently rounded abdomen. She was definitely beginning to show just like Natalie had said.

For a few unguarded moments, she seemed glad to see him. Then the look was replaced with a questioning one.

"Hi," he said and smiled. "I know it's not fair showing up unannounced like this, but I was in the neighborhood and wondered if I could stay a while."

She looked around him and took in Natalie and Jade out on the sidewalk. "This isn't one of your human jokes?"

He held up the black plastic bag. "This is everything I have on the planet."

"You really want to move in with me?"

"Yes."

She stood back and let him in. He turned at the door. Natalie waved and said she'd come visit in the morning. D'Anna closed the door. He looked around. Her little house was about the same size as Natalie's but the bedroom and kitchen were separated from the living room by walls and doors.

"I'll sleep on the couch," John said. "I don't want to put you out any more than necessary."

"Where's Sonja?"

"In the city."

"You left her?"

"We never were together like that." The silence stretched. "Look, I know this is awkward, but I want to be here with you. You don't need to worry about me…bothering you. Bianca has already given me orders on that. I'll be gone during the day. Natalie's explained to me that I'm going to have to work, but that's okay. I don't mind."

Suddenly D'Anna smiled. "I knew today was going to be special. This morning I wasn't sick for the first time in months and while I was lying in bed, I felt our son move."

Surprise was evident in his voice. "Already?"

"It felt like a feather brushing inside me. When did your wife feel your son move?"

"I don't remember. She was a little bigger than you are now, though. I do remember that much. And it was longer than that before I could feel him move."

"You can put your things in the bedroom. I have plenty of room in the closet and the dresser. I don't have much…not like Sonja."

"Are you sure you don't mind sharing?"

She gestured to the couch which was all of five feet long. "I don't think that will be too comfortable for you."

"You're offering to share your bed with me, too?"

"The scriptures say we should lie together in the same bed since we'r man and wife."

He started to tell her that they weren't man and wife, but he let it go. It didn't matter what she called them, he knew the truth, and it wouldn't do to antagonize her right now. Too much depended on him being allowed to stay in the settlement.

"We can't..._lie together_ in the scriptural sense because of the baby. We can't take the chance."

"I know, but you should still share the bed with me."

"I have a copy of your scriptures with me. It's brought me a lot of comfort recently. I have some prayer beads, too. They belonged to Yusef."

"Do you want to convert to our faith?"

"I don't know. Maybe we can talk about it later. I'd like to get unpacked first and then get something to eat." He smiled. "Do I need to go to the grocery store?"

"I have some food in the kitchen. We'll fix something. My appetite is better now."

"Maybe we could go for a short walk after dinner. You could show me the town."

"Not until the council approves you being here."

"Natalie's going to take care of that tomorrow."

He was in the bedroom shaking the wrinkles out of his shirts and hanging them on hangers when there was a knock at the door. He stopped and listened. He heard D'Anna's footsteps crossing the outer room. The door opened and then he heard a voice that he recognized immediately.

"A Five reported to me that we have a stranger in town and that he's here now." Cavil said. "Tell him to come out or my centurions will come in and get him."

TBC…


	43. Fathers and Sons

Chapter 43

Fathers and Sons

_10. After a thousand years there arose on Eden a group of scholars who wished to study the gods of the Twelve Tribes._

_11. And there were many debates in their governing body called the Council of Solomon after a great ruler._

_12. One group said that to study the ways and religion of their ancient ancestors was not forbidden in the scripture._

_13. While another group said that such study was an abomination and an affront to the God who had delivered them from slavery._

_14. This group prevailed and any statue that had been carved in the likeness of the old gods was taken and smashed._

_15. But a few scholars smuggled statues of Zeus and the other Olympians into the mountains and hid them in a cave. _

_16. And hid with them texts and scrolls that their legacy would not be lost forever._

_17. The cave was called the Cave of Zeus, but as the scholars died one by one_

_18. The location of the cave was lost and the story of the statues of the old gods became a myth._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Constantine, _Chapter 2:10-18

.

John felt his heart rate ratchet up several notches. He looked at the black plastic bag sitting on the bed. The pistol was still wrapped in a pair of sweatpants near the bottom. This wasn't the Cavil from the city. According to Natalie, none of the Ones in this settlement existed when the Angel of Death and his second-born brother killed the Sevens and the creators. This One was activated later and in theory, at least, was ignorant of the crimes of his older brothers.

D'Anna appeared in the doorway. "You need to come out here. Don't worry. It'll be all right."

He took a deep breath and reached for her hand wondering if her Cylon senses could detect his pounding heart.

He was telling himself to stay cool as she led him through the doorway. Cavil stood looking around the small room. John put his arm around D'Anna's shoulders and the two men stared at one another.

"I'd like to see the papers authorizing your move to the settlement." Cavil said.

"I don't have them yet. I didn't know I needed them until I talked to Natalie."

"Ignorance is no excuse."

"Look, I don't want to cause any trouble for anybody. I just want to be with the mother of my child…our child…mine and D'Anna's. Tell me what I have to do and I'll do it."

"He _is_ my breeder," D'Anna said. "The council voted a long time ago to let us have our breeders with us."

Cavil sighed in an exasperated way that befit one of the bureaucratic Fives more than it did the ruthless leader John had heard in the city.

"There are _rules_ that must be followed or we have _anarchy_," he said as if explaining to a child. "One of the rules is that humans can't move around without papers approving that move ahead of time."

"I hardly think this small offense constitutes _anarchy_," D'Anna said sarcastically. "Especially since John didn't know he was doing anything wrong. Now you need to leave. You're giving me a headache and upsetting the baby. Natalie's coming here tomorrow morning and we're going before the council. We'll get it straightened out."

John caressed D'Anna's shoulder. "You need to sit down."

She ignored him and spoke to Cavil with a level of emotion in her voice that John had rarely heard from her.

"I'm the only sister right now who is pregnant. The child I carry is _important_ to us for a number of reasons and I want his father with me. The scriptures say a mother and father should be together. It's my _right_. What do you think the council will do to you if you cause me to go into early labor? I chose _this settlement_ to have my baby because Natalie said it was the best of all the settlements including the city. Are you trying to prove she was wrong? Do you not want the honor of a child foretold by the scriptures being born _here_?"

"Not all of us believe in _that sort of thing_," Cavil said with a disdain that would make his city brother proud.

"Maybe _you_ don't, but there are many others of our brothers and sisters who do. How long do you think you'll be in charge if they find out you're here acting like a little dictator when you really have no more power than the rest of us on matters like this. I'll say it again. This man is the father of my child. I want him here. _It's my right_. You've satisfied your curiosity about what he looks like. I want you to leave. And take your centurions with you. Now!"

Cavil visibly deflated.

John managed to keep from smiling. D'Anna had just bested this copy of the Cylon leader. He didn't think she would have fared so well against the one in the city, but this one was almost a wimp in comparison. The copy he had heard talking to Sonja didn't seem to care if they had children or not, nor would he have been cowed by D'Anna's words because he obviously cared nothing for the opinion of his brothers and sisters.

Cavil turned and struggled to gain back his dignity as he said, "I'll expect all of you in the council chamber at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. _I'll_ be presiding so don't be late."

"We'll be there," John said. "D'Anna and I want to get this straightened out so we can get on with our life together."

He closed the door behind the retreating Cavil and his centurions and breathed a sigh of relief. Then he and D'Anna went into the small kitchen. He had her sit down while he made tea.

As the kettle began to heat, he said, "You handled that very well. I'm impressed. Cavil left here with his tail tucked between his legs."

D'Anna looked at him strangely. "He doesn't have a tail."

John smiled. "That's a human expression. Have you never seen a dog slink away after he's been fussed at?"

"No."

"Well, they tuck their tails between their legs and…never mind. What's important is that you won this round."

Her smile was serene. "God brought you here to be with me and our child. It's up to me to see that no harm comes to you."

Her faith was so absolute that it was a little frightening to him. Then he felt a small amount of guilt because he really wasn't here for her and the child as much as he was because Natalie had told him that's the only way he would be allowed to stay in the settlement.

"Look, I want to be upfront about a couple of things. I have a lot of nightmares. I'll try not to wake you up, but sometimes I have to get up during the night and walk around so if you wake up and I'm not in the bed, I'll probably be on the couch."

"Once I go to sleep, I sleep soundly. I doubt you'll wake me up."

"Natalie told me I'll have to work in the fields in the mornings. I'm going to help the doctors in the clinic in the afternoon so I'll be gone most of the day."

"I might be able to get you out of working in the fields."

"No. I don't mind. Really, I don't. I'd like to get to know some of the people here in the settlement."

"This is not like the city, John. Humans don't have the kinds of freedoms here they have in the city."

"I've already figured that out, D'Anna."

"Most of the humans in the city are there because they want to be or because they've accepted living and working with us."

"Not all of them."

"You're referring to Rika and Yusef and that one isolated, unfortunate incident."

John stood and looked out the kitchen window at the tiny weed-choked yard behind the house that joined another tiny weed-choked backyard. He couldn't tell if anyone was in the house behind them or not. He wanted to tell her just exactly what the situation with Rika and Yusef had been, but he knew it was pointless now to get into it with her.

The kettle began to whistle, and he managed to bite back what he wanted to say as he prepared their tea and put a cup on the table in front of her.

He sat and finally said, "Just so you understand that not everyone in the city is there by choice."

"Maybe not by his or her choice but by God's choice."

He struggled again to bite back his reply, choosing instead to sip some of the very hot tea and almost burning the inside of his mouth. This living arrangement might be more difficult than he thought unless he could figure out a way not to talk about anything controversial. He thought of the city and the friends he had left behind. He already missed the solitude of his apartment, but he missed the mothers and their children more, especially Petra and little Cassie and Rachel. And Doolittle. He missed Doolittle.

Finally he asked, "Who lives behind you?"

"A human couple. I don't know their names. I've never met them."

"Any kids?"

"I don't think so. They're too old. Sometimes in the evening they bring their kitchen chairs out behind the house and sit. She does something with yarn."

"It's called knitting. Jade said the human dwellings start in the next block. She said there were houses and apartments and what she called barracks."

"Only a few humans live in houses in this part of town. Most of the human couples and families live in buildings containing four to six apartments. They're easier to guard. There are some here and some a few miles away nearer the fields. The single men and women are housed in separate barracks. They're between here and the fields."

"Jade also told me I needed to watch my back. Do you agree?"

D'Anna sounded defensive. "I don't know why she told you that."

"Maybe because not everybody approves of humans and Cylons mixing."

"Nothing's happened since I've been here."

"Which has only been a little over a week."

"I haven't been out and talked to anybody yet. Bianca has been bringing my groceries. You'd need to talk to her or Natalie since they've been here from the beginning."

"Okay, so let's think about dinner. I'll be glad to fix something."

"I made a vegetable casserole earlier. All you need to do is put it in the oven and cook it for forty-five minutes. I'm going to lie down."

John preheated the oven, put the casserole inside and set the timer for forty-five minutes. He followed her into the bedroom and finished putting up his clothes. He left the pistol rolled in the pair of sweatpants and put them in an empty drawer along with Buddy's communication device and the charger. Last to go in were the prayer beads and the book of scriptures with the picture of Laura and Brae tucked inside. Before he closed the drawer he looked at his smiling son who resembled him so much and wondered what the child D'Anna carried would look like. She had said the baby would be blond and blue-eyed like Rachel, but he couldn't imagine how she knew that any more than she could know it was a boy.

He went to the bed and sat down on the edge. "Look, I know you hadn't counted on me showing up like this, but I'm going to do my best to make this work. I just want you to know that."

D'Anna reached up and rubbed the top of his arm.

"What are you going to do when Sonja shows up and wants to take you back to the city with her?"

"I doubt that's going to happen."

But if it does?"

"I'll tell her this is where I'm supposed to be."

For the first time her eyes softened and she smiled. She took his hand and placed it under her blouse on her rounding abdomen.

"You've made our son very happy."

"And what about you? Have I made you happy, too?"

"Yes, you've made me happy, too."

"Good. You rest. I'll come get you when dinner is ready."

As he walked out of the bedroom, John wondered if there would ever come a time in his life when he was happy the way he had been when his family was together on Caprica.

_…_

Whether intentionally or not, Irina Hoshi's daughter made their visit easy. After she had served tea to them, she told Kara that she needed to go pick up some groceries and a prescription for her mother and would be gone a little over an hour. She asked Kara if she would mind staying until she got back. It was like a gift from the gods. Now they could talk freely about Nereid without revealing classified information to Irina's daughter.

Kara had told Connelly that Irina's eyesight was no longer very good. He went over to her chair and bent down so she could see him better when he took her hand.

"Oh, my," she said and smiled mischievously, "I do believe Kara likes to surround herself with handsome men. She didn't pick her father, but Lee and Hunter and now you are all quite good looking."

That got a smile from Connelly and a murmured, "Thank you."

"In fact you remind me of someone I once knew. So does Hunter. He was a mercenary on the first mission. A handsome man. He fathered a little girl with one of the shuttle pilots. I've always wondered what happened to them."

"I met Connelly in the refugee camp where we both spent a few years," Kara said. "He had been a teacher in Antioch before the Cylons bombed the city."

"A Colonial history teacher," Connelly added.

Irina said, "The history of the planet we discovered predates both the Colonies and the Federation by thousands of years."

"It's just a hobby of mine. While Kara and I were in the camp we each independently discovered an old altar deep in some nearby woods. I was fairly certain it was one of the Altars of Zeus that were created on each planet after the exodus from Kobol. There are specific instructions in Pythia as to the size of the altar and what kind of information was supposed to be carved on it. Archeologists since then have confirmed it's definitely one of the Zeus altars. Last autumn it was moved to the Caprica Museum of Fine Art for study. I'm sure one day it will be on display to the public."

"Yes," Irina said. "There was quite a stir in the archeological community after the camp was closed and word about the altar became public. The daughter of one of the first expedition team members wrote an article about it. I'm sure there will be many more. Would it surprise you to know I still keep up with a few of the children and grandchildren of my old friends?"

"Not at all," Connelly said.

"I could hardly believe it when Kara brought Hunter here two months ago and told me that his grandfather was Perry Jaffee. I met Perry and his wife on Libran just before the second expedition left."

Kara said, "Connelly knows about Hunter and about the second expedition making it to Nereid. You can talk freely in front of him."

Irina Hoshi sipped from her cup of tea. "Well, that certainly makes things easier."

Connelly said, "Let me start by saying that Kara's father allowed me the privilege of reading your very impressive journals."

Irina smiled. "There's no need to flatter me, young man. I'll answer any of your questions without it."

"It's not flattery, Mrs. Hoshi," Connelly said sincerely. "I don't think you realize how important those journals are. With most of the records of the expedition either destroyed or unobtainable on Libran, your journals are one of the few records we have of the groundbreaking trip you made over sixty years ago."

"I'm afraid there's very little I can tell you that isn't in my journals. Some personal anecdotes perhaps, but nothing of substance."

"What I'd like to ask you about is the Kobol Stone."

"I'm afraid I know nothing about it except that it was rumored to be somewhere on the planet. It wasn't something our expedition was interested in, not officially anyway. We were a scientific expedition in name only. It's the only way the government of Libran could sell it to the Federation. We were there to look for tylium and other minerals that could be exploited for profit. Much to the disappointment of our sponsors, we found too little to make returning to the planet worthwhile. What little bit of archeological exploration that was done was really an attempt to locate the _mineral riches_ of the planet. Of course the meaning of _riches _is not the same among all people. Only a few of us saw the true beauty of that planet and what must have appealed to the Thirteenth Tribe thousands of years earlier. The fact that our definition of _Eden_ derives from their scriptures is testament to the paradise it was."

"It still is a paradise," Hunter said, "or it would be if it wasn't crawling with Cylons."

Kara said, "I wouldn't exactly call it _crawling_."

"As far as I'm concerned, one is too many."

"Have you asked Hunter about the stone?" Irina asked.

"I've already told Mr. Connelly I don't know anything about it. My grandparents looked but they never found so much as a clue other than what the Cylon scripture says. A splinter religious group took it into the mountains and it was never seen or heard of again."

Irina said, "The person you needed to talk to was Doctor Aimee Singh. She was one of the medical doctors on the first expedition, but the Kobol Stone was her passion, her obsession. She would have gone back on the second trip, but she was expecting her second child when that expedition left. She died several years before the Cylons tried to annihilate us, but she and I maintained a life-long friendship and corresponded even after Joshua and I moved here to Caprica nearly thirty years ago. Aimee never gave up hope that she would one day be able to return to the planet. She converted to the monotheistic faith in hopes of being allowed access to the archives of the Church of the Monad on Gemenon. It was the final straw in a marriage that had been deteriorating for years. Her husband and her grown children disowned her. That should tell you how strong her thirst was to discover the location of that stone."

Connelly asked, "Was she allowed into the archives?"

"Yes, she was eventually. She retired from her medical practice on Libran and spent six months there. She made several trips there in the early years. She and Lacy Rand who was the Reverend Mother by then became friends. She wanted the support of the monotheists in funding another expeditions to the planet, but Rand kept putting her off."

"Do you by any chance still have your correspondence with Dr. Singh?"

"I'm afraid not. When I moved in with Nadia and her husband six years ago, I had to get rid of a lifetime of accumulated clutter. Jonathan's work all went to the University. All of my personal correspondence went into the shredder. There was rarely anything in Aimee's letters about her quest. I'm so very sorry."

"That's all right. You couldn't possibly have known then that there would be a revived interest in the stone today."

"Who's interested in it?"

Connelly said, "The man who contacted me said he was a government employee…from the Ministry of Antiquities. He was very knowledgeable about ancient history. I asked him a couple of questions to be sure…something he couldn't fake. He knew his stuff. I think he was exactly who he said he was."

Kara said, "Well, we think…_I_ think it's the military who wants the stone because they're afraid the Cylons are going to find it. It's supposed to have a star map on the back that shows the way to Kobol and maybe even to Earth. I think somebody is afraid that the Cylons are going to send ships there and maybe do the same thing they did in the Colonies."

"I don't agree," Hunter said. "The Cylons on Nereid seem perfectly content with their slave settlements and their breeding program in the city. I can't see them racing around out in the galaxy trying to find some mythical planets."

"Kobol isn't mythical," Kara snapped. "You believed your oracle's words. Why don't you believe what Pythia says about Kobol?"

"It's not just Pythia," Connelly added. "Our ancient mythology places Mount Olympus, the birthplace of our gods, on Kobol. The monotheist scripture also says humanity originated on Kobol and scattered to the stars from there. Scientists have searched for evidence of evolution on all twelve of the Colonies and found nothing to indicate we evolved in this solar system therefore they reached the conclusion that we arrived here from somewhere else just like the scriptures say. It backs up the few written documents of ancient history that have survived."

"What if they're not looking for the Kobol Stone because they've already found it?" Kara asked.

"Now that's a scary thought," Connelly said.

While they were talking, Irina Hoshi was gazing out the window. Suddenly she said, "I just remembered something."

They all stopped talking and looked at her.

"Seven or eight years ago, just before she died quite unexpectedly, Aimee sent me something. She was writing a book about the first expedition and wanted me to proof some of the things she said about the planet. Oh, dear me. I hope I didn't throw it away."

"What was it?" Connelly asked. "A manuscript?"

"Oh, no. One of those little computer devices, about the size of a man's thumb."

"A USB drive. Did you ever see what was on it?" Kara asked eagerly.

"No, I'm afraid not. I didn't have a computer at the time. My grandson Louis was away at summer camp. He always helped me with the new technology. Then my husband fell and broke his hip and shortly afterward Aimee died. So many things happened about that time. I just forgot about that little device. Now I'm trying to remember what happened to it?"

"Do you think you threw it away?"

Irina brightened. "Go into my bedroom, dear," she said to Kara. "Down the hall, the first door on the right. On my dresser there's a pair of bronzed baby shoes, the little high-top ones. They were my son's…Louis's father. He and his wife and their two daughters died on Libran when the Cylons attacked. Louis is the only one who survived because he was here attending the Academy." She gazed out the window again. "So much death. So much loss."

Kara stood. "Are you saying the USB drive is in the baby shoe?"

Irina looked back at her and sighed. "Yes. I was babysitting one of Nadia's children and he stuck it in there and then couldn't get it out. I forgot about it until now."

Kara went into the bedroom and came back with one of the shoes. "You're right. Something's in there and it is stuck."

"Let me see," Hunter said and Kara handed the shoe to him.

"I think I could get it out with a pair of needle-nose pliers."

"My son-in-law keeps a tool box in the kitchen in the bottom of the pantry."

Hunter started off toward the kitchen and Kara called after him, "Don't damage the shoe or the drive."

While he was gone, Irina said, "Such a handsome young man. He bears a strong resemblance to one of the mercenaries who was on the first expedition. I believe he went back on the second one, too. But I already mentioned that, didn't I?"

Connelly glanced at his watch. "I apologize, but I'm going to have to go. I need to pick up my little girl at daycare."

"I'm sorry I wasn't any help to you," Irina said.

Connelly stood and took her hand again. "Whether or not there's anything on that USB drive, I'm still very, very glad I got to meet you. I'd like to come back sometime just to chat if that's possible. You're a part of our history."

"Of course. I'd love to see you again."

He looked at Kara. "If Hunter has any luck with extracting that drive from the shoe, let me know and I'll arrange to get it."

"I think the best bet would be to take it to a guy I know, Kevin Abinell. He's a computer genius. If he can get anything from the drive, he'll make a backup copy for protection."

"Great idea. Just let me know. I can see myself out."

When he was gone, Irina said, "He seems like a very nice man, but he's troubled about something."

"His wife has cancer," Kara said. "I don't think she's doing too well."

"Oh, I'm so sorry."

"They have a little girl, Elaina, who looks just like him. When I met him in the camp, his little boy Ethan had just died from some kind of infection. His first wife and his parents were killed when the Cylons bombed Antioch. It's just…it's so not fair. He's had more than his share of grief."

Hunter came back from the kitchen. "No luck. It's stuck in there good. I was afraid I was going to crack the plastic shell or damage the shoe."

"Take the shoe," Irina said. "You have my permission to cut it open if you have to."

"Are you sure?" Kara asked.

"Absolutely. If that little drive has any information that can help the Colonies and humanity, then do whatever you have to do to get it. I have my memories of Louis's father. I don't need a bronzed baby shoe to remind me of him."

The apartment door opened. Hunter helped Nadia carry in several bags of groceries and then he and Kara left but not before Hunter told Irina that he would like to come see her again, too.

She smiled and winked at Kara. "Two handsome men coming to see me…the neighbors will surely talk."

Kara knelt by Irina's chair and took her fragile hand. "I hope one day in a couple of months that you have a third handsome man coming to visit you."

Irina gently squeezed her hand. "Oh, my dear, I hope so, too. He's in my prayers every night."

Outside on the sidewalk, Kara locked the baby shoe in the compartment under the seat of her motorcycle before she said to Hunter. "Let's walk down the block to a little pub I saw and have a drink and wait for the traffic to clear."

"You can't drink," Hunter said. "You're driving. I just have to stay sober enough to hang on."

"I didn't say an alcoholic drink." They began walking. "I'll call Kev tonight and arrange to meet him somewhere tomorrow and give the baby shoe to him." She laughed. "I can't take it out to the boneyard. I can't go within a mile of that place or the MPs guarding it now will shoot me, so I'll have to meet him somewhere else."

"Is he the boy genius who got the equipment set up for Major Parker before our debriefings started?"

"That's him. And he's not a _boy_. Kev is a couple of years older than Lee. He just looks like he's seventeen."

They went into the little pub and settled in a booth. When the waiter came, Kara ordered a soft drink. Hunter ordered a beer.

"So what do you think of Connelly?" Kara asked.

"Smart. Seemed like he had a lot on his mind. I heard you tell Mrs. Hoshi that his wife has cancer. Is it bad?"

"We haven't talked much about it, but I think so."

"Is she going to die?"

"It depends on how well she responds to the chemo."

"What's that?"

For the first time in a long time Kara realized that Hunter had no frame of reference.

"It's short for chemotherapy. Doctors use a combination of drugs to fight the cancer. I don't know much more than that except most people get sick and lose their hair."

"So she might be okay?"

"Maybe. I don't know. Connelly said she had a bad reaction to one of the drugs they used during her first treatment so the doctors are going to try something else."

"If anybody in the valley gets cancer, they die. There's nothing Emmalyn can do to help them except ease their pain. She makes a strong painkiller out of poppy seeds. She gave me some after the wildcat clawed my back. It helped a lot."

"Maybe it won't be that way too much longer…I mean valley people dying like that."

"You and Connelly…you're tight, aren't you?"

She shrugged. "I told you we were in the refugee camp together."

"That's all?"

She shrugged again. The waiter brought his beer and her soft drink. Hunter continued to look at her.

"I had a silly school-girl crush on him. Nothing happened. And that's all I'm going to say. He's your age."

"Which means?"

"Nothing. It means nothing now. When I was crushing on him I was fourteen and he was twenty-five so it meant something then."

"Does Lee know?"

Her voice reflected her annoyance. "Lee knows where I met Connelly. He knows I had feelings for him. I still do, but not romantic feelings. I kept him from blowing his brains out after his little boy died. He kept two guys from raping me and probably killing me. So there's a bond between us. There always will be. And I don't expect you or Lee to understand. You weren't there."

"I probably understand better than you think I do."

They sat without speaking for a while until Hunter took out a mobile phone.

"Where'd you get that?" Kara asked.

"Major Parker got it for me so he can get in touch if he needs to ask me something. I'm going to check with Lee and see if their meeting is over yet."

Kara could tell he didn't get an answer on either Lee's mobile or his work numbers because Hunter left a message saying they'd see him later for dinner at Marble House.

They drank in silence for a few minutes until Hunter said, "So tell me about the place where you and Lee went this past weekend."

Kara grinned. "Totally five-star but cozy. None of that big impersonal resort feel about it. You can ask Major Parker. He and Kim went there on their honeymoon. Maybe you can take Maya there."

"I couldn't afford it on a lowly consultant's salary. Lee told me how much the weekend cost, but he sure seemed to think it was worth it."

"Tell you what. If you and Maya get married, I'll give you a weekend there as a wedding present."

Hunter smiled. "Will you put that in writing?"

"So have you asked her yet? How do you know she'll say _yes_?"

He just smiled and didn't answer.

"Come on, Hunter. Are you serious? Do you want to marry her?"

"If I make it through what's coming on Nereid…" he didn't finish the sentence.

"You'll make it."

"Will you put that in writing, too?"

"Gods. Sometimes I just want to smack you. Lee sort of asked me to marry him this weekend."

"How do you _sort of_ ask somebody to marry you? Either you ask or you don't."

"He asked me what I'd do if he gave me an engagement ring."

"I don't see one so I guess that means you turned him down."

"I convinced him we should wait a little longer. It's a big step. It's supposed to be forever."

"And you've got doubts."

"About me and Lee? No. I just want to wait. I want my dad home. I want him to walk me down the aisle. Dreilide thinks we should wait, too. He and my mother got married when they were eighteen. He said they should have waited."

"As long as you and Lee are happy, that's all that matters."

_…_

Lee closed and zipped the small leather portfolio he had carried into the meeting with him. He waited while the ranking officers around the table rose, chatted briefly and then left. Lee had watched the reactions of the senior staff as they had listened to Bill's plans. There were no expressions of surprise. There had been too many rumors circulating in recent weeks, which is one of the reasons his father had called the meeting to inform them of his plans. All of them had been expecting the announcement. The only thing that had gotten a few raised eyebrows and questions had been Adama's timeline. Two and a half months. A mere ten weeks away.

The admiral hadn't covered the plan in great detail because it was still preliminary, but basically he said their first objective was to destroy the three basestars over the planet, isolate the shipyard north of the city and the prison-lab complex on the high plateau and then deploy Marines near all the settlements and the city. The last two operations had to take place almost simultaneously. When he had told them that there were at least twenty-thousand human prisoners on the planet who had been forced into slavery, the feeling in the room amped up several notches.

One of the senior officers had questioned Bill's decision not to destroy the basestar shipyard and Bill had explained that it was now their belief that valuable and very advanced technology would be destroyed if they did. They wanted to take the facility without destroying the ship under construction. Another colonel commented that the Cylons would probably destroy the ship rather than let it fall into Colonial hands. Bill acknowledged that they were certainly allowing for that possibility.

Finally Lee and his father and Major Parker were the only ones left.

It was after six o'clock and Lee could clearly see the fatigue in his father's face. He knew that Bill was working twelve-hour days and had been since Kara's return from Nereid. He also knew that Bill probably went home most nights after eating dinner, whether at Marble House or somewhere else, and worked until midnight or later.

Bill took off his glasses and massaged his forehead with one hand.

"When are you going to give up sleeping entirely?" Lee asked him.

He got a slight smile from his father. "Isn't there a television commercial for some kind of energy drink where a guy tells us that we can sleep when we're dead?"

"When have you had a chance to look at television lately?"

"I saw it during the eleven o'clock news one night a few months ago."

"A few months ago? Is that how long it's been since you looked at the late news?"

"I usually manage to catch it a couple of times a week." He gave them a slight smile. "How else would I know what's happening on Caprica?" The smile broadened. "Of course I guess I could ask Laura and she could ask Kara who could ask Maya who could ask someone else on Laura's staff and if all that fails I could pick up the phone and call Marta Shaw."

Lee was glad to get a rare glimpse of his father's sense of humor. There wasn't a lot for Bill to joke about these days.

Parker asked, "Do you really think we can pull this off in two and a half months?"

"Our battlestars have been on alert since Kara got back from Nereid with the news that John is still alive…or he was two months ago. We've got to assume the Cylons broke him so we've got to assume they know the others are no longer in control of Caprica. My commanders know that they could be defending this planet at a moment's notice. They're ready for anything. In fact I think most of them are going to welcome the opportunity to go to the Cylon homeworld."

"You really think they broke John?" Lee said. "Because I don't."

"I said we've got to assume they did, son. Anything else would be potential suicide."

"He's right, Lee," Parker said. "You always plan for the worst case scenario, not the best."

Bill continued. "The battlestars have been on a stepped-up training schedule with their maneuvers and also for their Vipers and Raptors. It's the same training schedule we've been following at the airbase. We've got combat experienced Marines who have been in Sovana since Adar declared martial law up there over two years ago. Enlistments have been way up for the last six months. If we're not ready now, we never will be. Nothing can be gained by delaying a month or two."

Parker asked. "You said we'd be leaving roughly half the fleet behind to protect Caprica. Have you decided yet which battlestars will go and which will stay?"

"I've almost got the list ready. That's been one of my toughest decisions. We have eighteen spaceworthy battlestars right now. I'm going to leave ten of them to guard Caprica and take eight to Nereid. If they have only three baseships, eight will be more than enough."

"Is the _Galactica_ going?" Lee asked.

"Yes, she is. And I'll be going with her. Commander Cain will be transferring to the _Pegasus_ in six weeks. Admiral Thurman is delaying his retirement but he's coming back to Caprica and taking command of the airbase. Saul Tigh will assume control of the _G_ until I'm aboard."

"I'd like to be stationed on the _Galactica_," Lee said. "I'm sure Kara will, too."

He got another smile from his father. "I think that can be arranged, son."

"Can you tell me which ships are going besides the _Galactica_ and the _Pegasus_?"

"The _Ajax_, the _Columbia_, the _Scylla_, the _Minoan_, the _Valkyrie_, and the _Orion."_

_"The __Valkyrie__ and the __Minoan__ are old ships," Lee said._

_"_I can't take all my best ships to Nereid and leave the oldest ones to guard Caprica. They _Valkyrie_ and the _Minoan_ have two of the best commanders in the fleet. I took that into consideration, too."

"All I can say is I'm glad it's you who's making that decision and not me."

Parker said, "We haven't seen anything to make us believe that there are more Cylons out there but we just can't take the chance and leave Caprica defenseless."

Bill looked at Lee and smiled broadly again. "Your brother's Marine unit is coming home next week. I'm going to have them start working with Hunter on learning the terrain."

"Zak must not know it yet. I talked to him a couple of nights ago and he didn't mention anything about coming home."

"They'll be told in time to pack their gear and get on a transport. We don't want anybody letting down his guard because they're coming home."

Lee smiled. He hadn't seen his brother in nearly six months.

Parker said, "When are you going to make the announcement to the public. The minute those Marines start working with Hunter, word will get out that they're going off-world."

"The President and I are making a joint statement next Monday right after she announces it to the Quorum in their regular Monday morning session. They'll be asked to vote on it, but I can't imagine any of them refusing to do it."

"Tom Zarek might…just because he's such a jerk," Lee said.

"All we need is a two-thirds majority. That's eight of the twelve. I don't think that will be a problem considering that there are people from all twelve colonies on Nereid. I doubt that any of their representatives will want to vote against a rescue."

The thought that in ten weeks they would be going to war didn't seem real yet to Lee. He looked at his father.

"Does Hunter know yet?"

"I talked to him earlier today. You can imagine how happy he was to get the news. He's been ready to go back since he got here."

"Are you coming to dinner tonight at Marble House?"

Bill nodded. "Laura and I have a few things to discuss. She's naturally apprehensive about how the people of Caprica are going to react to the news."

"Is it all right if I tell Kara?"

Bill smiled. "You can tell her. If there's one thing we both know about Kara, it's that she can keep a secret."

_…_

John was surprised the next morning when he opened the door to find not just Natalie but Jade and Yoshimo as well. The only one missing was Buddy.

"Come in," he said. "D'Anna's still getting ready. She's not a morning person."

Jade stopped at the door. "Is she sick? I don't like the smell of puke."

"Not this morning. I took her some tea. She's not going to eat anything until we get back. Could I offer any of you some tea?"

"We'll wait," Natalie said. "This is just a formality and shouldn't take but ten minutes."

He quickly told them about Cavil's visit the afternoon before and how well D'Anna had handled the situation.

"Huh. I wish I'd been here," Jade said. "I'd have gotten in his face. Pompous ass. Little pipsqueak. Short stuff." She laughed at her own descriptions. "I've heard about him from some of my sisters. Short describes something else about him as well."

"Jade, that's enough," Natalie said.

John glanced at Natalie. She didn't look like she'd slept well the night before. Sonja had told him that they all had a standard sleep subroutine that they could access to give them a restful eight hours of sleep. Natalie must have chosen to forgo the routine.

John said, "So are you going to be my support group this morning or are you more like my entourage?"

Yoshimo smiled. "We're your character witnesses if the council requires it."

"Has this ever happened before?"

Natalie answered. "Not exactly. Usually a petition is presented to allow someone to be taken to the city, not moved here from the city."

The bedroom door opened and D'Anna emerged. The blouse she had chosen was simple and white and even tighter over her abdomen than the one the day before. Even though her belly was still small, it left absolutely no doubt about her condition.

John noticed that both Natalie and Jade stared at her briefly. The look on Jade's face was easy to read. It clearly said, _I'm glad it's not me. _Natalie's look was more ambiguous and John wondered if she wanted to one day have a child.

D'Anna took John's hand. "Let's go. We don't want to be late."

The council met in a building in the heart of the little town about five blocks from D'Anna's house. They entered and climbed one flight of stairs and found that they were the first ones to arrive. There was a long table on a low dais at the front. The rest of the room was filled with chairs, maybe twenty-five rows of them with about thirty across. Natalie indicated that they should sit on the front row in the center. D'Anna continued to hold his hand.

Cavil arrived at exactly nine o'clock with a Five trailing at his heels. They were followed in short order by a Four, a Three and an Eight and finally a Two who was carrying a cup of coffee and had not shaved. Natalie stood, walked to the front and took a seat beside the Eight.

John leaned over and whispered to D'Anna. "She's on the council?"

"Of course. She's the First Six. In a way she outranks this copy of the One. He's thirty-first in their birth order. He hadn't even been activated when she was born."

Cavil called the meeting to order and asked what business the assembled group had. Natalie nodded at D'Anna who stood. Apparently word of her condition had not gotten around in the settlement, because there was an immediate gasp from the Three on the council.

The Two said, "God be praised," and asked the Four if this was real. John smiled. Maybe they grew that ceremonial weed here in the settlement as well. The Two did look a little stoned.

"Order," Cavil shouted. "Be quiet." He leaned over and looked at the Two. "Yes, you idiot, this is real."

When the murmurs had died down, D'Anna said, "I've recently moved here from the city so my child can be born in this beautiful and peaceful community. Today I'd like to petition the council to allow my child's father to move here to be with me as is my right under our laws."

The Two said, "Her pregnancy fits the prediction of our prophet Azurra which means the child she carries is the one our scripture calls the peacemaker._ For she said, Three shall come in a rain of fire and will herald the coming of the peacemaker. And he shall be borne of the three and protected by the six. _A few months ago there was a meteor shower. Three of them fell to the planet in a rain of fire. And now our sister Three is pregnant and was brought here by a Six. Do you realize how important this is?"

D'Anna said, "Our brother Two speaks the truth. Before this baby was conceived I had a vision in which God spoke to me and told me I would bear the peacemaker. He led me to the prison to this man and told me he would be the father."

"Praise God," the stoned-looking Two said again.

The Five leaned over and whispered something to Cavil that none of the rest of them heard.

Natalie asked the council members if any of them objected to John moving there to be with D'Anna. None of them voiced any dissent.

"Then I'll make sure the paperwork is done authorizing his move."

"He'll have to work in the fields," the Five said, "starting _today_."

"Yes, I know. I'm going to assign him to half days in the fields and half days working for the doctors at the clinic."

John held his breath waiting for one of them to ask him about his medical experience. None did and then he realized that it really wasn't him they were interested in. All eyes were still on D'Anna.

The Four said, "I'll need to do an exam and verify the pregnancy."

"It's already been verified," D'Anna said.

"By whom?"

"One of your brother Fours in the city. I'm definitely pregnant or do you not believe _this_?"

She lifted the bottom of her blouse and showed them her rounding belly. That seemed to silence the question of her pregnancy being real.

The Two said, "The peacemaker will bring an end to one era and herald the beginning of another."

"As is the will of God," D'Anna added. "Do any of you question God's will?"

The One and the Five exchanged covert looks again. Cavil said, "Tell me more about the end of one era and the beginning of another."

"The scriptures aren't clear," the Two answered. "God doesn't always spell everything out for us. His children have free will to follow His ways."

"So this could be good or it could be bad," the One retorted.

Natalie quickly said, "How can you question this miracle or think that it might be bad? D'Anna is the first sister in nearly a year to conceive. Not only that, she's passed the critical first trimester when the few sisters who did conceive usually lost their children. We cannot look at this as anything but a gift from God."

The Two raised his cup of coffee and said, "Amen, sister. Tell it."

The Three on the council who had been silent so far suddenly stood and walked over to D'Anna. She placed her hand gently on D'Anna belly.

"You have been chosen among all of us for a great honor. God has blessed you and by extension our whole model."

The Two joined her and D'Anna allowed him to touch her as well.

John got a better look at the Two. His pupils were dilated. He was definitely stoned on something. _Still that's two on our side, _John thought. Then the Four stood and joined them. _That's three. _And the Eight. _That's four. It was a beginning._

When they left the council chamber, John was aware as he knew Natalie was, that the One and the Five who were still sitting at the table would clearly take the other side.

Yoshimo told them that he would walk D'Anna home and fix some breakfast for her. Jade went with them.

Natalie took John three blocks away to a large room full of various kinds of clothing where he got several work shirts, some overalls, a pair of boots, some socks and a straw hat. He changed behind a small curtain. Natalie said she would take his blue shirt and khaki slacks and the extra work clothes to D'Anna's. She handed him a pair of work gloves. She also had one of the golf carts waiting for them. She gave him a thermos of tea and a small basket filled with her cookies.

He put on the straw hat and tried to lighten her mood. "Do I look like Farmer John?"

It didn't even bring a smile from her.

"You look like you're ready to go to work in the fields. You might want to eat those cookies on the way. You won't have a chance after you get there. You're getting a late start for the fields. Tomorrow morning you need to be on the corner of the square at 6:00. A truck or a bus will come by and pick you up. You might also want to bring a snack. Water is provided. Keep the thermos. It's small enough to fit in the bib pocket."

Since he'd had no breakfast, John began eating cookies and they rode in silence until they passed the barracks that D'Anna had spoken of, four large buildings on either side of the road, eight all together. There were a dozen centurion sentinels at each building.

"Are you okay?" He finally asked.

"I'm fine. There's a truck that brings some of the workers back to the town at noon. I'll make sure your overseer understands you have chores in the town after lunch. I talked to Bianca and Laszlo after I left you at D'Anna's yesterday. They'll feed you lunch." She smiled for the first time. "Buddy is very anxious to see you."

Natalie finally stopped the golf cart beside a field of corn that was already as tall as he was. The endless rows stretched as far as he could see on both sides of the road and into the distance. He knew this was only one of the many fields he had seen from the air. It probably covered a hundred square miles. Every thirteenth row was planted with another kind of plant almost as tall as the corn.

"What's that growing between those rows of corn?"

"Sunflowers," Natalie answered. "The seeds save well and they're very nutritious."

An Overseer Six was waiting for them.

"The council approved John's petition to move here," Natalie told her. "He'll be with you half a day. You need to make sure he's on the noon truck. The clinic has him in the afternoons."

The Overseer smiled. "Scrubbing bedpans?"

"I'm sure that will be part of his duties."

The Overseer looked at him and asked sarcastically. "Are you waiting on an invitation to get out of the vehicle?"

John got out of the golf cart and put the empty cookie basket on the seat. He smiled. "Is it an engraved invitation?" When neither woman responded, he asked the Overseer, "Where's your whip?"

The platinum-haired Six looked at Natalie. "You didn't tell me you were bringing me a comedian."

Natalie still didn't smile, but she said, "He's one of those rare humans who managed to maintain his sense of humor. Treat him well. If I find out you've abused him _in any way_, you'll find yourself on the first transport to Settlement Delta with no chance for appeal…and that includes trying to extract sexual favors from him. He is _no_t fair game for you and the other Overseers. He belongs to a Three. He's her breeder and the father of her child. However, _I'm_ his handler. He's _my_ responsibility and I will take it as a _personal_ insult if he's not treated well."

The Overseer didn't reply. John didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but apparently she wasn't used to being threatened by a sister. With a glance at him that he couldn't read, Natalie turned the golf cart around and headed back toward town.

The sun was very bright and he made a mental note to bring his sunglasses the next day.

"Corn doesn't get as many nutrients from the soil when it's choked with weeds," the overseer said. "And the weeds are growing while you stand there gazing after Natalie. Despite her look of regret, she's not coming back for you so get that thought out of your little human brain." She pointed to a truck a quarter of a mile up the road. "Go up there, get a hoe and bring it back and start chopping out weeds. You should be able to make it to the other end of this row by the time the noon truck arrives. If you miss it, it's five miles to town and you'll walk every step of the way."

As John headed toward the truck, he looked down the long rows and saw a mix of humans and centurions. They'd been out here for several hours and most were far away by now. It looked like they were on alternate rows. Centurions hoeing weeds and guarding the humans at the same time. Once again he wondered if he'd made a mistake in coming here. Right now he could use a little of D'Anna's faith. He thought of the words in the Cylon prayer that had comforted him in the city. _When I am a stranger in a strange land, You are my guide. _He reached the truck, picked up a hoe and started back down the road and said another line of the prayer. G_uide my footsteps on the path that You have chosen for me. _

_…_

Back at his desk after the meeting, Lee turned on his mobile phone. He had two messages. The first one was from Hunter saying he and Kara had been to see Irina Hoshi and would see him at Marble House for dinner. The second was from Shelley Sydell asking him to call her. The number she gave was not her office.

He punched in the digits. She answered on the third ring.

"Hi, Shell," he said. "What's up?"

"It's short notice, but Troy and I would like to invite you to our wedding next Saturday afternoon. Do you think you'll be able to come?"

"Is Kara invited, too?"

"Sure. I meant you and Kara."

"I've got a friend staying with me…"

"That's fine. Bring whoever you want. Just let me know how many. We're going to have cake and hors d'oeuvres afterward so I need to know what to tell the caterer."

"There'll be four of us. How are you doing?"

"Better. I know this is sudden, but…"

"Hey, it's probably the best way to do it…a lot less stress on everybody."

"We've heard the rumors about what's coming. I've seen a huge increase in requisitions for non-perishable food supplies for the battlestars. A guy in the office next door told me they were stockpiling munitions like crazy. Troy doesn't know if he'll be left here at the airbase on Caprica or re-assigned to a battlestar. Whatever's going down, he doesn't want to take a chance I'll be left…without…survivor's benefits. I'm pregnant, Lee. I just found out for sure last Friday."

"Congratulations."

"If it's a boy we're going to name him Tucker."

"You can count on me to watch you get hitched. Just tell me what time and where?"

"The shrine of Aphrodite north of the city. Four o'clock Saturday afternoon. There's a big gazebo nearby where we'll eat. Troy has a few musician friends from high school who are going to play for us. You don't need to dress up."

"We'll be there."

"Thanks, Lee. I'll be looking for you and Kara…and your friends."

They hung up and Lee walked down to Major Parker's office. Parker was just turning off the lights. As they walked to the parking garage together, he told the major about Shelley's upcoming nuptials."

"That's probably a smart thing to do all things considered. I know a lot of the pilots are going to be reassigned to battlestars. Bill said we had way too many flying out of the base now."

"I'm looking forward to seeing Zak," Lee said. "I've missed my little bro."

"I'm sure he'll be glad to see you, too. He's been through a lot in Sovana. I probably shouldn't say this, but your dad asked me to read several of their mission reports. Zak's shown real courage under fire and some clear leadership skills. Your father is very proud of his youngest son, but Zak has also experienced a lot of psychological trauma with losing men in his platoon, so don't expect to see the carefree kid who left here six months ago."

"He sounded mostly like himself the last couple of times I've talked to him. At least he's quit talking about dying in Sovana."

Parker got off the elevator on the second level of the parking garage and Lee continued down to the fourth. The distance from his building to Marble House was a mile and a half as the crow flies. With traffic moving at a snail's pace and the circuitous route he had to take, the trip took almost thirty minutes.

Hunter and Kara hadn't been there long. Her cheeks were still flushed from riding the motorcycle. Hunter was on his hands and knees on the floor playing horse to a squealing Braedon. Kara was also on her hands and knees pretending to chase them. Maya looked at Lee, shook her head and mouthed, _kids_. Lee didn't think she was referring just to Braedon.

Kara stopped and sat back on her heels. "Hi."

Lee made a motion like he was drinking from a can. She pointed to herself and shook her head. Then pointed to Hunter and raised two fingers.

Hunter stopped and Braedon said, "Wide more."

Hunter collapsed on the floor. "Horsey is tired." He looked up at Lee. "How'd the meeting go?"

Lee shrugged. "My dad said he covered it with you earlier." He turned to Kara. "I've got good news. Zak's coming home next week. And we're invited to a wedding this weekend. Hunter and Maya, too."

"Whose?"

"Shelley and Troy."

Kara wrinkled her nose. "That's _good_ news?"

"You don't want to go?"

"I could probably come up with a hundred and one things I'd rather do, but I'm sure you've already accepted so we'll go."

Maya said, "I don't know the couple. Who are they?"

Kara grinned. "Lee's old girlfriend. She was late getting out the invitations, wasn't she? Or is it one of those shotgun things?"

"Her fiancé Troy Minos is a Viper pilot. They've heard the rumors about what's coming."

He shouldn't have to explain it further. Everybody should understand.

Kara said, "For a minute there I thought you were going to tell us she's knocked up."

"I wouldn't blame her if she were," Hunter said. "Her man's going into battle. He might make it, he might not." He stood and picked Braedon up. "All you got to do is look at this little guy to understand why they're doing it."

"I'm trying to imagine Shelley as a mother. She'll probably have her kid in full battle gear marching off demerits for some potty-training offense when he's Braedon's age."

That comment earned her one of _those_ looks from Lee and she realized she'd taken the Shelley jokes about as far as she should.

As they all went into dinner, Kara looked at him. "I guess this means I've got to wear a dress again." She grinned. "That's two weekends in a row. We're not going to make a habit of this, are we?"

Lee smiled. "Why? Afraid you'll be tempted to go shopping and go two over your dress limit?"

She rolled her eyes. No way would she buy a new dress just to impress Shelley Sydell. She couldn't hide the fact that she disliked Shelley, but for Lee she'd do anything…even go to Shelley's wedding and force herself to smile and wish the new Mrs. Minos luck.

_…_

John opened the back door of D'Anna's house, took a kitchen chair outside and sat in the early dusk. D'Anna had already gone to bed, but even though he was bone-tired, he was not accustomed to going to sleep before the sun was down. He knew he would probably have to change that habit soon.

His plan to meet and talk to some of the humans hadn't fared well at all. They were not allowed to speak as they waited for the big trucks that picked them up in the square each morning at six a.m. nor were they allowed to talk on the trip out to the fields or while they worked. There were several Cylons as well as several centurions in each truck to make sure that rule was enforced. It was a good tactic to maintain control. Isolate the humans by preventing them from talking. It's hard to form any kind of revolt or rebellion if you can't talk to one another. He was sure the humans had probably figured out ways to communicate, but he bet it wasn't because the Cylons allowed them to do any real socializing. And because he was the new guy in an established community, he would be under suspicion for a long time. So far even his attempts to make eye contact with anyone had failed. Those six years of living under Cylon control had taken its toll on them. John could almost hear the thoughts of those around him in the truck. _Be careful. We got a spy among us._

The highlight of his day now was seeing and talking to the doctors and oddly enough seeing Buddy. He'd taken the communication device and its charger to the clinic and left them there since that's where Buddy was. Each afternoon he took his break and sat on the back steps talking to the robot. Buddy stayed tuned into all the centurion chatter. The orders they had gotten from the humanoids so far had been nothing out of the ordinary. Lucy was incredibly bored and wanted John to ask Natalie about letting Buddy inside the clinic where she could resume some of her work.

John would have been glad to ask Natalie if Lucy could resume her work, but he hadn't seen her since the morning she'd dropped him off with the Overseer so he didn't know what she was doing. Bianca and Laszlo and Yoshimo hadn't seen her either nor had they seen Jade. The thought niggled in the back of John's mind that Natalie had gotten a couple of centurion pilots and gone back to the valley…maybe even taken Jade with her, but he didn't know for what purpose unless it was to torture herself some more over Daniel. But he was almost too tired right now to care.

He closed his eyes and had just about dozed when he heard voices. The door of the little house behind D'Anna's had opened and a man and woman had emerged carrying chairs. He was less than forty feet from them across a narrow strip of weeds. He grinned. Where were those sheep when you needed them?

The woman saw him first and stopped. She said something to the man and he stopped, too. John knew that he couldn't go for a walk in the town, but he didn't see how crossing a backyard could be considered going for a walk. He stood and walked through the weeds. He was prepared for them to shun him and go back inside and close the door in his face. Instead they stood still and watched him slog his way over.

The man was tall and thin with hair that was mostly gray with just a hint of the brown it had once been. The left side of his angular face was a meshwork of old scars. They stood out white against his tanned skin. He also wore an eyepatch on that side. His short-sleeved shirt revealed that his left arm was missing from just above the elbow.

The woman had mocha-colored skin. She was very attractive and at least a foot shorter than the man. She was maybe five foot two, also slim with curly, graying hair cut short. He guessed their ages at between forty-five and fifty-five. There was something vaguely familiar about the man, but John couldn't decide what it was. He wondered if they had served together on the _Solaria _as he and Doolittle once had. Then he wondered if the scars and other injuries had been acquired prior to being brought to Nereid...or after.

"Hi," he said when he reached them. "I'm John Gallagher."

They both ignored his outstretched hand and regarded him with suspicion. The woman said, "I thought a Cylon lived behind us."

Her accent was soft and lilting and clearly Gemenese. It made John think of Keshia.

He dropped his hand. "I'm her breeder. I moved here a couple of days ago from the city."

The man asked, "Were you forced to breed with her or was it your choice?"

"A little of both."

The man laughed, but it was an ugly sound. "Well, that's one thing this face has spared me from. None of them want something that looks like me, thank the gods. I don't have but one eye and I can't see too good out of it either. But it's good enough to work in the dirt for them. At least I can tell a weed from a stalk of corn so I'm not ready for their rubbish heap yet."

He stopped talking, breathing hard, obviously agitated. The silence stretched.

John said, "I've done a couple of mornings in the fields. It's hard work. I scrub floors in the clinic in the afternoons. Today I washed out a lot of bedpans. There's a nasty intestinal bug going around. A couple of days ago the docs had one patient. Today they got sixteen, all kids. I do laundry for them, too. There're a lot of sheets to wash when you've got that many patients."

The woman said, "I'm Kate. This is my husband Lucas."

"Which ship were you on?"

Kate answered. "I was first officer on the _Potemkin_. It was an E-class cargo vessel with interplanetary rating. We were on our way from Virgon to Caprica with several thousand pieces of high-end furniture when the Cylons surrounded us and forced us to jump here. My husband wasn't on a ship. They took him from Picon."

"I lived on Picon," John said. "I got off the planet the night after the big Cylon basestar exploded. I…uh…stole a ship. Got my daughter and a friend of hers to Caprica. Her mother wouldn't go with us. She was a Marine and wouldn't leave her unit. They had a war to fight. Some of them still believed it was a war the Colonies could win."

Even with the scars immobilizing most of the left side of his face, Lucas's shock was still evident. He gasped and his knees almost buckled. He would have gone down if he hadn't been holding on to the chair. Kate grabbed her husband and helped him sit down.

He put his forehead in his hand and said, "Holy Hera. Holy frakking Hera. You did it. You actually stole a ship and made it through all that radioactive debris. She told me that's what you were going to do but I didn't believe it could be done."

John felt as puzzled as Kate looked. "Do we know each other?" He asked Lucas. "You look familiar, but I don't think we've ever met."

"I was a Marine on Picon. I was in the same platoon as Socrata Thrace. Early that afternoon she told me that a friend of hers was going to steal a ship and get her daughter off the planet. I didn't believe you stood a snowball's chance in Hades of pulling it off. She said you'd been a Viper pilot. She said if anybody could do it, you could. I asked her what the hell she'd been smoking. There wasn't a ship or a pilot left on Picon that could get through all that radiation and debris."

Now it was John's turn to feel weak-kneed. "You…knew Socrata?"

Without taking his head from his hand, Lucas nodded.

"Is she…_here_?"

Lucas shook his head. "They all died. The whole damned battalion. Twelve hundred men and women. I should have died, too. We fought…" He shook his head again. "We'd been ordered to keep the Cylons from getting into a particular building in downtown Picon City where they were just damned determined to go. Command didn't tell us why, just to keep the Cylons out until our bomb squad could get it wired up and destroy it. We fought to the last man. We were almost out of ammo when their centurions overran our last post. Everybody was dead by then…or dying. I was calling for reinforcements from a command center that wasn't there any longer when I was hit. I don't remember anything after that until I woke up on one of their baseships. A Four had patched me up so I could be brought here to their prison and interrogated. I figured the toasters went around checking bodies until they found one that was still breathing because they'd been ordered to bring one of us back alive. I couldn't tell them what was in that building. I didn't have a frakking clue."

"You saw her die? You saw Socrata die?"

"I was with her. I didn't see her get hit. One of the others told me. It took me almost fifteen minutes to find her. She was almost gone when I got to her. She was trying to tell me something, but…she died without ever saying anything I could understand. I think she might have been trying to say _Kara_."

John felt light-headed. He took a couple of deep breaths. "Socrata and I had a daughter. Her name is Kara."

Lucas finally looked up. "As soon as you said you stole a ship to get your daughter off the planet, I thought that's who you were. Who was with Kara?"

"Her best friend…a kid named Karl Agathon."

"That was it? Nobody else? You didn't get anybody else off the planet?"

"No, just my daughter and him."

Lucas put his face back in his hand and began to sob. "They died. They all died…and for what? A damned building we didn't even know why we were defending. I never understood why the gods let me live." More sobs racked him.

John stood there not knowing what to do or say while Kate tried to comfort her husband.

"I'll come back some other time," he said as he backed away. "I'm sorry if I stirred up unpleasant memories."

He trudged back through the weeds in a near fog. He'd always known that Socrata had died on Picon, but to hear how it happened was still a blow. Their relationship had been far from perfect, but in what he now felt was another lifetime, he had loved her and she had borne their daughter. He was almost to the door when Kate caught up with him.

"Wait, please."

John stopped and turned.

"He gets very emotional sometimes. He's been that way since they brought him here from the prison."

"When was that?"

"Two years give or take a few months."

"Damn. You mean he was in their prison for over _three years_?"

"Yes. You wear a ring. Was Socrata Thrace your wife?"

"We weren't married but she was my daughter's mother. I'm married to someone else now. She's back on Caprica."

"How did you get here?"

He stuck to the same story he'd told a thousand times since he'd been on Nereid.

When he finished, she said, "We heard that Caprica wasn't destroyed like the other Colonies."

"That's true. The Cylons bombed parts of it but they didn't destroy it. They occupied it."

"Did your daughter and her friend both survive?"

They're fine. They've stayed close friends."

"Lucas will want to talk to you when he's feeling better."

"Please tell him I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to upset him like that. I was in their prison for a couple of months. I can't imagine what it would have been like to spend three years in there or to watch my whole battalion die around me."

She smiled slightly. "I'll tell him. He's not crying because of what he suffered at their prison or because he watched all his friends fall to their centurions. For almost six years he's believed his first wife and both of his children died on Picon. Now he knows that's not entirely true. His name is Lucas Agathon. The boy you saved, Karl, is his son."

TBC…


	44. A Wedding and a Funeral

Chapter 44

A Wedding and a Funeral

_11. In the second millennia there was born a prophet who spoke to the people._

_12. His name was called Abram and he said to them, God has grown weary with you His chosen._

_13. We allowed His Stone to be taken from the temple and we no longer follow His laws._

_14. I come with a warning from God. _

_15. Repent and follow Him or He will send plagues that will make the plagues of the old gods seem mild._

_16. But the people believed him not._

_17. God sent the first plague and the mountain called Aetna erupted in fire._

_18. And for hundreds of miles the crops died in the field and the fruit withered on the vine and day was as night._

_19. And Abram said, Turn from your wicked ways before it is too late._

_20. But the people heard him not. _

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Constantine, _Chapter 3:11-20

.

Kevin Abinell was waiting for Kara at a small restaurant in a shopping mall between the airbase and the boneyard. She got the baby shoe from the compartment under the seat. As she'd left her room that morning, she had stuck the shoe in the empty bag from Aphrodite's Secret that was still lying on her dresser.

As she walked through the door, she saw Kevin sitting near the window. She joined him, putting the bag on the table between them.

He grinned. "You didn't have to bribe me with something from Aphrodite's Secret. I'd have met you for lunch anyway."

"Funny, Kev. That's the shoe."

He slipped the shoe out of the bag. "How in Zeus's name did a baby every wear this? It's hard as a rock."

"The shoes weren't hard like that when the baby was wearing them. I showed the shoe to Laura. She said a lot of parents want to preserve their baby's first shoes so they send them to a company that dips the shoes in something that seals them and gives them this nice coppery color. It's called bronzing. I looked it up on the web. Maya told me that Sarah Porter had her daughter's first ballet slippers bronzed."

"My parents didn't bronze my first shoes."

"What'd they do? Bronze your first little baby computer?"

"Now who's being funny? So what do you want me to do with the shoe?"

"There's a USB drive stuck inside it. I'd like for you to get it out and see what you can get off of it. The kid who stuck it in there might have damaged it so we might be out of luck."

"Is this going to be something exciting like the zapper diagram you brought back from Nereid?"

"No. We're hoping it's a copy of a partially-finished manuscript that was never published about the first expedition to Nereid. The woman who was writing it died before she finished it. The person I got the shoe from didn't have a computer so she never looked at what was on the drive before her grandkid shoved it into the shoe. She's in her eighties now. She was a member of the first _Hyperion_ mission that went to the planet…the one that came back."

"So what does that have to do with the disk in this shoe?"

"Nothing. It's just background. We'll never get any kind of records off the planet about that first expedition. That USB drive was sent to her by a friend who was also on the first mission. Right now Irina's journals are the only surviving record we have. There might be something more on that disk. Even if there's nothing important, it's still part of history."

The waitress came and took their lunch order and they resumed their conversation.

"I don't guess this is official business or it would have come from Dr. Rafferty," Kevin said.

"It's semi-official."

"So why not turn the shoe over to the government?"

"We'll probably have to do that if we find anything. Until we do, it's still personal property. My history teacher from the Academy is going to read it and see if he can find anything worth passing on."

Kevin grinned. "So you're asking me to do this on my own time?"

"Come on, Kev. I'm not asking you to spend hours reading whatever's on the drive. Just get it out of the shoe without damaging it and make a couple of backup copies. You could do that on a coffee break and still have time to spare."

"There's got to be more to it than that or you would have done it yourself. Between you and Lee you've got enough computer skills."

"We already tried to get it out of the shoe and couldn't. Lee said the kid probably damaged it getting it in there. We were afraid we'd damage it more. Irina said she didn't care if you had to cut the shoe open. But if you don't want to do it, I'll give it a shot."

She held out her hand for the shoe.

He put it in the bag. "I was just kidding. I'll do it, Kara."

The waitress brought their soft drinks.

"Put this all on one check," Kara said to her. "I'm buying lunch."

When the waitress was gone again, Kevin said, "Admiral Adama called Dr. R last week for an updated progress report on where we stand on those canister devices to zap the centurion brains."

"So how are you doing?"

"We've got a prototype that will sizzle every computer circuit board and hard drive in a fifty-foot radius in 3.2 seconds. We had to take the thing way out in the country to even test it. Can you imagine what would have happened if we'd set it off in the hangar? Bye-bye to every piece of electronic equipment in the building including Sadie. The only way to test it for sure, though, is on a centurion. I'm glad I don't have to do that."

"Why?"

"When we were working on Sadie, I…almost…sometimes I felt like she was alive."

"They're machines, Kev. They're all machines…except the skinjobs, and I'm not sure what they are. Part machine, part flesh and blood. The autopsies of the ones killed in the bunker showed they all had data ports under the skin of their arms that were connected to their brains. I'll bet in the beginning that's the way their creators loaded the programming into them."

"No kidding."

"Somewhere along the way, the lines between pure machine and something more got blurred. Hunter told me that the canister even affects the skinjobs but not nearly so much. Lee said it's because some of their neural pathways are silica just like computer chips."

"He's right. Even if these canisters work, there's no way to mass produce enough of them in a couple of months to equip every soldier who's going to the planet. We'd be lucky to have a couple hundred by then."

"Everything you can make before we go will help."

"You do realize that these canisters aren't at all discriminating, don't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"They're going to fry _any kind_ of computer equipment in roughly a fifty-foot radius from where they go off. You won't be able to use them around any of your wireless devices or your smart weapons or anything else that has a computer chip in it unless the chip is shielded."

"Does Admiral Adama know this?"

"Of course he does. Dr. R submitted a complete report to him a couple of weeks ago after we got the prototype built and tested. Apparently he still thinks the military will find a use for them. Dr. R told me that a bunch of Marines are going to start training for the attack soon."

"That's right. Lee's brother Zak is coming home this week. His platoon is part of the invasion mission. They'll start training with Hunter next week."

"So it's going to be soon?"

Kara shrugged. "You know when that canister went off a couple of feet from me and Narch, I felt like bugs were crawling all over my skin."

Kevin smiled. "I know the feeling. When we did the first test, I forgot to set the timer and it triggered right away. It didn't hurt but it did feel like bugs crawling all over me for a couple of seconds."

Kara snickered. "Probably 3.2 to be exact."

"There must not be any kind of computer equipment on Nereid."

"Not in the forest where they use the canisters. Hunter and his guys all use old style assault rifles…or crossbows."

"Crossbows?" Kevin said amazed.

"It works fine against a skinjob. I saw one of Hunter's uncles shoot a Two through the neck. He was just as dead as if he'd been shot with a smart weapon. Of course _dead_ to them is relative since they download."

Kevin made a face. "Gross."

The waitress brought their sandwiches and they began eating.

He finished chewing a bite and said, "I guess everything went okay after you were debriefed."

"Fine."

"What about Hunter?"

"What about him?"

"Is he doing okay?"

Kara smiled. "If you saw him navigating the subway, you'd never know he grew up without electricity in a rural valley on another planet and had been fighting Cylons since he was fourteen years old. A lawyer in the AJA got him a birth certificate and today at lunch he and Lee are going down to a Registry Office and get him a Colonial ID. He's been studying to take his driver's test for the last two weeks so he's going to do that soon."

"Does that mean he's staying here?"

"No, he's going back to the planet to fight when we go, but I think he'll come back. He's fond of Braedon's nanny. Besides, I told him I'd let him ride my motorcycle if he got a driver's license. I can't go back on my word."

Kevin grinned. "You got that motorcycle insured, I hope."

"Of course. I told him if he put a scratch on it, I'd kill him. My dad gave me that bike. Hunter knows how I feel about my ride."

_…_

John stood in the shower at the clinic with the hot water beating down on his shoulders. Despite the fact that he'd been walking in the city and working out almost every day, he wasn't prepared physically for almost five straight hours of hoeing weeds up and down endless rows of corn. He put his hands on the tile and leaned forward until the hot water hit the small of his back. It felt so good that he groaned aloud.

He stood that way for a full minute and then reluctantly turned off the water. He dried, stood at the sink with the towel wrapped around his hips and shaved. Then he dressed in the scrubs he wore while working at the clinic.

When he came out of the bathroom, he took his sweat-soaked shirt and overalls and put them into one of the big washers along with his towel and some dirty sheets and started it. Bianca and Laszlo were waiting for him in their apartment to eat lunch.

"I was just about to send Laszlo to see if you were all right," Bianca said.

Before John dug into his first sandwich, he said, "The hot water felt so good I lingered. A hoe is not designed for a guy my height. I do a lot of bending over. My lower back is _not_ happy."

Laszlo said, "My wife and I were just talking. You're going to have to increase your calorie intake from what you were eating in the city. You can't afford to lose any more weight. I doubt you ever regained all that you lost while you were in the prison."

"I gained some while I was in the city. I can keep the pants up now without a belt. I weighed on your scales the other day," he admitted sheepishly. "I'm down fourteen pounds from what I was at my last flight physical."

"I'll get our cook to prepare some more meat and bread for you," Bianca said. "I don't see why you have to go into the fields at all."

He wanted to tell them that it was so none of the Cylons would get suspicious of why he had come to the settlement, but he had to assume that the clinic and the doctors' apartment were both under some type of electronic surveillance.

"That's the way it's got to be if I want to stay here. I can't say that Natalie didn't warn me. She did…a couple of times."

That afternoon when he took his break, Bianca followed him out to the back of the clinic and sat down on the steps beside him.

"You've been very quiet for the last two days. Are you just tired or is it something else?"

John looked up at Buddy. "Are we being monitored out here?"

The word _scanning _appeared on the screen of the communication device. They waited. Finally the words _no electronic surveillance detected_ followed by _Have you talked to Natalie?_"

"Not yet, Lucy. I haven't seen her for nearly a week. When I do, I'll send her out here to talk to you." Then he continued his conversation with Bianca. "I met the couple who lives behind me and D'Anna. Turns out he was in the same platoon as my daughter's mother. He's the last one left from a battalion of twelve hundred men and women who had been ordered to protect a building in Picon City until the Colonials could destroy it."

"While you were recovering from pneumonia, you told me about your daughter and her mother. You said then that you knew Kara's mother had died on Picon."

John nodded. "She did, but it gets more complicated. This guy is the father of the kid I got off Picon with Kara. When I told him, he fell apart. It was hard to watch that much grief and emotion. The real bummer is that the wife he had on Picon and their daughter could have gone with us. She chose to stay behind because she wouldn't leave him."

"Oh, John," Bianca said. "I'm so sorry."

"I'm sorry it happened that way, too, but it's not like I knew them. I met them about fifteen minutes before I left Picon. You see I'd stolen a ship...a drug runner's ship because it had enough shielding to get us through the radiation around the planet. I knew the guy's security force was coming after me because I couldn't disable the ship's transponder without taking out the whole emergency system. All I could think about was getting my daughter off that planet before those killers caught up with us. I wasn't going to hang around and beg anybody to go. I just hope Lucas understands."

"Are you talking about Lucas Agathon?"

"His current wife is Kate."

"We've treated Lucas a number of times. I really can't talk about all his medical problems. Doctor-patient confidentiality. You understand."

"I understand. I haven't seen them since the other night, but I know that sooner or later he and I will talk again and he'll want to know about his son."

"Is his son all right?"

"He's fine. He and my daughter have remained close friends."

"I think it would be very good for Lucas to hear about his son."

"There's just one big problem. His son has married a Cylon on Caprica, an Eight. Not only that, she's pregnant."

"Oh, dear gods," Bianca said.

"_Now_ you understand my dilemma. What do I tell him?"

"If I were you, I wouldn't mention anything about the son's Cylon wife or child. I doubt the child lived anyway. While we've had some human women give birth to half-Cylon children, the reverse hasn't yet happened. Several months ago I assisted Laszlo during a D&C on a young Eight. She'd suffered a partial miscarriage and was having a lot of problems."

"I didn't think you were supposed to treat the Cylons."

"Natalie got that changed after she saw how some of the women were suffering. Simon and the other Fours don't have the knowledge or skills to help them. Simon actually told the Eight to let him euthanize her so she would download into a new body. _That_ was his solution to her problem. I'm afraid that's their solution to anything they don't know how to handle. The poor girl was terrified and went to Natalie."

"I'm surprised they let Lucas live with the kind of shape he's in."

Lucas suffered terribly at their hands in the prison. His hold on reality is…tenuous to say the least so be cognizant of that. He might be perfectly rational one moment and off in one of his nightmares the next. And if I were you, I'd be careful what I said to him, especially in front of his wife."

"Why?"

"Kate is nice enough and she's been a gods' send to him. I doubt he would have survived his reintegration into our settlement without her, but my woman's intuition tells me she might pass along anything she hears to…others."

"To the Cylons?"

"No, not directly and maybe she doesn't realize the consequences of talking about their personal lives, but I know she works in one of the garment workshops and she talks when she gets the opportunity. She's always full of gossip when she brings Lucas here. And there are others who will pass along everything they're told. It shouldn't surprise you to know there are true collaborators among us. They will be on alert for any scrap of information about the new man in the settlement. That's you, John. Protect yourself. Don't automatically trust these people because they're fellow humans."

"When does Kate get the opportunity to talk to anyone? We aren't allowed to talk waiting for the truck in the morning or on the way to the fields, either."

"The Cylons are less strict with the women. Many of them work sewing garments, or canning and preparing food, or running day cares for the children or other such tasks. It's not an atmosphere in which silence is productive. As long as their conversation is work related or personal, it's allowed. In fact I rather think it's encouraged."

John snorted. "I guess the Cylons figure a group of women taking care of kids and talking about their husbands and families aren't exactly sowing the seeds of revolution."

"For what it's worth, be cautious in your dealings with the Agathons. Remember what you say to him in private may get passed along to her. I hope I'm wrong, but I'd rather you err on the side of caution."

"Thanks for the warning. Did they do all of that to Lucas in the prison? I mean the missing eye and arm and the facial scars."

"No, those injuries were present when he got here to Nereid. He told me that he was hit by centurion fire on Picon. You couldn't see what they did to him in the prison because his clothes hide most of it. His back and his legs and his chest are covered with scars from being whipped and burned…and of course there's the psychological damage. In a way you were very lucky, John. All the things that the drugs made you think were being done to you were actually done to him. Except the near-drownings of course and the beatings. They actually did those things to you as they did to Lucas. But again you were lucky. Lucas was…brutalized in other ways as well which continue to plague him to this day. That's why it might be better if you didn't mention his son's Cylon wife."

"But if I don't tell him and he finds out someday…"

"How is he going to find out? His son is on Caprica and he's here. Tell him the good things and leave out the rest. I'm a great believer in the truth, but in this case the entire truth will do him far more harm than good."

Laszlo came to the back door. "I need you both in here ASAP."

They hurried back into the clinic. Natalie stood near the front holding a listless dark-haired child.

"Go outside and help Jade with this baby's grandmother. She's very ill. They're both ill."

John hurried out the front door. There was a golf cart outside the clinic. Jade was supporting a woman in the back seat who would have fallen over otherwise. She was barely conscious. Together he and Jade got the woman out of the cart, and John carried her into the clinic. She weighed almost nothing. Even through her clothes he could tell that she was hardly more than bones.

The woman was fretting. "Esmari…Esmari."

"Natalie has your baby," Jade said. "She's not going to hurt her."

Laszlo was waiting in one of the exam rooms, but when he saw the woman in John's arms, he motioned to follow him. He had John put her on one of the beds. Laszlo quickly pulled the curtains even though there were no other patients on that side of the room.

"Help me get these clothes off her."

John wasn't sure who he was addressing. "Me?"

"You or the girl. It doesn't matter. We need to be very gentle with her."

Jade backed away. "I'm not a nurse. I'll get Natalie."

Laszlo was already unbuttoning the woman's blouse. John stepped up to the other side of the bed and helped him very carefully ease the woman's arms out of the long sleeves. She was wearing a sleeveless camisole underneath. The skin over her collarbones was paper-thin and her stick-like arms were mottled with large red and purple blotches. Laszlo leaned over and gently placed a stethoscope on her chest and began listening, moving it slowly from place to place.

Natalie pulled back the curtain. She no longer had the child. "Go help Bianca," she said to John. "I'll help Laszlo with Seléne."

John left, pulling the curtain behind him. Jade was standing outside.

"We brought some clothes for her and the baby."

"Well, maybe you could help us out and go get them," John said. "Where's Bianca?"

"She went through there with the baby," Jade pointed to a door that went to a room holding several cribs. Jade went toward the front and John walked to the nursery.

The child was on a small examining table. Bianca had stripped her and was looking in her ears with an otoscope. She finished and looked up.

"Go get…" she started and then said, "Never mind. Stand here with her so she won't roll off. It'll take me longer to tell you what I need than it will to get it myself."

John walked up and stood beside the table. Few things tore at his heart like a sick child, especially one who was crying weakly and reaching for him. He gently stroked her soft black hair and held one of her little hands. He wanted to pick her up and cuddle her, but he knew he probably shouldn't until Bianca said it was all right. From birth Braedon was a well-nourished, happy child. This little girl was clearly underweight.

Bianca came back pushing a cart at the same time Jade appeared carrying several cloth bags.

"Their clothes," she said.

Bianca looked at John. "Take everything from those bags and wash it on _hot_." She gestured to the floor. "Take the clothes I took off the baby, too. Wash the bags with them. Come back as soon as you get the washer started."

John scooped the items from the floor including a wet cloth diaper and took the bags from Jade. She tagged along with him to the back of the clinic and through the door into the laundry room.

He dumped everything into one of the big washers and turned it on. It was set on hot since that's how they always washed the sheets and towels.

"We went to the valley," Jade said.

"Why?"

"Maybe I needed a vacation," she smirked.

"Cut the crap, Jade. What's going on?"

"Natalie told me everything about Daniel and the creators. I didn't believe her so she took me there to hear it from Daniel himself. That woman Seléne and her baby were sick. Natalie told somebody named Emmalyn that she'd bring them back here and get the doctors to help them."

"That's not Seléne's baby. It's her granddaughter."

"Whatever. I had to promise Natalie I wouldn't do anything while I was there. She wouldn't let me take my knife."

"Did you keep your promise?"

"Yes. Then I had to promise her I wouldn't come back here and kill all the Ones. She said I would get my chance later. I'm looking forward to it."

"I'll bet you are."

"There was a man there who kept calling me Sharon. I had to tell him a dozen times that my name is _Jade_. He said I reminded him of a girl he knew named Sharon. I didn't tell him that one of my sister models is named Sharon. Her name comes from our scriptures."

"What's this guy's name?"

"Noel, but his uncles called him Narcho. That's a silly name…_Narcho_. He said it means _babe-magnet_ in old Gemenese. I think he lies."

John smiled and teased her. "You mean you don't know old Gemenese? I thought you Cylons knew everything."

"Huh. The creators didn't think filling up our brains with ancient languages was worthwhile. Natalie said Narcho was flirting with me."

"I talked to Narcho when we were there. He seems like a very nice young man. Good-looking, too."

"Maybe…if he shaved that beard and cut his hair."

"Do you like him?"

"Maybe. He told me if I came back he'd take me fishing. Huh. He'd probably get me out to the lake and try to drown me."

"Why do you think he'd do that?"

"Because of what I am. They hate us."

"Don't you hate them?"

She shrugged and gnawed at a thumbnail. "He's not so bad."

"You didn't mention to any of them that you're the one who killed their leader, did you? Those uncles you met…he was their brother."

She huffed. "You must think I'm _really_ stupid."

"I need to get back and see if I can help Bianca."

When he got back to the nursery, Bianca had completed her examination and put a clean diaper on Esmari. "Her temperature is normal and I don't see any evidence of sore throat or ear problems. Wash your hands. I need to get an IV started and I'll need you to hold her while I do it. Ideally we'd both be wearing latex gloves, but we ran out of those during the first year."

He went to the sink on the wall and began scrubbing his hands with the strong soap.

"So what's wrong with her?"

"She's extremely dehydrated. That's our immediate problem. She's also small and underweight for a child who is six months old."

"She's _six months old_?" John said in shock. "Brae was that big when he was three or four months old."

"According to Natalie she's six months old. Natalie said that lately she'd been throwing up every time she was fed. My guess is she developed an allergy to the milk they've been feeding her and it got worse over time. Goat's milk is no substitute for breast milk but most babies will tolerate it if there's nothing else. I doubt it ever did more for this child than keep her alive. We'll hydrate her and then get her started on a formula that I've made from soy beans. If she keeps that down, in a day or two we'll try some rice cereal."

"Will she be all right?"

"I don't know. Children are amazingly resilient given the proper care and nutrition, but I can tell you she wouldn't have lived much longer like this."

Bianca rolled an IV pole over to the examining table and hung a bag of clear fluid just as John finished scrubbing his hands.

"What do I do?"

"Hold both of her little legs. There's a good vein in her foot."

Even though he had been stuck hundreds of times with needles and didn't bat an eye when it was done to him, John still flinched as Bianca quickly and expertly inserted the needle in Esmari's tiny vein. For a few seconds he could understand why people fainted watching this. Bianca taped the needle to Esmari's foot and got the IV started. The child wailed briefly, but soon stopped and began gnawing on one of her fists.

"She's hungry," John said.

"I don't doubt that. Let's get some fluid in her and then I'll see about the formula. I don't want to run the risk of her kidney's shutting down."

"Can I hold her?"

Bianca got a clean blanket from a cabinet by the table. John pulled the rocking chair away from the wall and sat down. Bianca wrapped the child and carefully put her into his arms. He began to rock her and talk to her.

Bianca said, "I'm going to go help my husband with the grandmother."

When John finally glanced up, Natalie was standing in the doorway looking at him. He wanted to ask her just what the hell she was trying to do by going back to the valley with Jade, but considering that she'd probably saved Esmari's life, he kept his mouth shut. He couldn't imagine having to tell Hunter that while he was helping Bill Adama plan an attack to rescue the humans on Nereid, his baby daughter had died.

Natalie said, "Laszlo just told me that Seléne probably won't live through the night. He said all they can do is make her comfortable. She's in the last stage of some kind of leukemia. He said she's probably had it for years."

"I saw her arms."

"She looks like that all over her body. Laszlo said her skin has started breaking down. He doesn't understand how she's lived this long. Human diseases are horrible."

"So you've been in the valley for the last couple of days?"

"Yes."

"Why did you go back so soon? Wanted the knife in your heart twisted a little more because it didn't hurt enough the first time?"

"Jade was the main reason." Natalie answered coldly. "She's smart. She figured out that something is going on so I told her. She didn't believe me and she was distrustful of Buddy. She's changed her mind now. I want her support and I didn't want her telling one of the others what I'd said because we're not ready yet, so I took her there to meet Daniel and hear him tell it. She's on our side now…a hundred percent."

"So you wanting to see Daniel didn't have anything to do with it?"

"Of course it did." She snapped. "And I needed to gain a little distance from the situation here. Believe it or not, I like you, John. I don't think you realize how much it bothered me having to leave you with an Overseer. I know how hard the humans have to work in the fields. I wish I could allow you to have the life you led in the city, but for obvious reasons I can't do that. She hasn't abused you in any way, has she?"

"No. She's asked a few questions about my situation. That's all. Nothing I couldn't handle."

"Would you tell me if she did abuse you?"

"Would you really put her on the next transport to Settlement Delta…with no chance of appeal?"

"Yes, I would. I'd do it if I heard about any of the Overseers abusing any of the humans. We don't allow that here. The council voted on it."

"So no abuse of humans is allowed…except in Settlement Delta or at the prison," he said a little sarcastically.

"The Cavil in the city has assured us that the prison is now empty. He said _all_ the prisoners had either died or been released."

"Isn't he the same One who has lied repeatedly to his brothers and sisters about both the Sevens and the creators?"

"Perhaps I'll ask the Cavil in charge of the prison and lab to allow me to visit with the creators. As the First Six, it's my right."

"I'm not sure I'd do that until I was ready to confront him. The minute you demand to see your creators, you've tipped your hand. You might want to wait until we've had a chance to do some more planning and we can't do much of that if you're running off to the valley every couple of days."

She sighed. "Yes. You're right. I'll delay visiting the prison and lab until we have a plan."

John continued to rock Esmari. She had wrapped her little fingers around one of his thumbs and was trying to get it into her mouth.

Natalie said, "I'm going to have to go back to the valley. Emmalyn knows Seléne is dying. She made me promise to bring her body back so they could bury her beside her husband and her daughter."

"Why did you even bring her here at all? Why not let her die in peace with her people?"

"She wouldn't let us take the child otherwise. She got hysterical. Emmalyn's main concern was for the child. She'd done everything she could for Esmari. I asked her to come with us but she wouldn't leave Dessa. Dessa got hysterical, too. I was afraid I'd have a riot on my hands. We took Seléne and Esmari and left."

"So how did things go with you and Daniel?"

She crossed her arms and looked at the floor. "How do you think?"

"The same as when you were there before. You're eating your heart out over him and he's doing the same thing for Lucy. I'm beginning to think that some of you got your romantic programming stuck in a loop."

"That's a good one…coming from you."

He finally smiled at her. "I didn't say some of us humans don't do the same thing. But there's a big difference between continuing to love someone who returns that love and pursing somebody who's not interested. You need to think about that. Nothing will come from pursuing Daniel except heartbreak for you."

Bianca came to the door. "Seléne is asking for somebody named Hunter. Do you know who that is?"

John stood and put the child in her arms. "He's Esmari's father. I'll go."

Natalie followed him to Seléne's bedside. She was dressed now in a clean white gown with the covers pulled to her shoulders. He took her hand.

"Seléne, it's John. I'm Kara's father. I'll see Hunter soon. What do you want me to tell him?"

The sunken eyes tried to focus. Her voice was barely more than a whisper. "I was wrong…to keep the child from him. The gods forgive me."

John didn't know what she was talking about, but that wasn't important now. He said, "Hunter understands. He doesn't blame you."

"Does he forgive me?"

"Yes. He forgives you and he thanks you for taking care of his little girl."

"Tell Kara…she has my blessing to marry him and raise Esmari. She'll be a good mother to her. I did my best, but the child needs a mother."

"I'll tell her. You rest now. We're all going to take care of Esmari. She's a beautiful baby. She's going to be fine."

Seléne's eyes closed. "Juliana…where's my Juliana? Where's my girl?"

"You rest now. You'll see her soon."

"Yes…soon. My sweet…sweet girl."

…

John didn't sleep well that night and was awake at four o'clock the next morning. He dressed and went to the clinic. The curtains around Seléne's bed were closed. The nursery was empty and dark. He found Bianca in the kitchen of the apartment. She was in her robe and pajamas and was bottle-feeding Esmari who seemed much more alert.

"Seléne died a little after midnight," Bianca said. "She never spoke again after she talked to you."

"I hope she found peace."

"I hope so too. Natalie stayed with her until the end and then I sent her home. She's coming back in an hour or so with some centurions and a coffin. She'll take Seléne back to the valley. Jade volunteered to make the trip with her. So did Yoshimo. Since he's an ordained priest, he said he would offer to perform the burial service."

"I don't know if they'll allow it since he's a monotheist."

"I'm sure he can find some words to say that won't be offensive to Seléne's people."

"Did you sleep at all last night?"

"A few hours. Laszlo and I took a crib to our bedroom and kept Esmari with us. I fed her a little soy milk twice during the night and she kept it down. I'm very encouraged."

"Would you like for me to finish feeding her? I don't have to be in the square until six. You could lie down for an hour."

She stood and transferred the child to his arms. "I'm going to take a shower and fix breakfast. Stay and eat with us."

"How long are you going to keep her?"

"She's certainly not ready to go back today. I want her here while I do some more tests. I'd like to keep her at least a month. She's small and underweight for a child her age. I want to make sure she doesn't have other developmental problems as well. Natalie told me that the child has an aunt named Dessa who is learning disabled."

"Emmalyn said that happened when she was born. The cord was wrapped around her neck. She almost died."

"Well, that makes me feel better about this little one. With some good nourishment she'll probably soon catch up in growth and development to the norm for her age."

After Bianca left, John sat in the kitchen chair. Esmari sucked hungrily on the bottle of soy milk while he cooed and talked to her. Her blue eyes studied him the same serious way Brae's green eyes once had. He remembered Sonja's remark about his surrogate children, about how he wanted the little ones around him because he missed his family. Sonja had been wrong about him in a lot of ways, but about that one thing she had been right. He knew Hunter had met Brae by now and wondered what the two thought about each other. Was Brae standing in for the daughter Hunter had left behind just as the children in the city had stood in for his own son?

He smiled at Esmari. She had already found a place in his heart just like Cassie and Sophia and little Rachel. Then he thought of Karl's father. It was probably too late for some of the humans and Cylons to overcome their hatred of each other, but there was still hope for all of the children. They knew nothing of hatred and prejudice until they were taught by their elders. Esmari and all the little ones were their hope for the future.

_…_

When Kara and Lee got into the elevator at Lee's apartment building on Friday evening, he automatically punched the button for the eighth floor. Kara reached over and pressed the button for four.

"We're going to see Karl and Sharon and the baby. Remember?"

"Sorry. It's been a long week."

"I can tell you're distracted. What is it?"

"Nothing specific. Everything in general."

"Well tomorrow night you'll get to kick up your heels at Shelley's wedding. That should cheer you up."

"Don't start. Please don't start on that. I know you don't want to go."

The elevator stopped on the fourth floor and they got off. Kara led the way.

"Maya and I are going shopping tomorrow morning. She thinks she needs a new dress. I told her you said it wasn't black tie, but she still wants to look nice."

"Maya always looks nice."

"I think she's doing it more for Hunter than the people at the wedding."

Kara found the right apartment number and knocked on the door. Karl opened it. He was barefoot, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. They stepped inside. Kara handed him the gift bag she was carrying.

"This is from me and Lee. I told Sharon I'd replace the baby blankets that got cut up at your other apartment. There's a gift card in there, too. From Colonial Baby. They've got everything you could possibly need and then some."

Karl took the bag and hugged her. He looked at Lee. "Thanks. Both of you."

Lee smiled. "My contribution was strictly cubits. Kara did the shopping."

"Saunders handed me an envelope out at the base today…from him and Kendra…another gift card. Sharon said it would keep Hera in diapers for a couple of months. And Colonel Spencer handed me an envelope with two hundred cubits in it. He said he remembered how tough it was when he and his wife had their first kid. That's going to really help us since Sharon's on medical leave with no pay."

"Then buy something pretty for Hera with our gift," Kara said, "some frilly pink little dress or something. Is Sharon with Hera now?"

"She's taking a shower. She'll be out in a minute. I'm listening for Hera."

They walked into the living room. There was a couch, an end table with one lamp and a recliner.

"We don't have much furniture yet. We put a lot of our budget into the nursery."

Lee looked around. "This is nice. It's bigger than my place."

"It's a two bedroom. We really appreciate you letting us use your place until this one was ready."

"No problem. I was glad to help."

"Can I get you something to drink?"

"I'll pass," Lee said. "We're not going to stay long. I know you're both tired."

"Sharon has the worst of it. She's the one getting up every couple of hours around the clock to feed her. I had to go back to work this week. My paternity leave was up and the rent's not free. I couldn't afford to take an unpaid leave."

"How did it go?" Kara asked. "I mean out at the airbase? I didn't hear about any fights."

"Most of the other Raptor pilots have been cordial but not friendly. All business, all the time. I'm flying as Saunders' ECO. That's worked out fine. He's asked about Sharon and Hera a couple of times. I think he's the only one who's even mentioned them."

"Have you seen Maggs?" Kara asked.

"At a distance. I haven't gone out of my way to look for her."

"She's avoiding me, too…or ignoring me if she can't avoid me."

"Zak's coming home next week," Lee said. "Wednesday, I think."

"Are Zak and Maggie still split up?" Karl asked.

"He hasn't mentioned it and I haven't asked. I guess we'll find out. I thought we'd have a little welcome-home party next weekend. Laura suggested we do it at her apartment since it's so much bigger than mine. I promised her we wouldn't wreck the place. You and Sharon are invited, of course."

"Thanks, but I doubt we'll make it. Our partying days are over for a while. No way Sharon will leave Hera with a sitter yet."

Sharon walked into the living room. She was wearing sweatpants and a loose white shirt. Her still-damp hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Sharon looked tired…even for a Cylon.

"Hi," she said.

Karl held up the gift bag. "Something for Hera."

That got a smile from her finally. She looked at both of them and her eyes shone with tears. She hugged Kara briefly.

"Please sit down."

Kara knew that Lee didn't want to stay long, but he was a good sport and sat on one end of the couch. She sat beside him.

"How's the incision?" She asked Sharon.

"Much better."

"Are we going to get to see Hera?"

"I thought she'd be awake and hungry by now. Come on."

Karl and Lee stayed in the living room. Kara followed Sharon down a short hall to the bedroom at the end. A lamp glowed dimly. Kara walked over to the crib. Hera was on her back sleeping soundly. There was a small device at the head of the crib that looked like a cell phone. Two wires snaked under the cover.

"It's an alarm in case she stops breathing," Sharon said. "As of Monday she weighed five pounds two ounces. Dr. Junius wants her to stay connected to it while she's sleeping until she's at least six pounds. It's the only way he would let us bring her home."

Kara couldn't get over how small Hera was. She was nearly four weeks old and she was still two and a half pounds lighter than Brae when he was born.

"She looks like you," Kara said.

"You think so?"

"I don't see Karl in her at all."

Sharon smiled again. "Well, he's in there somewhere. I didn't do this all by myself."

"Do you think…that other Cylon women could have babies?"

"I don't see why not." Sharon sounded almost offended.

"None of them ever did here on Caprica."

"None of them were in a relationship with a man they loved," Sharon retorted. "Dr. Baltar and that creepy Simon were…you know what they were doing. Artificial insemination. How could a woman get romantic about something like that? It's not natural."

"Human women have been getting pregnant that way for a couple hundred years…when it didn't work the normal way."

"So what's your point?"

"Nothing. Really. Sometimes I think about the Cylons still left on your homeworld. We know there are humans there. Lots of them. I was just wondering…" she didn't finish the sentence.

"You're wondering if there are any babies like Hera on the homeworld now."

"I guess so."

"Karl heard a rumor out at the airbase. The talk is that the Colonials are going there to destroy our homeworld so if there are any babies, you're going to kill them."

"That's not true. We are _not_ going to destroy your homeworld."

"Then where did the rumor come from?"

Kara knew that Laura was going to make the announcement to the press Monday afternoon. She took a deep breath.

"Make sure you've got the news channel turned on after lunch on Monday. Laura's going to spell it out."

"We don't have a television. The one we had was smashed and we can't afford a new one right now."

"Okay. Yes, we're going to your homeworld but not to destroy it. We're going to rescue all the humans."

"And kill all the Cylons." Sharon's voice was soft and filled with bitterness.

"No. I'm sure we'll kill some, mostly centurions, but a lot of us may die, too. We just want to rescue the humans that are being held as slaves."

"Karl will have to go, won't he?"

"I don't know, Sharon. I'm not the one who'll make that decision. I just know that some battlestars are going and some are staying over Caprica. Some of us are going to be reassigned from the airbase to battlestars and some aren't."

"You and Lee will be going."

"We know a lot about the planet. Hunter's going back, too. It was his home before your creators showed up and their centurions took over the planet."

"What will you do with our creators? Will they go on trial like you were going to do to the Cylons here on Caprica?"

"We can't put them on trial. Your creators are dead. The death of the Seven model wasn't an accident. The Cavil who died in the bunker poisoned the amniotic fluid in their tanks with a lethal virus. When the creators tried to stop him, he had his centurions gun them down. They were dead before any of you even came to the Colonies."

Sharon gasped and cried out. "No! No! That's not true! The creators can't be dead. They're the instruments of God. He wouldn't allow them to be killed."

At the sound of her mother's cry, Hera jerked and began to wail. Karl rushed to the doorway followed by Lee.

"What's going on?" Karl asked.

"I told her that their creators are dead," Kara said.

Karl rushed over and put his arms around his wife. "Gods, Kara. Why did you do that?"

"Because she deserves to know the truth."

Lee walked over to Kara, took her arm and pulled her down the hall into the living room. Once there she jerked her arm away.

Lee asked, "What in the hell are you trying to do?"

"Sharon thinks none of them in that bunker deserved to die. Cavil was pure evil."

"I agree, but this was _really_ bad timing on your part."

Kara was breathing hard, anger that she couldn't focus at anyone was bubbling through her, anger whose origin she couldn't figure out.

"I'm going for a walk," she said. "Alone."

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know, Lee. I just need a few minutes by myself. Please. Just back off and give me a few minutes."

She went to the door, jerked it open and then closed it gently behind her. Slowly and feeling dazed Lee walked down the short hall. Sharon was sitting in a rocking chair while Karl changed Hera's diaper. Hera was still wailing. Sharon had a pillow in her lap and had already unbuttoned her shirt. Lee got a brief glimpse of her small breasts before he turned around and walked back into the living room. While they were rooming together at the Academy, Kara had mentioned Sharon's lack of modesty, but Lee wasn't comfortable standing there talking to a bare-breasted Sharon. Lee sat on the couch until Karl appeared five minutes later.

"I'm sorry," Lee said. "I don't know what happened with Kara."

Karl motioned him into the kitchen which was arranged exactly like Lee's. Karl got two bottles of beer out of the refrigerator, opened them and handed one to Lee. They sat at the small kitchen table.

Karl asked, "Where is Kara?"

"She said she needed to go walk…alone. If it's one thing I've learned about her, when she says she wants to be alone, I'd best leave her alone. Ever since she got back from Nereid, she's been under a lot of stress. She'll come around."

"After her father got us off Picon and we got separated from him and we were living at the little stone house, a couple of times Kara and I got into it pretty bad over some of the dumbest stuff."

"Things have been so good for me and Kara lately. I should have known it was too good to last."

"So what's this about the Cylons' creators?"

"I don't know anything about the Cylons' creators."

Karl gave him a skeptical look. "Kara must know something."

"It must be something she didn't mention during her debriefing." When Karl didn't reply, Lee added, "Look, she doesn't tell me everything. Kara wouldn't have told Sharon something unless she felt like it was the truth. You know she's stuck by you both when almost everybody else turned their backs on you."

"I know."

Lee stood and put the empty beer bottle beside the sink. "I'd better go see if I can find her."

"Thanks for stopping by. Tell Kara she's welcome anytime. You are, too."

Kara wasn't in Lee's apartment so he rode the elevator down to the street and looked in both directions. He even walked the two blocks to Zeno's but she wasn't there either. Finally he took out his mobile phone and called hers. It went to voice mail so he left her a message and then sent her a text. _Lv U. R U OK? _

The answer came back almost immediately. _Lv U 2 back soon xxx_

He turned around, walked to his building and rode the elevator up to his apartment. There was nothing to do now but wait for her to work through whatever was bothering her. He went into the bedroom and changed out of his uniform into jeans and an old Academy sweatshirt. Then he got the last beer from the refrigerator, settled in front of the television and found a hockey match that he knew might stand a chance of keeping his attention.

…

When Kara left Karl and Sharon's, she rode the elevator down to the ground floor. Her intention was to walk around the block and try to sort through her feelings, but as she exited the building, a transport had just pulled up in front. A man with a briefcase got out. Impulsively she jumped in and gave the driver an address near the university.

She knew the bookstore was closed for the day by now, but she also knew Leoben still lived above it. She had the driver let her out at the entrance to the service alley that ran behind the buildings. All had metal fire escapes leading to the second floors. She climbed up and knocked on the metal door. Leoben opened it after a few minutes. She was expecting the surprise on his face. Silently he stood back and let her in then locked and bolted and chained the door behind her.

She looked around. They were standing in a small kitchen. Everything was old but clean. It surprised her. Leoben was such a slob about his appearance that she hadn't expected him to have such a clean kitchen. There wasn't even a dirty dish in the sink.

"What's up?" He finally asked.

"I was in the neighborhood," she said.

He held up the mug in his hand. "I just made coffee. You want some?"

"No thanks."

"You want to sit down?"

She shrugged and he turned and walked through the kitchen doorway. She followed. The living area was large because it covered the entire second floor of the bookstore below. A bedroom and bathroom occupied part of one side. There was a small grouping of furniture around a television on the other. The rest of the floor space held stacked boxes.

Leoben followed her gaze. "Storage for the books."

He picked up the remote control and turned off the television. He had been watching a hockey game. He gestured toward the couch before he sat in the recliner.

Her phone buzzed. Lee. She let it go to voice mail. Then she saw the text. She answered it and then sat on the edge of the cushions with her clasped hands between her knees. She took a couple of deep breaths and looked up at him.

"We're going to Ner…to your homeworld and rescue the humans. Laura is going to make the announcement on Monday."

The news didn't seem to faze him. "I'm surprised you waited this long."

"That's where I was on my mission. I was there for just over a month. I learned some things about your model Seven and your creators. Do you want to hear it?"

"I told you before I don't remember our homeworld."

"Do you remember the Sevens?"

"No, but Natasi told me that they had died when the creators accidentally introduced a virus into their resurrection tanks. The virus killed the living models as well. She said they were the artists among us."

"That's not the way it happened. I'm not saying Natasi lied. She was probably telling you the truth as far as she knows."

"But you know what _really_ happened." He seemed almost amused.

"Cavil…the one who died in the bunker…killed the Sevens because they wouldn't go along with his plans to wipe out humanity. When the creators tried to stop him, he had his centurions kill them too, just like he had them kill you when you disagreed with him."

Leoben didn't react at all like Sharon. In fact he was so still and calm that Kara wondered if he'd understood her.

Finally he said, "You've obviously known this for a while. Why did you wait until tonight to come tell me?"

"I feel like I owe you one. You saved my life last fall. I just told Sharon and she didn't believe me."

"How is sister Sharon? Is her baby still alive?"

"They're doing fine."

"After you rescue all the humans, what then? Destroy the homeworld?"

"No. I think Laura plans to let you keep your homeworld but without the ability to build any more basestars. We're going to have to destroy the ones over the planet."

"So you don't plan to massacre the Cylons on the planet?"

"Gods, no. The ones who fight run the risk of being killed, but we aren't going to do wholesale slaughter of everybody. Laura isn't planning another holocaust in retaliation for what was done to us. Those who choose not to fight will be okay."

"I'm sure okay is a _relative_ term."

Kara clasped her hands tighter and looked down at the floor. "My dad's a prisoner on your homeworld. That night instead of dying when he blew up the basestar, he got thrown thirty light years away into orbit over your planet. He was in prison for a while. Now he's being forced to be a breeder. Yolanda Brenn saw something before she died. She saw another child for him. I think it's going to be half Cylon."

Leoben looked at her for a long time. "Is her prophecy what's upset you?"

"I don't know. I don't know what's wrong with me right now. I just got so angry when Sharon didn't believe me, but I'm not sure why. Lee probably thinks I'm losing it again like I did when I thought I'd lost my dad. In a way I don't blame him. I love Lee…and I love my dad and I don't want him hurt when we go to the planet."

"Are you afraid you'll have a hard time accepting the child or are you afraid it will affect your feelings for your father?"

"I'll love my dad no matter what. He didn't frak a Cylon because he wanted to. I'm sure of that. Hunter told me the Cylons on the homeworld have a drug they use on men who won't cooperate. I guess they just rape the women."

"I'm not a part of that, Kara. My life is here on this planet, selling books, proving to myself, if nobody else, that humans and Cylons can live together without one race enslaving the other. Every day that I go downstairs and open my shop, I'm proving that Cavil was wrong. I can't tell you how much pleasure that gives me. That and the fact that the man who had his centurions murder me is dead."

"I met another one of you on the planet. You look exactly alike, and yet you're so different. He was going to turn me over to be raped and tortured."

Leoben studied her for a long time and finally said, "I don't know what you want me to say. That wasn't me."

"I know." She stood. "I've got to go. Lee's waiting on me."

"Call a transport and tell them to pick you up out front. I'll let you out. I don't want you walking down that alley again. I'm not sure I'd walk down there at night."

Kara called a transport and Leoben led her down some interior stairs that came out in the back of the bookstore. They walked to the front and waited just inside the door.

"I think Natasi's going with us," Kara said. "Laura told her if she helped negotiate a peace, then she would let her stay on the homeworld and have her freedom. The only thing holding Natasi back right now is she doesn't want to leave Gaius Baltar and he's not about to leave his cushy life here on Caprica. Lee watched some tapes of them together. At first it looked like Baltar had the upper hand, but Lee said she obviously has some kind of hold on him. I mean besides the obvious. But they don't know if it's enough that he'll go with her…and we don't think she'll leave here without him."

"Do you know which sister is going to have your father's child?"

"A Six or maybe a Three. I think he's…been with both. I really don't know."

"Maybe my fate and yours are still entwined," Leoben mused. "In my dreams I still see the room with the windows and the trees. Maybe my fate is to return to my beginnings. Maybe that's the only way I'll ever understand who I really am."

"So you'll think about it?"

The transport pulled up and he unlocked the door. "I'll think about it."

.

The sound of the door opening woke Lee. He looked at his watch. He'd been asleep almost an hour. The hockey match was over. Groggily he turned off the television just as Kara walked in and sat on the couch.

"Are you okay now?" Lee asked.

"I think so."

"You've been gone over an hour."

"I know. I went to see Leoben."

"Why?"

"I'm not sure. He doesn't remember anything about their homeworld or the creators so our discussion was short and sweet."

"How do you know their creators are dead?"

"One of them told me?"

"One of who?"

"A Seven named Daniel. The only one who survived the massacre that killed his brothers and their creators." Kara took a deep breath and told him what she knew, omitting any mention of Lucy Cain.

"Why didn't you tell us this during the debriefing?"

"I did. I told Major Parker. He ordered me to keep it quiet. He and your dad are sitting on it for now."

"Why?"

"I'm sure they've got their reasons."

"Does Hunter know?"

"I told him about Daniel after we got here. He wasn't happy, but Daniel has been living there for years without causing any problems. I think he realized that Daniel just wants to live in peace like Leoben does here. Parker ordered Hunter to keep quiet, too."

"What's Daniel like?"

Kara got up and walked into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator. It had recently been cleaned out. "Frak, what happened to the beer?"

Lee followed her. "I drank the last one. Hunter and I have plenty of beer over at Laura's apartment. I haven't had a chance to restock here yet."

Kara dragged a chair over to the refrigerator and stood on it. There was a nearly full bottle of ambrosia in the cabinet above. She stepped down and got two glasses.

"The nectar of the gods. Want some?"

"Why not."

She carefully poured two juice glasses nearly full and then handed one to him. She took a big sip. The liquid was strong and sweet and burned all the way down.

"Daniel is an artist. He reminds me of Drelide a little bit. I played _Diaspora_ for him on my handheld. Daniel took a reed flute he'd made and played back the melody without a mistake. But he's more than a musician. He's an artist and a writer, too. He was painting a picture of me when I left. I wonder if he'll finish it."

Kara took another sip of the drink and looked at Lee. Seeing him with the glass of ambrosia in his hand and wearing his old Academy sweatshirt, she had a strong feeling of déjà vu. The first time she'd been to his apartment they'd stood in the kitchen exactly like this. That had been two years ago. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

Lee was looking quizzically at her. "What?"

"Do you remember the first time we stood here drinking ambrosia?"

"I remember," he said softly. "That's the night my whole world was turned upside down."

"Are you sorry?"

"I wouldn't change a thing."

"You're not sorry considering everything I've put you through starting with that night?"

He walked over, put his glass down on the counter and gently pushed a loose strand of hair out of her face. His eyes searched hers and he felt like he was being pulled into a depth as deep as the ocean. Since they had met on that crazy day in the hallway outside an interrogation room, Lee had never questioned the Fates for bringing her into his life. She had once told him that their meeting was destiny. He had never questioned that, either.

He took the glass from her hand and put it beside his.

"I'm here for you, Kara. I'll always be here."

She put her arms around his neck. Their mouths met. The hesitancy he had shown that first night was gone, but the gentleness was still there. She had always loved that about the way he kissed her, the gentle way he began. It made the passion later seem so much hotter. Lee knew how to kiss her. He had always known how to kiss her.

Leoben and the fate of the creators and even her father were forgotten. Kara took Lee's hand and pulled him down the hall to the bedroom. It took them less than a minute to shed their clothes. They were Lee and Kara, but she was also Posiden's green-eyed daughter, the sea nymph of the painting and he was her blue-eyed prince, and tonight they were writing their own story and creating their own art with the passion and fire of their love.

_…_

For the second time in just over a week John stood in the wind-swept cemetery only this time he and Emmalyn weren't alone. It seemed like half the valley residents had walked up the long, winding path to bid a final farewell to a woman who had never ventured outside the valley until the day before.

Natalie had surprised him by showing up as he was eating breakfast with Bianca and Laszlo. She had already contacted his Overseer and told her that John had another chore to perform that day. The chore turned out to be flying them to the valley. By the time he had gone back to D'Anna's and put on his blue shirt and khaki slacks, centurions had brought a wooden coffin for Seléne's body and had carried it to the airfield. It was on board the ship waiting for them when they had arrived an hour later.

Once again Buddy had been his copilot. Once again Natalie and Yoshimo had been his passengers only this time Jade had been with them as well. The trip had been solemn and nearly silent. About half-way there John had realized why Natalie had wanted him along. She hadn't wanted to do this alone. She was looking to him to handle things and so he had, leaving them all at the ship in the meadow while he had gone to Targa and Beck's. Targa was the only one there, but he had told John that he'd get a horse-drawn cart for the coffin. Then John had gone to Emmalyn's.

She had known as soon as she had seen his face.

"Esmari?"

"Doing much better. Bianca…Dr. Cardenas…thinks it was an allergy to the goat's milk. She switched Esmari to soy milk. She's going to be fine, but Bianca wants to keep her a little longer to be sure."

Emmalyn had put her face in her hands and had wept briefly and John wasn't sure if it was grief for Seléne or relief for Esmari. Probably both. Then she had dried her eyes with the hem of her apron, pulled herself together and handled everything else. By early afternoon a grave had been dug and the simple wooden casket carried to the cemetery in the cart. Targa, Beck, Narcho and three other men had carried it up the hill.

No one had objected to Yoshimo conducting the service. Today instead of wearing one of the non-descript outfits John was used to seeing, Yoshimo was wearing the dark charcoal-gray vestments of a Colonial priest, replete with the white collar.

The service he conducted was exactly as Bianca had predicted. Yoshimo's words pointed to neither religion specifically and seemed to speak to all of those assembled.

Dessa cried the hardest and Emmalyn led her down the hill as soon as the service was over. The others drifted away until finally there were only a few of them left. Targa and Beck began filling the grave. Narcho and Jade stood to one side. John was fairly certain that Jade had never attended a human funeral before.

"You need some help?" John asked Targa.

"We only got two shovels," Targa answered. "You go ahead. We'll take care of it. She was one of us."

Natalie had a small bouquet of wildflowers in her hand. "I'll wait. I want to put these on her grave."

When John turned, he saw Daniel standing hesitantly several rows away. They exchanged a look. Daniel nodded slightly and said, "I'll wait with her."

John beckoned to Jade and Narcho. The three of them began to descend the hill.

"Jade tells me you have to go back this afternoon," Narcho said.

"We've only got the Heavy Raider for the day. Natalie doesn't want to draw unnecessary attention and maybe mess up the chance for future trips."

"Damn," Narcho said. "I was hoping maybe I could take Jade fishing with me and Dessa this evening. The fish are biting near sunset right now."

John grinned. "We could always leave her here. Pick her up on the next trip. Of course that might be next week or it might be next month."

Jade said, "You'll have to bring Esmari back."

"I know, but Bianca wants to keep her three or four weeks to make sure she's developing normally. You really want to stay here for a month?"

"Huh. You think I'm not tough enough. I spent plenty of time…"

"Working in the settlement," John cut her off. He realized she was about to make a reference to her experiences in the forest. "I know. Hoeing weeds all day long is tough work."

He gave her a look and Jade seemed to catch on.

"Where would I live?"

John said, "Emmalyn might give you a bunk if you agree to help her with her chores."

"You're serious," Narcho said. "You might stay?"

"Maybe."

"We'd better talk to Natalie and Emmalyn first," John said. "They're still the bosses."

"I didn't bring any extra clothes with me."

Narcho said, "I'm sure Emmalyn could help out with that, too."

An hour later when the ship lifted off from the meadow, Jade wasn't on board. Just before they left, he took her aside and told her to be careful about mentioning her experiences in the forest. He hoped she saw the wisdom in his suggestion.

She smiled and said, "Maybe I'll teach Narcho how to make a kite and maybe I'll teach him how to fight Cylons like Cavil. And maybe he'll teach me how to fish."

When the Heavy Raider reached cruising altitude, John said to Buddy, "Long day, big guy. We won't make the settlement until sunset. I'm beat. Take the controls and watch those instruments for me, will you?"

_You rest. I will fly the ship._

John leaned back against the headrest and kept his eyes on the horizon. He thought of the difference between the elaborate burial services he had attended in the Colonies and the simple one he had just attended. And then he put Seléne's death behind him and thought of a little girl he would be glad to see when he got back to Settlement Alpha. Though she wouldn't remember her grandmother, Esmari would carry part of her in her blood and her genes just like Brae and Kara and D'Anna's child would carry part of him and that thought gave him a feeling of peace even as he knew what was brewing for all of them just over the horizon.

_…_

It had never dawned on Kara that Shelley's parents were still alive until Mrs. Sydell was escorted in and seated on the front pew of the Shrine of Aphrodite. She was followed down the aisle by Shelley's only attendant, her older sister. As matron of honor the sister was wearing a strapless dress of pale blue satin. The groom stood at the front with his best man. Both were wearing their dress gray uniforms replete with sashes. Troy wasn't what Kara would call handsome, but he was clean-cut and rugged and the expression on his face when Shelley and her father started down the aisle spoke of his love for her.

Shelley was wearing a long, cream-colored satin dress with no train. It was strapless and simple in design with a pale blue satin sash that came to a bow in the back and then fell to the hem of the gown. She wore a fingertip veil fastened to a small headband of pearls. There was a single strand of pearls around her neck. Kara had to admit that Shelley looked beautiful today. She glanced at Lee. He looked at her, smiled, and reached for her hand.

Beside her Hunter had his arm over the back of the pew behind Maya. Kara had thought he would be bored with the ritual, but he seemed to be taking everything in. Maya had found a dress that looked great on her, one with a slightly draped back in a soft plum color. The skirt was just above her knees and Maya definitely had the legs for it. Due to Maya's prompting Kara had wound up with a sundress in a dark pink color. It had inch-wide straps and a short-sleeved white jacket that was piped in the dark pink of the dress. When she had walked into the sitting room at Marble House and Lee had seen her, his eyes had lit up, but he had the good sense not to tease her about going two dresses over her limit. She'd even gotten a new lipstick which Braedon had to help her test.

With her son in her arms Laura had watched them leave, but before Kara had gone, Laura had whispered to her, "You look beautiful. I wish your father could see you today."

Kara had replied, "He will…soon."

In the depths of despair just after Yolanda Brenn's death while she still believed that she'd lost her father, Kara had told Lee that bright, shiny futures were overrated, but tonight, despite everything that had happened, she decided she would take back those words. She didn't know what was in store for any them, but here in a little temple dedicated to the goddess of love, she found the faith to believe in a better future once again.

TBC…


	45. Prophecy

Chapter 45

Prophecy

_11. Because His people heard him not, the Lord sent a second plague to Eden._

_12. For three days and three nights the ground shook and again fire came from Mount Aetna._

_13. Buildings fell and the oceans flooded the shores and the pillars of the Temple trembled._

_14. Abram said, Heed ye the power of God for He has spoken to His wayward children._

_15. Ignore me at your own peril for to ignore me is to ignore your God._

_16. After the third day the ground ceased shaking and fire no longer came from the mountain._

_17. The people laughed at the prophet and called him crazy and said to him, _

_18. God will not destroy his chosen people. Begone. Take your words of doom elsewhere._

_19. Years passed and Abram grew old in the service of the Lord and mourned for the sins of his fellow humans._

_20. And in heaven God saw all and was displeased with the children he had led from slavery on Kobol._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Constantine, _Chapter 4:1-20

.

Laura sat in the back of her limousine with Billy Keikeya on one side of her and Bill Adama on the other. She dreaded this Monday morning meeting with the Quorum of Twelve more than she had dreaded a Monday with them since her inauguration. This morning she would tell them that they were going to war on another world and ask them for their support. She would like to be able to go before the news media after lunch and say that their vote of approval had been unanimous.

Tom Zarek would probably oppose her on principle alone because it was the surest way to get his name in front of the citizens of Caprica. Zarek had no problem with killing. Zarek had killed before when he'd bombed a government building on Sagittaron. And though he had not been found guilty of other killings during his escape from a crashed prison transport, he most certainly had knowledge of those killings. Zarek's problem would be that the Colonials weren't going to nuke the planet and destroy the Cylons after the humans had been rescued.

And his position would be popular with many Capricans who vehemently espoused the view that the only good Cylon was a dead Cylon. Laura understood their sentiment although she did not agree with it. The data that Dr. Nylund and the _Penelope_ had recently brought back about the utter destruction of eleven of the Colonies had only stirred feelings that lay very close to the surface in almost everyone.

On more than one occasion beginning last November, Zarek had voiced his hatred of the Cylons and on those same occasions he had stated that the ones in the bunker should be taken out and summarily executed. He had never mentioned putting them on trial first. Since Tucker Clellan had done that job for them, Zarek had been smugly silent.

Sarah Porter on the other hand would probably stand against her not because she wanted the planet nuked, but because she was a pacifist and was opposed to all war on religious grounds. She had opposed Laura both times Laura had gone to the Quorum over funding for the escalating war in Sovana. In that regard Sarah also had the support of many Capricans. The conflict in Sovana was not a popular one. Many people felt like the government should withdraw the troops and leave Sovana to the warlords and drug dealers and monotheist terrorists who were fighting not only each other but anyone else who got in their way as well. It was easy for the average Caprican to forget that there were several hundred thousand decent, law-abiding humans just like them who refused to leave the only place they'd ever called home.

General Nathan Vargas who was her main military advisor for the northern part of the continent had put it to her succinctly. _Contain them in Sovana or fight them when the conflict spreads to Caprica City. _Still her last request for additional funding had gone through only because several days earlier a bomb had been discovered in luggage about to be put on a commercial flight from Sovana to Delphi, the religious heart of the planet. No one had claimed responsibility and several popular web sites had said that the government had staged the whole thing to gain support for escalating the war. That was a lie, of course, but many of those who had been anti-Cylon now concentrated their vitriolic suspicions on the government.

Walking into the Quorum chamber this morning and the press conference this afternoon were both going to be like walking into a lion's den. Then she glanced down at her hand and saw her wedding ring and thought of her husband. His plight gave her courage and she realized that she would face a hundred lions if it would gain his freedom and that of the human slaves on the planet. She would face a hundred Tom Zareks and Sarah Porters and James McManuses in order to see John lift his son in his arms again.

"You've got all the handouts," she said to Billy.

"In there." He pointed to the briefcase on the floor at his feet. "And the laptop with the additional information."

The handouts were some of the reconnaissance photos from Lee and Kara's missions over the planet and some well drawn maps depicting the placement of the settlements as well as the city and the lab-prison complex. There were several additional pages of facts and figures.

The limousine drew up outside the Capitol Building. They waited for Edgar to receive the okay from his team and open the door. Billy got out first.

"You'll do fine," Bill said to her. "This is going to go better than you think."

It was the first time he'd spoken since they'd gotten into the car.

She managed a smile and took heart from his encouragement.

Outside the chamber where the Quorum met, Marta Shaw stood talking to Jacob Cantrell, the Sagittaron delegate.

Jacob Cantrell had been elected by the people of Sagittaron just as Marta Shaw had been elected by the people of Caprica. Both had served multiple terms and both were savvy politicians. Both were also lucky enough to have been on Caprica when the Cylons attacked.

Marta glanced over as they approached and her gaze immediately went to Bill Adama. Billy continued past them into the chamber to set up the laptop he was carrying.

Marta smiled broadly showing her beautiful white teeth. "To what do we owe the honor of the admiral's presence today?"

Laura smiled back. "I think that will become clear very shortly. There may be some questions that Bill is much better equipped to answer than I am."

Jacob Cantrell didn't smile. "Does that mean we're going to talk about Sovana _again_? We voted the additional funding. I thought it was settled."

"No, we not going to talk about Sovana today," Laura replied.

Marta was still smiling and Laura suddenly realized that Kendra had probably passed on the rumors to her.

"Sovana or not," Marta said, "I still think someone is getting ready to ask us for money. Am I right, Admiral Adama?"

Bill managed one of his half-smiles. "Protecting Caprica and its people isn't happening for free."

"Shall we go in?" Laura said. "I'd like to start on time this morning if possible."

Billy had his laptop booted and linked to the overhead projector by the time she reached her seat at the head of the long table. Not surprisingly Marta had waylaid Bill just inside the door. He was listening politely.

Despite the fact that the chairs around the table had no names on them, everyone seemed to always sit in the same place. It made it easy for Laura to see who was missing. She needed eight affirmative votes today. Since Zarek and Porter were present that meant even a few missing members would make the required eight votes harder to get. They were still three delegates short.

Her Vice President Scott Mickelson walked in with one of his aides. The first seat to her right was always reserved for her second in command, the seat to the left for any guests. Billy sat near her at a small separate table. A waiter brought her a cup of tea and Scott a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee was placed where Bill would sit.

Laura took a sip of tea and tried to calm her nerves. She and Scott and Marshall Bagot engaged in small talk about their children for nearly ten minutes as Laura discretely glanced at her watch. She finally breathed a sigh of relief as the missing three walked in.

"We're already half an hour late getting started. I'm going to call this session of the Quorum to order."

That was the signal for the waiter to withdraw and close the doors behind him. Bill and Marta sat down. Billy began placing a sealed folder in front of each delegate.

When he finished, Laura took a deep breath. "Before we begin the very serious business we have before us today, I'd like to thank all of you for your work on the Quorum and your support of the people who now call this planet home. Whether we call ourselves Capricans or still think of ourselves by the name of another Colony, we are all humans." She took another deep breath. "I mention this because we now know that on a planet thirty light years from here, we have brothers and sisters who were taken when the Cylons attacked us almost six years ago."

She looked around at their shocked faces. A few like Marta Shaw already knew. Most did not. Zarek kept his face neutral enough that Laura couldn't tell whether he had heard the rumors or not.

"I think we all know," she continued, "that the Cylons who attacked us came from somewhere _out there_." She gestured vaguely toward the ceiling. "We know they didn't originate on one of our planets and we know they didn't construct their basestars in our solar system. We have carefully monitored the Armistice Zone for twenty-five years and they did not cross it before they began their murderous attack on humanity six years ago. If we stop and really give it thought, I think we would all certainly reach the conclusion that there might be others where the ones we dealt with came from." She paused to let her remark sink in.

Zarek jumped right in. "Are you telling us that we didn't get them all last November?"

"That's exactly what I'm telling you."

"Where are they?"

"I'm getting to that."

"How long have you known this?"

"Mr. Zarek," Laura said. Her voice was still calm but had taken on the edge of steel that she knew how to use. "When I finish, if I haven't answered your questions, I'll be glad to consider them at that time."

"Are we in any danger of being attacked?"

Marta Shaw finally snapped at him. "Oh, for the gods' sakes, Tom, quit playing to the cameras." She indicated the devices that recorded every Quorum session for archival purposes. "Your grandstanding will never make it to the six o'clock news so shut up and let the President continue."

Laura silently thanked her. She was sure most of the other members did, too.

"Please bear with me for a short history lesson whose meaning will soon become clear. Some of you may be familiar with an expedition that took place over sixty years ago in which the government of Libran outfitted a large scientific vessel for exploration beyond our solar system. The ship was named the _Hyperion_. In a sector of space later named the Prolmar Sector after the man who headed that expedition, they discovered a sun much like our own with ten planets orbiting it. The fourth planet which is almost the size of Caprica was the only one habitable for humans. They spent a year exploring and came back with the news that the planet contained the ruins of a vanished civilization."

There was a gasp from Sarah Porter. She said, "Kobol. They found Kobol. The gods be praised."

"No, I'm afraid it isn't Kobol. A second expedition with the same ship was undertaken almost five years later. Sadly the _Hyperion_ did not return from that mission and was deemed lost. By then the government of Libran was experiencing financial problems and no rescue mission was mounted. The fate of the _Hyperion_ passed into history as a question mark."

Tom Zarek was impatiently drumming his fingers on the table. Laura stopped speaking and stared at him until he stopped. Then she glanced at Billy and he dimmed the lights and projected his first slide onto the screen at the other end of the room. The point of view was at the edge of the Prolmar sector. The screen switched to an animated view and they watched like they would have from the bridge of a ship as it entered the system and flew toward the fourth planet. Even though Laura, Bill and Scott had watched this several times the afternoon before, she still got goose bumps. Her husband was somewhere on that planet.

"Ladies and gentlemen," she said, "I give you the home of the Thirteenth Tribe. According to their scriptures they called the planet Eden. We have chosen a new name. We call it Nereid."

"Respectfully, Madame President," Zarek said, "this is an interesting history lesson but what does it have to do with the Cylons?"

"Because this planet is where the old Cylon centurions went when they left the Colonies twenty-five years ago…the U-87s and the 0005s. As we all know their exit from the Colonies ended the First War, but they weren't through with humanity. It was on Nereid that a group of humans known as _the creators_ made the humanoid versions of the Cylons that we later came to know as Cavil and his brothers and sisters and that most humans refer to as _skinjobs_. It was on Nereid that some of them planned their return to the Colonies and the holocaust they inflicted on us."

Laura paused for affect. She had finally stunned Zarek into silence. Laura glanced at Billy and the ship began to move lower into the planet's atmosphere.

"We now have good intelligence that not all of the Cylons came to the Colonies. A group of them, possibly as many as half, remained on Nereid because they didn't want to annihilate the human race. They had other plans for us. During the confusion of the holocaust, they came here and forced entire ships full of humans to jump to their homeworld. Many of our missing ships that were listed as destroyed were actually found on Nereid during a classified recon mission. The Cylons also landed on some of the Colonies and took whatever they needed to start agricultural and ranching settlements including the ranchers and farmers, livestock and seeds. However they did not want to create another Eden. They did not want to live in peace with their human captives. They enslaved them and there they remain today." She took another deep breath. "They've also forced some of the humans into becoming breeders with much the same intentions that Simon set up his breeding experiments here on Caprica."

The animated ship now skimmed the surface of the planet showing Kevin Abinell's computer-generated rendering of the settlements and the city and the prison-lab complex and finally the basestar shipyard.

Billy brought the lights back up.

"Please open your folders," Laura said. "The first page contains the estimated numbers of humans, Cylons and centurions currently on Nereid. There are also three large basestars above the planet. There's another one under construction that should be ready within three or four months. We don't know if that's all they have but it's all we've currently observed."

There was the sound of paper tearing as the members used their pens and ripped the paper seals. Laura gave them a full minute to look over the data before she said, "We're going to Nereid to rescue our fellow humans."

"Then what?" Zarek asked. "Destroy their homeworld like they destroyed eleven of ours?"

"Nereid is not only their home, Mr. Zarek. It's the home of the survivors of the second _Hyperion_ mission. They reached the planet but due to problems with the ship, they were never able to leave. We haven't made a final decision, but we hope to be able to eventually negotiate a peace so that both humans and Cylons can co-exist on the planet."

"Co-exist," Zarek exploded. "Have you lost your mind? Those murdering bastards won't co-exist with anyone."

Bill Adama spoke up for the first time. "You need to dial it back and watch your language, Zarek. President Roslin's decision has been made. We need to respect it."

"How could a military man like you go along with something so insane?"

"I'll admit my first inclination was to nuke the planet, but that was before I fully understood the situation and thought it through. Now I agree that the wholesale destruction of another world is…excessive to say the least, especially considering that a group of humans calls it home. The planet is also a treasure trove of archeological information that our people will want to study for years to come."

"But the Cylons…how can you even consider trying to live with them after what they've done?"

"The Cylons on the planet may not agree to a peaceful solution in which case…" Bill left the sentence unfinished and let them fill in the blank. He didn't have to say, "If they refuse to negotiate, we'll take no prisoners."

Zarek wasn't ready to admit defeat. "We've only got your word that there were survivors from the second _Hyperion_ mission. That's very convenient _and_ very suspicious in my book."

Laura looked at Billy and nodded. He got up, went to the door and opened it. Lee and Hunter were waiting outside and entered. When they got to the front of the room, Laura said, "We thought some of you might have questions or doubts. Most of you already know the young man in uniform. He's Captain Lee Adama. Lee is one of the ones who flew the recon missions over the planet. The young man with Lee is Kyle Franklin although we call him by his nickname of Hunter. His grandfather is Perry Jaffee who headed the second _Hyperion_ expedition. On our last recon mission to the planet, contact was made with his people and Hunter agreed to come to Caprica and tell their story. Most of the information in your folders about the planet and the settlements comes from him. The rest comes from recon photos. We decided to allow you to ask him some questions if you'll do it politely and also if you'll understand that some things he cannot talk about."

"What happened to the Thirteenth Tribe?" Sarah Porter asked.

"We don't know," Hunter said. "They were gone long before my grandparents arrived on the planet. The city was in ruins. The Cylons are rebuilding it now."

Safia Sayne asked, "Do you know the names of any of the survivors taken from the ships and the Colonies?"

"No," Hunter said.

"How are the humans being treated?" Sarah Porter asked.

"They're slaves, but if they cooperate, they're given adequate food and shelter."

"And if they don't cooperate?"

Hunter shrugged. "Use your imagination."

"Tell us about the breeders," Jacob Cantrell said.

"There's not much to tell. They take men and women to the city to be breeders. Some go willingly. Some don't."

"Have there been…results?" Cantrell asked.

"You mean half-breeds, don't you?" Zarek said.

"We heard some human women have kids, but none of the Cylons women have…at least not that our contact has heard about. There are half-breeds in most of the settlements, too, but we heard they all have human mothers."

"How have you remained free?" Zarek asked.

"The Cylons use us for something they call _training_. It's more like a game to them, though, since they download when they're killed. At first we killed a lot of them, but they're learning. It's getting harder and harder to get the jump on them."

Zarek said, "So you've helped train them and now they'll use that training against us."

"It was either that or let them take us as slaves. We wanted to stay free and live in our valley. When we made that choice, we didn't know what the future held. Our only oracle was dead by then. We didn't know that one day we'd be fighting alongside Colonial troops."

"Tell us about the skinjobs' creators," Jacob Cantrell said. "Who are they? Where did they come from?"

"I don't know anything about them."

"Who do you think they were, Madame President?" Zarek asked.

"At this point I could only speculate like the rest of you."

"How did you get to Caprica?" Zarek asked Hunter.

Bill Adama quickly spoke up. "That information is classified. Right now Hunter has been working with some of our best military planners on how we will free the humans on the planet with a minimum of loss to our own forces and to those in the settlements. Hunter will also help brief the troops we'll take with us to the planet. He's been fighting the Cylons there for fifteen years. He's an invaluable asset to us."

"_Fifteen years_," Marta Shaw said. "You can't be old enough to have been fighting them for fifteen years."

"I first went into the forest with a team of fighters when I was fourteen."

"Dear gods," Sarah Porter breathed. "The barbarity of war that it takes our children as soldiers."

"I wanted to go," Hunter said. "I wanted to protect my people."

"When are you going?" Safia Sayne asked.

Bill said, "We haven't set an exact date, but between two and three months. We'd like to do it before they launch the basestar that's now under construction."

"Who's going to protect Caprica while you're gone?" Cantrell asked.

"Good question," Zarek interjected. "How do you know there's not more of them out there somewhere."

Bill answered. "We don't. We're leaving over half the fleet here…half our battlestars and all of our fighters at the airbase."

Laura said, "Which brings us to why you're being given this information today. This afternoon I'm going to hold a press conference and announce our intentions to the people of Caprica. Once our Marines start training for the invasion, it will be impossible to keep the plans a secret. I'd like to be able to tell the press that I have the support of the entire Quorum. So I would like to ask you to vote right now. Would all those who support the mission to free our fellow humans on Nereid please say _Aye_."

It sounded like she had gotten an _Aye_ from all of the delegates.

"All opposed, please say _Nay_."

She waited a few seconds and then asked, "Does anyone abstain?"

When her last two requests were met with silence, she said, "For the record, the Quorum has voted unanimously in favor of rescuing the humans on Nereid."

Zarek said, "You didn't ask us how we felt about what to do with the planet afterward."

Laura managed a slight smile. "First things first, Mr. Zarek. Let's get those prisoners home before we think about the planet."

"Can we afford to fight a war on another planet and one in Sovana at the same time?" Jacob Cantrell asked. "And I'm not just talking about the funding. Do we have the troops to do it?"

Bill answered. "Enlistments are up nearly a hundred percent over last year this time, and I think we'll find the funding since we don't want the Cylons showing up on our doorstep in the future."

Marta Shaw asked, "How do you know that they won't start killing the humans the minute you show up over the planet?"

Bill continued answering. "We don't. We're counting on the element of surprise to help us."

Laura said, "I would ask you to keep this to yourselves until after I meet with the press this afternoon. It will also give you time to formulate replies to your constituents. I know there are many other issues currently facing us, but I'd like to ask you to table those until next Monday."

Jacob Cantrell said, "I think we've spent enough cubits this morning."

"Thank you for your support," Laura said. "We'll adjourn on that note."

She sat and took a deep breath and watched the Quorum members gather their folders and slowly leave. She was sure many of them would go on to eat lunch together and discuss the morning's revelations. She imagined that Zarek would make a phone call to James McManus scheduling an interview to follow closely on the heels of her press conference.

"All things considered that went well," Bill said. "You got your unanimous approval."

"You were right," Laura said as she smiled at him. "It went better than I'd thought it would." She turned to Hunter. "Thank you. You handled the questions like a pro. Perhaps there's a future for you in politics."

He grinned. "Only if it's on Nereid."

She turned to Lee who had taken a seat in a chair against the wall. "Thank you for bringing Hunter over."

"We actually rode the subway. It's a lot faster than driving and trying to find parking over here."

"Would you both like to join Bill and me for lunch at Marble House?"

"We've got another meeting," Lee said. "Major Parker is having lunch brought in for us. Then I've got to head out to the airbase. I'm slated to spend the afternoon in the Mark VII simulator."

Laura and Bill watched the young men leave.

"I know you're proud of Lee," Laura said.

"I'm proud of both of my sons," Bill replied.

She stood. "Time to go back to Marble House and prepare for the press conference. What did Marta Shaw have to say to you before the meeting?"

"She asked me to go to lunch with her. I asked her for a rain check."

"You really should think about it. She's intelligent and attractive. I liked the way she handled Zarek this morning."

Bill smiled. "You're right. I owe her lunch just for that."

...

John looked out the window above the sink as he washed the dinner dishes. Kate and Lucas Agathon had just brought chairs out and sat down behind their house as they'd done for the last three evenings. John had been so tired, though, that he hadn't felt like making the effort to go talk to them. He didn't want to be responsible for Lucas breaking down again, either, so for the last three evenings he'd gone to bed as the sun was setting and had fallen immediately into an exhausted and dreamless sleep.

Tonight he felt better and decided that he'd put off their next meeting long enough. It might not be nearly as bad as he'd imagined it would be. He'd decided to take Bianca's advice and make no mention of Sharon Valerii or of Karl's marriage to her. Bianca was also right about the baby Karl and Sharon had conceived. It might not have lived.

He walked to the bedroom door. D'Anna was already asleep. He'd said something to her at dinner about going for a walk afterward. She'd obviously decided against it. He would mention D'Anna's long hours in the bed to Bianca and get her take on it. If Bianca didn't see any problem with it, he'd quit trying to get D'Anna into the fresh air for a little exercise.

He walked out the back door and crossed the narrow strip of weedy lawn.

Lucas Agathon got to his feet and this time he shook John's hand. Kate went inside and brought out another chair.

"We wondered if you were still around," she said.

"I've had a couple of really rough days," John said. "I've been going to bed right after dinner."

Lucas said, "It takes a while to get used to working in the fields. Give it a few months."

"I sit at a sewing machine all day," Kate said. "My back and shoulders hurt all the time now."

"Will they let you change jobs…maybe rotate with somebody else for a while?"

Kate and Lucas both laughed.

There was an awkward silence. Finally Kate asked, "How's the Cylon?"

"Her name's D'Anna. She's doing okay."

"She must trust you letting you come talk to us."

"She doesn't know I'm out here. She goes to bed early."

"I saw her leaving the clinic two days ago. She looks pregnant."

"She is."

"So you did your job," Lucas said.

John shrugged.

"What's it like…frakking one of them? They made just like a human woman?"

"Lucas," Kate hissed. "Hush that kind of talk. I don't want to hear it. I'm sure John doesn't either."

There was another awkward silence. John was beginning to think he'd made a mistake in walking over tonight.

Finally Lucas said, "Kate says you're still in the military."

"The Reserves."

"What rank?"

"Major."

"I guess they were rough on you at the prison. An officer of your rank would know a lot more than a non-com like me."

"Tell us about Karl," Kate said before John could say anything.

She obviously wanted to steer the conversation away from their experiences at the prison. That was fine with John. The prison was the last thing he wanted to talk about.

"Karl's doing fine. He and my daughter have stayed good friends."

"_That's all_?" Lucas asked with clear disappointment in his voice. "I always thought when they were old enough they'd…wind up as boyfriend and girlfriend…maybe even get married. Trish did, too. She always thought one day…" his voice trailed off and his one eye temporarily lost focus. "They are old enough, aren't they? Time…I can't keep it straight…I forget how many years it's been."

"Kara will soon be nineteen."

"That means Karl's twenty. They're old enough. Are you sure they're not…maybe they're just being cool about their feelings."

John said, "She and Karl are like brother and sister. Kara says he's her best friend and always will be. Sometimes that's better than being boyfriend and girlfriend. Best friends…they last. Kara has a boyfriend. Same guy she's been with for a couple of years now."

"Is she a pretty girl?" Kate asked.

John smiled. "I think so, but I'm definitely prejudiced."

"She's cute as a button," Lucas said. "She's blond like her mother. But Socrata had blue eyes. Kara has green ones."

"Like yours," Kate said to John. "What about Karl? Is he as handsome as my Lucas?"

"Karl's a very nice looking young man. Tall like his father."

Lucas asked, "The girls…they like him?"

"I'm sure they do," John answered. "He's soft-spoken and polite. Very respectful."

"He was a shy boy. Trish worried about him a lot. I'll never forget the day he asked me what he should do because some girls at school had started beating up on a new girl. He was about nine at the time. The little girl was a year younger. It's the first time I can remember him showing an interest in standing up for anybody else. I asked him what he wanted to do. He said he wanted to put a stop to it. He did. He brought her home with him the next day and Trish asked her to stay for supper. That's how I met Kara. After that she was a regular at our house. I felt like I'd gotten another daughter."

John took a deep breath. "For what it's worth, you can't know how much I appreciate everything you did for her. The times she spent with Karl and your family were the happiest times she had growing up. She still talks about some of the camping trips you all went on and how much fun she had."

Lucas nodded. "How come you weren't around?"

"Socrata kept Kara away from me starting before she was three. Legally I couldn't do anything about it. Socrata was a good soldier, but in a lot of ways she was a lousy mother. The night I took Kara and Karl off Picon was the first time I'd spoken to my daughter in ten years. She didn't even know who I was."

Kate seemed aghast. "Why?"

"Socrata never would talk about her reasons."

Lucas said, "Socrata was a strange one all right. One of the best Marines I ever knew. She never talked about her personal life. Never. Until you told us a few days ago, I thought the husband who left her was Kara's father. I wouldn't have known about him at all except Kara told us. She said he played in a band and that one day she came home from school and he was gone. A few days later they moved into base housing. He never came back."

"He's a musician and a composer. Very talented. He's still alive. Living on Caprica. Kara's back in touch with him."

Lucas said, "About a year after Socrata moved onto the base, Trish tried to fix her up with the father of a kid in Karl's class. Divorced guy. Socrata told her real quick that she wasn't interested. She said she had a friend who gave her everything she wanted from a man. That was the end of that. I think it hurt Trish's feelings. I told her to stay out of other people's personal lives. Socrata was a very attractive woman. She could have her pick. She didn't need my wife running interference for her. Where'd you two meet?"

"In a rehab hospital. She'd had a shoulder joint replaced and I was trying to learn how to walk on a prosthetic leg."

"I remember when she got shot in a training accident. We all thought she'd take a medical discharge, but damned if she didn't work through it and come back more determined than ever. How'd you lose your leg?"

"Motorcycle accident. My fault. Nobody else was involved."

"You drinking?"

"Not that night. It was just speed and sheer stupidity on my part. Tempting fate to see how much I could get away with. I'd lived through the last couple of years of the First War. I'd been through battles nobody should have survived. I'd lost a lot of friends and fellow pilots. I thought I was invincible. You know how stupid you are when you're young. You're going to live forever. When I met Socrata in that hospital, the doctors had already told me my Viper-flying days were over. They didn't think I'd ever fly any kind of ship again. I was on the verge of killing myself. She gave me a reason to live."

Lucas reached out, put his hand on Kate's shoulder and squeezed gently. "I can understand that."

Kate smiled at her husband and patted his hand before she looked over John's shoulder and said, "I think somebody's looking for you."

John turned. Natalie stood in the doorway of D'Anna's house.

"My handler," he said to them.

Kate said, "I thought you were with a Three."

"I am, but she's not my handler. That Six, Natalie, is my handler. I take my orders from her. It's a long story…and complicated. Don't you have handlers?"

"We do," Lucas answered. "We report to the same Two, but we haven't seen him in months so we just keep doing what we were told."

"He's a stoner, a weed-head," Kate said derisively. "Got his own little dope patch out beyond the airfield…or so I'm told. There's a few of them who say it enhances their religious experiences. I've got my own thoughts about what kind of experiences it enhances. I've heard that some humans join them and they have orgies."

"Now, Kate," Lucas said gently, "John doesn't want to hear that kind of gossip. You've never seen them doing any such thing. You're just repeating what you've been told by some of the other women."

John stood. "It's been nice talking to you tonight, but I'd better go see what Natalie wants."

"We'll talk again," Lucas said.

"You can count on it."

When he got to the door, Natalie said, "You've made some new friends."

"I've met two of our neighbors…the only two apparently. The rest of these houses look empty."

"Except for that couple and one other on the far end of the block, all these houses are empty. We chose this location because it's near the clinic and it will allow D'Anna some privacy. Let's take a walk."

"Not trying to be hard to get along with, Natalie, but I need to go to bed soon. If you want to talk strategy and plans, we're going to have to start earlier."

"I'm taking you out of the fields. Bianca and Laszlo have asked for you full-time at the clinic. Having Esmari there all the time when she's not really sick is creating a hardship for them, but Bianca isn't ready to release her and let me take her back to the valley yet. You've bonded with the child. They'd like for you to help take care of her. I told them I'd help, too."

"You could get any teenage girl from the settlement to come in and babysit Esmari. She's a sweet, agreeable baby."

"The doctors didn't ask for a teenage girl. They asked for you. It's my decision. I've already told Cavil. He didn't object. For some reason he thinks you have medical training. I don't know where he got that idea, but I didn't tell him he was wrong."

They went through the house. John closed the front door quietly and they began walking toward Main Street.

Natalie said, "Lucy wants to resume some of her research."

"You finally talked to her?"

"Through Buddy, yes. I'd put it off long enough."

"Are you going to let her?"

"I don't know what she can do. Most of the creators' equipment was taken to the lab at the prison. The only instruments and things left here are used by the doctors. I explained that to her. She's not happy."

"Why not give her a computer and let her do what she can. A brilliant mind like hers cooped up in a centurion body with nothing to do. She's probably going nuts."

"Her goal is to create a flesh and blood body and transfer her avatar to it."

"Did she tell you that?" John asked.

"No. She didn't have to. It's what Daniel wants, too."

"What are the chances of that happening? From what I've seen the answer is zero because the lab equipment isn't here any longer. Zero chance that she will ever be able to leave that centurion body."

They reached Main Street. Twilight was settling around them. Except for the patrolling centurions, the street was deserted. John was aware of dozens of red eyes scanning them. It was an unsettling feeling. He felt a level of scrutiny from these centurions that he'd never felt in the city. Natalie turned and they started back.

They walked in silence for a block. She finally said, "Between you and Lucy you've given me a lot to think about."

"Come to the clinic tomorrow after I've gotten a good night's sleep. We'll talk some more."

"Are things going all right with you and D'Anna sharing living quarters?"

"Fine. We see each other at dinner and that's about it. She's sleeping the rest of the time. I think it's excessive, but who am I to say?"

"Are you behaving yourself?" She asked playfully.

"If you're asking me if I'm following Bianca's orders in regards to _no sex_…yes, I am. That's one thing about living on the edge of physical exhaustion all the time. It mostly takes care of the urge...at least in a guy my age."

"Hmmm. Maybe that explains why the birth rate among the humans in all the settlements is less than we projected."

"I'm sure that's part of it. If you'd give everybody two days off instead of one and allow some socializing, you'd probably see some results in about a year."

"Bianca and Laszlo told me the same thing."

"It's common sense, Natalie. Humans don't have your strength or your stamina."

"Cavil and the others on the council think if we allow the humans too much time to socialize, they'll start plotting against us."

"I still think you could lighten up a little…especially if you want to see more babies born. Worn out people don't make good parent's either. Believe me, those first couple of months with a newborn will exhaust most couples. They don't need ten hours in the fields on top of it. Laura and I walked around like zombies for weeks after Brae was born. I walked the floor with him many a night while he was teething and still had to go to work the next day." He chuckled softly. "If I sat in the car for five minutes after I got to work, I'd fall asleep."

"Was it worth it?"

"Oh, yeah." John felt tears come to his eyes as he thought about his son. "I'd do it again in a heartbeat."

They reached D'Anna's block. Several patrolling centurions clanked past them and moved on, their scanning red eyes penetrating the surrounding area but providing scant illumination. He and Natalie turned up the sidewalk and began walking toward the house. The street lamps that lit Main Street stopped after two blocks. John didn't know if they'd just run out of lamps or had done it on purpose. Twilight had faded into night. There was only a sliver of moon. The houses on either side of them were dark. Farther down the block light glowed behind curtains. As they approached the house, though, John was aware that a shadow passed between them and that far lighted window.

He had just started to ask Natalie if she'd seen it when there was the crash of breaking glass and for the second time since he'd been on Nereid, John thought of the mouth of hell as one side of D'Anna's house erupted in a bright orange blossom of fire.

...

Kara was tired…tired enough that she stopped half-way through getting dressed and lay down on one of the narrow benches in the women's locker room at the airbase. The adrenaline that had fueled her for several hours that afternoon had dissipated and she had crashed hard.

The silence was broken only by the sounds of a running shower and a muted conversation. Of course she was later today than usual and most of the pilots were already gone.

She closed her eyes. The door to the corridor opened and then closed and the muted conversation was cut off. The shower stopped running. She realized that if she didn't get up she was going to fall asleep.

"Are you okay?" Maggie asked.

Kara opened her eyes and sat up. Maggie stood at her locker in white hip-hugger panties and a white sports bra. How long had it been since Maggie had spoken to her? Four weeks? Five?

"I'm tired," Kara said. "Major Jessups was determined today to shoot me down. I pulled moves in that Mark VII that I don't even think I could do in a Mark II. It's bigger and heavier but that computer assist is awesome."

Jessups and Valinski and a half-dozen other instructors were going up with them on several training runs every week and putting them through a grueling series of maneuvers designed to simulate combat with Raiders as much as possible. The only thing missing was the live ammunition. A weapon's lock was considered a kill. She'd come so close today to being _killed_. Too close. Twice Jessups had her in his sights. Twice he was a second away from getting a lock on her. It made no difference that Jessups had told her afterward that she'd done some damned fancy flying or that she was getting better in the Mark VII every time she went up in it. She'd still come too close.

Maggie brought her back to the present. "I guess you already knew what the President was going to say today in her press conference."

"Some of it."

One of the reasons they were later that day was because Colonel Spencer had everyone crowd into the ready room after lunch to watch Laura's press conference on a big screen television. It had been standing room only and Kara had gone in late on purpose. She'd stood at the back and was able to get away before the pilots could crowd around her and start asking questions. She'd gotten to her Viper and was inside with the canopy closed before anyone caught up with her.

"Were you the one who flew the recon missions she mentioned?"

"Me and Lee. Do you know Zak is coming home on Wednesday? He's in the group of Marines who are going to start training to go to Nereid."

"I heard. Have you seen Karl and Sharon's baby?"

Kara almost laughed. She and Maggie were both dancing around topics that neither wanted to discuss.

"I saw Hera for about five seconds last Friday night."

"How's Karl dealing with being a father?" Maggie prompted.

"Okay, I guess. Lee and I weren't there very long."

"Does the baby look like him?"

"No. She looks like Sharon. She's tiny. She looks like a little doll."

Maggie started pulling on her fatigues and Kara did the same thing.

Maggie asked, "Is Sharon going to come back and fly a Raptor again?"

"I don't know. If she does it'll be months. Karl said she was on unpaid medical leave. I think it'll be a long time before she'll trust Hera to day care. I mean the kid _is_ special."

"So Sharon will miss going to her home planet."

"She's never been there. She told me once that she was born on a basestar…although I wouldn't exactly call what happens to them being _born_."

"The President said today it would be two to three months. Do you know the date?"

"No. That will be up to Admiral Adama. A lot probably depends on how well the training goes. I think he's anxious to go. I'm sure Commander Cain is chomping at the bit. Lee thinks she was hoping to find Cylons on some of the nuked planets so she could go in guns blazing."

"Are you getting reassigned to a battlestar?"

"Lee and I are both going back to the _G_. That hasn't been announced, yet, but I'm sure."

"What about the rest of us?"

"Some are staying here and some are getting reassigned. If you want to go, you should say something to Colonel Spencer. I told Flat Top and Crash the same thing. You're a good pilot, Maggs. You should get your pick. We could use you on Nereid."

"I think I'll do that."

Kara finished buttoning her fatigue jacket and after brushing her damp hair and pulling it back into a ponytail, she walked to the door.

"See you around," she called back to Maggie.

"Keep up that fancy flying. Don't let Jessups get you."

There were a lot fewer cars than normal in the parking lot when Kara straddled the motorcycle. Before she put on her helmet, she fished her mobile phone out of the small backpack she carried and turned it on. There was a message from Lee saying he and Hunter were on their way to Marble House and would see her for dinner. She had another message from an unfamiliar number, but she recognized the voice immediately. Leoben.

"Kara…I got some information you might be interested in seeing. Call me when you get a chance. No rush."

She called the number. Leoben answered on the third ring.

"It's Kara. What's up?"

"I've found something I want to show you. It has to do with what we were talking about last Friday night."

"Tonight…about 8:30?"

"Come to the front. I'll let you in."

...

Laura sat sideways on the couch with her bare feet propped up. She had changed out of the simple navy blue suit and white blouse that she had worn to the Quorum meeting and the press conference. Now she wore a comfortable pair of slacks and a soft blue cotton sweater.

She had a drink in her hand. Maya sat at the table with her laptop working on one of her assignments. Braedon had scattered his toys everywhere as he always did.

He came over to the couch and reached for her drink. "Juice."

"No, sweetheart, this is not juice."

"App juice."

Maya stared to get up. "That means apple juice. I'll get him some."

"Keep working," Laura said. "I'll get it for him." She put her drink down on the table and picked up her son. "You are getting to be such a big boy. Your dada will hardly recognize you."

She carried him into the small kitchen and put him down while she got the apple juice and poured it into his sippy cup, making sure the lid was snapped on tightly. He took the cup from her and carried it back into the sitting room. Brae was almost twenty months old now. He'd tripled his birth weight and grown nearly a foot. He no longer looked like a chubby baby, and every day it seemed that he looked more and more like John. Tears came to her eyes. In some ways she didn't think she could bear the two to three months before his rescue.

"No, Brae, leave mommy's drink alone." Maya's voice came from the sitting room. Laura rushed out of the kitchen.

Braedon's sippy cup sat on the carpet near the table. He had nearly succeeded in reaching her drink.

"Juice," he said and pointed to the glass Maya now had in her hand. "Momma's juice."

Laura took the glass from Maya and walked into the kitchen. She drank the remaining whiskey in one swallow and rinsed it in the sink. Maya was trying to soothe Braedon. Laura didn't think she could take one of his tantrums. Not tonight. She took the apple juice out of the refrigerator and poured a few mouthfuls into her glass and took it back to her son. She knew she shouldn't have given in like that, but she couldn't handle a tantrum.

She was more than thankful when Lee and Hunter walked in. Braedon immediately forgot about his desire for her drink and ran to Hunter. She picked up his sippy cup and walked into the kitchen. Lee followed her.

"Thank the gods you're here," Laura said. "Braedon was just about to throw a tantrum because he wanted some of _momma's juice_. I really shouldn't have an alcoholic drink around him, but after the Quorum this morning and the press conference this afternoon, I felt like I deserved one."

Lee smiled. "I think you deserve more than one."

Laura also smiled. "Maybe after Brae is in bed tonight."

"Is my dad coming to dinner?"

"At lunch he said he was going to work late tonight. I couldn't convince him otherwise."

"Kara's on her way. She was late leaving the airbase. I guess you heard McManus's interview with Zarek afternoon."

"Not yet. How bad was it?"

Lee shook his head. "The two of them can generate enough hot air to float a couple of blimps."

"McManus and Zarek both think the only good Cylon is a dead one…unless of course it's a Cylon centurion working in one of the tylium mines. That's perfectly acceptable."

Lee said glumly, "The real bummer is that I'm afraid the majority of people on Caprica share their feelings."

"Yes. I'm well aware of that sentiment. Long before my press conference was over, the switchboard at Marble House lit up like the lights on a Winter Solstice Tree. The overwhelming opinion was to destroy Nereid. Some callers didn't even care if we rescued the humans first. One man said twenty thousand humans was nothing compared to how many there were on Caprica and they weren't worth the risk of letting any Cylons escape the planet. One caller referred to the prisoners as _acceptable collateral damage_."

Lee shook his head again. "That sucks, to put it crudely."

Laura wanted another drink…anything to dull the headache that had started behind her eyes. "Yes, crudely put or not, I couldn't agree with you more. I just wasn't prepared for how many people would willingly sacrifice their fellow humans in their zeal to rid the universe of all Cylons."

Kara walked in and joined them in the little kitchen. Lee could tell by looking at her that she'd had a tough day. He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him.

"That bad, huh?"

"Jessups almost got me this afternoon. Twice."

He rubbed her shoulder. "_Almost_ doesn't count."

"I told Leoben we'd come by tonight. He's got something he wants to show me. Hunter can go with us or he can stay here."

Laura hadn't heard Kara mention going to see Leoben in quite a while. "I didn't know you were still in touch with him."

"I went to see him a few days ago. He's told me a couple of times that he doesn't remember anything about their homeworld. I don't know why I keep asking him about it. At first I thought he was lying to me. Now I think he's telling the truth. Cavil really wiped his memory."

"Does this have anything to do with your father?" Laura asked.

Kara shrugged. "Sort of."

"Do you want to share it with me?"

She shook her head. "Not yet. It's probably nothing."

"We're going to get him back. You don't need Leoben to tell you that."

"I know," Kara said.

Maya came to the door and said that dinner had been served in the small dining room. Kara glanced at Lee. She hadn't exactly lied to Laura, but she knew that Leoben would never have called her if he hadn't felt it was important.

After Laura walked out of the kitchen, Lee pulled Kara to him and kissed her.

"Cheer up. It's not the end of the world because Jessups almost got you today. I'll bet he got everybody else he went after."

Kara started to tell him that it wasn't just the training exercise today that was bothering her, but she kissed him back and that put the rest of it out of her mind.

...

John thought Natalie screamed, but later he wasn't sure. He just knew as he saw the flames leaping out of the window that he had to get D'Anna out of the house and that he probably had less than a minute to do it. He didn't even try the front door because the living room was engulfed in fire by the time he got there. He ran around to the back and was through the kitchen and into the bedroom. He slammed the bedroom door against the encroaching flames.

D'Anna was sitting up in bed. She looked dazed.

"Get up," he shouted at her. "The house is on fire."

He tried to open the bedroom window but it was stuck so he grabbed the lamp from the bedside table and used the base of it to smash the glass and break out as much as he could. Then he grabbed the blanket off the bed and laid it over the wooden window frame.

The room was already filling with smoke.

"Shoes," D'Anna gasped. "I can't find my bedroom shoes."

He grabbed her and lifted her over the broken glass on the floor. He knew there was broken glass on the ground outside as well, but getting cut feet was better than dying of smoke inhalation or burning to death. He pushed more of the blanket through the window and helped her through. He saw Natalie outside.

"Carry D'Anna over the glass," he shouted at her. "She's barefoot."

Natalie came over and easily lifted D'Anna.

John could barely see now for the smoke in the room, but he crawled back across the bed to the dresser, felt in the drawer until he found the pistol, the book of scriptures with Laura and Brae's picture tucked inside and the prayer beads. Then choking on the smoke, he crawled through the window, snagging his shirt and feeling a shard of glass rake down his back. He staggered a few steps and fell to his knees, coughing and retching.

Suddenly a centurion was beside him, lifting him like he weighed no more than a child, carrying him away from the burning structure.

The robot put John gently on the other side of the street and then went to help the other centurions who had pulled a big pumper truck in front of the house and were beginning to reel out the hose.

Gasping and still coughing, John leaned back on his elbows and watched them try in vain to save the little house that he and D'Anna had shared for a week.

Natalie came running down the street, alone this time. She stopped and looked around and finally saw him on the opposite sidewalk.

"I thought you were behind me," she gasped.

He coughed again and almost retched and managed to choke out, "Where's D'Anna?"

"I took her to the clinic. She had some cuts on her feet. Come on. I need to get you there, too."

It was evident by now that the only thing the centurions could do was keep the fire from spreading to the other houses. He got shakily to his feet. The pistol was tucked into his waistband under his shirt. He still had the prayer beads and the book of scriptures clutched in his hand. Those were the only two things that Natalie saw, but it was enough.

"You went back for _those_?" She asked in disbelief.

He put his arm over her shoulders for support. "Let's go."

Bianca was waiting for them. She helped Natalie get him to a bed and get his boots off.

"D'Anna?" He rasped.

"Laszlo is cleaning and bandaging several small cuts on her feet. Other than that she seems to be fine?"

"The baby?"

"I didn't detect any distress. The baby's heartbeat is normal. You can listen to it if you'd like."

"I trust you," John managed before he started coughing again.

"Lie back," Bianca ordered him as she unbuttoned his shirt and put a stethoscope on his chest. "Take a deep breath. How much smoke did _you_ inhale?"

He knew she saw the pistol but she didn't say a word as he slipped it out of his waistband and under the sheet. Fortunately her body shielded his action from Natalie just before she walked over to the bed.

She said, "John went back for his book of scriptures and some prayer beads."

"Dear gods," Bianca admonished him. "What were you thinking?"

John concentrated on breathing and didn't answer. The less he said right now, the better.

Laszlo rolled a portable oxygen tank beside the bed and extended the tubing. He placed the mask over John's nose and mouth and started the flow of air. The sound and smell of it reminded him of scuba diving on the coral reefs of Aquaria. He closed his eyes.

As tempting as it was to go off into one of his daydreams, he concentrated on what he had seen near the house, the only thing he'd seen…the shadow. Clearly someone had thrown some kind of firebomb through the window of D'Anna's house. The only thing that had saved her life had been that the bomber had tossed it through the wrong window. The living room and bedroom both had windows on the front. Either the bomber hadn't known which was which or his aim was seriously off. Then John wondered if the bomber was even a man. He had seen a shadow. It could just as easily have been a woman.

Then another thought crossed his mind. Had the bomber known that he wasn't in the house? Could the attack have been directed toward him as much as toward D'Anna? Maybe it was about killing them both.

And a last question before he gave up and tried to quit thinking about it. Was the fire bomber a human or could it have been a Cylon? The One and the Five on the council had been the only ones who hadn't congratulated D'Anna on her pregnancy. There was every possibility that Cavil now saw her unborn child as a threat to his power. The stoned Leoben had clearly said that the peacemaker would usher in a change. If D'Anna had died in the fire, she would have downloaded…but the baby wouldn't have…and neither would he. That would have ended the threat of this child being the peacemaker.

Any way he looked at it, the feeling of personal safety John once had here in the settlement had vanished like smoke from the burning house had vanished into the night sky. The thought of helping Natalie with a Cylon civil war began to fade as he began to seriously think again about getting D'Anna off the planet and back to Caprica.

If someone had put a target on them, John was absolutely certain that another attempt would be made. He also knew that if someone wanted him and his child dead badly enough, whether they were human or Cylon, male or female, they would eventually succeed.

...

"Are you sure you want to go with us?" Kara asked Hunter as they rode the elevator at Marble House down to the parking level.

"If you don't want me to go, just say so. I'll be glad to stay here."

"I'm fine with you going. But we're going to see a Cylon who looks just like the Twos you fought in the forest."

"I went with you to see another Cylon…and she's the same model that killed my father. Besides, Maya's got to study for a test. She doesn't need me hanging around tonight."

"Okay, but just so you'll know, this Leoben isn't like any of those you ever met on Nereid. He looks like them, but he's _not_ a fighter."

"I gathered that already," Hunter said with a touch of sarcasm in his voice. "He's a _wimp_."

"Not entirely. You should have seen what he did the night he saved my life," Kara said hotly.

"Easy, you two," Lee said. "We've all had long days. We can always put this off. Talking to a Cylon isn't worth going at each other's throats."

"No," Kara said. "I told Leoben we'd be over tonight. If you don't want to stay, just drop me off. I'll call a transport when we're through talking."

"Calm down, Kara. We'll stay."

The digital clock in Lee's car flashed 8:24 just as he pulled into a parking place in front of the bookstore. There were only a few dim interior lights. The sign hanging inside the glass door said _CLOSED_, but Kara saw Leoben waiting for them. They all got out and he let them in. Leoben locked up behind them. Hunter stopped and looked around.

"Bet you never saw this many books in your life, did you?" Kara asked him.

"The most I've seen in one place are the bookshelves in Laura's den."

"This is Leoben," Kara said before she realized that introducing him to Hunter was totally unnecessary. She turned to Leoben. "This is Hunter, a friend of ours."

"The man from our homeworld," Leoben said with a touch of amusement in his voice.

"My homeworld, too," Hunter retorted, but his voice held no animosity. "Kara says you're all right, so I'll take her word for now."

Leoben led the way to the steps in the back and they climbed up to the second floor.

He had made coffee and there was a plate of cookies sitting on the table. Kara breathed in the aroma.

"These smell good. Did you make them just for us?"

"They're from the deli down the street. Apple with cinnamon and raisins. Baked fresh this afternoon. They're supposed to be healthy. Help yourself."

She took a cookie. Hunter and Lee each took two. After the first bite Kara wished she had taken a second cookie as well. She waited until she had finished chewing before she spoke.

"So what do you want to show me?"

"Do they both know what we talked about?" Leoben asked.

"I gave them the short version on the way over," she answered.

"Just so you'll know," Lee said, "I don't believe in oracles or their prophecies. I think Kara is reading a lot into what Yolanda Brenn told her on the night she died. How she could have taken those few words and deduced her father is alive is beyond me."

"What about you?" Leoben asked Hunter.

"If I didn't believe in the words of an oracle, I wouldn't be on this planet right now."

"How so…if you don't mind telling me."

"Years ago when I was nine or ten, an old oracle on Nereid told me that one day I would save the life of Posiden's green-eyed daughter and that she would take me to her world to tell our story."

Kara added. "Yolanda Brenn called me Posiden's green-eyed daughter the first time I went to see her. I was impressed considering she was blind."

They sat in silence for a few moments until Lee said, "Neither one of you mentioned that during your debriefings. I mean about what the oracle told Hunter."

"What difference would it have made?" Hunter asked.

Kara said, "The only difference it would have made is that Lee would probably have written you off as whacky along those lines like he does me. Major Parker might have, too. Lee thinks I'm mostly sane but when it comes to oracles, I'm completely nuts."

"That's not fair," Lee said.

"What's not fair about it? How many times have you told me that it's nothing but smoke and mirrors and parlor tricks? You and your dad both call it mumbo-jumbo. Admit it. If I'd told you that Yolanda had said my father was still alive and that I believed her, you'd have wanted to haul me off to see a shrink."

"All right," Leoben quickly said. "I get the picture. So we have two believers and one non-believer. Tell me, Lee, do you believe in the gods?"

"No."

"Then something that was written in both the scrolls of Pythia and the monotheistic scripture would hold equal weight with you?"

Kara said. "He's an equal opportunity non-believer so it would hold no weight with him at all."

Hunter said, "Come on, Kara, knock it off. Lee's entitled to his opinions just like you are."

"Believing in the gods is _not_ an opinion," Kara said. "It's _faith_ and you've either got it or you don't."

"Agreed," Leoben said, "but _our_ faith teaches us to be tolerant of the beliefs of others, even those who don't believe at all."

"Not all of you feel that way," Kara said. "Look at the monotheists up in Sovana who are into bombing our temples."

"And look at the Sons of Ares who are into beating unarmed mourners with bricks and wooden clubs," Leoben countered. "We can find examples in both faiths of bigotry and intolerance without looking very far at all."

"You're right," Hunter said. "So what do you want to show us?"

Leoben got up and handed Kara a copy of Pythia, the book version instead of the scroll. "Read the verse I've marked in pencil."

"Out loud, please," Hunter said.

Kara read, "_Pythia said to the daughters of the temple, 'After the blaze at the dawn of the third age of mankind, a child shall be born of a non-believer and he will bring peace to the warring tribes.'"_

Leoben said, "Remember that many thousands of years ago when Pythia lived and wrote, anyone who didn't believe in the old gods would have been called a non-believer even if he…or she…worshipped a single deity. Pythia could have been referring to a monotheist or even an atheist."

"What does Pythia mean when she says _the third age of mankind_?" Lee asked.

"The _dawn_ of the third age of mankind," Leoben corrected him.

"Okay, the _dawn_ of the third age of mankind."

Leoben smiled. "Business has been slow. I was able to spend some time over the weekend doing research on the web. I even walked over to the university yesterday afternoon and used their library. As it turns out I think the most definitive answer comes from a thesis written several years ago by a graduate student at Caprica U. She cites dozens of examples in ancient texts that say the first age of mankind ended with the exodus from Kobol therefore the second age of mankind started with the settling of what our scripture calls Eden and you call Nereid and then continued with the settling of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol in this solar system. According to prevailing theory, we're at the end of the second age of mankind. The third one is about to begin. The meaning of one word in that verse holds the key to her interpretation."

"The word _blaze_," Lee said.

"Exactly right," Leoben said. "The use of the word _blaze_ to refer to a conflict causing wide-spread devastation goes back to the beginnings of our written language. Even in antiquity before anyone had a clue about the power of nuclear weapons, mankind was often bent on annihilating members of another tribe…for one reason or another."

They sat in silence for a moment. Then Lee said, "I guess it goes without saying that the holocaust visited on us by the Cylons fits the definition of a _blaze_."

"Of course it does. But there are others who've found examples that the word _blaze_ may cover multiple conflicts. As an example for the tribes fighting on Kobol, one _blaze_ lasted almost thirty years. That's why some Pythia scholars think the current _blaze_ isn't over yet and that it will include at least one other conflict. Based on the President's press conference today, I think I agree with them."

"They think the fight for Nereid is part of the current _blaze_," Lee said.

"Yes, because it's a continuation of the conflict between humans and Cylons just as the fighting last November was. So while we're technically still at the end of the second age of mankind, we're on the cusp of the third which will be ushered in by the birth of a special child…the peacemaker."

He stood and handed Kara the book of monotheist scriptures. She couldn't bear to look at it for a moment. Waves of feeling were crashing through her because she knew where all this was heading.

"Our oracle also made two more prophecies," Hunter said. "And no, I didn't mention those either because I didn't see how they applied. She told my grandfather that three strangers would come to our valley, two followed by one, and that they would bring great change. She also told him that he would live to see the birth of a peacemaker. One of those has already happened. Kara and her copilot came to the valley followed by her father. Two strangers and then one."

Leoben bowed his head for a moment. "In the last year or so have you had a meteor shower over Nereid?"

"Not long before Kara and I left the planet. We watched it. Why?"

"Read the first verse I've marked," Leoben said to Kara.

"_And Azurra said to her people, the Lord your God has sent to me a vision of a rain of fire from the heavens. Three shall fall, one and then two and these will herald the coming of a peacemaker."_

"In more ancient times," Leoben explained, "meteor showers were often referred to as _a rain of fire from the heavens _or_ a rain of heavenly fire_."

Hunter said, "Hundreds of meteorites entered the atmosphere that night, but only three looked like they reached the planet. One fell and then a few minutes later two more on almost the same trajectory. Kara and I both saw them."

Kara's hands had begun to tremble. She flipped the pages to the next bookmark and read the verses Leoben had checked._"And Jerusha had a vision and said to her father, The days will come again when our people shall be persecuted for worshipping our God. And He shall hear their cries and send to them a peacemaker, a child of two races but one faith. And his birth will be presaged by a rain of heavenly fire. Three stars shall fall. One followed by two. Xander marveled and said to those assembled, My mother Azurra also saw the birth of this child. For she said, Three shall come in a rain of fire and will herald the coming of the peacemaker. And he shall be borne of the three and protected by the six."_

She looked up at Leoben. Lee and Hunter still didn't understand the prophecy, but she did. She understood it completely now as did Leoben.

"The last sentence has puzzled religious scholars for thousands of years," Leoben said softly. "They've tried to find an explanation of how one child could be borne by three women, and when they couldn't explain it, they endowed it with mysticism and said it didn't have a literal meaning. Some refer to it as the birth trinity, but no one ever really understood it or could explain it…until now."

"The prophecy isn't referring to three women," Kara said. "It's referring to a Cylon model Three. D'Anna. She's going to have the peacemaker."

"And the six who will protect him are not necessarily six different people, but possibly a model Six." Leoben added.

"Maybe it means both," Hunter said.

"True," Leoben answered. "The six daughters of General Ulixes protected Azurra's son Xander and some believe that his story closely parallels that of the peacemaker. He led the exodus of the persecuted Thirteenth Tribe from Kobol and brought them to a planet where they found peace."

"A child of two races but one faith," Kara whispered almost in a trance.

Two races…human and Cylon, but o_ne faith_. She couldn't accept that implication. She just couldn't. Her father would _never_ convert to the monotheistic faith. Her father would never give up their gods for the one God of the Cylons. That part of the prophecy had to be wrong. Some long ago scholar had to have made a mistake in translating their scripture from the language of ancient Kobol.

Lee said, "Okay, so a Three on Nereid is going to have a child that everybody will call the peacemaker. How does that affect us other than some people think it ushers in a new age of mankind…if you believe in that sort of thing?"

Leoben answered him. "It affects all of us, but you more so than me and Hunter because that child is going to be Kara's brother and when you and Kara marry, he'll become your kin as well."

TBC…


	46. By Your Command

Chapter 46

By Your Command

_1. After a long life of faithful service to his God, Abram went to dwell in Heaven._

_2. The Lord looked down at His people, at how they had turned their backs on Him and scorned his prophet, _

_3. And the Lord sent a final plague upon the people who thought they were His chosen tribe._

_4. Their crops began to fail in the fields and in time herds of their animals sickened and died._

_5. Slowly starvation spread across the land. The people died, first the poor and then the children._

_6. A group of the faithful prayed to God and said, Lead us from this darkness that we may begin anew,_

_7. And we will be steadfast in our worship and not forget the One True God._

_8. The Lord heard their prayers and spoke to them, Take a ship and travel to the home of the Fifth Tribe _

_9. For they are a tolerant people and there you shall dwell in peace._

_10. And a faithful few left their home on Eden and journeyed across the stars to Gemenon._

_11. There they established a settlement in the mountains and chose a leader whom they called the Reverend Mother._

_12. And all vowed that the sins of Eden would never plague God's chosen people again._

_13. God's wrath continued unabated for many years on Eden until the sinful had perished from the planet,_

_14. And the wind howled a lone sentinel through the pillars of the temple and the ruins of the once great city._

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Constantine, _Chapter 5:1-14

.

The drive from Leoben's bookstore back to Marble House was made in total silence. None of them said a word. Lee knew Kara was upset, but he didn't know what to say to her that would make her feel better. He was afraid that anything he said would just make it worse.

Hunter sat in the back seat staring out the window. Lee had no idea where Hunter's thoughts were…on the prophecy of a peacemaker or maybe somewhere in his valley back on Nereid or maybe on Maya.

He pulled up to the gate of the parking lot at Marble House. The Marine guard walked to the window and shined a flashlight into the car focusing briefly on each one of them.

"Could you pop your trunk, sir? We've been asked to check every car coming in tonight."

Kara opened the car door. "It's okay. I'll walk from here."

"You don't have to…"

"Lee, it's a hundred yards to the door. It'll do me good."

She leaned over and kissed him but it was an absent-minded kiss. To say that she had a lot on her mind was definitely an understatement. Hunter got out and got into the front seat with Lee.

Lee motioned to the guard. "It's okay, corporal. We're not going in."

They closed his trunk and he backed up until he could turn around.

They were halfway to the apartment before Hunter spoke.

"Kara's really upset."

"You think?" Lee said and was immediately sorry for his sarcasm. He apologized and then asked, "Do you really believe all that stuff?"

"It's hard to argue with the scriptures."

"Ours or theirs?"

"Does it matter? Both say the same thing."

Lee took a deep breath but again couldn't keep the biting sarcasm out of his voice.

"Then I don't guess it matters. Kara and Leoben have spoken. Who are we to doubt them? I mean between them they have so much experience decoding ancient prophecies."

"There's no need to make fun of them. I happen to agree with their interpretation. Your Yolanda Brenn wasn't the only one to see a special child. Our oracle on Nereid saw it, too. And they both lived thousands of years after those scriptures were written."

"Don't you think they might have read the scriptures and that's where they got their prophecy ideas? Maybe it was just them parroting something they'd read."

"I'm sure someone who doesn't believe can find a hundred ways to deny the possibility of their truth."

Lee felt anger bubble through him but not at Hunter. It was more at the whole situation.

"You know, Kara doesn't need this on her right now. She got enough to deal with. She needs to keep her mind on learning that Mark VII. I wish the hell she'd never gone to see Leoben last Friday night. I wish the hell she'd never said whatever it was that got him started on this quest of his to fill her head with somebody else's ideas. He's the one who sent Kara to Yolanda Brenn a couple of years ago. He's the one who got her into all this prophecy crap in the first place. He's the one Cavil always referred to as a _false prophet_ in his interrogations at the bunker prison. I've watched about half of them. Cavil made fun of us for letting Leoben go. He said we'd made a big mistake in trusting him. He said Leoben would teach us to doubt. Now I'm beginning to wonder if Cavil wasn't right all along."

Hunter was trying to keep his cool. "You know there is a chance the prophecy isn't _crap. _Not everything that involves faith deserves to be dismissed as crap."

"You're right. And it's not Kara's faith that bothers me but the rest of it."

"A big part of our religion has always been about prophecy. Didn't you ever go to any kind of temple when you were growing up? Every temple had an oracle. Your father is a warrior. I would have thought he'd have taken you to the Temple of Ares."

Lee shook his head. "My father was hardly ever home and my mother…she was either too drunk to get up on Sunday morning…or too hung over. I guess you could say neither one of them was heavy on the spiritual side. By the time mom got her act together, I was sixteen years old."

"Have you ever asked your father why he doesn't believe?"

"No. But you're welcome to ask him if you want."

Hunter snorted. "I'm not that brave _or_ that stupid. Kara told me her mother took her to the temple almost every Sunday."

"Kara was raised in the faith. Her mother didn't do much else for her, but she did take her to the temple and make sure she got a spiritual foundation."

Hunter said, "I was raised in the faith, too. Don't worry about Kara. She'll find a way to cope. I'm more worried about you."

"Me?" Lee said incredulously. "Why are you worried about me? It's not _my father_ who will supposedly get a Three pregnant with this proverbial peacemaker. Save your worries for Kara and John…and Laura. They're the ones who need it."

"I'm worried about you because if you aren't careful how you handle this, you'll lose Kara over it."

"So _you_ can see the future, too. Or are you just playing psychiatrist tonight?"

Hunter didn't say anything for several blocks. Then as Lee pulled into the underground parking garage at Laura's apartment, Hunter said, "I know you haven't asked for my advice, but I'm going to say what's on my mind anyway. Kara's faith is very important to her. Don't ridicule it and that includes the prophecy. If it turns out to be true, then you'll have some decisions to make. Kara loves her father. She stole a ship and jumped across trillions of miles of space to find him. No matter what she has to do, she'll accept the child and her father's part in making it because she loves him. She'll even accept his conversion to the Cylon's faith if that happens. She won't like it, but in the end, she'll accept it just like she'll accept and love her new brother…and she'll protect him and his existence with her life just like she kept that crazy copy of Cavil from taking Braedon. So if you love her and want to keep her, you'll be careful how you deal with her beliefs."

They got out of the car and walked to the elevator. Lee punched the up button. "You're right. I've got to let Kara know I love her and support her no matter what."

"Right now my advice is to do nothing other than what you've just said. Let her work through it. When we were in the valley and our Cavil showed up and told us we couldn't leave, Kara was upset because she wanted to start looking for her father right away. It took her a couple of days, but she worked through it and adapted."

"You're saying her faith kept her going?"

"She accepted that she couldn't change her situation without getting herself killed. She started helping Emmalyn and Seléne. She went fishing and rabbit hunting with us. She didn't sit around and mope. She adapted."

They rode the elevator up to Laura's apartment. Lee unlocked the door and turned off the alarm. Hunter went straight to the kitchen and got two beers while Lee went into the bedroom and changed out of his uniform into jeans and a t-shirt.

When he walked into the den, Hunter had the remote control and was searching the guide channel for movies. Lee picked up the beer that Hunter had put on a coaster for him.

"In some ways I think you know Kara better than I do."

Hunter grinned. "I understand her because she and I are a lot alike."

"I'm surprised you two didn't…"

"Don't start down that road again. She and I are probably _too much_ alike. I've got a beautiful lady in my life now. Just between you and me, if I survive going back to Nereid, I'm going to ask Maya to marry me. I don't have much hope that she'll say _yes_, but I'm going to ask."

Lee settled back on the couch and took a long drink from the beer. "Maya might surprise you."

"She's devoted to Braedon and Laura. I'm not sure where I rank in there."

"I still think you're underestimating Maya's feelings for you. And don't worry about her leaving Laura and Brae. Laura won't have a bit of trouble finding another nanny. Besides by then John will be home."

"Laura's really serious about us all living together on Nereid, isn't she?"

"I don't think she would have announced it to everybody on Caprica in a press conference today if she wasn't."

Hunter took a sip of beer. "She's a smart lady and I think she's a good leader…or she's trying to be, but I can't believe after what you all went through here on Caprica while the Cylons were in power that she could even think they would be willing to live in peace with us on Nereid."

"I don't think it's possible," Lee said. "And if you want to know the truth, neither does my father. He's not going to nuke your planet, but I don't think he believes the Cylons will surrender and negotiate a peace. I think he believes they'll end up in a fight to the death with us. He doesn't think there will be any Cylons left to worry about living with."

"I've noticed how cautious Major Parker is not to talk about anything beyond the fight to free the slaves. He doesn't believe Laura's going to get her utopia either."

"Part of me hopes my father is wrong."

"You'd want to live with them?" Hunter asked in surprise.

"I don't know. I might under the right circumstances. If nothing else, I'd like to see whether it would work or not. I _can_ understand where Laura's coming from. And I can understand Kara's position, too. Leoben's okay and so is Sharon. Maybe it's ones like them that Laura is thinking about. You know her father was a Colonial ambassador, don't you?"

"You told me."

"Laura grew up listening to him talk about negotiating and working out compromises. It's in her blood. Laura also has a hard time believing that a race of beings created by a group of brilliant humans can be _all bad_. There's something about her that wants to look for a way for us to live peacefully with the Cylons. When she was trying to explain her feelings to my father, she called the Cylons _our children_. She said good parents don't kill their children. They help them grow and learn, but she's smart enough to know that will never happen on Caprica. How could we expect humans and Cylons to live together in peace here after the way they destroyed eleven of the Colonies? Still, I think Laura believes Nereid is more like a new Eden where mankind can start all over and try to correct some of our mistakes. Maybe we're all being too pessimistic. Maybe she's the visionary."

"But living in peace with the race that killed and enslaved us? Don't you think that's going too far?"

"Look at the history of the Twelve Tribes. They fought each other off and on for thousands of years starting way back on Kobol and each time made up and lived in peace afterward."

"Until the next war started."

"There's only one way we're ever going to find out if we can live with the Cylons, so you'd better have an answer prepared when Laura asks for your help."

"_My help_," Hunter said incredulously.

"You're clearly a leader. After the fighting's over, she'll look to you for help in establishing a blended government on Nereid."

Hunter snorted. "I came here to help plan this fight so we could get rid of the Cylons, not get all cozy and move in with them."

"I don't blame you for feeling the way you do after what they've done to the humans on Nereid and especially to your people. I'm just saying have an answer prepared for Laura when she asks because she will."

…

After Kara got out of Lee's car and walked across the parking lot, she rode the elevator up to the second floor at Marble House and went to her room where she began to pace. She was almost as keyed up as she had been in her Viper that afternoon. She took off her fatigues and put on sweatpants and a gray t-shirt. Thoughts were racing through her mind almost too fast for her to grasp. She needed a drink because she didn't think she would be able to go to sleep otherwise.

Leoben had given her a piece of paper with a notation of the verses of scripture that she had read. She picked it up and looked at it…three lines that had turned her world upside down.

She stuffed the piece of paper in her pocket and walked barefoot down the hall. Light still showed under Laura's door so she knocked. Ten seconds later Laura opened it. She was in her robe and nightgown.

"Oh, Kara. Please, come in. I thought it was Maya. She's studying for a big test tomorrow. I told her to come get me if Braedon woke up. I only got him down about thirty minutes ago. He didn't want to go to sleep tonight."

"I know he didn't want Hunter to leave."

"He's grown very fond of Hunter. He still kisses John's picture every night and calls him _dada_, but I'm afraid he's forgetting his father."

"Dad will be home soon. Do you mind if I get a drink?"

"Help yourself."

Kara walked over to the sideboard and poured a small glass of whiskey. "Do you want one?"

"Why not?"

Kara poured another one and took it to her stepmother.

"Thank you. Do you want to talk about your visit with Leoben tonight?"

"Not right now. I'm too wiped out. I'm going to bed. You should, too."

"I'm going to work for another hour at least. I'm still reading reports from some of my cabinet members and then there's the transcript of the second conjugal visit we allowed Natasi and Baltar."

Kara snickered. "Just be glad you got the transcript instead of the recording. Lee had to look at both of them. All I can say is he's got a stronger stomach than I do. Baltar totally creeps me out."

"Romo thinks that there might be something in Natasi's programming that's she's having difficulty overcoming. After all, when they took over Caprica six years ago, her main purpose was to seduce Baltar and get his total cooperation in starting a breeding program. Romo thinks Cavil may have done something to her programming to insure her undying love and devotion. They certainly wouldn't have wanted her to get fed up with him after a few months and kick him to the curb."

"I wouldn't put it past Cavil to have done _anything_ to further his agenda. He wiped out Leoben's memory without a second thought because Leoben wasn't toeing the line any longer."

Kara turned up the glass of whiskey and took a big swallow. It was so strong that it brought tears to her eyes. She wished Laura kept ambrosia instead. The silence stretched. Finally Kara stood and took the piece of paper out of her pocket.

"I'm too tired to talk about this tonight, but maybe in the next couple of days you could find a copy of the Cylon scriptures and read these verses. There's a verse from Pythia there, too, but I know you've got a copy beside your bed."

Laura reached out and took the slip of paper. "This has to do with your father?"

Kara gulped the rest of the drink. "Part of it might not be such a big surprise…I mean we know why they took him to the city."

Laura took a deep breath. "Thank you...for being honest with me…as you always are."

"You probably won't thank me after you've read it, but I think you deserve to know."

"Goodnight, Kara. Sleep well."

Kara left, closing the door quietly behind her, but instead of going back to her room, she rode the elevator downstairs and went out onto the little walled terrace with the Posiden fountain…Posiden, her father's namesake, god of the sea, with the beautiful Nereids sitting at his feet. She sat in a padded lounge chair and watched the water spouting from the dolphins' mouths and heard it splashing into the basin. It had a hypnotic quality and her eyes soon grew heavy. She was too tired to think anymore.

The next thing she was aware of was one of the security guards waking her. For a moment of sleepy confusion she thought Posiden had stepped out of the fountain.

"Time to go up to bed, Miss Kara."

She got groggily to her feet. "What time is it?"

"Two in the morning."

"Thank you."

He held the door open for her and she trudged down to the elevator. She almost went to sleep on the ride from the first floor to the second. She'd been dreaming when the guard had awakened her, but she couldn't remember now what it was. At least the light was off under Laura's door.

In her bedroom Kara crawled under the cover. Her last thought before she fell asleep was that they were one day closer to rescuing her father and finding out if the prophecy was true.

...

John was suddenly aware that Bianca was standing beside his bed with Esmari in her arms. She was already dressed in the gray scrub pants and white physician's jacket that she wore each day and he realized that it was probably early morning.

"What time is it?" His voice was hoarse and raspy and he coughed several times until his throat was clear.

"A little after seven. How are you feeling?"

He sat up. "Not bad…all things considered. I slept good after I quit coughing. How's D'Anna?"

"She's fine. Still sleeping. Laszlo fixed breakfast while I was giving this little one her bottle. Do you feel like eating with us?"

"Let me grab a shower first. I smell like smoke."

Fifteen minutes later he had showered and stood shaving. Other than the scrubs he kept at the clinic and the slacks and shirt he was wearing the night before, the rest of his clothes had burned up in the house. He'd have to ask Natalie about going to the clothing store again.

Five minutes after he finished shaving, he was seated at the table in Bianca and Laszlo's kitchen. He didn't think a big bowl of oatmeal and a plate of eggs with toast had ever tasted so good. Bianca had located a high chair and Esmari sat at the table with them. Bianca was successfully feeding her small mouthfuls of oatmeal. In barely a week, the child had blossomed. She was babbling, those little sounds that Brae had begun to make around four or five months. Her cheeks were rosy, her lashes long and dark, her eyes a clear, dark blue. She had begun to smile and laugh. She was a beautiful baby and John had no doubt she would grow into a beautiful little girl. He tried to imagine her playing around the fountain with Cassie and Sophia and Rachel and the other children. Again he tried to imagine his sons with them.

Laszlo brought him back to the present. "In case you noticed your gun was missing, Bianca took it. She was afraid you'd knock it out of the bed last night."

"Or roll over on it and shoot yourself," she added.

"Where is it?" John asked.

"On top of the kitchen cabinets," Laszlo answered. "I think it should stay there."

John grinned. "It will until I need it."

"How in the gods' name did you manage to get a pistol?"

"I got it from someone in the valley."

"I take it Natalie doesn't know."

"No. I'd appreciate you not telling her either. I'm sure she would confiscate it."

Bianca said, "Yesterday I would have said you didn't need anything like that here in the settlement, but today I'm not so sure. Can you tell us what happened last night?"

"Somebody threw a firebomb through the window of D'Anna's house. I think I remember smelling liquid tylium as I ran into the bedroom and slammed the door to keep out the flames. Fortunately whoever did it didn't throw it through the bedroom window or D'Anna wouldn't be sleeping in the next room right now. She would have downloaded at one of their res facilities."

"Did you see who it was?"

"I saw a shadow, that's all. But I've been thinking about it and I'm fairly certain it was a Cylon…either a One or a Five. My guess is it was a Five because they usually wind up doing the dirty work for the Ones."

Laszlo said, "You'd better be damned certain before you make an accusation like that."

Before John could say anything else, Natalie walked in. She had a basket of her cookies and put them on the table. She studied him for a moment.

"You look well this morning."

"Better than I was last night. We were just discussing the incident."

"Cavil will start rounding up the humans later this morning. We'll find out who did it."

"I know who did it."

Natalie was shocked. "Why didn't you say something last night?"

"Because I didn't _see_ who did it. I'm certain now, though, that it was a One or a Five, probably a Five because he screwed up and threw the bomb through the wrong window."

"Are you accusing a brother of trying to kill a sister?" She asked coldly.

"If you want to put it that way…yes I am."

"You're wrong. We don't kill each other."

"Think about what you just said, Natalie. Wasn't it only a few weeks ago that we discussed the way you watched a One kill a whole Cylon model…your brother Sevens."

"That was different," she said defensively.

"How was it different?" John asked angrily.

"The One who did that is gone. He went to the Colonies."

"So none of the rest of them are capable of killing another Cylon? Is that what you're telling me?"

Natalie pulled out a chair and sat down. Bianca asked her if she'd like coffee. Natalie shook her head.

"What makes you so certain about last night?" She finally asked.

"You remember the six or seven centurions who were patrolling while we were walking back to the house? They were behind us."

"Yes."

"There were another half-dozen in front of us that went on in another direction. Don't you think if a human had been sneaking around in the dark, your centurions would have spotted him? If I remember correctly, they scanned the whole street just seconds before somebody tossed that firebomb."

She sat silently pondering his words so John went on.

"You know how the One and the Five on your council reacted when the Two started rambling on about D'Anna carrying the peacemaker. What's the one way to make sure their power structure doesn't change because of it? Kill D'Anna, that's how. Maybe they don't consider it killing since she would have downloaded, but the baby wouldn't have. And I think that whoever threw that firebomb thought I was in the house with her so he was going to kill two birds with one stone, metaphorically speaking. Kill the baby _and_ the baby's daddy. No more peacemaker. And no more chance of making another one…at least not with me as its father."

Natalie didn't want to admit it, but he could also tell she saw the logic behind his reasoning.

John continued. "Why don't you go ask Buddy if he heard any unusual centurion chatter right before it happened? If they'd spotted a human sneaking around after dark, I'd think there'd be some kind of record of it. I'd say bring Buddy in here, but I'm afraid he would scare Esmari."

Natalie got up without a word and left the room. John picked up a cookie and took a bite.

"What's this about a One killing another model?" Laszlo asked.

Briefly he told them. He knew they would have to talk later because before he could finish, Natalie came back in. She sat down at the table.

"I told Buddy to look at every patrol log from last night in a five block radius around D'Anna's house. If the centurions who scanned the street saw a One or a Five…or a human, there will be a record of it."

John had broken off a piece of his cookie and given it to Esmari. He smiled at her as she held it with both hands and began to tentatively gnaw on it. He tried to imagine handing a cookie to his and D'Anna's baby one day.

No one spoke for a moment as they all watched Esmari with the cookie.

Then Natalie said, "I'm going to move John and D'Anna into one of the apartments upstairs. I'm doubling the centurion guards on the clinic and I'm going to bring Buddy inside at night to stand at their apartment door. He'll have orders to admit no one unless one of us or D'Anna tells him to."

In the front of the clinic a bell rang.

Laszlo stood and walked over to Bianca's chair where he leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. "Our first patient has arrived. Take your time."

Bianca got up and took their plates and bowls to the sink.

"Leave those," John said. "I'll clean up and wash dishes. I'll watch Esmari, too. You go help your husband."

She walked behind his chair and patted his shoulder before she left the room. "You're a good man, John. Did I ever tell you how much you remind me of my son?"

He smiled. "You might have mentioned it a time or three. Did I ever tell you I'm honored you think so?" She patted his shoulder again and then he and Natalie were alone. "Whenever you figure out which Five did it, I'd like a few minutes alone with him."

"I can't allow that. If you kill him, you'll go back to the prison."

"I'm not going to kill him. I'm just going to rearrange his facial features. He won't look quite like your creators made him when I get through with him."

"Let me put it this way, John, if a human does _anything_ to one of us, he or she would be punished. Even I couldn't stop that from happening."

"But you can do whatever you want to us. Tell me something. If I'd died last night and you'd caught the Five red-handed, would you have done anything to him?"

"I…I don't know. That's never happened before. In the instances where a human was…killed here, it was because he attacked one of us. The killing was justified."

"So if I'd been asleep in the house with D'Anna last night, how would you have been able to justify a Five killing me?"

"I'm still not a hundred percent convinced it was a Five."

John lifted his shirt and pointed to the scar that traversed the upper right side of his chest. "That came from where a surgeon on Caprica cut a bullet out of my lung. You know who put it there? A Five, that's who."

"Sonja told me you stepped in front of your wife to save her life and that's why you were hit."

"The point I'm trying to make is that the Five didn't decide on his own to shoot Laura. The order came from Cavil. The Five was doing Cavil's dirty work. Just like last night. On Caprica if one person orders the killing of another, he's just as guilty as the man who pulls the trigger."

"I can't argue with you because I wasn't on Caprica. I don't know what happened there, but I find it hard to believe a brother would have decided to kill a sister."

"There's one way to find out. Make Cavil and Doral put their hands in the stream and ask them."

"I can't order a One or a Five to do anything."

"Could your council?"

"They could…but they won't. They simply won't entertain the idea that D'Anna's death was ordered by one of us."

"In that case I need to take D'Anna to Caprica…the sooner, the better."

"Why?"

"Because if somebody wants the baby and me dead, they'll figure out a way to do it. They'll keep trying until they succeed."

"You doubt our ability to protect you?"

"Quite frankly…yes I do."

"I can't let you leave. Not yet. I need your help."

"Tell me what's going to happen if your Cavil orders the centurions guarding this place to follow him inside one night. I've no doubt Buddy would give his life protecting me and D'Anna, but he's no match for five or six centurions. Once they took care of him, D'Anna and me would be toast. No pun intended. Or rather me and the baby would be toast. D'Anna would download so maybe Cavil and his stooge Doral don't consider it _killing _when all it involves is a human and a half-human fetus."

Natalie sat in silence for a moment. "You have a point. I think it might be time to remove the telencephalic inhibitors from the centurions guarding the clinic."

"Why don't you start with one and see how it reacts. If it does something completely off the wall, you can get the others to restrain it and put the inhibitor back in. Besides, if you start with one, you can let Buddy mentor it for a day or two and fill it in on the situation we're in. Then you'll have two who can mentor two more and so on."

She finally smiled. "You have a very logical way of looking at things."

"I prefer to think of it as being cautious with the unknown."

...

Lee, Hunter and Bill would have been with Kara at the airbase on Wednesday at lunch when the troop ship carrying Zak and his fellow Marines landed, but the flight was a full twenty-five minutes ahead of schedule. As it turned out, the only one there to greet Zak was Kara and she almost missed him. The big ships carried over 800 passengers and there were three of them that landed within ten minutes of each other.

She waited patiently while the Marines began streaming out of the ships. She was wearing her flight suit because she didn't think she'd have time to change before she had to take the Mark VII up and most of the Marines milling around waiting on buses to take them into the city probably thought she was one of the crew. That didn't stop a couple of them from asking her for her phone number though, even after they saw the Viper wings on her flight suit and the lieutenant's pins on her collar.

She just smiled and told them she was waiting on somebody.

She finally spotted Zak but it took her nearly a minute to get his attention. He left the group of Marines he was walking with and jogged over to her. They hugged for a long time before she really looked at him. She noticed the buzzed haircut and his tan face and leaner body right away. It took a moment longer for her to see the change in his eyes. They were harder and maybe colder. The warmth and innocence of the irresponsible, fun-loving, boyish womanizer were gone. In the six months since she'd last seen him, Zak Adama had become a man.

For just a few seconds his brown eyes misted with tears and then the tears were gone.

"So you're my entire welcoming committee?" He joked.

Kara wiped away a tear. She and Zak had had their differences in the past, but none of that mattered now.

"They're on their way…your dad and Lee and someone else we want you to meet. They'd have been here but your transport ship got in early. I sent Lee a text as soon as I saw the ships touch down. They were just leaving Admiral Adama's office. Lee thought they'd be here in time to see you get off the transport."

"You look good. Just like I remember."

"Thanks. So do you. Glad to be home?"

"I hear we won't be home long. We're going a lot farther away than Sovana."

"In a couple of months."

"So what's it like where we're going?"

"Nice. I hope we can leave it that way. I'd better be going."

"So soon?"

"I borrowed a jeep from one of the hangar crew. He's probably wetting his pants wondering where I am."

"What happened to the motorcycle?"

"I didn't want to go all the way to the parking lot to get it. This way I didn't have to go out one gate and back in another."

Zak grinned. "I'll see you and Lee soon, I hope."

"You'll see us tonight. The President's having you for dinner. Act surprised when they tell you."

Kara hugged him again and then walked toward the jeep she'd parked beside one of the maintenance buildings. If she had stayed there much longer she was afraid she would have started to cry and she didn't have a clue why.

…

Lee stood back and let his father greet Zak first. He couldn't remember the last time he had seen his father and Zak hug. Even when the hug was over, Bill didn't seem to want to let go of his younger son so he and Zak and Lee ended up in an awkward three-way hug. Zak finally pulled back slightly.

"I hate to tell you both, but I enjoyed hugging Kara more."

"I got her text," Lee said. "Why didn't she wait?"

Zak grinned. "Something about a dogfight with her instructors."

"You look good, son," Bill said.

"Anybody who leaves Sovana in one piece looks good," Zak remarked.

"So, hey," Lee said. "I'd like for you to meet a friend. You'll be working with him soon. Zak, meet Hunter. Hunter, meet my brother."

The two men shook hands and Lee could tell that each was taking the measure of the other.

"So you're the one Kara brought from the Cylon homeworld," Zak said.

"I'm the one," Hunter replied.

"Are we really going to get to kick some Cylon ass soon?" Zak asked.

"We're going to rescue some humans," Bill said. "I imagine in the process we'll engage some Cylons and their centurions in armed conflict."

"Listen to him," Zak joked. "Is that how you have to talk when you get to be an admiral?"

Bill smiled. "That's how you have to talk when you deal with politicians, especially the President. Speaking of which, she's invited you to dinner with us tonight. I hope you can make it. It'll be good to see my family at one table for a meal again."

"Hunter and I will pick you up," Lee said to Zak. "18:00. Be ready."

"I'd better get going and catch up with my friends. I got to fill out some paperwork."

"See you later, little bro," Lee said.

"Semper fi, big bro."

They watched Zak jog over to his friends and pick up his duffel bag.

"He looks good," Lee said. "I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I'm glad he's all right."

"Looks can be deceiving," Hunter said. "We all find ways to cope."

Bill looked at his youngest son walking across the tarmac for a minute before he turned back and looked at Lee.

"I just told Laura a few nights ago how quick children grow up. One day you're taking your little boys to the airfield to see your Viper and the next day you're watching them go off to war."

...

Kara was coming out of a tight 4-g turn when she suddenly knew what she needed to do later that afternoon, but the fact that Major Jessups was on her tail prevented her from giving the thought more than a fraction of a second of her time. It was there and gone almost before she had a chance for it to register.

Then her mind was back on the training exercise. She put the Viper into a steep vertical climb, _going ballistic_ as some of them called it, until the Viper's stall warning system was howling at her. At thirty thousand feet in altitude she tipped the ship on its nose and let it fall toward the planet.

She smirked as she caught a glimpse of Jessups' ship on her dradis. He was far behind her and she wondered what compliment he would have to pay about her fancy flying this time.

What he actually said was, "That was a good move, Lieutenant Thrace. Just remember that there might be a sky full of Raiders waiting for you. Look at your dradis before you do something like that over Nereid."

"I was weapons hot, sir. I would have been ready for them."

"I wish we had a dozen more like you."

She grinned. "Would you be as rough on them as you are on me?"

"Probably rougher."

"Are you going with us…to the Cylon homeworld?"

He smiled. "I can only hope, but I'm afraid I'll probably be left here to mind the store while you hot shot young pilots go to Nereid."

That afternoon Kara didn't delay after her shower. She dressed quickly and left the airbase. She didn't hit much traffic until she was in the city, and she made it to the meeting hall on Attica Street where she and Lee had dined with Coretta Howliss and her brother Ogala in good time. She parked the motorcycle on the street but took her helmet with her.

Jake the dog lay on the small porch so that meant Ogala was inside.

"Hey, boy," Kara said as she squatted and scratched Jake behind the ears. His tail thumped. "Are you going to let me go inside?"

Jake stood up, stretched, turned in a circle before he licked her face and lay back down. She opened the door. Somewhere in a side room she heard a bell ring, a soft _ding dong _but she saw no one. She wandered around looking at the carvings and paintings. In one corner was a tall wooden statue that Hunter had called a totem. She recognized the head of a bear and some type of bird with a curved beak and a wolf and a raven. The other head was mostly human but had a long, pointed nose. Less than a minute later Ogala walked through an open doorway from another side room.

"I wondered when you would come back," he said.

She shoved her hands in the pockets of her fatigues. "Nice statues."

"The work of our ancestors on Tauron and the work of a few young artists here on Caprica. One day soon Coretta and I hope to return to Tauron to visit our family. Maybe we'll bring some more work back with us."

"We all want Coretta to run against Tom Zarek for Tauron's seat on the Quorum in the next election."

He smiled. "Jake and I are both trying to convince her to do it. What brings you here this fine afternoon?"

Suddenly Kara realized she didn't know how to tell him why she had shown up at their meeting hall and place of worship.

She finally said, "I'm looking for answers."

"Spiritual answers?"

She shrugged. "I guess."

"Would you like to sit down? I could make some tea."

"That would be nice. I'm thirsty. I sweat a lot during our training exercises. Nerves."

She realized that she needed a few more minutes to get her thoughts together and was glad for his offer of tea. She followed him into the small room where she'd heard the bell. It was an office with a table and chairs in one corner and a coffee maker and hot plate beside a small sink in the other corner. A desk and several file cabinets took up the rest of the space. More Tauron artwork adorned the walls. Ogala ran water into the kettle and started it heating. The furniture was all old and had seen a lot of wear.

"We had a couple of chairs just like these in our first apartment in the city. Me and three other people shared a two-bedroom place in a ratty neighborhood but it was all we could afford."

He smiled. "Were your chairs donated?"

She grinned. "We got some of our furniture off the street after it was discarded. I think that's where we picked up the chairs. The rest came from second and third-hand stores. One of my roommates called it shabby chic. The guys called it shabby crap."

"I think I can do you one better than that. I was born in a tent on Tauron after my parents were forced off our ancestral lands by some men the government said had legally bought it. My birth cradle was a cardboard box."

"Did you live in the tent long?"

"Three years before we were moved into government housing in Quanniq. My father never got over what happened. He died when I was nine. My mother lived until I was twelve. Coretta was fourteen. We went to live with our aunt and her husband on a farm far south of where we were born. Coretta and I were miserable. As soon as I finished high school, we moved back to Quanniq."

"I lived in a tent in a refugee camp for two and a half years after the Cylons bombed Antioch."

They sat and sipped the tea. It was strong and sweet. She told him a little about what had happened to her and Karl in those first years after her father had gotten them to Caprica. When they finished the tea, he motioned for her to follow him and they crossed the large meeting room to an alcove where there were two short rows of chairs and an altar. There were a number of small statues on the higher altar and another group on a lower altar. She recognized their gods on the high altar but not the others.

"Kachinas," Ogala said as if reading her mind. "They represent part of our belief system that isn't covered by the mainstream." He pointed to several of the small figures. "This one represents the sun and this one is rain. Taurons have traditionally worked closely with the earth and with nature. That's why some refer to us as _dirteaters_, but it has given us an appreciation for life in a different kind of way than many city dwellers have."

Ogala lit a taper and then some candles and a cone of fragrant incense. Immediately Kara thought of the woods surrounding the Altar of Zeus near the refugee camp and the woods on Nereid where she'd found Daniel the day Cavil had come there.

After a moment of silence she bowed her head and said a prayer to Zeus for her father's safety. When she finally looked up it was to see that Ogala was studying her.

"You are troubled, more so today than when you were last here."

She nodded. "Is there anything in your scriptures about the birth of a peacemaker."

"We share the same scriptures, Kara. I assume you're speaking of Pythia. There are several places where she speaks of a peacemaker. Perhaps if you tell me what's bothering you, I could be more help."

Leoben had shown her only one verse, but she accepted Ogala's claim there were more verses referencing a peacemaker. She took a deep breath.

"You called yourself a shaman. Does that mean you're an oracle?"

"I'm a priest, but I wouldn't call myself an oracle."

"But you do sometimes see the future?"

Ogala said solemnly, "Not like an oracle. Not like your Yolanda Brenn. I feel your unease. Does this have something to do with the President's press conference on Monday afternoon? Do you have concerns about what will happen when you go to the Cylon's homeworld?"

Kara looked at the floor. The gaze of his sympathetic brown eyes made her feel like he could read her thoughts.

"I've been there," she said softly. "That's where Hunter is from."

Ogala pondered the information for a minute. "I knew he was from the stars as soon as I met him. Don't ask me to explain it. I just knew."

"His grandfather was the leader of the lost _Hyperion_ mission that Laura mentioned."

"What's troubling you, Kara? I can't help you if you won't tell me what it is."

"The Cylon scripture also talks about a peacemaker. A couple of their prophets saw it. The oracle on Hunter's planet told his grandfather that he would live to see the birth of a peacemaker, and Hunter's grandfather is in his eighties."

Ogala nodded slowly. "So you think this event is going to happen soon."

"The kid may already be on the way…the peacemaker. I mean already conceived."

"A peacemaker won't be a bad thing, Kara. Why are you upset?"

Suddenly the stress of the last week got to her. She tried unsuccessfully to choke back a sob and then the tears started. For a few moments she couldn't even speak. Ogala produced a box of tissues from somewhere and she grabbed a handful. He placed his hand gently on her shoulder.

"Tell me your grief, child. Unburden your heart."

His touch seemed to calm her. She mopped her eyes and got herself under control.

With her head still bowed she said, "My father…is their prisoner on their homeworld, and they made him…he's one of the breeders that Laura mentioned in her press conference. I think he's going to be the father of the peacemaker. A Cylon, one of the Threes, is going to be the mother."

Ogala digested her information calmly. "I've known for many months that something was going to happen. The spirits of my ancestors have spoken to me often in dreams. There have been other portents in the natural world."

"The baby's not really the worst of it," Kara said and almost started crying again. "My father is going to convert to their religion. One of their scriptures verses says, _a child of two races but one faith._"

"There are worse things that could happen to a man."

"But the _Cylon God_. We don't even know what He looks like. I look at Zeus and Hera and Posiden and the others and I know what our gods look like. When I pray I feel like I'm really talking to _them_. The Cylon God is just a…a spirit or something. How can something that doesn't have any shape or form be that powerful?"

"He's not just the Cylon's God, Kara. He's the God of all the monotheists. They took their form of worship from humans on our world and those humans took it from members of the Thirteenth Tribe who worshipped one God even on Kobol. Their religion is just as old as ours and many believe it's just as valid. It doesn't belong just to the Cylons."

"Then you don't see anything wrong with it," she said.

"A person's faith is a very personal thing. Do you know what your father endured as their prisoner?"

She hung her head. "I know they beat him. I saw a scar on his face. I'm sure they did a lot worse than that. Lee told me a couple of things the Cylons did to their prisoners here on Caprica, but he wouldn't tell me everything."

"Then please don't judge your father. Perhaps he turned to their God when he felt his own gods had deserted him. I think you should give him the benefit of the doubt until you know his story."

"It doesn't really matter. I'll love him no matter what."

"And the child…this peacemaker that oracles and prophets see in our future?"

"You can't blame a baby for anything. Babies are innocent. D'Anna and the other Cylons are the ones to blame." She took a deep breath and repeated. "They're the ones to blame, not my dad."

Ogala smiled slightly. "Do you feel better now?"

"Lots better. That's some powerful tea you brew."

...

John had gotten Esmari down for her morning nap and was coming out of the small bedroom that held her crib when he almost bumped into Natalie.

"Frak, you startled me. What's up?"

"Let's go out back."

"I can't hear Esmari if I'm out back."

"Then I'll bring Buddy in here."

"Fine."

In a few minutes John heard the clanking of centurion feet and Buddy squeezed carefully through the kitchen doorway. Natalie followed and put the communication device on the table where they could both see it. Buddy knelt and sat back on his heels so he wouldn't tower over them.

"Hey, big guy," John said. "Thanks for getting me away from the fire last night."

_Protect father of peacemaker. Protect friend. _

"Tell John what you just told me," Natalie said.

_Seven minute gap in all centurion surveillance logs last night._

"Let me guess," John said. "The exact seven minutes that the different groups would have been scanning D'Anna's neighborhood."

Natalie looked disgusted. "While it's not positive proof of guilt, it doesn't look good for our leader."

"Could anyone else have made seven minutes of centurion logs disappear?"

"Any one of us _could_ have done it. The question becomes why _would_ we have done it?"

"I think you know the answer to your question."

"We can't prove it. The servers are guarded by six of Cavil's very loyal centurions. There's no way we'll get past them. Even Buddy couldn't get past them."

John sat at the table feeling suddenly depressed. "So basically we're frakked. Cavil's going to get away with trying to kill us which means he'll get to keep trying until he succeeds."

Buddy pointed to the communicator. John and Natalie both looked at it.

_Take out the telencephalic inhibitors. Buddy will do the rest._

"Who said that?"

_Lucy. Buddy and I are in agreement._

"We'll do it after dinner tonight," John said. "Bianca can watch Esmari."

"What are you going to do after dinner tonight?" D'Anna asked sleepily from the doorway.

"Hi," John said. "I thought you were going to sleep all morning. Esmari and I looked in on you a couple of times."

She hobbled into the kitchen. "The cuts on my feet hurt."

John got up and let her sit down. "What would you like to eat? I'll fix it for you."

"Nothing right now. Maybe later."

"How about some tea?"

She nodded and he walked behind her and ran water into the kettle.

"Where are we going to live now?" D'Anna asked Natalie. "Can we come live with you?"

"I think you'll be safer upstairs. There are six apartments. You can pick the one you want? I've doubled the guards on the clinic. Buddy will stay outside your door at night."

"How did the fire start? I don't think we left anything on the stove."

"Someone tried to kill you and John," Natalie said. "A firebomb was tossed through the window."

"Who?" D'Anna asked in shock.

"A One or a Five," John said.

"I don't believe it."

"I'm positive he's right," Natalie said gently. "The centurion scan logs from last night were tampered with. Right now all we lack is proof of which one did it."

"What would we do if we got it?" D'Anna asked.

They all sat glumly. She was right.

...

"Nice," Zak said as he looked around at the den of Laura's apartment.

"I can't believe you've never been here before," Kara said to Zak even as she eyed the beautiful blond at his side.

Lee walked into the den from the kitchen. "Hey, little bro."

"Big bro. You remember Annabeth, don't you?"

"As in Brigitta and Annabeth. Where's your twin?" Lee asked. "I thought Zak usually dated both of you…together."

"She's dating one of Zak's friends tonight. They might drop by later."

"There might be a little problem with security downstairs if they're not on the guest list," Lee said. "After all, this apartment belongs to the President."

"You're kidding," Annabeth said. "_The_ President. Of the Colonies? You're joking. He's joking, isn't he Zakkie?"

Kara fought the urge to roll her eyes. What did Zak see in this airhead? Then she realized that the answer to that question was glaringly obvious.

"So come meet a couple of friends of ours," Lee said to Zak and Annabeth.

"I met Hunter Wednesday afternoon and ate dinner with him that night," Zak said.

"I didn't meet him," Annabeth said. She turned back to Kara and mouthed, _he's hot_.

The doorbell rang. "I'll get it," Kara said. "It's probably Kendra and Saunders."

It wasn't. It was Sam Anders and Tory Foster.

"Kara," Sam said. "Long time no see...unless you count seeing you at a distance at the championship game. Still buzzing around in the air?"

"Sam, Tory. Come in. I'm still buzzing around in the air."

"I thought Zak said you were living at Marble House now."

"I am. Lee and a friend of his are apartment-sitting for Laura at this place. I never got a chance to congratulate you on winning the championship. You played an awesome game."

"Thanks. You're looking good tonight."

"Maya's here."

"I know. Zak warned me."

Tory wrapped her arm possessively around Sam's.

He winked at Kara. "I guess I'd better go face her and say hello."

Kara started to follow them into the den when the doorbell rang again. She opened it to Kendra and Saunders.

"Sam Anders just showed up with Tory Foster. That should be interesting considering he asked Maya to marry him a couple of months ago. And Zak's already here," she said in a low voice as she let them into the foyer. "And he brought some…bimbo."

"Not Maggie?" Saunders said.

Kara shook her head. At that moment Annabeth looked back over her shoulder to see who had just arrived.

"Holy frak," Saunders said, "she's the Grenwald beer girl."

"The what?" Kara and Kendra said in unison.

"The Grenwald beer girl. The one in the commercials. She was also in the Sports Illuminated calendar. March, I think. Or was it April? She had on this little string thing…"

"Hey, Dwight," Kara said. "You don't need to give us a detailed description. We don't care what she was wearing."

"How does Zak know her?" Kendra asked.

"Who knows. Zak's dated so many beautiful women he probably couldn't tell you where they met. She's got a twin sister named Brigitta."

"No kidding," Saunders grinned. "You mean there's _two of them_?"

Kendra poked him.

The doorbell rang again and Kara opened the door. Karl stood outside with a six-pack of beer under his arm. A dateless Alex Quartararo stood beside him.

Kara said, "I didn't expect to see you two show up as each others' dates tonight."

Karl handed the beer to her. "I ran into him downstairs. He was lost."

"Man, this is some place," Quartararo said looking around. "I guess it pays to be President. Is this our tax money at work?"

"Laura bought this place years ago," Kara said.

Saunders pointed toward the den, "Guess who's here? Sam Anders _and_ the Grenwald beer girl."

"No," Quartararo said.

"Yes," Kendra said. "Why don't you guys go in there and let Lee introduce you to both of them. Get the drooling over early in the evening."

"Not me," Karl said as the other two hurried into the den. "I've met Sam and I don't care about meeting the girl."

"Gods," Kara said. "Why couldn't Zak have just asked Maggie tonight?"

"He did," Kendra replied. "Or he tried to. I talked to Maggie earlier today. She said Zak had called her a dozen times since he's been home. He left her about that many messages asking her to come with him tonight. She said she finally texted him to go frak himself."

"Good old Maggs," Kara said as she glanced at Karl. "Always quick to forgive. Did she have a date tonight?"

"I don't think so." Kendra answered.

"You want me to put the beer in the kitchen?" Karl asked.

Kendra walked into the den to join the others and Karl and Kara walked to the kitchen.

"How's Sharon?" She asked.

"She's fine. She insisted I stop by tonight. I'm not going to stay long, but she knows I haven't been out anywhere in nearly two months."

"It's good to see you. I'm sorry I upset Sharon last week."

"I should have called you and told you everything was okay. Sharon said to tell you to come by anytime you wanted."

"But she doesn't believe what I told her."

Karl shrugged. "She doesn't want to, but after I told her about Laura's press conference last Monday, I think she's changed her mind. She said if the creators were still alive, they would never have allowed humans to be made slaves on their homeworld."

"So grab a beer or something and let's go mingle. It'll be almost like old times."

Karl stayed nearly an hour. The evening was progressing nicely until Annabeth came into the den from the terrace. She looked angry.

"Something wrong?" Kara asked her.

"Zak is acting so…weird."

"I'll go talk to him. I'm sure you can find somebody to talk to in the meantime. Why don't you check out Quartararo? He's single and looking for that _special someone_ right now."

Without waiting for Annabeth's reply, Kara went out onto the terrace and closed the door. The evening had slipped into night. Across the river she saw the lighted dome of the Capitol Building. Marble House was just beyond it.

The terrace was dark, lit only by the ambient light from the street far below and from the city across the river. She looked around and didn't see Zak anywhere. For a moment she felt a surge of panic as she called his name.

"Down here," he said softly.

He was squatting on his haunches and leaning back against the terrace wall at the far end.

She walked over, squatted beside him and leaned back until she was also leaning against the wall. "Frak, you scared the crap out of me."

He chuckled softly. "You thought I'd jumped?"

"What the hell are you doing hiding out here in the dark?"

"It's quiet."

"Let's go back inside. I'm not going to leave you out here by yourself."

"I don't want to go back inside right now."

"Then I'll stay out here with you."

"You don't have to do that, Kara. I'm fine. I just can't take all the…party atmosphere. I can't take all the people. It's not that I don't appreciate what you and Lee did having a welcome home party for me, but…" He let the sentence hang and didn't finish it.

"I understand," she said softly. "You need to be with just one person tonight and she's not here."

"I don't know why I did what I did. I don't know why I sent her that stupid email breaking up with her. It was right after my buddy had gotten his head blown off. I was…" again he didn't finish the sentence.

"Zak, you don't have to explain anything to me. I understand."

"You've always had Lee."

"Lee thought I was in denial and going nuts. We fought more during that time than we'd done in the whole time we'd been together."

"I tried to make it right with her. I tried. I've called and sent her texts and emails. She wouldn't even answer until she sent me a text to go frak myself."

"That's the way Maggs is. She didn't speak to me for weeks and then she did and it was like nothing had happened." Kara stood and reached down and took Zak's hand. "Come on."

"Where're we going?"

"Do you trust me?"

"With my life."

"Then trust me to do the right thing for your heart."

She pulled Zak into the den and over to Lee who was talking to Saunders and Kendra.

"Let me borrow your car keys," she said softly.

He took them out of his pocket. "Where're you going?"

She smiled. "Down to the car to make out with your brother."

"You want company?"

"Nope. Three's a crowd. I'll be back soon. Keep our guests entertained."

She and Kendra shared a look. Kendra knew exactly where Kara was going with Zak.

As they exited the parking garage, Kara asked, "Where does Maggie live now?"

"Oh, no," Zak said. "I am not going to Maggie's apartment so she can tell me to my face to go frak myself."

"She's not going to tell you. If she says it, it'll be to me because I'm going to talk to her first. Now where does she live?"

Zak gave her the address. "She's got a roommate. Another pilot."

"So? She's got her own bedroom, doesn't she?"

"I don't know about this…"

"You remember when we got in that fight at the cemetery right after your mother's funeral?"

Zak snorted. "Yeah. You busted me in the lip."

"You were right about what you said about my mother. But I'm right now. So just shut up and let me drive."

Traffic was light enough that she got to Maggie's apartment building in ten minutes. She pulled up in front and stopped in the _No Parking_ zone. She left the keys in the car.

"If the cops show up, circle the block. Which apartment?"

"3-G."

She got out, walked to the door and pressed the number. Maggie answered.

"It's Kara. Let me in."

The door buzzed and Kara took the elevator up to the third floor. Maggie was standing in the apartment's doorway when she got off.

"I thought you were hosting a welcome home party tonight for Lee's brother. What the hell is going on?"

"I don't usually get involved in stuff like this, but I've got somebody downstairs who wants to talk to you."

"No…frak no!" She started to close the door but Kara stuck her foot in it.

"Listen to me, Maggie. Zak's in bad shape. Nobody knows quite how bad except me because I was there once. He loves you and he needs you. He really needs you. Please don't turn your back on him now."

Kara was surprised that tears had come to her eyes. She struggled and got herself under control. Maggie was staring at her. Kara could see the indecision.

"Who did he bring to the party tonight?"

"Just some bimbo he doesn't give a rat's ass about. She doesn't understand him or care about what he's going through and I know you do. Seeing his friend get his head blown off has messed him up. It's messed him up bad. He was on the terrace alone in the dark tonight. It's eight floors up. Do I need to say anything else?"

Maggie took a deep breath and then another. "Tell him to come up. I can't make any promises, but..." She shrugged.

"Thanks. I'm not saying that you and him…should do anything. Just listen to him. Just be there for him."

Kara rode the elevator downstairs and opened the passenger door. Zak had been sitting with his head back against the headrest and his eyes closed. He jumped.

"Go," she said. "And don't be a jerk. She's willing to talk to you. Don't push her if she's not ready for anything else."

He got out of the car. "I owe you."

She smiled. "One day I might even collect."

When she got back to the apartment, she slipped the car keys into Lee's hand. He took hers and they walked into the kitchen.

"So how was making out with my brother?"

She grinned and put her arms around his neck. "I've got my arms around you, don't I? That should tell you which one I prefer."

They kissed gently at first and then more deeply. Lee finally pulled back. "Where did you take him?"

"Maggie's."

"You think that was a good idea?"

"She's probably the only one who can reach him right now."

"It sounds like you were doing a pretty good job of it."

She kissed him again. "Lee, I know Zak will be my brother one day, but I don't want the responsibility for him. He needs Maggie right now. As much as it pains me to admit that anyone could need _her_…"

Lee kissed her lightly. "You just want to fix everything that's broken, don't you?"

"Funny. Hunter said the same thing to me after we got here from Nereid. He said I was always trying to make things right for the people I care about."

He smiled. "Do you think you can make things right for me later tonight?"

"Why?" She teased. "Do you have something that's broken?"

"Not broken, but definitely in need of attention."

She smiled and kissed him and managed to forget for several long moments that in a few months they were all going to war.

...

Natalie took care of Esmari while John spent the entire afternoon cleaning the apartment that D'Anna had picked out. Just before dinner he put away the vacuum cleaner and mop and made the bed with clean sheets and a clean bedspread.

During dinner they told Bianca and Laszlo about the gap in the surveillance logs. Bianca said she would give Esmari her bath and get her ready for bed so John and Natalie could do whatever they needed to do. They waited until after D'Anna had gone to bed.

Then he and Natalie walked out into a perfect early summer evening. He would have loved to have gone for a walk after being inside all day, but they had work to do.

"I just thought about something," John said. "Does Buddy have one of those inhibitors?"

Natalie said, "I would think he'd have to or it would have been noticed during maintenance checks."

"Then how…" John started to ask before he looked at the communicator.

_It is a dud. Inhibitor disk in place but no software program loaded on it. I fixed it [Lucy]._

"Do you know how to remove the inhibitor without damaging the robot?" John asked Natalie. "Markham told me that you need a pair of needle nose pliers."

Buddy extended his thumb and forefinger talons.

_I can do it. _

"You're sure you want to do this," John said to Natalie.

"We don't have a choice so let's get on with it while we still have some daylight."

There were now four centurions at the back of the clinic instead of the original two. Natalie commanded one to kneel and lower its head. It obeyed her immediately.

She looked at Buddy. "Go ahead. Do it. Remove the inhibitor."

With the other robot on its knees with its head lowered, it was easy for Buddy to reach under the metal cowl spanning its shoulders and protecting the back of its head. With amazing dexterity and gentleness Buddy removed the inhibitor from the base of its neck. He held it up to them. Markham had shown John one that he'd taken from a dead centurion. It was about the size of a small DVD disk but the edge was waffled instead of smooth.

John found that he was holding his breath. He let it out and sucked air into his lungs. For a moment nothing happened and then the centurion shuddered, if metal can be said to shudder. It jerked its head rapidly from side to side several times and rose quickly to its feet.

"Talk to it Bud," John said urgently. "Tell it everything is okay. Tell it not to panic."

He had visions of the big machine running amok and threatening Natalie and being gunned down by the other three and of the bullets hitting him as well.

Natalie put her hands out in a placating gesture. Her voice was soothing. "There's nothing to be afraid of."

The big head swiveled toward her and the red eye scanned her. It took a step in her direction. Behind them John heard the weapons of the remaining three centurions lock into place. He tried to control his own sense of panic.

"Tell them to stand down, Bud. Do it now or we're _all_ dead."

Natalie was talking calmly to the centurion in front of her. "You know who I am. You know you have nothing to fear from me. The creators gave you life. We have just given you the ability to make your own decisions. We've taken away your electronic shackles. You're free. You're no longer a slave. You are as your creators meant you to be. We are _equal_ now, you and I, and we need your help. Will you help us?"

Buddy managed to get John's attention and pointed to the communicator in John's hand. He held it up and read.

_Centurion number LG745933 has spoken to Natalie. Show her._

John smiled as he read the next words. He was also aware that the centurions at the bottom of the steps had sheathed their weapons in unison and stepped back. He took the communicator and handed it to Natalie so she could read the words as well.

_By your command._

TBC…


	47. The Painted Snake

Chapter 47

The Painted Snake

_1. For those of the Thirteenth Tribe who left Eden and journeyed to Gemenon, _

_2. They found a sparsely populated world from which nature offered little welcome._

_3. The Second Tribe had settled there but many had moved on to other planets._

_4. Those who remained were steadfast in their devotion to the Lords of Kobol._

_5. Yet they welcomed their brothers from the Thirteenth Tribe._

_6. The immigrants joined the communities of the Second Tribe and worked hard. _

_7. They worshipped their God quietly and were generous to their neighbors._

_8. They tithed of their earnings and began building a temple complex and monastery in a mountain range._

_9. On the day of its dedication a conclave elected their first Reverend Mother a woman named Anna, daughter of a priest and a pious woman._

_10. She took no husband nor bore any children but dedicated herself to God. _

_11. For her long and peace-filled years the Church of the Monad grew and prospered._

_12. And upon her death in her ninety-third year, she was succeeded by a pious young sister of the cloth named Bekah._

_13. In the sixth year of Bekah's reign, she had a vision and said to her followers,_

_14. We are Soldiers of the One and we must drive the many gods from our home. _

_The Cylon Scriptures, Book of Exodus, _Chapter 1:1-14

.

Buddy removed the telencephalic inhibitors from the four centurions at the rear of the clinic and there they stopped because the freed centurions weren't as easy to manage as Natalie had anticipated. They were fiercely committed to protecting D'Anna and John, but they wanted to immediately take on Cavil and his loyal supporters. It took everything in Natalie's power to convince them to wait until they had a plan and were ready.

She was now afraid that they might do something without talking to her first so she was hesitant to free any more of them. So Natalie's fledgling rebellion screeched to a halt until she could decide what to do next.

Then John had a day at the clinic that put the centurions and the rebellion out of his mind. He was aware of the commotion the minute he got down the stairs from the second-floor apartment he now shared with D'Anna. He heard the doctors' urgent voices and the shrieks of the man's wife and Bianca pleading with her to let them work.

He rushed to the door of the first treatment room. The scene was chaos. Laszlo was trying to use the defibrillator but the man's wife had flung herself onto her husband's chest and was screaming for him to wake up. Bianca was no match for the larger and completely hysterical woman. John didn't think. He just grasped the woman around the waist from behind and lifted her off her husband.

Her screams were shrill and piercing and she struggled against him at first, kicking and trying to twist away, and then she collapsed in sobs. He pulled her backwards until she was out of the doctors' way. Later he couldn't remember exactly what he said to her, but he held her while Laszlo and Bianca struggled in vain to restart the man's heart. They worked for twenty minutes without the slightest response from their patient.

When Laszlo finally shook his head and pronounced the man dead, John expected more hysterics from the wife, but none were forthcoming. Her sobs had ceased by then and she sat unblinking and unmoving in the chair where he had led her.

"She's in shock," Bianca said. "I can manage her from here. Go check on Esmari, please. She was awake, but I had to leave her in her crib."

It came as no surprise that Esmari was sitting in her crib wailing. John picked her up and rocked her back and forth in his arms the way he had done so many times for Brae, talking soothing nonsense to her until she stopped crying. Then he changed her diaper and carried her into the kitchen. She didn't want him to put her in the high chair, so he held her while he heated the soy milk for her bottle.

He had just sat down in the chair to feed her when Natalie walked in with a basket of cookies. Esmari smiled at Natalie when she spoke to her, but she was far more interested in the bottle.

"We had a death this morning," John said. "Heart attack. The doctors are with his wife now. She's gone into shock."

"I saw the medical transport cart outside. I wondered what had happened."

"How about making some tea. I'm sure Bianca and Laszlo could use some. The widow probably could, too."

Without a word Natalie got up, ran water in the kettle and put it on the stove.

"I checked on the newly freed centurions. They're still restless."

The kettle whistled and Natalie made tea for them.

When she brought John's cup, she sighed. "I never dreamed this would get so complicated."

John almost chuckled. "Going to war used to be a lot simpler…just pick up the nearest club and whack your enemy with it."

Natalie sat in dejected silence for a while and then asked, "Have you eaten breakfast yet?"

He shook his head. "This little one was hungry. She comes first."

"Then let me take her. I'll feed her and you can get something to eat."

John transferred Esmari to her, took two mugs of tea and walked through the clinic to the front. Bianca had gotten the widow into another room and was sitting with her. John leaned down and put one of the mugs in her hands. Her eyes looked glazed but she lifted it to her mouth and drank. He handed the other mug to Bianca.

"Thank you," She said softly. "This is much appreciated."

"Can I do anything? Go get anybody?"

"Simon has gone to get their handler. She'll make all the arrangements."

John gestured to the widow. "Has she got friends or family who could be with her now?"

"Her handler will know. Is Esmari all right?"

"She's fine. Natalie's feeding her. Where's Laszlo?"

"Filling out the necessary paperwork. They're meticulous record keepers. I guess they inherited that from their creators."

He went back to the kitchen. Twenty minutes later Bianca joined them. By then John had made oatmeal and toast. He couldn't find any eggs.

Bianca sat down wearily at the table. "That poor man should have been on Caprica where he could have gotten the kind of medical care we can't provide here. He had a congenital heart defect and needed a valve replaced. He was in pain and suffered every day, much the same way Yoshimo's wife suffered."

Her statement was a clear indictment of what the Cylons had done in taking human slaves. Natalie said nothing. Laszlo walked in looking tired and dejected. Bianca got up and put her arms around him.

"You did everything you could to save him," she said softly. "What happened this morning was inevitable considering the shape his heart was in."

As she gently kissed her husband and caressed his face, John witnessed the love and devotion that had sustained them as a couple for over thirty-five years. He had sensed it before, but had never seen it as clearly as he did in that moment. He looked down at his plate. The moment was intimate and private and he felt like an intruder. He ached to see Laura and hold her in his arms. At one time he had dreamed they had that same kind of love, a love that would last for the rest of their lives. Now he knew he had lost his chance with her because of what he had done on Nereid.

"Sit down, both of you," John finally said to hide how deeply he had been affected by everything that had happened that morning. "Eat something. Please."

"I'll take some tea," Laszlo said. "I don't have any appetite right now."

Bianca toyed with her oatmeal. The silence stretched. John was almost glad when someone began pounding on the bell at the front of the clinic. He left Esmari to Natalie and followed the doctors to the waiting room.

A Two had an overall-clad woman in his arms. Her head lolled to one side and she was struggling to breathe. Her lips were turning blue."

"Snake bite," the Two gasped. "Got her on the arm, right above the top of her glove."

"Follow me," Laszlo said.

As they went to one of the treatment rooms, Bianca asked him, "What kind of snake? Did you see it?"

"I didn't, but one of the men working with her called it a painted snake."

John knew from Bianca's look that wasn't good. "Go get the breathing bag," she said to him. "And a trach tube."

By the time he got to the treatment room with them, the woman was unconscious and Laszlo was giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He took the tube from John and skillfully inserted it into the woman's airway. Then he attached the bag and began squeezing it rhythmically, forcing oxygen into her lungs. After a minute of squeezing the bag, the bluish color at her lips receded and pink returned but she showed no sign of regaining consciousness.

Bianca cleaned and bandaged the two small puncture wounds, which were barely visible and no longer bleeding. The woman's hand and arm showed some mild swelling but that was the only other sign she'd been bitten.

John stepped over to Laszlo and after watching the way he squeezed the bag for several more minutes said. "I can do that for you. I can tell you're getting tired."

They switched places and without a break swapped hands on the bag.

The Two stood in the doorway. "Is she going to be all right?"

Bianca said, "It depends on how much venom the snake injected. The painted snake's venom is a neurotoxin that paralyzes the muscles of the diaphragm. Within twenty minutes the victim can no longer breathe and dies, sometimes sooner. Five minutes later and we would have been too late to even try to save her. The problem is we have no anti-venom to counter the effects of the toxin. If we can breath for her long enough, her body may be able to overcome its effects. Only time will tell."

John looked at the Two. "What's her name?"

"Dodona. That's all the overseer told me. I don't know her last name."

Bianca said, "Dodona Selloi. She's a priest and an oracle although she's not been allowed to lead a single worship service since she was brought here. They've tried to make a farmer of her just like they've done with seventy percent of the rest of us."

The Simon who ran the clinic walked to the door. "Everything under control in here?"

"We're fine," Laszlo said. "We're doing everything we can for her."

For the first time John picked up something subtle in Laszlo's voice. He wondered if Simon realized how much Laszlo disliked him.

Simon and the Two walked out of the room and toward the front of the clinic. John doubted the Two cared whether Dodona lived or died other than her loss meant one less human in the labor force.

Bianca sighed and said, "When I met Dodona nearly six years ago, she was heavily addicted to chamalla. She'd been taking it for years to enhance her prophetic visions. When she ran out of what she had in her luggage, she came to us begging for more. We couldn't help her since we had almost nothing here in this facility then. We certainly didn't have chamalla. We didn't even have anything to ease her withdrawal symptoms. I'm afraid she suffered terribly…shakes, cold sweats, blinding headaches, nightmares. They eventually subsided as her body rid itself of the drug, but even after it was out of her system, she had many of the symptoms for weeks, especially the headaches and shakes. I think her religious beliefs were the only thing that kept her from killing herself. The suicide rate among our drug addicts was very high that first year as they all went through withdrawal cold turkey."

John kept squeezing the breathing bag while Bianca got an IV started for Dodona. The bag offered enough resistance that after only fifteen minutes he was sweating and his hands began cramping.

"It gives you an idea of how strong the muscles of the diaphragm are and what it takes to overcome their resistance," Laszlo said as he took over from John. "These bags were never meant to be used long term. They're meant to get a patient to a trauma center where he can be hooked up to a mechanical ventilator if necessary. I wish we had a one, but this is our only option for keeping her alive. We'll just have to keep relieving each other as we get tired."

"How long?"

"Twenty-four hours. Maybe longer."

"Would you let Buddy do it?" John asked. "He won't get tired so he could keep the air going constantly for as long as it takes."

Bianca and Laszlo looked at one another. "I don't see why not," Laszlo said.

John went out back and got Buddy. Laszlo explained everything to the robot and then Buddy took over squeezing the bag. John had been right. Laszlo told Buddy how many breaths per minute and Buddy maintained the rhythm and count perfectly.

They stepped outside the room and John asked Bianca. "Why do you call it a painted snake?"

"It's actually quite beautiful. Six years ago when we had our first victim, someone killed the snake and brought it to us thinking we could use the venom to help the man. They didn't understand the complex process of making anti-venom and that we don't have the equipment to do it. The snake looks like an artist dabbed swirls of scarlet and blue and yellow on a black background. No one had ever seen one like it in the Colonies although a herpetologist later told us it's very like the deadly coral snakes found mainly on Aerilon."

"How often does someone get bitten by one of these painted snakes?"

"Once or twice a year. It always happens in one of the fields. The snakes are shy and aren't aggressive or I'm sure we'd have had more. Dodona was probably pulling weeds by hand and didn't see it." Bianca answered his next question before he asked. "So far we've had only one person survive even with us keeping them ventilated. Our only survivor was a young man, healthy and very strong."

"So Dodona doesn't stand much of a chance."

Bianca shook her head. "I don't know. All we can do is keep her hydrated and breathing. The rest is up to her and the gods and how well her body can clear itself of the toxin. We'll have a better idea in twenty-four hours."

…

That night John dreamed for the first time in a week. Dodona Selloi was dressed in a flowing black robe painted with splashes of red and yellow and blue. She called to him and when he got close to her, he saw that she had the fangs of a snake. She reached for his arm to bite him. He jerked awake and lay with his heart pounding. At least the dream wasn't of the firing squad this time. He finally got up at three o'clock and went downstairs. Bianca was sitting by Dodona's bed, her head propped on her hand. Her eyes were closed. John grasped her shoulders gently, leaned down and whispered to her.

"I'll watch her," he said. "Go get some sleep."

She didn't argue with him. Earlier that day Laszlo had shown him how to listen to Dodona's heart with a stethoscope and also how to take her blood pressure. They were doing it every fifteen minutes. John knew that if either her heart rate or blood pressure dropped or went up significantly that he would have to get the doctors.

When Bianca was gone, he settled into the chair. Buddy was still rhythmically squeezing the bag. The communication device sat on the bedside table.

"How're you doing, big guy?" He asked softly.

_I am helping the human named Dodona Selloi._

"Yes, you are," John said. "If she survives, she'll owe her life to you."

_It is a good thing to save a life. _

"Yes, it is…a very good thing. In my book it makes you a hero."

_Tell me about yourself, John._

"Is that you, Luce?"

_Yes. Just talk to me please. About anything. I tried to talk to Bianca but she kept falling asleep._

"Okay, we'll trade stories. I tell you something about myself and you tell me something about yourself. Agreed?"

_Agreed._

But even as John talked about his childhood on Virgon, he couldn't shake the feeling that everything was beginning to unravel on Nereid and that he and D'Anna were still in danger. He wanted to go home. He just wanted to leave all this behind and go home.

_…_

Bill was waiting for Laura in her sitting room after she got Braedon to bed. He indicated the drink he had poured for her.

She took it and sat down on the other end of the couch.

"Thank you for the drink and thank you for waiting while I got Brae down."

"I've been enjoying your very fine whiskey."

"Aren't you sorry you didn't ask Marta Shaw for a date tonight?" She teased.

"I met her for lunch yesterday. I thought asking her to dinner tonight might send the wrong message…or am I wrong?"

Laura smiled. "What message are you trying to send…or not send?"

"I enjoy her company but I'm not interested in a relationship."

"Then I think you made a wise choice. As was your choice of the Capitol Club for lunch."

"The Capitol Club was her choice."

Laura continued smiling. "Yes, Marta does like to see and be seen. You sat at one of the best tables and were there for almost two hours. She smiled and laughed a lot and you fought over the check. You ultimately won."

He sipped his drink. "I think you've got a better intelligence network than Special Agent Darren."

"My Secretary of Education was sitting at a nearby table. She's very loyal. She couldn't wait to call me."

Bill nodded and didn't say anything.

"You must have been enjoying yourself to stay for two hours," she prompted.

"You said it yourself. Marta is an intelligent and attractive woman. She's very pro-military, but I think you already know that about her."

"So how many of Caprica's problems did you solve in your two hours together?"

He finally smiled and took a swallow of his drink. "I don't think we solved any. We spent a great deal of time talking about our children. She confessed that when she asked me to get Kendra on the _Penelope_ mission that part of her reason was to put some distance between Kendra and her boyfriend. She'd had him checked out and he had no plans to attend veterinary school like he had told Kendra."

"So her meddling was less about Kendra's career than it was personal."

"I'll give Marta points for admitting it. She even admitted she had hoped that Lee and Kendra might get romantically involved during the mission."

Laura almost chuckled. "Apparently she had no idea how devoted Lee and Kara are to each other."

"Apparently not."

"Did she mention Dwight Saunders? After all he was also an Academy valedictorian."

"She's very happy with Kendra's current choice. It validates her meddling."

They sat in easy silence for a while. _Just like an old married couple_, Laura thought.

She finally said, "It was nice to see Zak on Wednesday night. He seemed...very different than I remember him. Of course I've only seen him a few times since Carolanne's funeral."

"I think Zak's found something better to do with his life than pimping for the Caprica Buccaneers."

"Bill," Laura admonished gently, "there's absolutely nothing wrong with a career in public relations. Kara says he's far more outgoing than Lee. And the ladies love him."

Bill chuckled. "He's always had an eye for the ladies. When he was still in high school Carolanne caught him with a girl up in his room."

"What did she do?"

"She closed the door and called me."

"What did _you_ do?"

"I had a talk with him about being careful."

Now Laura chuckled. "That's all?"

"I told him to have enough respect for his mother that he didn't take a girl to his room when she was expected home."

They sat in silence for a while again. Laura wondered if Bill was thinking about the time her mother had caught them in her room and the disastrous consequences that had followed.

"John got a girl pregnant when they were both fifteen," Laura said softly. "His parents were dead and he was living in a foster home. She was the daughter of his foster parents."

"I didn't know that."

"I think I'm the only person he ever told. He said he was confused about life and ignorant about sex in the way only a naïve fifteen year old can be. He knew where babies came from, but he didn't think it would happen to him and the young woman. Now he's not sure why he was ever that trusting, but he'd been through a horribly traumatic experience in losing his parents and four brothers."

"What happened?"

"When her father found out he beat them both half to death. She lost the baby. The father went to jail and the girl and her mother both blamed John. When he had recovered enough to get out of his hospital bed, he took his few belongings and hitched to the coast where he signed onto a fishing trawler. He had just turned sixteen. That's what he did until he joined the military when he was eighteen."

Bill was silent for a minute. "I know his parents died when he was young. I didn't know the rest."

Laura lowered her head, not sure why she'd told Bill something so private about her husband. Yet in a way she did know. She was very afraid that Bill was going to harshly judge John for what he had done on Nereid. She wanted Bill to know that John's early life was far more traumatic than he realized.

"Kara went to see Leoben this past Monday night," Laura said.

"Why?" Bill asked in surprise.

"As much as I hate to admit it, she's always had a connection with him. I think it started shortly after she killed another copy of him three years ago outside Baltar's lab. I think from that moment she's believed that their fates were entwined."

"What's your point?"

"She listens to him."

"I'm still not following you. Where are you going with this, Laura?"

"Leoben…pointed out some scripture to her, both ours and theirs. Kara now believes that," Laura took a deep breath, "that…" She couldn't go on. She knew that Bill put no faith in scriptures of any kind and that included prophecies.

"Spit it out, Laura. It can't be that bad."

"She thinks John's status as a breeder will produce results. She thinks the child has been prophesied by both our religions as something called the peacemaker."

"Have you encouraged her to believe this nonsense?"

Laura took another deep breath. "I've neither encouraged nor discouraged her. She gave me the scripture verses. I found and read them then she and I talked. She shared her thoughts with me and I listened. She believes it."

"Don't tell me you believe it, too."

Her voice caught. "I have a hard time arguing with scripture. It's not just theirs. It's ours, too."

"Laura, those scriptures were written thousands of years ago. Things were very different then."

"What if it's true? What if my husband has fathered a child with a Cylon?"

"Hunter says no half-breed children of Cylon mothers have survived on Nereid."

"Sharon Agathon's child is alive. It _can_ happen."

"Are you more worried about the personal aspect or the political implications?"

As usual, Bill had zeroed in on exactly what was bothering her.

"Both."

"I think you're worrying for nothing."

"I hope you're right."

"If we get to Nereid and find out it's true, do you want us to leave John on the planet?"

"Of course not. How can you joke about something like that?"

"It's a legitimate question, Laura. You're the President of what's left of the Colonies. Do you want to face the press and the people of Caprica and acknowledge a half-Cylon stepchild? It would be the same relation to you as Kara."

Laura got up and poured another drink. What would she do if the prophecy turned out to be true? She couldn't blame John. He'd been forced into functioning as a breeder. What should she do?

Slowly she turned to Bill Adama, her oldest friend, the man who understood her perhaps better than any other, and hoped he understood what she said next.

"I want you to bring my husband home to me, but leave the Cylon and the child behind on Nereid. There will be plenty of time to deal with them after we've freed the human slaves."

"And if mother and child should become casualties of war?"

"I'm going to trust you to make sure that _doesn't_ happen. I cannot even think of the killing of women and children…even Cylons."

"So you have John back here on Caprica and his child and its mother cooling their heels on Nereid. What then?"

Laura took a sip of her drink. "I will cross that bridge when I get to it. One step at a time, Bill. One step at a time."

What she couldn't bring herself to think about much less say to him was that John might refuse to leave the child…and its mother…behind. How would she explain _that_ to the good people of Caprica? More importantly, how could she accept it herself?

_…_

Dodona Selloi began to regain consciousness during the next morning. She began breathing on her own late that afternoon. John could tell that the doctors were surprised and very pleased. They had lost a patient but also saved one with Buddy's help. Dodona was still confused, though, and couldn't remember where she was or how she had gotten there. Laszlo explained that her brain had gotten very little oxygen for several minutes as well as being affected by the neurotoxin. She might eventually recover most of her pre-bite memories but there was always the chance that she wouldn't.

After dinner that evening John carried Esmari with him and went to see Dodona. She was very pale, her dark eyes wandering around the room. Buddy was still beside the bed although he was monitoring Dodona's breathing instead of actively keeping her alive. Natalie was sitting with her to give Bianca a break.

John walked up to the side of the bed. Esmari clung to him but didn't make a sound.

"Hi," he said to Dodona. "How are you feeling?"

Her voice was weak and hoarse. "You were here last night talking to yourself. I recognize your voice."

John smiled as he remembered his lengthy conversation with Lucy as they swapped stories about their lives. To Dodona it would certainly have seemed like he was talking to himself.

"Guilty as charged," he said. "I was trying to stay awake. I didn't think you could hear me."

"I heard. The robot was in here, too. I thought you were talking to it."

"His name is Buddy. He kept you breathing. Now he's acting as a monitor to make sure you keep breathing."

Dodona was silent for a while and John thought she had drifted off to sleep. Natalie reached for Esmari, but the child fretted and clung to John.

Suddenly Dodona's eyes opened. "You must take the child's mother and leave this place. You are in great danger. You must all leave this place. I see a ship in flames. I see death for you and the child if you stay. Someone comes to help you. Tomorrow. Wait for them and then go while you can. Save your child for he is the one on whom we all wait."

Her last words were barely audible and then she fell silent. Her eyes closed. Her breath was coming in short gasps. John felt chills run down his spine. He looked over at Natalie. She was staring open-mouthed at Dodona.

"Bianca said she's a prophet of your people."

"She's a priest and an oracle," John said softly. "A lot of people believe that the gods have given them the ability to see the future."

"She has seen danger for D'Anna and for your son. She's seen danger for all of you."

"So it would seem."

Natalie got up and walked out of the room. He followed her.

"At first light tomorrow I'm going to send Buddy to the airfield to activate the FTL drive on the Heavy Raider. Tomorrow I'll find an excuse to get you and D'Anna out there. Doing it tonight would be far too risky. Tomorrow we can move about without attracting attention."

"Are you telling me you're letting me take her to Caprica?"

"That's exactly what I'm telling you. There's no place on this planet that Cavil wouldn't eventually find her...and you."

"I'm taking Esmari with us. Her father is on Caprica. He has a right to have his daughter with him."

"That's fine with me."

"We need to tell them, Natalie. We need to tell the doctors everything. They have a right to know because the minute I take that ship and disappear with D'Anna, this clinic will become ground zero for Cavil's reprisals."

"Take Bianca and Laszlo with you."

"Let's go tell them." He stuck his head back into the room. "Keep an eye on Dodona, Bud. Come get us if anything changes."

He knew Buddy had questions because he could see words scrolling down on the communication device but they would have to wait.

"I'll be back later and we'll talk," he said to the robot. It was the best he could do right now. The feeling that things were spinning out of control had grown stronger.

_…_

Lee ran his finger gently down Kara's spine. They were in her bedroom at Laura's apartment, the one he was temporarily occupying. They had just made love, hot and hungrily, the first time in almost a week. He knew if he didn't keep her talking, she would fall asleep and then she wouldn't want to get up to go back to Marble House.

"It was a good party," he said softly. "Zak wasn't here for half of it, but everybody else had a good time."

Kara yawned and rolled over so they were facing each other. "Crash will probably remember tonight as the luckiest night of his life. He meets the biggest pyramid star on Caprica _and_ hooks up with the Grenwald beer girl in one short evening."

"I'm not sure he and Annabeth are _hooking up_. All he did was volunteer to take her home since you robbed her of the date who brought her to the party."

She smirked. "I didn't notice her asking us to get her a transport instead. She never even asked me where Zak had gone. Shows how much she cares."

"I'm not sure the Zak she knew even exists anymore."

"Even if she doesn't invite Crash in for a drink, just getting to share a transport with the girl who posed in a string bikini for Sports Illuminated will keep him riding high for weeks. I'm sure by Monday he'll be telling everybody out at the airbase that he and Miss April are an item. Was it a good picture of her?"

"What makes you think I've seen it?"

"If you tell me you haven't, I'm going to worry about you."

"Somebody left a well thumbed copy in the officer's rec room on the _Galactica_. I might have looked through it while I was waiting for Kendra or something."

"So is Annabeth really that hot wearing nothing but a few strings and three little triangles of cloth?"

"I'm sure some guys think so."

"But you don't?"

"She's not my type, Kara. She's got some nice physical attributes and I'm sure a lot of guys look at her and fantasize because that's all they see. I don't need to dream about somebody like that. I've got you."

She smiled. "I'll bet you say that to all the girls."

He gently pushed a strand of hair from her face. "Only the ones I'm sleeping with."

She laughed and gave him a playful punch on the arm. "It's a good thing I'm not the jealous type."

"You know a lot of guys would have freaked out if their girlfriend had taken off in the middle of a party with their brother."

"When I saw Zak get off that transport on Wednesday, I just had a strange feeling. I always thought he would be the one who was untouched by the war. Now his memories are as bad as any of ours. Maybe worse."

"I never dreamed he'd enlist," Lee said softly. "Even Dad didn't have a clue. You should have seen him when we got to the airbase Wednesday. He was hugging all over Zak like he hadn't seen him in a couple of years. He knew that Zak could have died up there in Sovana."

"Lee, you should have seen your dad when you had to eject and were lost somewhere in the ocean last November. That's the closest I've ever seen him come to losing it. He was calm on the surface but underneath he was frantic. He loves both of you."

"Now Zak's like the prodigal son to my dad."

Kara's eyes opened wide in surprise. "Are you talking about the story from the scripture? Lee Adama is going to quote scripture to me?"

"Just because I'm not religious doesn't mean I don't know anything about the scriptures. The story of the prodigal son has been used over and over in literature and film. It's more of a parable than anything else. It teaches us about redemption and forgiveness."

"So in order for Zak to become a man in your father's eyes and be welcomed back into the fold, he had to give up his partying lifestyle and frivolous job and become a warrior?"

Lee smiled. "If I was talking like that, you'd accuse me of being Dr. Lee. The only person who understands why he did it is Zak, so let's just let it go and enjoy the time we have before I have to take you back to Marble House."

He leaned over and kissed her gently even as his hand moved up her ribcage and over her breast in a caress. He felt her response. The love he and Kara shared was the most meaningful thing in his life and he knew he would do anything to keep it that way.

_…_

Breakfast for John and the doctors the next morning was a somber meal eaten mostly in silence. The only sounds were Esmari's babbling.

When Laszlo was drinking his second cup of coffee, he said, "I can't leave the people of the settlement, John. I've thought about what you and Natalie told me for a long time last night. I can't leave the people who depend on us. I took an oath."

"And I won't leave our patients or my husband," Bianca said. "I took the same oath that he did and we've been together almost thirty-six years. If he dies on this planet I'll be by his side."

Laszlo reached over and gently grasped her hand. "D'Anna needs you. Esmari needs you. We'll be together again…if not in this world then in the next."

Tears came to her eyes and she choked back a sob. "No. We both go or we both stay."

John said, "I can't make either of you go, but I'm afraid of what will happen if you stay behind. I doubt you'll be allowed to continue treating the sick humans. You'll probably be taken to the Cylon prison and we all know what happens there."

Neither of the doctors said anything. John knew they were at a stalemate. As he tried to think of some other way of appealing to them, Natalie walked in. Her face was ashen.

"It doesn't look like you'll be taking D'Anna anywhere. Buddy just got back from the airfield. The FTL drive on the Heavy Raider can't be enabled."

"Gods damn it," John cursed in frustration. "Why not?"

"Apparently some parts have been removed from the drive engine. No amount of bringing the software on line will fix that."

"So what do we do?"

"I don't know," her voice bordered on tears. "I just don't know. Buddy is devastated. He thinks he's failed in his duty to you and D'Anna."

John stood. "Where is he?"

"Out back. If ever a centurion could be called heartsick, he is."

John took the communication device from Natalie, walked out the back door and sat on the wide concrete top step.

"Come here Bud and sit down beside me."

The big robot complied.

"Listen, Buddy, I don't know where you got the idea that you failed us, but you didn't. Cavil or one of his stooge Fives frakked with that FTL drive. That is _not_ your fault. I don't blame you. We'll figure something out. We can't give up. Not yet."

_LG3395457 says there are two ships on the planet with working FTL drives. One is at the airfield in the city. The other is at the airfield at the prison. He knows because he used to fly on a cargo ship that went both places._

"There're at least a dozen Heavy Raiders at the airfield in the city. I'm sure there's that many or more at the prison. Does he have any idea how we could identify the ship?"

_He knows the serial number but would have to scan each ship to find it._

"Okay. That's a start."

_I will go with you to Caprica._

"Bud, you can't."

_I must protect the peacemaker and parents of the peacemaker. It is my duty._

"You've got to stay here and protect Natalie. She's going to need you in the next weeks and months. You're her link to the other centurions."

_I want to go with my friend. I want to go with you._

"Listen, Bud, I'd like for you to go, too, but you can't. I'll be okay and D'Anna will be okay. There are doctors on Caprica who are specially trained to take care of high risk pregnancies like hers. They have all sorts of wonderful equipment so that if the baby comes early, they'll be able to save his life. But the…centurions on Caprica wouldn't welcome you with open arms. I'm not sure what would happen to you. You're my friend, big guy, and I won't take the chance you'd be harmed."

_Then I will never see you again after you leave._

"No. That's where you're wrong. I'm coming back, Bud. I'm making you that promise right now. I will be back. You've got to promise me something, though. You've got to promise me that you'll take care of Natalie. She's the important one now. She'll be your leader one day instead of Cavil and this planet will be a different place for everybody."

Behind them a voice said, "Why do you say Natalie will be our leader? What do you know that I don't know?"

He looked over his shoulder and then rose to his feet. Sonja, looking as beautiful as he remembered her, was standing in the doorway. She was wearing the short black skirt and stiletto heels.

She looked him up and down. "Why are you still in your pajamas?"

"These are scrubs. I'm working for the doctors here in the clinic."

"Then why are you sitting out here talking to a centurion?"

John handed the communication device to Buddy and walked up to Sonja.

"Just taking a break. What are you doing here?"

"I came to see you."

She put her arms around his neck and pressed her body to his and kissed him hard on the mouth. It took only a few seconds for Sonja to get a response from him.

He pulled back from her and she smiled at him. "I love the clinic," she said. "It's full of beds and they're all empty…well one is occupied. Why don't we go in and make it two occupied beds?"

He took her arms from around his neck and struggled with the desire he felt. He was angry at himself. He should never have let her kiss him.

"I've missed you, John," she said softly. "I've missed the way you kiss me and touch me and…"

"Don't. Please don't go there. Whatever we had ended when I left the city."

"In your letter you said that you cared for me."

"I also told you why you and me couldn't ever have a relationship…or didn't you read that part."

She hung her head. "I read it."

He took a deep breath. "We're not going there. Understand?"

"I did come to see you, but I came for another reason, too. We brought Rachel. Something happened that freaked us out."

"What?"

"It involves that crazy Cavil who is _temporarily_ back in the city from his _insane_ search of the forest."

"Who's _us_?"

"Petra and her Simon. We brought Cassie, too. And Rachel's father. He insisted. Believe it or not, Leoben does care about his daughter. He's been visiting her every day."

"Where are they?"

"Inside."

"Let's go." He looked over his shoulder. "I'll be back later, Bud. We'll talk some more."

That got a sly smile from Sonja. "Are you still talking to centurions? Next you'll tell me that they've started answering you."

John finally grinned. "That would rock your world, wouldn't it?"

"You rock my world, John," she purred. "From the very first time. Do you remember how we did it that day up against the wall?"

"Knock it off, Sonja."

He led the way into the clinic. He found everyone gathered in the kitchen. Natalie was holding Esmari who had fallen asleep on her shoulder. Petra's husband Simon and Leoben stood talking to Natalie. Petra sat at the table nursing Rachel and talking to Bianca. Cassie was clinging to Petra's leg. Laszlo was preparing tea.

John squatted down beside Cassie, feeling a twinge in his real knee. "Is that my big girl?" He said to her. "Do you remember me? What's my name?"

"Chon." She reached for him and burrowed her face into his neck as he lifted her in his arms.

John patted Petra's shoulder. "Everybody looks good. Rachel's grown."

Petra looked up at him and he could see the stress and fear in her eyes. "We're all well…physically. We're here for another reason. My husband can explain…or Sonja."

Sonja said, "We know what happened here early this week when someone tried to kill D'Anna and John with a firebomb. The Cavil here sent a centurion with a full report to the city. It brought our Cavil straight home from searching the forest."

Simon took up the story. "He called an emergency meeting of the council and demanded to know who had done it and why. The report said that no one had been apprehended, but the reason for the attack was clear. During a discussion about the peacemaker, the Two on our council said that six children would be born to protect the peacemaker. He found their names in our scriptures and read them. He said these children must be protected at all costs. One of the names he read was Rachel."

Petra said, "Day before yesterday a centurion tried to take Rachel from me when we went to park. The other mothers gathered around me and it seemed to be confused. Then Leoben got there and made it leave."

"The centurions have standing orders to protect all the women and children," Leoben said. "Fortunately I was able to make it understand that the order to take Rachel would harm her."

"He brought Petra and Rachel and Cassie to my apartment," Sonja said. "Then we sent for Simon."

"The order to take Rachel had to have come from Cavil," Simon said. "I confronted him and he tried to tell me that he sent the centurion to take her out of concern for her safety. He said that he and his centurions would protect her since _someone _was out to get the peacemaker and his protectors. I told him Rachel was perfectly safe with us."

Sonja said, "But I convinced them to stay with me that night. It's a good thing I did."

"Two men broke down the door to our apartment," Simon said. "They took nothing and left as soon as they found out we weren't there."

"You're sure it was men and not centurions?" John asked.

"A neighbor saw them," Petra said. "Two big men in dark clothing wearing ski masks and carrying weapons."

Sonja added. "I should make it clear that no humans would be carrying weapons in the city without Cavil's knowledge and approval. They were probably brought from the prison."

John felt his pulse rate increase at the thought of the two big men from the prison. If the city Cavil had told Natalie the truth and the prison was empty, then he had found work for those men in the city. He looked at little Rachel in Petra's arms and made a vow that those men would one day pay for their crimes against their fellow humans.

Leoben continued. "Everyone stayed in my apartment last night and this morning we got to the airfield and took the transport here."

Natalie, who had not spoken until now, said, "You realize he'll eventually track you here. Maybe not today, but soon."

Petra looked up with tears in her eyes. Her voice trembled and the tears spilled over. "Maybe there's a human couple here who could take Rachel. Maybe if…maybe Cavil wouldn't be able to find her if she's out of the city and lost among the humans."

Bianca put her hand gently on Petra's shoulder. "That would never work, my dear. We simply couldn't introduce a child into the settlement without anyone finding out, and believe me, there are people everywhere who would betray her presence for a favor from a handler. There are others who would betray it meaning no harm but simply for something interesting to talk about. In a matter of days, certainly no more than a week, Cavil would know everything."

"She'd be safe on Caprica," John said.

They all looked at him. Natalie said, "Due to what we found out this morning, that's not possible."

John looked at Natalie, "Buddy came back and talked to the other four centurions. One of them used to fly a transport ship. He said there's a Heavy Raider in the city and one at the prison that would fit our needs. We've just got to figure out a way to get to one or the other."

"You're insane," Simon said, "certifiably insane if you think you could steal one of those ships."

Leoben quickly agreed. "The ships you're talking about are Cavil's personal ships. He has a couple dozen centurions guarding them all the time. They won't even let one of us near it without him."

"Even the ship at the prison?"

"I've never been to the prison," Leoben said. "Simon hasn't either. But you can bet that the ship is still guarded. Maybe not by as many, but it wouldn't be sitting there like a plum for the picking."

"Who's Buddy?" Sonja asked.

John glanced at Natalie. She smiled and said to Sonja. "If we tell you we'll have to kill you."

"Oh, funny," Sonja shot back.

Natalie looked at John, and he saw hope in her eyes.

"Buddy is one of ours. Just take John's word for it that he knows what he's talking about."

Leoben looked at him. "What would we have to do to get you and D'Anna and Rachel to Caprica? You just tell me what to do and I'll do it."

"Me, too," Sonja echoed. "We're all in this together."

Bianca asked, "Do you think this Cavil of yours in the city wants to _kill_ the child?"

"We don't know," Leoben answered. "We've all talked about it. We don't know if he would kill her or simply give her to one of his pets, maybe one of the Eights, so she could be watched."

Simon said, "He might give her to one of my brothers to be…they might want to conduct experiments on her to see if something makes her special."

"The only thing that makes her special is her name," John said angrily.

"Experiments," Bianca said in horror. "What kind of experiments."

Simon shook his head and wouldn't answer, but Leoben said, "Dissect her. They've done it several times after one of the sisters had a still-born baby."

Petra and Bianca both gasped. "You never told me that," Petra said to her husband.

"I was against it," he said vehemently.

Natalie said, "The past is done. We need to concentrate on _now_ and start making a plan. I think we need to implement it tonight. The longer we wait the greater the chance that we'll be discovered."

John sat down at the table and looked around at everybody. "You've all got to understand the risks. The odds aren't good that we can pull this off."

Bianca said, "John, if you and D'Anna stay here, Cavil will find a way to kill you and the child. And now another innocent life is at risk."

Simon said, "He'll kill D'Anna, too, and either box her or wipe her memory when she downloads."

"So we're all in agreement that I have to get D'Anna and Rachel off Nereid tonight?" John asked.

Everyone nodded.

"I'm taking Esmari, too. Okay, I'm going to lay out a plan. Feel free to start poking holes in it."

…

That afternoon a thunderstorm knocked out power to the settlement and sent the maintenance centurions out in force. Rain was still falling but had slacked off considerably when Simon and Leoben left the clinic with Petra and Cassie and Rachel and rode in one of the transport carts to Natalie's house.

Natalie stayed behind and the rest of them waited until dark. The rain had stopped by then, but a dense fog had settled in. That worked to their advantage. John found he couldn't argue with D'Anna's pronouncement that God was helping them.

Shortly before midnight, Buddy pulled another transport cart to the back of the clinic. Natalie, John, D'Anna and Bianca got on. Natalie was carrying Esmari. Sometime during the afternoon, Laszlo had managed to convince Bianca that she had to go with them. John would be flying the ship. D'Anna couldn't handle two babies on her own.

As part of their plan, they had left Laszlo tied up at the clinic with a scalpel to free himself within easy reach. He was to wait until near dawn before he alerted Cavil that John had kidnapped his wife and taken D'Anna and gone. John had even tied Dodona's wrists loosely to the bed, apologizing all the while, telling her that as soon as the doctor freed himself, he would free her.

She had looked at him serenely. "You're going."

He had nodded. "We're going."

"Save the child. That's all that matters. I'll pray for you."

John walked out the back and waited while Bianca said goodbye to her husband. It broke his heart to hear her crying as they ran from the back door to the transport that Buddy had parked in the alley. John put his arm around her. "He'll be fine. You'll see him again. You've got my promise on that."

Natalie held a sleeping Esmari. Centurion LG3395457 followed them and they all gathered at Natalie's house. The power was still off. Sonja had lit a solitary candle.

"We'll have to walk to the airfield so as not to alert the guard centurions at the gate," John said. "It's nearly a mile."

Choking back her own sobs, Petra handed Rachel to Bianca. "Take care of her. Please take care of her. I couldn't love her more if she were mine."

"She is yours," John said. "Rika gave her to you. And you can go with us. You can bring Cassie."

"My place is with my husband," Petra said. "We'll be all right."

Simon put his arms around her and held her. John glanced at Cassie who lay sleeping on Natalie's couch and prayed that she was right.

Sonja lit a lantern and handed it to Buddy. "Lead the way. We're right behind you."

Leoben took Bianca's arm to help her since she was carrying Rachel. John shouldered the big bag with the soy milk and clean diapers that Bianca had packed. His book of scriptures and the prayer beads were in the bottom. The pistol was tucked into the back of his slacks.

Sonja took Natalie's arm since she had Esmari. John took D'Anna's. They set off with the other centurion, LG33 as John had started calling him, bringing up the rear.

It was slow going in the dark. The ground on the woodland path was slippery and they all walked slowly and carefully. The trip that took twenty minutes in the daylight took them nearly an hour. They finally reached the tarmac and stopped at the edge. Buddy and LG33 continued into the hangar. The centurions on duty helped them pull the Heavy Raider outside. Then Buddy got them back into the hangar so they wouldn't see who boarded the ship. He left his lantern at the base of the boarding ramp.

John told the others to stay put temporarily and he ran for the ship. Once inside he powered it up and got the interior lights on. The others quickly followed him. He got D'Anna and Bianca seated and helped them fasten the harnesses. Natalie handed Esmari to Sonja and Leoben sat beside her. Then John and Natalie exited the ship. Buddy came out of the hangar with LG33 who boarded the Heavy Raider and got into the pilot's seat.

At the bottom of the ramp, John said his farewells to Natalie and Buddy.

"God go with you," Natalie said to him before she hugged him briefly. "Keep them safe."

John put his hand on Buddy's shoulder. "You take care of Natalie, Bud. I'm counting on you to take care of her until I get back, friend."

They had left the communication device at Natalie's house so John didn't know what Buddy replied, but he had a pretty good idea because the big robot also put his hand gently on John's shoulder.

"Play your cards right and Cavil won't have any idea you were involved in this," John said to Natalie.

"Godspeed," She said with tears in her voice. "Save our peacemaker."

John was so near tears by then that he couldn't reply. He turned and hurried up the ramp and started it retracting.

"Make sure you're strapped in tight," he said to everyone. "We'll be climbing through storm clouds."

In only a few seconds John was in the copilot's seat and strapped in. Outside the windscreen, the night was so dark that even the fog was invisible. He trusted that Natalie and Buddy had moved to the edge of the tarmac.

"Set a course for the prison and take us to twenty thousand feet," he said to LG33. The centurion flipped a series of switches and then put a long string of numbers into the navigation computer. John hoped they were the coordinates of the prison airfield. With a smooth motion the centurion pushed the vertical controls. The ship began rising and then turned. John caught a glimpse of Natalie's lantern, a pinprick of light in a sea of black and then it was gone as they accelerated rapidly and began climbing. He wondered how long it would take him to become instrument rated on a Heavy Raider. He tried to think of any number of things except the danger into which they were flying.

_…_

Maya and Kendra chose to watch from the sidelines on Sunday afternoon as Lee, Hunter, Dwight and Kara joined several guys in the park for a pickup game of pyramid. Kara had never played pyramid before. Soccer was her game, but she found herself unable to sit on the sidelines while the guys played.

They were ten minutes into the game when Zak and Maggie walked up. Zak wasted no time in joining them. Maggie went over and sat with Maya and Kendra. After twisting her knee slightly Kara joined them. She picked up her discarded sweatshirt and wiped the sweat from her face before she pulled it over her t-shirt.

"Is it bad?" Maya asked her about the knee.

"No, but if I do it again, it will be. The last thing I need is to be kept out of the cockpit with a bum knee."

Maggie said, "The guy in the black t-shirt is playing dirty anyway. Watch the way he's blocking shots."

Kendra snickered. "Where's Sam Anders when you need him? There was a guy on the Delphi team last year who used to do the same thing. Sam finally got fed up with it since the referees kept missing it. About the third time the guy did it and wasn't called on it, Sam and him tangled. He and the guy both got benched for the rest of the half."

Kara grinned. "I remember that. It was the championship game two years ago and the Buccaneers lost. Sam took a lot of heat because he lost his temper."

"He's from Tauron," Kendra said.

"Who?" Kara asked. "The guy who kept elbowing Sam?"

"No, the guy out there in the black t-shirt. He just used the bottom of it to wipe his face. His abdomen and chest are covered with blue tattoos."

"A dirt eater," Maggie said

"Not every Tauron deserves that name," Kendra retorted.

"I agree," Kara said as she massaged her aching knee. She wished she could put some ice on it, but she didn't want anyone to know it was still hurting.

"Hunter's getting tired of black t-shirt's dirty play," Maya said.

Kara laughed. "You can tell that all the way over here?"

"Just watch. Lee and Dwight are going to be diplomatic and tell the guy to knock off using his elbows in their ribs. The guy will say he wasn't aware he was doing it or something like that. But he'll keep on because that's the way he plays. And then Hunter is going to accidentally take him out."

"Or Zak," Maggie said.

It happened five minutes after that and it ended the game. Maggie had been right about Zak. He had beat Hunter to it. Kara realized anew how much Zak had changed. The good-natured PR guy had become a warrior in all ways. Afterward he and Hunter stood laughing and talking and Kara sensed that the two men were bonding in the way that only comrades in arms could bond.

That night she thought her sore knee was keeping her awake and then she thought it was the change in Zak, and then she realized that something else was going on, an uneasiness that she couldn't explain. She kept thinking of her father and some verses of scripture.

Finally she got up and tiptoed into her brother's room. Braedon slept soundly and Kara gently touched his silky hair.

"Soon, sweet boy, soon" she whispered. "We're going to bring your dada home to you."

_…_

The storm that had taken out the power in the settlement hadn't affected the prison-lab complex so that when LG33 began a descent to the airfield, there were enough lights that John could see. He wouldn't have wanted to try to land a ship in the dim conditions, but since LG33 also had infrared, it was no problem.

"Take us to the far end of the field," John said. "We need to scope everything out before we let anybody leave the ship. If something doesn't feel right, we'll…have to come up with a new plan."

LG33 put the ship down on the other side of the far hangar. John took the pistol from where he had laid it and shoved it into his waistband again before he lowered the ramp.

"Sit tight, everybody. We're going to check everything out first."

"Can we help?" Sonja asked.

"Let me and the centurion check it out first."

"I'll go with you," Leoben said.

The plan was that after LG33 found the correct Heavy Raider and brought the FTL software on line, John would take Bianca and D'Anna to the FTL-enabled ship. The centurion would return to their ship and take off at the same time maximizing confusion if anyone was tracking them. While they were still close enough that their dradis signatures would be indistinguishable from each other, John would jump his Heavy Raider. With any luck it would go unnoticed and LG33 would take the other Heavy Raider with Sonja and Leoben as passengers back to the airfield at the settlement. Sonja and Leoben would handle getting the Raider back into the hangar and spend the night at Natalie's house. They hadn't taken the plan any farther than that.

LG33 began scanning the Heavy Raiders parked at the airfield. They weren't lucky enough for it to be one of those outside. That meant it was being kept in a hangar. It didn't take John long to figure out which one. Even before LG33 pointed to the smallest hangar, John saw the centurions. There were eight outside the door. He had no doubt there were more inside.

He motioned and LG33 and Leoben followed him back to their Heavy Raider.

Inside John said. "We got trouble. The Heavy Raider we need is in a hangar guarded by at least eight centurions."

"Let me and Sonja see if we can get them to leave," Leoben said.

"I got a better idea," John said. "What we need is a distraction, a big distraction. Okay, everybody out of the ship. Sonja, I want you to take Bianca and D'Anna and the babies and hide behind the third hangar from here. The Heavy Raider we want is in the small hangar near the end. In about ten minutes all hell is going to break loose. When you see those centurions leave the hangar, you get down there and get on board. I'll be right behind you."

They went over the plan again and the women left. John waited until they disappeared behind the first hangar.

"Okay," he said to LG3, open the maintenance hatch and cut the fuel line. He turned to Leoben. "I need your shirt and undershirt."

Without a word, Leoben stripped off both and handed them to John. The tylium fumes from the cut fuel line were almost overpowering. John handed the shirts to LG3. "Soak them in fuel, set them on fire and then toss them into the Raider. Then light the cut fuel line and run like hell toward the sixth hangar. Tell the other centurions to get the fire brigade started or this whole airfield will go up in flames."

He and Leoben went to the corner of the first hangar and watched while LG33 followed John's instructions. It took the fuel cells four minutes to explode. By then the sixth hangar was empty. All the centurions were busy enacting their fire suppression protocols. LG33 entered the hanger, got into the Heavy Raider and started the software download that would enable the FTL drive. John and Sonja were busy getting D'Anna and Bianca strapped into their seats. Leoben was acting as lookout.

Leoben said, "How are Sonja and I going to get back to the settlement now that you've burned up our ride?"

"There's other Heavy Raiders here," John said.

In the distance they saw headlights. Leoben said, "That'll be men from the prison right now."

Sonja grabbed both their arms and pulled them down the ramp. "If Cavil catches us here, he'll make us stick our hands into the stream. He'll start asking questions and then he'll know everything we know."

"Shoot us," Leoben said. "Kill both of us. If they see you do it that's even better. We can tell him it was part of your plot to escape."

"What am I going to shoot you with?"

"The gun you've got in your waistband. I saw the outline of it under your shirt when you bent over. You need to do it now. They'll be here in about thirty seconds. Shoot Sonja first and then me. With any luck we'll download on a basestar."

John took out the gun and chambered the first round. He pointed it at Sonja's heart and found that he couldn't pull the trigger.

"I can't."

"Give me the gun," Leoben said urgently. "Now."

He took it from John's hand, turned and shot Sonja at close range in the chest. Then he handed the gun back to John.

"Head or heart," Leoben said. "It's got to be fatal. Do it! Do it now!"

The headlights were so close that John could hear the transport engines over the roar of the burning Raider. He took a deep breath, put the barrel over Leoben's heart and pulled the trigger. He was on the bottom of the ramp before Leoben hit the ground. _They'll download,_ he told himself, _somewhere on the planet or on a baseship. They aren't really dead._

He flung himself into the pilot's seat. LG33 was helping the other centurions fight the fire. John couldn't wait on him. He used the vertical control to get them just a few yards off the concrete before he applied horizontal thrust. He scraped the top of the hangar door on the way out, but he knew the ship didn't sustain any damage. It was far sturdier than the flimsy sheet metal hangar.

"Hold on to those babies," he shouted to D'Anna and Bianca and then put the Raider into a steep climb. Buddy had told him how to activate the FTL drive and how to put in the coordinates. Back at the settlement he'd had a moment of panic when he'd realized he didn't know any coordinates for the Colonies. Lucy had come to the rescue. She had a number of them. John had picked the one nearest the ice planet. He knew the insanity of jumping into space in a Cylon Heavy Raider right over Caprica where someone was bound to shoot first and ask questions later. At least near the ice planet, they would be checked out first.

He keyed in the coordinates, verified them once and then twice. They were still climbing when he engaged the drive. Space bent and in an instant they were in Caprica's solar system far above the atmosphere of an ice planet that had housed a Cylon research facility during the First War, a facility where old centurions had dissected humans in an attempt to create a new form of life.

He slowed the ship to a standstill and left the cockpit. "Are you both okay?"

"I'm fine," D'Anna said.

"I'm dizzy," Bianca answered.

"Do you want me to take Rachel?"

"You've got blood on you. Are you hurt?"

"No. It must have come from Leoben. I had to shoot him. I'll tell you why later."

"Take a diaper and clean yourself up."

"I need to get back to the cockpit so when the first battlestar gets here they can see me. I don't want to get this far and get blown out of the sky by one of our own."

D'Anna said, "Won't a baseship or another Heavy Raider come to check on us."

John took a deep breath. "No. The Colonies have been under our control since last November. It'll be a Colonial ship."

"I don't understand," Bianca said.

"There'll be plenty of time for explanations after we're safely aboard a battlestar."

He took a clean diaper from the bag, wet it with water from one of the bottles and took it to the cockpit where he cleaned Leoben's blood from his hand and face as best he could. He couldn't do anything about the spray of blood on his shirt. He wondered how long it would take before a battlestar jumped into space near him. He was sure the Colonial Early Warning System included the ice planet. Then he wondered which battlestar it would be.

Six minutes passed before there was the familiar wink of light and a battlestar materialized in the distance. Even though he was too far away to see a name, he could tell that it was a galactica class ship instead of mercury or valkyrie class. It might even be the _Galactica_.

"We got company, ladies," he called to Bianca and D'Anna.

He felt strangely calm as he saw the squadron of Vipers launching and then approaching. He didn't move, just let the Heavy Raider drift. He had no communications in the ship because the centurion pilots didn't need it. This was going to be visual all the way. The Vipers circled the ship. He tried to imagine the chatter that was going back and forth over their communications right now. Finally the lead Viper got close enough that John could see the pilot for a few seconds before the Viper's bright lights almost blinded him. He did the only thing he could think of to do. He waved.

The seconds ticked by until he was sure a full minute had passed. The Viper pilot who had made the visual contact was a female but more than that he couldn't tell. Her weapons hot status registered on a screen in the Heavy Raider. He knew that if he so much as twitched she would open fire. He checked the Raider's weapons status again to make sure that it hadn't automatically armed anything. All the lights were off. He wished he'd thought of writing a note ahead of time that he could have plastered on one side of the canopy that said _FRIEND. _

The formation of Vipers moved. They aligned themselves beside and behind him. The pilot of the lead Viper turned and waggled her wings. The invitation was clear. _Follow me. _He breathed a sigh of relief. This might work out all right after all.

John carefully edged the Heavy Raider forward. They neared the battlestar and he saw the name. It was the _Galactica_. He wondered if Cain was still the commander. He was escorted to the port landing bay. He knew the procedure. He brought his ship inside, put it down on one of the pods for larger ships, cut the power and waited for the bay to be retracted and pressurized.

When the flashing red light at the end of the bay went off and the green light came on, he pressed the control that opened the door and lowered the ramp. Heavily armed Marines poured into the bay and surrounded the ship. He unstrapped Bianca's seat harness and helped her up. Rachel was awake and had begun to cry. He had no doubt that she was hungry. Esmari was awake, too, but so far she was silent. John got D'Anna up as well and then told both women to stay inside the ship. He went to the door of the Raider with his hands up.

"I've got women and children aboard," he said. "They need to be taken to Sick Bay."

The Marines didn't move. John thought of the firing squad in his dream. Finally a Marine captain walked forward. "State you name and what you're doing in a Cylon ship."

"Major John Gallagher, Fleet Reserves. I stole this ship and escaped from a planet under Cylon control over thirty light years from here."

"Major John Gallagher died last November. State your correct name."

"I am John Gallagher. Is Cain still the commander of this ship?"

"Yes, sir."

"What about Doc Cottle? Is he still running Sick Bay?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then please take these women and children to Doc Cottle. I'd like to speak to Commander Cain, please. I'd like to ask her to send a message to Admiral William Adama informing him of the situation."

"Put your hands behind your head, sir. We have to search you."

John complied and one of the Marines thoroughly patted him down."

"Are you injured, sir?" The captain asked. "You have blood on your shirt."

"I shot two Cylons before I escaped," John said. "The blood came from one of them. The pistol is in the cockpit."

"You're to accompany us, sir."

Bianca appeared in the doorway of the Heavy Raider with the wailing Rachel in her arms. "I'm a doctor," she said in a raised voice, "and I've got another woman and two hungry babies with me."

The Marine Captain spoke into a communication device at this shoulder. "Sir, there are two women and two babies on board as well. Please advise." His instructions came back in several bursts of static. "All of you follow me."

John helped Bianca down the ramp and went back for D'Anna. The Marines had lowered their rifles, but as D'Anna appeared in the doorway, they raised them again.

"Easy, guys," John said. "She's not armed, and she's pregnant."

Esmari started to cry then and reached for him. D'Anna nearly stumbled. He caught her and supported her, helping her down the ramp. The sea of uniforms parted enough for them to get through.

The captain ordered four of his men to escort Bianca and Rachel to sick bay. He pointed to D'Anna and then to another Marine. "Give the baby to him."

"D'Anna needs to go to sick bay, too," John said.

The Marine took the screaming child from D'Anna's arms and followed Bianca down the corridor.

"Commander Cain wants to see you, sir," he said to John.

"What about D'Anna?"

"She goes out the airlock."

"No! Hell no! Call President Roslin. Call Admiral Adama. They'll both tell Commander Cain to stand down. For God's sakes, D'Anna's pregnant. If you airlock her you're killing an innocent child."

"Your child?" A husky female voice said.

The sea of Marines parted again. Helena Cain strode through them and stood in front of John. She was as tall as Sonja and Natalie, but there was no warmth in her eyes. They were cold and hard and made him think of a snake poised to strike.

"I asked you a question, Major Gallagher."

"Yes, sir. It's my child. Call Admiral Adama. Please."

"And why would I do that?"

"He will not authorize throwing D'Anna out an airlock."

"I am the sovereign authority on this ship. If I say she goes out an airlock, then she goes out an airlock."

John stared at her, hatred and bitterness and rage coursing through him, all the emotions he'd tried to conquer after he'd left the prison. Everything he'd endured as a prisoner, everything he'd been through afterward, everything he'd risked to get D'Anna and their unborn child off Nereid and it had come to this…an ignoble death over an ice planet where old centurions had once tortured humans in ghastly experiments in an attempt to create a new race.

He was beyond thinking rationally. He went for Commander Cain's throat. Choke the snake. Keep her from using her venom on anyone else.

He got his hands around her neck just before his world exploded in a burst of white hot sparks.

When he began to regain consciousness, he realized he was on the floor of an airlock. His head was pounding and something warm trickled down his neck. He had no doubt he'd been clubbed with the butt of a rifle. D'Anna was cradling him tenderly, rocking back and forth. Her eyes were closed and her lips moved silently in prayer.

Commander Cain stood in front of them with a dozen Marines around her.

"You attacked a superior officer over your pregnant Cylon whore. That earns you a trip out the airlock with her."

Cain and the Marines retreated into the corridor.

The amber warning light inside the airlock started flashing and the klaxon blaring. The big door began closing. He wondered how long it would take for them to die in the icy vacuum of space.

"I'm sorry," he managed to say to D'Anna. "I'm so sorry."

"Have faith, John. God will not let our child die. Pray with me."

But there were no prayers left in him, no faith. Nothing, only a tired emptiness as vast as space.

Then over the blaring klaxon he heard a voice, the voice of a man who disliked him personally, but who was still an honorable officer, a man who wasn't as insane when it came to Cylons as his commander.

Just before the heavy door finished its journey across the metal track and clanged shut, he heard Colonel Saul Tigh roar, "Gods damn it, Commander. I don't care what he did. You can't airlock the husband of the President of the Colonies. The man saved millions when he blew up that basestar. You'll face a firing squad. Is that how you want your career to be remembered?"

TBC…


	48. Fire and Ice

Chapter 48

Fire and Ice

_In my youth I always dreamed that there was something I was meant to accomplish with my life. When I made the decision to pursue a career in medicine, I thought I had found my calling and purpose, but during my year as one of the physicians aboard the _Hyperion_ on her first mission to the fourth planet in a sector of space later named the Prolmar Sector after our mission leader, Hans Prolmar, the seed of another idea took root and began to grow. On that mission I came to believe that the fourth planet, the only one habitable for human life in that solar system, was the home of a vanished tribe of humans, the legendary Thirteenth Tribe. Others on the expedition disagreed, but I held fast to my belief. Thus began my obsession with a long-vanished people and their ultimate fate._

_There are those among my family and friends who will tell you that my quest has driven me mad and cost me much, but I will tell you that it was the beginning of an extraordinary journey of the spirit as I followed my heart and the dream that began to take my thoughts on the first night I spent on a planet that I now know was called Eden by its first inhabitants. This is the story of my awakening faith as I followed that dream to the heart of the archives of a church that is scorned by many, the Church of the Monad on Gemenon._

_Unpublished Manuscript_ _(Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

The mobile phone on Laura Roslin's bedside table chirped. It was her personal phone, and the people who had the number could be counted on one hand. Only one person used it with any regularity. She rolled over and looked at the clock as she grabbed the phone. It was 5:57. Her alarm would go off in eighteen minutes.

"Bill?"

"Laura. I apologize for waking you."

She knew he would never have called at this hour unless something had happened. She also realized that her heart was hammering. When she spoke, she sounded out of breath, like she'd been running.

"What's wrong?"

"About an hour ago John jumped a Cylon Heavy Raider into space near the ice planet. The _Galactica's_ number was up in the intercept rotation and was dispatched to investigate. They have him on board."

Laura could barely get her breath. "Is he all right?"

"The _Galactica_ is back over Caprica now. I'm at the airfield. A Raptor has been prepped. I'll be leaving in a few minutes. I'm taking Major Parker with me. I need his unbiased opinion of whatever we find."

"What do you mean?"

"Laura," Bill said gently, "John has been under the control of the enemy for the better part of a year. I can't afford to let our friendship cloud my judgment. You're going to have to accept the fact that the man who jumped that Heavy Raider into our solar system is _not_ the same man who left it last November. Don't you understand that this whole thing could be a setup? They could have brainwashed him. I've already ordered that Heavy Raider gone over with a fine-tooth comb to look for…anything dangerous or any kind of communication equipment. And even if it's exactly what it looks like…an escape…then John will still have to undergo a very lengthy debriefing."

"But he's all right. Please tell me he's all right."

Bill hesitated. "There was a confrontation between John and Commander Cain. I'm going to get to the bottom of what happened as soon as I'm on board."

"What are you _not_ telling me?"

He hesitated again and then said, "He wasn't alone in that Heavy Raider. I don't know the details but he brought two women and two babies with him. One of them is a Cylon, a Three."

Laura gasped. "Oh, dear gods. It's true. The prophecy is true."

"I don't want you to read too much into that yet. The other woman is a doctor. She told Saul Tigh that the father of one of the children is here on Caprica. She could only mean Hunter. Didn't I read in their debriefing report that he has a baby daughter?"

"Yes, that's right. Why would John have Hunter's child?"

"I don't know any more than I've just told you. I've got to go. The crew chief is signaling. They're ready for Major Parker and me to board the Raptor. I'll call you ship-to-shore as soon as I have more news."

"Promise me, Bill. Promise me." But the connection was already broken.

Laura sat on the side of the bed with the phone in her hand, thoughts and emotions swirling through her like a spinning kaleidoscope. Her alarm clock eventually went off and she silenced it.

What had Bill not said to her? He was definitely holding something back. She had heard it in his voice. What was it? She counted the months since John had been gone. A little over eight. It wasn't possible that the other child was his. Kara had told her that John had been in the prison for almost four of those months and only taken to the city to become a breeder afterward. No, the other child couldn't possibly be his.

Still, there was something Bill hadn't told her. And then Laura knew. She simply knew. The Three was pregnant. John cared enough about a Cylon who was pregnant with his child that he had brought her home with him, and Bill cared enough about _her_ that he had tried to spare her from that hurt as long as he could.

Laura Roslin sat on the side of her bed, put her head in her hands and wept for all she had gained that morning…and for all she had lost.

_…_

Either the blaring klaxon had a timer that had shut it off, or someone in the corridor had gotten tired of hearing it and turned it off. Inside the airlock the bright amber light also ceased blinking rapidly inside its wire cage.

John didn't know exactly how much time had passed because he had drifted in and out of consciousness. At some point D'Anna had torn a piece of material from his shirttail and held it against the back of his head to stop the bleeding. The pressure wasn't helping his pain, but it appeared to have worked. He could no longer feel the trickle of warm blood running down his neck.

He couldn't understand what was taking so long. Only much later would he learn about the standoff between Saul Tigh and Helena Cain, a standoff that involved a number of Marines some of whom had sided with Tigh and others who had sided with their commander. It had threatened to turn the corridor outside the airlock into a battlefield. Lieutenant Gaeta had finally ended the stalemate by bringing them word that Admiral Adama had ordered them to jump back to Caprica and was on his way to meet them in a Raptor. Gaeta had also handed Cain a printed copy of Bill's message to her.

_If you airlock Major Gallagher or the Cylon, you'll follow them out the same airlock as soon as I get on board._

The stalemate ended with Cain carefully folding the message several times, tucking it into her uniform pocket and then stalking toward her quarters without a word. Her Marines stood down and Tigh opened the inner airlock door, but all of that took nearly thirty minutes to transpire and while it was going on, the door stayed closed.

All John knew at the time was that in the corridor there was a switch that controlled the outer door of the airlock and that at any minute that switch might be activated venting him and D'Anna along with the pressurized air into the ice-cold vacuum of space."

Cut off from the warmth of the corridor, the airlock gradually became colder but the cold helped revive him. He knew he had a concussion. He should try to keep talking. He should try to keep himself conscious. He wanted to savor every minute of life that he had left.

"I think we jumped," D'Anna said, "but I don't know where."

He didn't want to think about where. It could be anywhere that two bodies would never be found.

Instead of voicing his thoughts, he asked D'Anna, "Did you ever read a poem called _Fire and Ice_?"

His voice was thick. He sounded like he was drunk. Fatigue or bleeding in his brain? Or both?

He started to shiver…a stark reminder of his time in the prison. D'Anna held him closer to her. She was a lot warmer than he was.

"No," she said softly. "I've never read any poetry although some of our scriptures read like poetry. The Songs of Miriam are beautiful."

"I've forgotten who wrote the poem now. I read it years ago when another pilot and I were cleaning out the locker of…of one of us who'd died in battle. It was in a little slim volume of poetry that a girlfriend had sent him. I kept it. Nobody else wanted it and the girlfriend had broken up with him by then."

John drifted back in time. The pilot's call sign had been _Little Mac_ because his last name was McCluskey and he stood barely five foot four. He'd been a good pilot and he'd died anyway. He'd almost made it back to the _Solaria_ in a crippled Viper. On approach to the landing bay a round from a Cylon Raider had hit him and his ship had disintegrated in a fireball. Little Mac was gone in a fraction of a second. He'd never felt a thing. Never had a clue he'd died in fire.

"Go on," D'Anna said.

John's mouth was dry. "The poet says our world will end in fire or ice. Little Mac's ended in fire the way I always thought mine would end." He drifted again. "I'll bet he's sitting on a hill somewhere in Elysium right now laughing at me. _Yeah, Starbuck, you crazy bastard. Gonna suffocate and then freeze solid as an ice cube. Ice, man. You always thought it would be fire and it's gonna be ice. I never felt a thing when I died, but you will."_

D'Anna said, "I don't understand."

"That's okay. I don't expect you to. I'm just yammering. Nothing important. Trying to keep talking. Trying to stay awake."

Waiting for an icy death.

She must have read his mind. "We won't die, John. God _will_ protect our child."

"I gave my call sign to my daughter. I'm not _Starbuck_ anymore. She is. The guys at the base hung a new one on me. Now I'm _Papa Bear_. You see when I went back into the Reserves, I was about to become a father again and…never mind. I know you don't give a frak about what my life on Caprica was like."

"That's not true. I've always liked to hear you talk about your life on Caprica. You never seemed like you wanted to share much of it with me."

Suddenly the interior door started sliding open. Warm air from the corridor washed over them. As soon as the door was fully open, Saul Tigh strode in with six Marines. Two of them hauled him to his feet, but John's knees buckled.

"He's hurt," D'Anna said trying to keep the piece of shirt pressed against his head wound.

"Take him to Sick Bay," Tigh ordered. "Take her to the brig."

"No," John said. "Take her to Sick Bay, too. Please."

"Bill Adama is on final approach to the ship right now," Tigh said. "I'll let him decide what to do with her. In the meantime, the Cylon goes to the brig. Don't worry. After the message Bill sent to Commander Cain, I don't think anyone will touch your Cylon."

John tried to walk, but his legs were too rubbery. It was worse than being drunk. The two big Marines ended up mostly dragging him all the way to Sick Bay. It was a stark reminder of the two big men at the prison who had dragged him to the little gray room. His body reacted. He began to hyperventilate and to fight nausea.

But there was no heavy wooden chair bolted to the floor waiting for him at the end of his journey this time, no rubber hoses or red-hot wires or hypodermic needles. No galvanized tub filled with cold, filthy, brackish water. No Six wearing heavy boots or Three with her cattle prod or Four with his drugs.

There was only Dr. Sherman Cottle whose wrath was directed not at John, but at the Marines for what they had done to him. Cottle used words John hadn't heard since his days on the _Solaria_. Under Cottle's withering invectives, the Marines got him to a bed and both fled Sick Bay.

"Hey, Doc," John said when Cottle at last took a breath. "I don't think they were the guys who clobbered me."

"Zeus on a zebra!" Cottle said still going full steam. "A man saves millions of people and then manages to return from the dead and what do they do? Try to kill him to see if he can do it again?"

"I didn't return from the dead. I never quite got there."

"That's beside the point. Cain had no right. None! I hope I get to attend her court-martial."

"I went for her throat when she said she was going to airlock D'Anna. D'Anna needs to be here. She's four months pregnant and her blood pressure is high."

Cottle had just finished using a pen light to check the response of John's pupils.

"Roll over," he said roughly. "I need to see how bad that head wound is."

John obediently rolled onto his side. "Did you hear me about D'Anna?"

"I'm not deaf. A pregnant Cylon with high blood pressure can wait an hour until I take care of you."

"How're Bianca and the babies?"

"Fine."

"Ow," John winced as Cottle began examining the back of his head.

"I know it hurts. I'm going to shoot the wound full of lidocaine so I can clean it and stitch it up."

John smiled. "You're not going to pass off the task to one of your med techs this time?"

"Hell no! Even if Admiral Adama hadn't sent word for me to personally take charge of you, I'd have done it anyway. He's on his way up here."

"That's what Colonel Tigh said."

"You're going to feel a few stings when I inject the lidocaine. It should go numb shortly afterward."

Cottle was right. Half a dozen bee stings and the back of John's head began to go numb. He could feel pressure but no pain as Cottle cleaned the wound and then a pulling sensation as he threaded and tied off the sutures.

"How many stitches?"

"Six. It was deep…all the way to your skull."

"I don't suppose you could inject any of that lidocaine into my skull, could you? I've got a bitch of a headache."

"I'm going to do an MRI next. If you don't have any bleeding in your brain, I'll give you something to take the edge off the pain and let you get some rest."

The curtain at his bed was yanked back just as Cottle was pressing a bandage over his wound. Bianca, looking like one of the Furies, took in the scene.

"Thank the gods somebody came to his senses! When I heard what that insane woman had ordered done to you and D'Anna, they had to hold me in here. I still plan to tell her what I think of her the minute I see her."

"This is Dr. Bianca Cardenas," John said to Cottle. "She's a pediatrician. She also saved my life on Nereid when I was dying of pneumonia…she and her husband. He's a surgeon. Bianca, this is…"

Her tone softened. "We've already met. Dr. Cottle was kind enough to allow several of his med techs to help me with the little ones."

"Are they fed and happy?" John asked.

"They're fed and dry. I don't know about happy. Esmari seems bewildered with all the attention she's getting. We finally got Rachel fed and to sleep. She's never had anything but milk from her mother's breast. I didn't think we were going to be able to get her to take a bottle. I guess her hunger won out."

Cottle lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply before he turned his head and exhaled a stream of smoke.

"I'm taking John for an MRI. Would you like to go along?"

"Of course I would and please put out that vile-smelling cancer stick."

John managed a smile. "You're wasting your time talking to the doc about his cigarettes."

Cottle motioned for an orderly who released the wheels on the bed and began to roll it down the center of sick bay. Bianca put her hand on John's arm and walked beside him. For a moment he thought of a mother tiger protecting her cub.

Bill Adama was on the way and they were all safe. John finally allowed himself to relax. He'd actually pulled it off. He'd gotten them all to safety. He was almost home. Another chapter of his life was ending and a new one beginning. He closed his eyes and was asleep before they reached the other end of the room.

_…_

Laura knocked softly on Kara's bedroom door. Despite washing her face in very cold water for several minutes, Laura knew that her earlier bout of tears was still evident in her swollen eyes.

Kara opened the door wearing flannel sleep pants and a t-shirt.

"Hey," she said to Laura. "Come in. I was just getting ready to hit the shower. What's up?"

Laura stepped inside and pushed the door shut even though there was no one in the hall. She took a deep breath and managed to keep her voice steady.

"Your father's back."

Kara stared at her stepmother like she'd grown another head. "How?"

"All I can tell you is that Bill called and said John had jumped a Heavy Raider into space near the ice planet. The _Galactica_ intercepted and has them on board."

"Them?"

"He brought two women and two children with him."

Kara felt her knees go weak. The one she had injured playing pyramid the day before began to hurt.

"Cylons?"

"One of them is." Laura took a deep breath. "A Three. The other one is a doctor."

"What about the kids?"

"Bill thinks one of the children is Hunter's little girl. He doesn't know anything about the other one. He promised to call me as soon as he had more information."

"I guess Dad's okay. I mean he is okay, isn't he?"

"I don't know. Bill would never say exactly other than there had been some kind of confrontation between John and Commander Cain."

"Cain hates Cylons as much as anyone I know," Kara said, her voice betraying her fear.

"I assume by extension she would hate anyone who would try to defend a Cylon," Laura said.

Kara said. "If she and Dad tangled, it was probably over the Cylon. He must…he obviously…he wouldn't have brought her along if there wasn't a good reason," Kara finished lamely.

She knew Laura was thinking about the prophecy just like she was. When they'd talked about the scripture verses the previous week, Laura had been surprisingly calm. Now Kara wondered if Laura had simply dismissed the whole idea or if that was the only way she could cope with it. Laura answered her unspoken question.

"I think what Bill held back is the fact that the Cylon is pregnant."

Kara slowly nodded. Laura's thoughts echoed her own.

"I guess we'll find out soon enough."

"Yes, Bill is going to call me as soon as he knows something."

"Does Lee know about any of this yet?"

Laura shook her head. "I don't know. I doubt it unless Major Parker called him. Bill took the major with him."

"I'm going to call Lee," Kara said.

"Assuming one of the children is Hunter's, how can he help plan the attack on Nereid and care for a baby, too?"

Kara realized that for once, she was probably thinking more clearly than Laura.

"What don't we go talk to Maya about that?"

"That's a very good idea. We've got plenty of room and plenty of help here at Marble House. Hunter has done so much for us. Caring for his child is the least we can do for him."

Kara grinned for the first time. "Something tells me Maya wouldn't have it any other way."

Then she did something she'd never done before of her own volition. She hugged her stepmother. She knew there was no way she could begin to understand what Laura was going through right now, but Laura loved her dad and the next weeks and months were going to be tough on her. Laura deserved her support.

…

As Lee walked back into the bedroom after taking a shower, his mobile phone chirped.

"Hi," he said, his feelings of apprehension clear in his voice. "You aren't usually up at this hour. Is something wrong?"

"My dad's home," Kara said.

"What?"

"Your dad called Laura early this morning. My dad jumped a Cylon Heavy Raider into space over the ice planet. The _Galactica_ intercepted. Now they're back over Caprica and your dad is on his way up there."

Lee was too stunned for words.

"Did you hear me?" Kara asked after a long silence.

"I heard you. I just…how do you think John pulled off something like that?"

"He obviously had Cylon help just like he did that day he came to the valley. He brought two women back with him. One of them is a Three."

Lee didn't say anything. All he could think about was the scriptural prophecy Leoben had shown to Kara. He knew Kara would now think it was coming true.

"Are you still there?" Kara asked.

"I'm here."

"Something else. Besides the two women, he brought two babies. We think one of them is Hunter's little girl."

"That complicates things."

"Maya will help take care of her. Unless you and Hunter want to do it."

"How can we do that and go to work every day?"

"Exactly. Look, I'll call you as soon as I know anything more or you can call me if you hear from Major Parker."

"Should I say anything to Hunter since we don't know for sure about his kid?"

"That's your decision."

"What are you going to do today?"

"I'm going to call in sick. They can do without me for one day. I'm not scheduled to fly anyway."

"Hunter and I will go into the office. We're helping Major Parker conduct a seminar this morning with some of the Marines. Of course you said Major Parker went with my dad. It might be cancelled."

"Or you could conduct it."

"I could. I did the agenda for it. It's a basic orientation to Nereid similar to the presentation Laura gave to the Quorum. We're doing morning and afternoon seminars for the Marine leaders every day this week."

"I'll call you the minute I hear anything."

"I love you, Kara. I'm really glad John's home."

"Me, too. I love you."

Lee dressed quickly and put his phone in his uniform pocket. He found Hunter in the kitchen eating cereal and reading over a report.

"My part of the seminar this morning," Hunter said as he glanced up.

"I just talked to Kara. Major Parker and my dad are on the _Galactica_ right now. Parker won't be here for the training seminar. I think we're going to have to conduct it. John jumped a Heavy Raider into space over the ice planet. They went to talk to him."

Hunter put the report down and looked up. "Kara's father escaped from Nereid?"

"That's what it looks like. He brought two women and two babies with him. My dad thinks one of them might be your daughter."

For a few moments there was no reaction and then Hunter took a deep breath.

"What made him think that?"

"One of the women told him that the baby's father was on Caprica. Who else on Caprica could have a baby on Nereid?"

"How can we find out?"

"My dad is supposed to call Laura later this morning. Kara's not going to the base. She's staying at Marble House with Laura. She'll call me as soon as she knows something."

Suddenly the reality of the situation seemed to dawn on Hunter. "What am I going to do? I can't take care of Esmari and…and help plan the attack on the Cylons."

Lee smiled. "I think Laura and Maya will see to it that she's taken care of."

"I couldn't ask them to…"

"Yes, you can. Look at all you're doing for the Colonies."

"But…"

"Eat your cereal, Hunter, or we'll be late for work."

"Esmari won't even remember me," he said glumly.

"I'm sure it won't take long for you to get reacquainted."

"Who were the two women Major Gallagher brought with him? Was one of them Esmari's grandmother?"

"I don't know. All Kara knew was that one was a human and one was a Cylon."

"A Three?"

"You don't need to say what's on your mind. It's on Kara's, too."

"Is she pregnant?" Hunter asked.

"My dad didn't know or he didn't say."

"You mean you didn't discuss the peacemaker prophecy with him?"

Lee hoped the look he gave Hunter was answer enough.

_…_

The voices at his bedside, though soft, woke John. He opened his eyes. He was in one of Sick Bay's few small private rooms.

Bill Adama was talking to Cottle and another man, a slim officer about Bill's height with the collar pins of a major. Cottle was talking.

"I found no evidence of inter-cranial bleeding on the MRI, but he was knocked out and according to the Cylon, he lost consciousness several time while they were in the airlock so he suffered a moderately severe concussion."

The major glanced at John. "He's awake."

Bill turned. There was more silver at his temples than John remembered and he looked older. Then his mouth turned up in a smile.

"Hello, John. Welcome home."

John tried to sit up but a wave of dizziness swept him. He grabbed for the rails of the bed and lowered himself carefully.

"Easy," Cottle said. He made an adjustment at the foot of the bed and the head came up slowly until it was a quarter of the way up. "Better?"

Without raising his head John reached out his hand. Bill took it and they shook. He asked, "How's the head?"

"Apparently it's harder than the butt of a rifle."

"This is Major Brandon Parker. He's Lee's CO. I don't believe you two have met. Major Parker is working for me now."

The two officers nodded at each other. "Lee's mentioned you," John said. "He thinks very highly of you."

"I think very highly of Lee, too."

"Do you feel like telling us what happened?" Bill asked.

John managed a smile. "Starting when?"

"Tell us about the incident with Commander Cain. We've heard her side of it. We'd like yours."

"Just start with when you got out of the Heavy Raider," Parker added.

John tried to remember everything that had transpired, but his only clear memory now was of seeing the Marines with their rifles raised and thinking of a firing squad. The next thing he remembered was Saul Tigh standing in front of him and D'Anna in the airlock. He told them everything he could.

"Sorry," he finally said. "I guess you'll have to ask D'Anna what happened." He looked over at Cottle. "Is she all right?"

"I checked her. Her blood pressure is high, but not in the danger zone…yet. Her main concern was you."

"Is she still in the brig?"

Bill said, "She's fine where she is until we get her back to Caprica…get you _both_ back to Caprica."

"If you take them today," Cottle said, "then Major Gallagher needs to go to the hospital. With the kind of head trauma he suffered, he should be observed overnight. I'm less worried about the immediate needs of the Cylon, but she should be evaluated by an obstetrician who specializes in high-risk pregnancies."

"Is John all right to talk to us for a while?" Bill asked.

"I'll give you an hour," Cottle said. "Then he needs to rest."

"How about a drink?" John asked.

"Nothing alcoholic," Cottle replied and lit a cigarette. "You can have anything else you'd like."

"Anything cold with ice would be fine."

Cottle said, "I'll get something," and left the room.

John asked. "Is there any chance I could talk to Laura…just for a minute?"

Bill and Major Parker exchanged a look.

"Let me see what I can do," Bill said.

"Is she doing okay?"

"She's fine. I talked to her early this morning. I owe her an update."

"Kara and Braedon?"

"Both fine."

John closed his eyes momentarily. "Good."

"I'll try to work out something so you'll get to see them all soon."

John said. "I've got something I'd like to say to Commander Cain…with you present…both of you. I guess Major Parker has top-level security clearance."

Bill gave a soft chuckle. "His is probably higher than mine."

John took a deep breath. "What I've got to say to Cain involves her sister."

There was another exchange of glances between Parker and Adama.

Bill said, "Right now Commander Cain is confined to quarters. I've relieved her of her command of the _Galactica_ pending a full investigation into what happened in that landing bay this morning. She'll be sitting at a desk back on Caprica until then. I'm giving Saul Tigh temporary command of the ship."

Cottle walked back in with a big plastic glass filled with water and ice. John drank. It was so cold it made his headache worse, but he was thirsty.

When Cottle made no move to leave, Parker said, "Could you give us a few minutes of privacy?"

Cottle nodded, but before he walked out of the room, he said, "Go easy on the major. He's still my patient."

Parker closed the door of the small room before he turned and spoke. "During your daughter's debriefing she told us that Lucy Cain had been taken to Nereid and had become one of the creators of the skinjobs. Is that what you want to discuss with Commander Cain?"

"That's what I want to tell her. She was so damned ready to kill a pregnant Cylon, I want her to know her sister helped create a few of them."

"I'm afraid we can't let you do that," Bill said, "since the only proof you have is the word of another Cylon or someone who thinks he's a Cylon…the lost seventh model if I remember correctly."

"I have more proof than the word of a Cylon. Before Lucy was killed, she created an avatar of herself and loaded it into a centurion. I…stumbled on that centurion in the city and later found a way to communicate with it. I've heard a lot of Lucy's story."

Even as he was saying the words, though, John realized how crazy they sounded. His notion was confirmed when Bill and Major Parker glanced at each other again. He couldn't imagine what they were thinking. Were they attributing it to his head wound or to whatever had happened to him on the planet? Or did they think he'd simply lost touch with reality. It became very important to John that they believe him.

"Look, I know it sounds crazy," he said. "But I think I can prove it if you'll just let me talk to Commander Cain. Five minutes. That's all I want."

Parker said, "We may never get another chance when Major Gallagher and Commander Cain are in such close proximity."

Bill asked, "Can you do it without making any mention of Lucy Cain being a creator?"

"You mean like get Cain to verify something trivial Lucy told me that I would have absolutely no way of knowing otherwise?"

"I think that would work."

Bill left the room. There was an awkward silence until Parker said, "You realize we've got weeks of debriefing ahead of us."

"I know," John said. "I wouldn't expect anything less. I guess you've met Hunter."

"I'm well acquainted with Hunter. He's a remarkable young man."

"I guess my daughter told you all about the month she spent with Hunter's people."

Parker nodded.

"Are Kara and Lee…are they okay?"

"As far as I know. I saw Braedon. A few days after Kara got back, your wife was kind enough to have all of us to Marble House for lunch. He looks a great deal like you. He's a bright, happy little boy."

John nodded. Just thinking about his son brought tears to his eyes. "I've missed them all…so much."

"I can only imagine," Parker said sympathetically.

There was another silence. John closed his eyes and pictured the year-old boy he had left last November…hardly more than a baby. He knew Brae had grown. Now he wanted to see him so much he felt the familiar ache start in his chest.

"I have a son," Parker said. "He's almost ten. And a daughter who's five and a half. I passed up a promotion to stay here in Caprica City rather than go to Sovana and be separated from my family."

"It kept me alive," John said softly. "When I was in their prison, thinking about my wife and my kids kept me alive."

Before Parker could answer, the door opened and Bill entered. Helena Cain was behind him. John caught a glimpse of a Marine outside and then Bill closed the door. He didn't know if the Marine was there for Cain or for him.

Parker stepped back and let Bill and Cain approach the bed. Cain stood stiffly, her eyes locked on a point on the wall above his head.

"John has some news about your sister Lucy," Bill said.

Cain's voice dripped cold contempt. "If you think for one minute that I'm going to believe _anything_ that Cylon collaborator has to say, you're sadly mistaken, _sir_."

"The Cylons took Lucy to Nereid from Tauron at the end of the First War…" John started.

Cain didn't let him get any farther. "That information is common knowledge. Not where they took her, but when they took her."

"She was alive until six and a half years ago. The same Cavil who led the Cylon force to destroy the Colonies had her killed. She left an avatar of herself. I spoke with her quite a few times recently."

John had never seen such cold hatred in anyone's eyes before. She was actually trembling with it. "Liar," she hissed before she turned to the admiral. "Request permission to leave, _sir_. I will not be subjected to any more of this man's lies. He's clearly a Cylon agent. They turned him. If you think they didn't, then you're kidding yourself. He attacked me. He wanted to kill me over a Cylon whore who's pregnant with his child."

John said softly, "A couple of nights ago Lucy told me about the blue dress your mother bought her when she was six. She told me she wore the dress to a birthday party for a kid who lived down the street. It rained and she got soaked running home and the dress was ruined. She said she cried and you told her that when you were grown up you'd buy her another blue dress just like it. She said one of the things she hated about the Cylons taking her was that she never got that blue dress from the sister she loved."

Cain's body stiffened and John thought for a moment that she was going to launch herself at him. Bill must have thought so, too, because he stepped between Cain and the bed.

"Is that story true?" Bill asked her. After many long moments without an answer from Cain, he asked again. "Is it true?"

"Yes," Cain choked. "It's true."

"That will be all," Bill said. "You're dismissed."

Cain fled the room and Parker shut the door. "I think that's enough drama for today."

"I really wanted to tell her that her sister worked with the Cylons," John said. "She helped create the Sevens and Eights."

"I think you've given her enough information that she'll be able to figure it out," Bill said. "I'm going to see if I can get a call through to Laura. We'll be back shortly."

He and Major Parker left the room. As the door shut, John again saw the Marine. That answered his question about who the guard was for.

He shifted in the bed trying to get comfortable. He finally found a position that didn't hurt his head and closed his eyes. Cain might be as cold-blooded as a snake, but she had a soft spot, one weakness that made her seem almost human and that weakness was named Lucy.

_…_

Laura sat at her desk looking at the report in front of her without seeing it. Nearly four hours had passed since she'd talked to Bill. She wondered why he hadn't called her. She wondered if something was wrong. She let all her fears get away with her until she finally called and asked her secretary to bring her some tea.

As soon as she'd gotten downstairs that morning she'd called Scott Mickelson, her Vice President, and told him what little she knew. She asked him to take her place at the Monday morning Quorum meeting. She said to tell them only that something personal had come up.

"Would you like for me to have a sandwich sent up to have with your tea?"

Laura shook her head. "I'm not hungry."

She had just put down the phone when her private line rang. She could tell from the static that it was a ship-to-shore call.

"Bill?"

"Hello, Laura. This is a scrambled line so it might not be as clear."

"I understand. How is John?"

"He has a concussion and…"

"A concussion?"

"I'll explain later. Doc Cottle doesn't want to release him until tomorrow."

"Other than that, how is he?"

"Cottle said he's in remarkably good physical condition all things considered. His weight is down but not drastically. Other than that I can't say. Major Parker and I have only talked briefly. John is…he seems almost too normal for someone who's been through what we think he has. We still don't have any idea exactly what we're dealing with."

Laura took a deep breath. "How is the Cylon?"

"Cottle says her blood pressure is high but not critical. We're leaving her in the brig for now."

"She's pregnant, isn't she?"

Bill hesitated and finally said, "Yes. Cottle says about four months."

"John's child?"

"Yes."

"At least _I know_ what I'm dealing with now. What are you going to do with her?"

"Bring her back to Caprica."

"Interrogate her?"

"She'll definitely undergo an interrogation."

"And John?"

"He'll be debriefed. It'll take a while considering how long he's been away."

"When can I see him?"

There was a long hesitation. "I'm not sure that's a good idea right now."

"Bill, he's my husband."

"Laura," he said gently, "I told you this morning that John was under the control of the enemy for the better part of a year. We have to make sure he's no danger to himself…or anyone else."

"You think John would try to _hurt me_?" She asked incredulously.

"You're the President of the Colonies. I'm not going to take any chances."

"John is the…the kindest, gentlest man I know. He would never... I want to see him, please."

"I'll try to work it out, but it won't be right away."

"Can I at least talk to him?"

"I'll arrange it later today. Doc Cottle is insisting that John get some rest."

"I'll be here, Bill. I'll be right here. Do you have any news about the two babies?"

"We spoke with the other woman that John brought with him. She's a pediatrician. One of the babies is definitely Hunter's child. The other one is mixed, the daughter of a human mother and a Two. The mother is dead. There's more involved but we didn't want to start debriefing her on the _G_ without the proper recording equipment. They'd all been up all night. She's exhausted. Cottle's insisting that she get some rest, too."

"Are you coming back today?"

"Yes. We're letting Cottle keep John overnight. I'll go back and get him tomorrow."

"Will you come over tonight and talk to me?"

He hesitated. "Yes."

"And you'll arrange for me to talk to John today?"

"Yes. You'll hear from me."

Bill broke the connection.

Laura put down the phone. At least she knew for sure now. She could start dealing with it.

_…_

Late in the afternoon Cottle allowed Bianca to visit John. She came in with Esmari in her arms. As soon as the child saw John, she reached for him.

"We'll be going to Caprica tomorrow," John said. "Doc Cottle is going to release me…I don't mean let me go. I mean release me to the military."

"Does that include D'Anna?"

"Yes. You, too. D'Anna and I will go into some kind of custody, probably the brig. I don't know what they'll do with you and the babies."

"Major Parker talked to me earlier," Bianca said. "He said I would be taken to an apartment and then I would tell them how I arrived on Nereid and answer a lot of questions. He also said I could keep the children with me." She smiled. "I asked him how much time he thought I could spend on his questions while I cared for two children. I also told him that Esmari's father would probably want her with him. He's going to see what kind of arrangements can be worked out. I'd like to keep Rachel with me. I was allowed to go see D'Anna. She's doing as well as can be expected. She was more concerned about you than anything. She can't understand how your own people could harm you like they did."

"I lost my cool with Commander Cain, but I couldn't stand by and let her airlock D'Anna."

"Why didn't you tell us, John, that the Cylons were no longer in control of Caprica?"

"I didn't know for sure until I saw my daughter in the valley a couple of months ago. By then I'd told the other story so many times I think I'd started believing it myself."

"How did you get to Nereid?"

He told her the truth this time.

Bianca stared at him as if not quite comprehending. "I don't know a thing about your military ships, but how in the gods' names did you think you'd survive jumping your ship near explosives?"

"I didn't. It was either that or let that basestar launch eight hundred Raiders and then go on to destroy Caprica. My daughter was in a Viper. My wife and son were on Caprica. I thought it was a fair exchange. My life for all of theirs."

"Dr. Cottle also told me you're married to the President."

"For now," he said sadly. "She might have other ideas after she finds out about…everything I did on Nereid."

The door opened and Bill walked in with a large mobile phone. He handed it to John and said, "Your wife."

Bill and Bianca left, closing the door behind them.

John took a couple of deep breaths before he put the phone to his ear. "Hi," he said and realized that his eyes were filling with tears.

There was static on the line but not so much that he couldn't hear.

"Oh, John," Laura said before she choked up. "Bill told me you'd been hurt."

"Not bad," he managed, and then it got easier to speak. "I'm all right," he repeated, willing himself to believe it even as he tried to convince her.

"I thought we'd have to rescue you."

"So did I. I had a lot of help getting away."

"You've told Bill?"

"Not yet, but I will. I plan to tell them everything. My debriefing is going to take a long time."

"I know, but Bill also said he'd let me see you."

"I want to see you, too, Laura. I want to see Kara and Brae, too. And Lee. And everybody."

"I'd like to meet the doctor you brought back with you…and the Cylon."

"About that…"

"I know she's pregnant. I know you told Commander Cain it's your child. Is that true?"

He took a breath. "It's true. I don't expect you to understand or forgive me, but I can't turn my back on her."

"Do you think that's what I would expect you to do?"

"I haven't…I don't know…I thought…I don't know what I thought. I don't want to discuss something this personal over the phone. I need to see you, Laura. I need to sit down with you and talk, face to face. I hope Bill will let us."

There was the tiniest hint of mirth in Laura's voice. "Have you forgotten who Bill ultimately answers to? Does _Commander in Chief_ ring a bell? I think he and I will be able to work something out."

She had no sooner said the words than the door opened and Bill stuck his head in. John nodded and Bill closed the door.

"He's calling time on me. I love you, Laura. I'll see you soon."

"I love you, too, John."

The door opened. John handed the phone to Bill. "Thank you."

Bill nodded. "Major Parker and I are going back to Caprica tonight. We're taking Commander Cain with us. I'll be back around noon tomorrow to get you when Cottle releases you. The…others are staying on board tonight while we make arrangements for their lodging on Caprica. We'll all go together tomorrow. I think Dr. Cardenas would be more comfortable with you along. I know the Cylon would."

"Her name's D'Anna," John said, "just like the reporter here on Caprica, only they're about as different as night and day."

Bill gave him a look that John found hard to interpret…something between disgust and pity.

"Get some rest tonight. I'm glad you made it back."

When Bill was gone, John lay back and tried to get comfortable. The lidocaine had worn off and the back of his head was throbbing. He managed to find a place on his side that was tolerable. He thought that sleeping was out of the question with all the thoughts that were spinning through his head, but the hiss of the air in the vents was soothing. Sleep came easier that he thought it would.

_…_

Kara sat on the floor in front of the couch in Braedon's sitting room. Maya had gone into her bedroom to work on a paper for her education class. Kara was half-heartedly playing with her brother. Brae kept bringing toys to her and placing them around her. She absentmindedly picked up a Raptor.

"Dada," Braedon said.

"Your Dada is home. He's on a battlestar right now," Kara said glumly. "He's on the _Galactica_ and I can't see him or talk to him."

Braedon went over to the table and pointed to John's picture. "Dada."

"Yes, that's your dada." Then she brightened. "How would you like another baby here to play with? How about a little girl named Esmari? Can you say _Esmari_?"

Kara said the name several more times and Braedon finally managed to say, "Mawi."

"That's pretty good. Esmari is Hunter's little girl."

Braedon looked toward the door. "Hunta."

"Hunter and Lee will be here later."

Braedon went back and pointed to the picture. "Dada. Here."

The door opened and Laura walked in. Kara looked up expectantly and Braedon ran over to her. She picked up her son and kissed his chubby little cheek before she sat on the couch and he slid off her lap and went back to his toys.

"I talked to your father," she said to Kara.

"I figured Admiral Adama would work out something for you. How is he?"

Briefly Laura told Kara what had happened when John had confronted Commander Cain.

"That bitch," Kara said angrily. "I hope Admiral Adama kicks her butt out of the service."

"Bill has temporarily relieved her of command. Whether it becomes permanent or not remains to be seen. I imagine some sort of due process will be involved."

"Who's running the show on the _G_ now?"

"Colonel Tigh."

Kara said sarcastically, "I'm sure that's a big improvement. I hope Admiral Adama thought to load his Raptor with booze. Tigh will need it."

"Saul Tigh saved your father's life. His and the Cylon's."

Kara took a deep breath. "I'll bet my dad hates owing him that much. I sure do."

"I think you're being a bit hard on the colonel," Laura said. "He has no love for the Cylons and yet he put his rank and probably his life on the line in order to do the right thing. I owe him. We both owe him."

"How did Dad sound?"

"Surprisingly like himself. We were on a scrambled line and there was a lot of static."

"Did he mention the Cylon?"

"I brought her up. I don't know if he would have said anything if I hadn't mentioned her first."

"What did he say?"

"He admitted she's pregnant and that the child is his."

"Did he say anything about the prophecy?"

"He said we needed to talk face to face. I imagine it will come up then."

"What are you going to do about her?" Kara asked.

"I'm going to make sure that she's well treated. Beyond that I don't know. Dr. Cottle said she needed to be evaluated by a specialist."

"Do you want me to call Sharon and find out her doctor's name?"

"Later."

"I expected you to be more upset about it."

Braedon crawled onto the sofa and onto Laura's lap. He had one of his stuffed toys and was showing her that its ear had gotten dirty.

Laura absently took the toy and said, "Maybe it hasn't really hit me yet. Maybe I'm reserving my reaction until I find out what John wants to do…until I find out if he's got…feelings for her."

Kara didn't comment. Laura was probably making a wise choice. Wait and see how her father felt about the Cylon and their baby. Wait and see if he knew about the prophecy.

"Maya wants to take care of Hunter's little girl," Kara said. "She's almost through with her spring semester. She's not going to go to summer school. She said it would be no problem. Braedon's bedroom is huge. There's plenty of room to put another crib in there."

"We'll talk to Hunter when he and Lee get here this evening. I don't want to commandeer his child."

"I talked to Lee at lunch. All you'll have to do is convince Hunter that it won't be an imposition."

_…_

John lay in his one comfortable position until an orderly brought his dinner tray. The man raised the head of the bed and put the tray on a rolling platform that extended over the bed. As he was leaving, Cottle walked in and sat down in the only chair in the room. He didn't ask John if he could smoke. He just lit a cigarette.

"Do you still smoke?" Cottle asked.

John stirred the mashed potatoes and gravy. "I gave it up when Laura and I started dating."

"I've made the effort a couple of times. It never lasted."

"Same here. Until Laura. Then our son was born and I knew I'd kicked it for good."

"The planet…Nereid, Bill called it. Was there any tobacco there?"

"Not that I saw. Some of them grew weed. A few of the Twos and Threes use it in their religious ceremonies. I know it was grown just outside the city because I talked to a kid who helped them grow it. I actually sat in the city square and shared a joint with him one afternoon."

Cottle chuckled. "Their drug laws must be slacker than ours."

"They don't have any drug laws because they don't have any drugs…except the weed, of course, and they limit who has access to it. I heard it was grown in their largest settlement, too. You can ask Bianca, but I think all kinds of addictions went by the wayside after the humans were taken to Nereid. Only bad thing is they didn't have much in the way of medications either. Bianca told me that she worked with an herbalist creating what they could."

Cottle had been nodding and slowly smoking his cigarette. "That's how our pharmaceutical industry started hundreds of years ago…from herbs and other natural ingredients. She sounds like a resourceful woman, your Dr. Cardenas."

John grinned. "She's not mine, Doc. She's married. Very devoted to her husband."

Cottle colored slightly. John smiled. For once he had flustered the gruff and usually unflappable medical officer.

"Is there a Mrs. Cottle?"

"Not for a lot of years."

"Kids?"

"No."

"The crew of this battlestar are your kids?"

Cottle snorted but didn't answer.

"I met a woman in a valley on the planet that I'd like to introduce you to…Hunter's aunt. She's a medicine woman. I think you'd like her. She's also very attractive."

Cottle took a drag on the cigarette but again said nothing. He finally asked, "What are you going to do about the Cylon?"

John pushed the half-eaten meal tray away. "She's got a name. D'Anna. I don't know that I'll be allowed to do anything."

Cottle inhaled another long drag on the cigarette. "Let me put it this way, if you could do anything, what would you do?"

"Figure out a way to take care of her and the child."

"Do you want to keep your current family?"

"Of course. I just…it wouldn't be right to turn my back on D'Anna now. There's some circumstances…" He took a deep breath as he thought of the prophecy. "It's too involved to get into now. I'm too tired to talk about it."

Cottle took John's remark as a hint to leave. He stood, took a bottle of pills out of his pocket and gave two of them to John. "For your headache," he said as he took the tray. At the door he turned and said. "I don't envy you the situation you're in, but you can't do anything about it tonight. Take those pills. Get a good night's sleep. The fun for you starts tomorrow."

_…_

Kara could see the fatigue in Lee's face the minute he walked in. It made her feel guilty about calling in sick and goofing off all day. Hunter looked tired, too.

She got up from the couch, walked over to him and put her arms around him. They stood in the embrace for a long time until Kara pulled back and ruffled the hair on his forehead.

"Are you letting your hair grow or have you just been too busy to get it cut?"

"I've been too busy."

She smiled. "Just don't let it get too long."

Braedon had run over to Hunter who picked him up and walked over to Kara and Lee. "Major Parker called me at lunch today. They've got Esmari on the _Galactica_. They're bringing her down here tomorrow."

Kara said, "Laura told me."

"Where is Laura?" Lee asked.

"She went to her bedroom to change clothes. I'll go get Maya. Then we can talk."

Braedon held up his toy Raptor and said, "Dada home."

"That's right," Hunter said.

"I know Dad can't wait to see him."

"I'm sure he can't wait to see all of you," Lee said.

Laura came in and they settled on the couch and chairs. Hunter was on the floor with Braedon. Laura said to Hunter.

"Bill is bringing your daughter here tomorrow."

"Major Parker called me at lunch today. He said it would be fine for me to take the day off and do whatever I needed to do."

"We'd like for you to consider letting Esmari stay here," Laura said.

"Braedon is in playschool all morning," Maya said. "I can easily take care of Esmari and him both. When I worked for Sarah Porter, I took care of her two and they were a real handful."

Kara smiled and nudged Hunter with her toe. "Just say _yes_. You'll avoid a lot of headaches."

"You'll get to see her every evening," Laura said. "If you'd like, we'll give you your own room here at Marble House."

"He can have mine," Kara said. "I'll move in with Lee."

Laura gave her an indulgent look and said, "Somehow I doubt your father would approve."

"I'm okay staying where I am," Hunter said. "I'd just like to spend as much time in the evening as I can with Esmari."

"Of course," Laura answered. "Tomorrow I'll have another crib brought in and put in Braedon's room."

Hunter looked up at Maya. "You're sure."

Her smile was full of feeling. "Absolutely."

"Then it's settled," Laura said.

There was a knock on the door and Bill walked in. Laura slid over on the couch and made room for him. She had a hundred questions but they would have to wait.

Bill didn't waste any time on pleasantries. "We plan to have John and the others back on Caprica by early afternoon tomorrow."

"I'd like to be there," Kara said. "Please."

"I'm going to arrange for you and Laura both to see him, but for security purposes, we aren't going to allow anyone on the airfield when that Raptor touches down."

Laura said, "We'd like to keep this as quiet as possible for as long as we can. I don't want to turn our personal lives into a media circus, especially so soon after announcing our plans to invade Nereid. You can imagine what kind of field day the press would have with the news of John's return. I've got to think long and hard about how I'm going to announce it or even if I'm going to make a public announcement."

Lee said, "Too many people know it. It's bound to get out. Personally I think it would be better coming from you than from someone else."

"Lee's right," Bill said. "We might sit on this for a couple of days, but not forever."

"I'm thinking of John," Laura said. "He's basically a very private person. He wasn't raised dealing with the media like I was."

"I said we couldn't keep the news of John's homecoming quiet," Bill said. "I didn't say we couldn't keep John away from the press. He'll be our guest out at the base for a while and then he'll be moved to a safe house such as Kara and Hunter occupied when they got back."

"We were questioned for over a week," Kara said, "and I was only gone a month."

"Then that should give you a rough idea of how long John will be our guest."

Laura gasped. "You can't mean you'll keep him a prisoner for seven or eight weeks."

"There's one thing I want all of you to understand," Bill said wearily. "We don't know what we're dealing with. It could be exactly what it looks like or it could be something entirely different."

"What do you mean _something entirely different_?" Kara asked, emotion rising in her voice. Lee put his hand on her arm in a calming gesture that had no effect on her.

"Kara," Bill said gently, "your father has been under Cylon control for over eight months. We've got to make sure he hasn't fallen victim to a syndrome in which he begins to identify with his captors. I believe Major Parker called it Knossos Syndrome."

She stood. "Are you saying my father might have turned? Are you calling him a traitor?"

Laura said, "No, that's not what he's saying…is it, Bill?"

"What I'm saying is that we can't afford to take any chances. John was privy to a large number of military secrets as well as a lot of governmental ones. We need to know how much of that information is now in enemy hands."

"None of it," Kara said.

"Please be reasonable," Laura pleaded.

Kara turned on her. "Do _you_ think he spilled his guts?" She asked.

"My heart tells me no, but we've got to do like Bill says and at least consider the possibility. After all, he did bring a pregnant Cylon home with him."

Kara's voice rose. "So _that_ makes him a traitor? He didn't do it because he was _hot_ for her. They drugged him. You of all people should know that. You know how he felt about D'Anna Biers. He could barely stand being around her."

Laura winced and Kara was immediately sorry for what she had said, but she was telling the truth and they all knew it.

Lee stood and put his arm around Kara. "We all love John," he said. "None of us wants to believe anything bad about him, but my father is right in that John will have to undergo a lengthy debriefing and thorough physical and psychological evaluations. Only when we know everything he was subjected to on Nereid can we start to determine what his state of mind is now."

Kara pulled away from him. "I'm going to my room. I'm not hungry so you all go ahead and eat without me and talk about how you think my father is a traitor and while you're judging him for what he did with the Cylon, just remember how he got me and Hunter to the Raider and how he saved the lives of everybody on Caprica when he went back to that basestar and blew it up."

She stalked out of the room.

"Oh, dear gods," Laura said. "She seemed so reasonable when we talked earlier."

"I'll go after her," Lee said.

"No," Hunter's voice was soft but his tone was commanding. "Let her be. You'll only make it worse. She's got to work through this on her own. There's a part of her that knows Admiral Adama is right, but she's listening to her heart right now and her heart is fiercely loyal to her father. She's not going to listen to you…not yet."

"I think we should go in to dinner," Laura said calmly. "Lee, you and Hunter can tell us about the seminars you conducted today. I'll have a tray sent to Kara's room."

Her message was abundantly clear. They would not talk about this painful subject at dinner. Hunter stood and picked up Braedon. He still had the toy Raptor in his hand. When Maya tried to take it, he said, "No. Dada home."

Laura looked at her son. At that moment she wanted nothing so much as to see Braedon in his father's arms.

_…_

Doc Cottle had put a waterproof bandage on John's head so he could shower and wash at least part of his hair. He shaved and dressed in a pair of fatigue pants and an olive-gray t-shirt that had been sent up from the ship's store.

When he left the room, four Marines were waiting. Two walked in front of him and two fell in behind him. He didn't complain. It was better than being shackled which is what he had expected. They escorted him to the hangar deck where a Raptor was waiting. Bill stood outside along with the pilot and ECO.

Dwight Saunders and Karl Agathon both smiled as soon as they saw him, but neither made a move with Bill standing there. For the first time in days John thought of Lucas Agathon.

"Gentlemen. It's been a long time."

"We both volunteered to come get you, sir," Karl said.

"I hear you've become a husband since I saw you last."

Karl's grin was enormous. "Yes, sir. And a father, too. We have a little girl. Hera."

"Congratulations. Who does she look like?"

"She looks just like Sharon."

"How are you, Lieutenant Saunders?"

"Fine, sir. Is Narcho doing okay?"

Bill gave him a look, but John answered anyway. "Last time I saw him he was fine. He's got a beard now. He looks like a younger version of Hunter's uncles. I guess you've met Hunter."

"Yes, sir."

"That's enough small talk," Bill said. "Get on board and start prepping for takeoff."

The two young pilots obeyed instantly. John glanced around and saw Bianca being escorted by two Marines. She was carrying Rachel. Cottle was beside her with Esmari who was fretting and squirming. When they reached the Raptor, Bill motioned for one of the Marines to help Bianca on board. When Cottle got to them, Esmari reached for John and he took her. He kissed her cheek and talked to her for a minute and she quieted. The second Marine took the big diaper bag on board.

One of the Marines produced a pair of shackles.

"We won't need those," Bill said.

"Are you sure, sir?" The Marine asked.

Bill looked at John with the child in his arms and said, "I'm sure."

Cottle shook his hand. "Good luck, Major Gallagher." Then he looked at Bill. "Somebody will have to take those stitches out in a couple of days."

"We'll make sure John gets good medical care."

"Thanks for everything you did for me," John said to Cottle who took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one before heading out of the hangar bay.

Bill motioned for John to get on board and then followed him up the ramp into the Raptor. He asked Karl to sit in the copilot's seat and he sat in the ECO chair. John and Bianca sat opposite each other in the jump seats. D'Anna was already on board and had been shackled to her seat.

John looked at her and said, "Hang in there. This won't be a long trip."

Ten minutes later an elevator lifted the Raptor into the starboard launch bay. As they cleared the ship, John saw Caprica through the windscreen. Something stirred deep inside him as he looked at the beautiful blue-green planet. The trip through the atmosphere down to the surface took barely twenty minutes, just long enough for Esmari to fall asleep on his shoulder.

Saunders sat the Raptor down at a remote part of the airfield. There were several jeeps and a dozen Marines there to meet them. Bill helped Bianca down the ramp first. John followed and saw Hunter standing with the Marines.

"Esmari's father," he said softly to Bianca as Hunter approached them. John turned so that Hunter could see his daughter's face. Hunter reached out and touched her hair. The two men looked at each other. John understood that even the strongest and toughest of men would find tears in his eyes when he looked at the child he hadn't seen for months.

"She's grown," Hunter said softly.

"You've got a sweet, beautiful little girl," John said as he carefully transferred Esmari to her father's arms. They managed to do it without waking her.

For a long time all Hunter could do was look at his daughter and then he asked, "Any news from the valley?"

"Seléne is dead. Leukemia. Everybody else is fine."

John introduced Bianca to Hunter. Then he very briefly told Hunter about how Esmari had come to be in their care. Bill allowed them almost ten minutes to talk before Marines led Hunter and Bianca to a waiting jeep.

Only then was D'Anna brought out of the Raptor. A Marine produced another pair of shackles. John held out his wrists and stood quietly while he was fastened into them. When everything was locked in place, the Marine stood back.

"I'd like two minutes to speak privately with Lieutenant Agathon. Please."

Bill nodded and motioned to Karl. Then he and the Marine withdrew far enough to give John and Karl some privacy.

Karl could barely look at him. "They shouldn't have put those things on you, sir," he said angrily.

"I have some news. I really don't know how to say it except to say it straight out. I met your father on the planet a couple of weeks ago. He was badly wounded in the fighting on Picon. He lost an arm and an eye and he's got some facial scars, but he's alive."

For a few moments Karl stared at him blankly like he hadn't been able to comprehend the words. Then he suddenly took a deep breath and nodded slightly.

"That's not all. He was in the Cylon prison for a couple of years. I don't know everything they did to him, but I know it was bad. He thought he'd lost all of you on Picon. He's married again. I didn't tell him anything about you other than you were okay. I sure as hell didn't mention Sharon. That's going to be up to you."

Karl was still looking stunned. The color had drained from his face.

"Are you okay?" John asked. "Maybe I shouldn't have said anything, but I think you deserve to know. It'll come out in my debriefing."

Karl finally found his voice. "No. I'm glad you told me. I'm…really glad."

Bill called, "We've got others waiting for us, John. We need to go."

Tears came to Karl's eyes. "Thank you, sir."

John shuffled toward Bill and the Marines. One of them had already helped D'Anna into a jeep. He was helped into another one. Bill sat in the front with the driver. They took the long way around so that they skirted the busiest part of the base. John watched in fascination as several Vipers launched in the distance.

"Are those Mark VIIs?" He asked.

Bill nodded.

"Is Kara flying one now?"

He got another nod.

They finally reached a one-story building and were escorted in the back door. John recognized it as the brig.

"This is temporary," Bill said. "We're still working on a more permanent solution for your lodgings, but I thought you'd rather be on Caprica than on the _Galactica_."

"I don't care where you put me. Just please make sure D'Anna gets medical care."

"We have a trained medical tech on duty at all times."

"She needs a specialist. Bianca and Cottle both said so."

"She'll be watched."

"Watching her isn't doing her blood pressure any good. She needs to be evaluated by a specialist."

Bill lost his patience. "Why is she so important to you, John?"

"The child she's carrying is important."

Bill looked disgusted. "So you've bought into that prophecy mumbo jumbo just like your daughter has."

"What do you mean _just like my daughter has_?"

"Kara's been talking to Leoben. He told her about it."

"Did she tell Laura?"

"Of course she did. Kara lives at Marble House with her. She has since she got back from Nereid."

John realized he was going to get nowhere with Bill when it came to D'Anna.

"Forget I said anything. Just take me wherever you're going to put me."

To his surprise he was taken to an interrogation room instead of a cell. A Marine removed the shackles but handcuffed him to a heavy metal ring on the table. John decided that they weren't going to waste any time starting his debriefing. The Marine left and shut the door. He sat and waited at least thirty minutes. The back of his head began itching around the edge of the bandage but he couldn't reach back to scratch it with his hands cuffed to the table.

Suddenly the door opened and Kara walked in.

He smiled at her and said, "Hey, baby."

"Hey, Daddy."

She managed to keep her composure as she sat down in the chair across from him. She pushed her hand across the table and took one of his. He managed to get his other hand around hers. He knew that neither one of them could manage the emotional questions and answers yet.

"You look good. I hear you're learning to fly the Mark VII."

"_Learned_," she retorted. "I've _learned_ to fly it. Just ask your buddy Major Jessups."

"So he's a major now."

"I went by to see him this morning and told him I had something better to do this afternoon than let him chase me all over the sky. He'd heard the news already. He said to tell you that you owed him a drink for all the nice things he said at your memorial service."

"You tell him I'll buy him as many as he can handle if I ever get out of here. Did you and Lee get your trip to Nereid worked out?"

"He and Hunter are temporarily living at yours and Laura's apartment. They come to Marble House every night for dinner. Hunter and Maya have a thing now."

"Are you saying they're romantically involved?"

She gave him one of her _duh_ looks. "Didn't I just say that?"

He squeezed her hand between both of his. "I'm so glad to see you, baby. You don't know how much I've missed you and that smart mouth of yours."

"Don't," she said and fought tears. "I can't handle this yet. I'll start to cry and then…" She brooded for a few moments and then said angrily. "Why did they cuff you to the table?"

"I guess they think I'm suddenly going to activate some secret protocol that was brainwashed into me on Nereid by the Cylons and go berserk or something."

"Laura's going to freak out."

"She's here?" John said in surprise.

"Of course. She's outside." Kara grinned. "She told me to go in first and soften you up."

"Brae?"

"No."

"Good. I want to see my son, but I don't want him to see me chained to a table."

Kara took out her phone and scrolled through the pictures until she found the one she wanted…Braedon sitting on Hunter's shoulders with a huge smile on his face. She held it out for her father to see.

"He's grown," John said echoing Hunter's earlier words.

She gave him another _duh_ look. "That's what babies do."

"He's forgotten me, hasn't he?"

"No. Every night he kisses your picture. Maya started that with him right after…that night. I told him you'd come home. Yesterday he carried his toy Raptor around saying, _Dada home._"

John took a deep breath and struggled with his emotions. The door opened and Bill stuck his head in.

"I've got to go," Kara said. "Admiral Adama is being stingy with your time today. I'll be back to see you as soon as they'll let me. Lee is going to come see you, too." She came around the table, leaned down and put her arms around his neck. "I love you, Daddy. Welcome home."

John nodded. "I love you, too, baby," he whispered.

Kara left and the door closed. He knew who would come through it next and tried to prepare himself. He wished he weren't cuffed to the table so he could stand up and take her in his arms. But he would deal with the humiliation just to see her.

The door opened and Laura stepped inside. She was wearing one of his favorite dresses, blue with short sleeves and a slim skirt that showed her beautiful legs. Her hair fell softly in waves around her shoulders. For a moment he felt like he was dreaming, like he was still in the Cylon prison and dreaming.

Laura could hardly get her breath. She was still angry from the argument she'd just had with Bill about John being handcuffed to the table. She'd done everything she could to prevail upon him to remove the cuffs, but Bill had stood firm. She finally realized that nothing she could say would sway him.

Bill had finally ended the argument by saying, "You're the President of the Colonies and your safety on this base is my responsibility. I'm sure Edgar and your security team would agree with me. Take as long as you want with your husband…within reason."

"Since you have him in an interrogation room, are we being observed?"

"No, but you are being recorded."

"And will our conversation later be analyzed by you and Major Parker?"

"I've put Parker in charge of John's debriefing. That decision will be his. I don't plan to watch it or listen to it. I do respect your desire for some privacy."

Laura had taken a deep breath and looked at the ceiling for a few moments before she had reached for the door. Now she just stood and drank in the sight of her husband. His handsome face was more angular and she saw the faint new scar above his right eyebrow that Kara had mentioned. He'd definitely lost weight, but otherwise he looked exactly like she remembered him.

"Hi," he said, trying to lighten the mood. "Forgive me for not standing. Kara warmed up the chair across from me just for you."

Laura walked over and gently touched his face. He was real. She looked at the bandage on the back of his head.

"How many stitches?"

"A couple."

"Does it hurt?"

"It did. Now it itches. Come on. Sit down in front of me so I can look at you."

Laura sat. John reached out for her hand as far as the short chain would allow. She put both of her hands in his. He could smell the faint sweetness of her perfume. He leaned over and kissed first one of her hands and then the other.

"I'm so sorry," he managed to get out before he had to stop for a few moments.

Laura shook her head. "Please don't apologize to me. I know you suffered terribly at their hands."

"It was bad at first. But later…" he dropped his eyes. The love and trust that was so clear on her face was more than he could take. "Later it was different."

"Look at me, John."

He steeled himself and lifted his eyes. He had never hated himself more than he did at that moment. She was so innocent. She had no idea.

"D'Anna…"

"I know she's pregnant. I know you were drugged. I don't blame you."

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "She only used the drug once and she gave me too much. I passed out and nothing happened. I woke up the next morning feeling like somebody was splitting my skull with an axe. I was shaking so bad I couldn't stir my coffee."

"Then the child isn't yours."

"No. It's mine. What I'm saying is that after that she didn't have to use the drug. I just did what she wanted. I'm so sorry. I don't deserve…"

"Shhhh. Please. You don't need to do this, John."

"No, you're wrong. I do. I can't let you believe I'm still worthy of your love. I've got to tell you the rest of it."

Laura sucked in her breath. "The rest of it?"

"D'Anna wasn't the only one. There was a Six. Sonja. I…me and her…"

Laura could barely speak. "She's pregnant, too?"

"No. She's dead. I mean she's not really dead, but…before she…died, she and I had…I guess you'd call it an affair. I did what she wanted at first because I wanted to get outside and she promised…you see I wanted to see if I could plan an escape. Later I did it because…she saved my life and she took me to the valley and I was able to get Kara and Hunter to the Raider…and then I did it because I wanted to." He looked down and shook his head. "I don't deserve you, Laura. I can't let you go on thinking that I do. Better to put it all on the table up front."

Breathing had become exquisitely painful for her. "Do you love either one of these women?"

He shook his head. "Gods, no. But I do feel responsible for D'Anna. She's not the least bit like the D'Anna you know. She's extremely religious and naïve about most of the rest of life. She's convinced the child she carries has been prophesied by their scriptures. I brought her here because her life was in danger. Hers and the child…and mine…and little Rachel, the other baby we brought here."

"D'Anna thinks she's carrying the peacemaker?" Laura asked.

"Yes."

"Do you believe it?"

"D'Anna says the child is a boy. I don't know how she could know, but that's what she says."

Laura got up and stood by the side of the table. She gently lifted his chin so that he was looking at her. The pain in his eyes almost took her breath.

"Would you like to see Brae?"

"Yes, but not like this. Not while I'm chained to a table."

"I'll work it out with Bill."

"Laura, I'm so sorry."

She leaned down and very gently kissed him on the cheek. "Get some rest tonight and answer all of Major Parker's questions. He's a very nice man. You can trust him."

He nodded and reached for her but the chain stopped him again. She was just out of his reach. "I love you, Laura. I'll always love you."

"We'll work through this, John. The important thing is that you're home. I'll see you again soon. I promise."

She walked out and very gently closed the door behind her. John clenched his fists and put his head down on them and felt the pain of loss. But it was better to start getting used to it now. Laura had heard the truth from him. A lot of men would probably think he was a fool for telling her about Sonja, but he'd done what his conscience had been telling him to do. It was better she heard it from him than read it in D'Anna's debriefing report.

Laura stood in the hall for a moment and regained her composure. Slowly breathing became less painful. Something had clearly happened to John on Nereid and she now felt utterly confused. He had turned what should have been a joyful reunion into a painful one for both of them and he'd done it on purpose. He was pushing her away even as he told her he loved her.

Bill came down the hall. "Are you all right?"

"Where is the Cylon…D'Anna? I'd like to meet her."

"She's in a cell on the women's side of the brig."

"Lead the way."

"Are you sure about this?"

Laura lifted her chin. "I'm absolutely certain. You were right. The man in that room is not the man who left here last November and the Cylon is the only one who can tell me why. She owes me some answers and I intend to get them."

TBC…


	49. Gentleman's Agreement

Chapter 49

Gentleman's Agreement

_Today I boarded the ship _Hyperion_ on a ground-breaking scientific mission to a sector of space where our telescopes have identified a sun much like our own, and physicists have determined through a series of complicated formulas that several planets must orbit that sun. But for me the most exciting aspect of our expedition was shared by Hans Prolmar, our leader. He read us a letter that he received from a Gemenese priest who claims that there is a planet named Eden that was once home to the legendary Thirteenth Tribe who left Kobol ahead of the other twelve. The priest bases his belief on a passage in the last chapter of their scriptures that says, 'The road to the future is also the road to the past'. The priest believes we will find this planet but most of the expedition members do not._

_Dr. Prolmar, who holds a PhD in astrophysics, is not of a mind to believe what he calls 'religious hokem', but there are those few of us who are not so ready to dismiss the idea. I realize that my job on the _Hyperion_ will be the medical care of the expedition members and the crew, but I cannot deny the excitement that rises in me at the thought that after centuries of speculation, I might be involved in discovering the truth about the lost Thirteenth Tribe. _

_Unpublished Manuscript_ (Notes) by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

When Laura walked up to the cell in the brig containing the Cylon that John had brought from Nereid, the woman who was sitting inside looked amazingly like the reporter D'Anna Biers. Yet even through the bars Laura could see some subtle differences. This copy looked younger and more innocent. Her blond hair was pulled back and she had bangs. The reporter who had died in the bunker had never worn bangs or pulled her hair back that Laura could remember.

The other obvious difference was the way this D'Anna's abdomen rounded against the white blouse she was wearing. She'd had to unbutton the lowest button in order to accommodate the child growing within her. John's child. Laura tried to remember how she had looked when she was four months pregnant with Braedon. She was barely showing. A suit jacket had easily covered the slight protrusion. But then D'Anna Biers was a taller, bigger woman. Laura decided that the Cylon's creators must have liked tall women. All three of the female Cylon models were above average height.

D'Anna was sitting cross-legged on the bunk with her upturned wrists resting on her knees and her eyes closed in a pose that Laura recognized from yoga classes she had taken many years earlier. She didn't remember the name of the pose, only that it was one of meditation and relaxation. Her initial reaction was one of surprise that a Cylon would be practicing yoga, and then she wasn't sure why she had felt that way.

Laura stepped up to the bars and said, "Hello, D'Anna."

Slowly the blue eyes opened and took her in. "You're Laura. You're John's wife."

Laura heard the surprise in her own voice. "How do you know?"

"He had your picture in the sleeve pocket of his flight suit when he was brought to the prison. You were wearing that same dress. Your son was sitting on your lap. He's a beautiful little boy. My son will be beautiful, too, mine and John's, but he will have blond hair and blue eyes."

Her comment momentarily threw Laura. She remembered the day the picture was taken. She knew it was one of John's favorites, but she didn't know that he had carried it with him in his flight suit.

D'Anna continued, "I took the picture from John's prison records. I kept it for a while and then I gave it to him because he wanted it. The last time I saw it, he had it in his book of scriptures."

"His book of scriptures?" Laura parroted.

"Yes. He asked for something to read. Sonja gave our scriptures to him."

"While he was in the prison?"

"No. After I brought him to the city. He found great comfort in reading them."

"Are you saying that my husband was comforted by reading the holy book of the monotheists?"

"Yes. God saved him for a reason and he knows it. He nearly died, you know."

"How could I know that?"

"You haven't talked to him? You came to see me before you talked to your husband?"

"I was allowed to see him very briefly. We didn't discuss everything that was done to him while he was your prisoner."

D'Anna gently smoothed the white blouse over her abdomen and smiled. "Among my sisters I alone have been blessed. Our son is very special."

"The peacemaker?"

D'Anna brightened. "You must be a woman of faith if you know about the prophecy. Do you believe?"

"My beliefs aren't your concern," she said coldly. "What you did to my husband is. I want to know everything you did to him."

"I didn't do anything to him. I rescued him from the prison. You can ask Bianca. She said John was near death from pneumonia when I sent for them and brought John to her and her husband. I saved his life."

"Then you drugged him to make him have sex with you."

D'Anna looked at the floor. "He told you that?"

"Yes."

"I did give him the drug," she finally said as she looked up at Laura, "but I didn't understand how to use it. I gave him too much. He passed out and another sister and I had to put him to bed. I'd never seen a naked human before I saw John at the prison."

Laura gritted her teeth. "Why didn't you know how to use the drug?"

D'Anna smoothed her blouse again emphasizing the roundness of the flesh beneath it.

"Because I'd never taken a breeder before…either Cylon or human. John was my first. He forgave me for using the drug on him. Our first time together was very good. He was very gentle with me…just like he was every time after that. He pleased me just like he did Sonja. We fought over him because she seduced him and he was mine. He stopped me from hurting her even though they were together after that. Of course I won in the end. He killed her and Leoben both…right before we left the planet. He did it so we could get away…so he and I can be together. He wants to raise our child with me. He told me so many times."

Laura sucked in her breath. Bill stepped forward and took her arm. "Please don't subject yourself to any more of this."

"Who are you?" D'Anna asked.

"Admiral William Adama."

"Are you Laura's friend?"

"Yes, he is," Laura said, her voice beginning to tremble and crack. "My very good friend."

Bill put his arm around her shoulders. "Let's go. This was a mistake. I should never have let you do it."

She let him lead her away.

Behind them D'Anna called, "Is John all right? When can I see him? He wants to be with me. When can I see the father of my child?"

Laura clenched her jaw. "When Hades freezes over or our sun novas…whichever one comes first." Then she looked at Bill. "Consider that a Presidential order."

She got no argument from him.

...

John sat in the interrogation room with his head down on his clenched fists for fifteen minutes before a Marine opened the door and unlocked the handcuffs.

"Follow me, sir," he said.

In the hall two more Marines fell into step behind them. They walked a short distance and turned left down another hall. A big MP unlocked a metal door at the end and let them go through.

They were in an area that contained several cells. The door to the first one was open. The Marine stopped. John understood and went inside. It was the same size as his cell at the Cylon prison and it was arranged the same way. The sink and toilet were clean, but this one smelled like musty concrete and metal, the same smells that had filled his nostrils for four months. It was even cool like his cell on Nereid with a single bright light in the ceiling. The only things missing were the odor of sewage from a leaky toilet and the scratchy wool blanket that had reeked of his own sweat and dried blood.

"Do you need anything, sir?" The Marine asked.

"A six-pack of beer or a fifth of liquor would be nice."

The Marine's expression didn't change. "I'll pass along your request, sir." He pulled the door shut and John heard it lock electronically. Then he was alone except for the vigilant eye of the surveillance camera in the corner of his cell, just like on Nereid.

Despite having slept well the night before, he was suddenly very tired. His eyes went to the bunk. It looked much more comfortable than the paper-thin mattress on the concrete slab in his Cylon cell, but John was suddenly afraid that if he lay down, he would wake up and find this was all a drug-induced dream…that he wasn't home after all, that he was still on Nereid and the little gray room was waiting for him.

He sat down on the floor and leaned back against the wall and tried to control his suddenly racing pulse. He began hyperventilating and sweating just like he'd done the day before when the big Marines had started dragging him down the corridor on the _Galactica_. His stomach began to churn and bile rose in his throat. He tried to calm himself by getting up and putting cold water on his face. If he didn't lie down on that bunk, he couldn't wake up in another cell.

He dried his face on a paper towel and sat back down against the wall. The nausea began to recede. His long-sleeved t-shirt was now damp with sweat. He was cold, but not yet to the point of shivering. He crossed his arms over his chest. At least he wasn't naked like the Cylons had always kept him, but in the drug-induced dreams he was never naked. He started the ritual that had usually helped him. _Breathe in. You're alive. Breathe out. You're still alive. _He repeated the mantra over and over until there was nothing in his mind but the sound of his own controlled breaths.

He was dozing, his chin on his chest when he became aware of movement outside the cell.

Lee Adama stood looking in at him.

"Why are you sitting on the floor?"

John yawned. "Napping."

"Isn't that what bunks are for?"

John struggled to his feet and went over to the bars. Unlike his daughter who had looked just the same to him, Lee looked more mature and he looked tired. John put his arms through the bars and managed to hug his friend the way he hadn't been able to hug Kara.

Lee said, "I wish they'd found better accommodations for you. I'm going to give my father hell about it."

"Don't bother. Nobody knows what to do with me. If I were in your dad's place, I'd do the same thing. So how have you been? You look stressed."

"There's a lot going on right now."

"And I had to drop out of the sky and further complicate your life, didn't I?"

"Don't, John. Nobody is happier about you being home than me." He grinned. "Except maybe Kara…and Laura."

"I really made Laura's day. But I told her the truth. If she doesn't want to hear my name spoken, you'll understand why."

"The Cylon?"

"That's just part of it. I don't want to talk about the rest of it now."

"Major Parker will be conducting your debriefing. Dad made it clear to me last night that I wouldn't be involved in yours. I'll be questioning either the Cylon or the doctor, maybe both."

John nodded. "You'll like Bianca. She wasn't put in a cell, too, was she?"

"No. I thought we were going to take her to a safe apartment in the city like we did Kara and Hunter, but then Major Parker decided to keep her here on the base to make debriefing her easier and keep her safer since she's got a baby with her. With you and the Cylon both here, it just made sense."

"Where could they put Bianca here on the base?"

"You remember the old Officer's Club? It has four apartments on the second floor for visiting high-rankers, mostly those who came from Fleet Headquarters on Picon. Nobody below the rank of full colonel ever got to stay there. It's been vacant since the new O-Club was finished early this year. She was put in one of the apartments."

"They let her keep Rachel with her?"

"Yeah."

"That's good."

"I heard the baby is a half-breed. Is that true?"

"Her mother was human. Her father was a Two. They're both dead. I mean her father isn't really dead since he downloaded somewhere after I shot him, but her mother is."

"Why did you bring Rachel back with you?"

"It's too long a story to start right now. Let's just say Rachel's life was in danger."

"Who from?" Lee asked in shock. "She's just a baby."

"That crazy Cavil who's running the show on Nereid. It has something to do with the prophecy about D'Anna's baby. I guess Kara has told you about that."

"I was with her when she talked to Leboen. I really wish Parker and my dad would let me help with your debriefing."

"You and I are friends, Lee. You're all but engaged to my daughter. I don't want you hearing some of it. I know my debriefing will be recorded and I know you can watch it, but that won't be like me sitting in a room with you and having to see the look in your eyes while I tell it."

"It can't be _that bad_," Lee said in an attempt to lighten the mood.

"What I did on Nereid will cost me my marriage. I realized that today. I don't think Kara will turn her back on me, but…what do I know? Hell, this whole damn thing might be a dream like I had so many times at the prison after they drugged me. I wanted to come home so bad that I'd have these vivid dreams and think I was here. I'd think I was with Laura on the island. If I lie down on that bunk, I might wake up back on Nereid in their prison."

"Is _that_ why you were sitting on the floor?"

"They're right to keep me locked up. I'm probably crazy as a cuckoo by now." John went back to the wall and sat down. "Do you know when they serve dinner in this place? It's been a long time since lunch. I'm really hungry. I stayed hungry a lot in their prison. Let's just say they were stingy with the food and it wasn't prepared by anybody who knew how to cook. I ended up sharing a lot of it with the roaches. Of course sometimes I think I got what the roaches didn't want."

"I'll go find out about your dinner."

"It's good to see you again, Lee…whether you're real or not."

Lee signaled to the camera mounted over the outer door and was let out. As soon as the door closed behind him, he had his phone out and had called Major Parker's mobile."

"Sir, we've got to do something about John?"

"What do you mean?"

"They've got him in a cell in the brig and I think…I don't know…I'm afraid he's losing it."

"He seemed very rational on the _Galactica_ when I talked to him."

"It might have been putting him in the cell that caused the problem. I think he's starting to flash back to the prison on Nereid. Is there anywhere else we can put him? I found him sitting on the floor. He's pale and sweating. He's afraid if he lies down on the bunk, he'll wake up back in his Cylon prison cell."

"Damn," Parker said. "Against my better judgment I let your father call the shots on this one. He's convinced himself that John is a walking time bomb mostly because of his concerns about the Cylon. I ignored my gut feeling about what putting him behind bars might do to him psychologically. That was a big mistake on my part and I regret it. I want you to stay there with him while I make some other arrangements. John's too valuable a resource to have him mentally destructing because of our stupidity. I'll take the heat from Admiral Adama if there is any. Give me an hour. Stay with John. Try to keep him talking and keep assuring him he's really home and not drugged or dreaming. Talk about things that are familiar to him and keep it light if you can."

He ended the call. Lee glanced at his watch. It was nearly six o'clock and he was expected at Marble House for dinner but this was far more important.

He pressed the number for Kara's mobile phone. When she answered, he told her that he and Major Parker were still working on something and that they shouldn't wait on him for dinner. He didn't want to go into anything over the phone about her father's situation. He'd tell her later when he saw her.

"I saw my Dad, today," Kara said happily. "He looks good except your Dad had him handcuffed to a frakking table. I thought that sucked." She lowered her voice. "Laura saw him, too, but something happened. She'd definitely been crying when she got back here. She tried to tell me everything was all right, but she's not a very good liar. She's gone to her room."

"Is my Dad there?"

"He went with her. Do you need to talk to him?"

"No. How is Hunter doing with his kid?"

"They're doing great. Esmari went to Maya right away. I think Maya reminds her of Dessa."

"Who?"

"Hunter's sister. They have the same dark hair, plus you know how good Maya is with kids."

"How's Brae taking it?"

Kara chuckled. "I think he's in love. Maya had Esmari sitting on the floor on a quilt and Brae squatted down beside her. Esmari took one look at him and gave him a huge smile. I could hear Brae's little heart go pitter patter. Now he's bringing her all his toys, even his precious Raptor. He calls her Mawi."

"That's great. Look, I've got to go."

"Do you want me to save you something from dinner?"

"Don't bother. I'm not sure how late I'll be. I'll come by there as soon as I get through here. I love you."

"Love you, too."

Lee ended the call and had the MP let him back through the heavy metal door. John was sitting on the floor with his arms wrapped around his knees. He glanced up.

"What's the verdict on dinner?"

"Nobody knows anything. I talked to Major Parker and he said to sit tight because he's still working on getting another place for you to stay. So I'm going to keep you company for a while." Lee sat down cross-legged outside the cell.

John half-chuckled. "You don't have to babysit me. I'm not going to hang myself with my t-shirt yet…at least not until I see what they send me for dinner and how many roaches are on the plate."

"I'd rather sit in here and talk to you than sit in the hall."

"Are you and Kara doing okay? As soon as she told me she'd stolen that Raider, I knew you weren't involved and I knew it would cause you two some problems."

Lee hesitated and then said, "It did cause us some problems, mostly because she didn't trust me enough to tell me what she was planning. We've worked through the problems."

"I'm surprised your father didn't throw her in the brig."

"She and Hunter were kept at a safe house for over a week while they were debriefed. Dad wouldn't let the theft of the Raider go completely. He charged her with misappropriation of government property. She came out okay."

John chuckled. "I wonder what he'll charge me with? Destruction of government property? I'm afraid I totaled the Raptor. The Cylons finished what I started."

"He's not going to charge you with anything."

"How about treason? How about collaborating with the enemy or aiding and abetting the enemy? I'm sure there's a few I don't even know about. Frakking the enemy? Is that a treasonable offense because I sure as hell did that? I've had a couple of recurring dreams. One of them involves a firing squad."

"John, stop it. Please."

John chuckled softly. "You never could tell when I was joking, could you?"

Lee hoped John was joking.

"By the way, congratulations on your promotion to captain. I saw the collar pins. When did it happen?"

"A couple of months ago…right after I got back from the _Penelope_ mission."

"You were off-planet?"

"A scientific expedition went to all the Colonies to assess the damage and look for survivors. My dad dreamed up the mission to keep me busy and keep my mind off what Kara had done. Kendra Shaw and I were the liaisons between the _Penelope_ and her escort ship, the _Galactica_."

"Did you work with Commander Cain much?"

"Some."

"I guess you heard about…" John pointed to the back of his head.

"I heard. In a way it surprises me but in a way it doesn't."

There was a short silence and then John said, "D'Anna's blood pressure is too high. Bianca said it's probably the beginning of something called preeclampsia."

"What's that?"

"I don't really understand it except it can eventually get to be life-threatening for the mother. Bianca told me the only cure for it is to abort the baby or deliver it if it's near enough to term. D'Anna says no way will anyone abort the child so I don't know what will happen. D'Anna needs to be seen by a specialist. I don't think that's going to happen."

"A week after the fighting last November Zak joined the Marines. He's been in Sovana since he finished basic training. What he went through up there changed him. He's not the same little brother I remember."

"War changes everybody, Lee."

"I just finished the classroom part of Mark VII training a couple of weeks ago. Some of the pilots in my class think we should call in an airstrike and level Sovana and everything around it."

John snorted and said sarcastically, "That'd teach them a lesson, wouldn't it? Is that what Bill plans to do to Nereid?"

"No. Thanks to Hunter's intel we're only going to use airpower on their baseships and any Raiders they manage to launch. The rest of it will be fought mostly on the ground. That's why the Marines are being involved. Damn, I wish we'd had your intel while we were planning. Hunter doesn't know squat about the city or the settlements other than where they are."

"After I was in the prison I spent over three months in the city and nearly a month in Settlement Alpha, the biggest one. I saw a lot from the air, too. I can tell you one thing that's going to hamper your Marines on the ground…no roads outside of the city and the settlements. While they can slog across the toughest terrain, keeping your troops supplied with everything they need to fight is going to be a problem. Rations and ammo are going to have to be airlifted to them which means your supply ships will be vulnerable to ground fire from centurions. You'll have to airlift out the wounded. You'll still need fighter support _after_ you take out those baseships."

"How long do you think it will take for you to tell Major Parker everything you know?"

"I got no idea. It depends on how much detail he wants. If he wants to hear every little bit, it'll take a couple of weeks minimum. When are you going? Bill wouldn't tell me."

"Roughly two months. If you've got intel that makes a significant change to what we already know, it might be postponed for a month. One thing that's a time constraint is that based on the recon photos Kara took, we think they'll launch a new basestar before the end of the summer. That's in a little over three months. We want to go before that happens for a couple of reasons…one less ship to deal with and we hope to capture some new technology."

"I wish I could help you there, but I don't know anything about a baseship factory."

"Kara photographed it on her recon missions. It's several hundred miles northeast of the city in what looks like an extinct volcano. You can't see it except from directly above. Do you think your Cy…D'Anna would know anything about it?"

"You can ask her but I seriously doubt it. She's not into much of anything except their religion and this baby she's going to have." They sat without speaking for a minute until John said, "Tell me about your scientific mission. Did you get to go down to any of the planets?"

Lee talked for the next forty minutes, surprising himself with the amount of detail he remembered about his two trips to Tauron's surface and what had happened to them. He was talking about being shot down by the Heavy Raider when the door opened and Major Parker walked in.

Lee stood and John got to his feet again.

"I'm sorry you had to wait in here so long," Parker said to John. "It took longer than I expected to get your quarters set up."

"I thought this would be my permanent home for a while," John said.

"No. Just temporary. We're moving you over to the old O-Club. Dr. Cardenas is over there with Rachel. We're putting you in the apartment across from hers."

Parker made a gesture to the camera and the electronic lock on the cell door released.

The three men exited the brig. Six Marines were waiting for them. They were escorted to a jeep. Parker got in the front seat beside the driver and Lee sat beside John. There was a jeep in front of them and another behind them.

They started off through the early summer evening. John took a deep breath and then another. He didn't think for a minute that Bill had wanted him anywhere but in the brig nor did he think that Bill had authorized moving him. He owed this latest development to Lee and Major Parker. John smiled as he put his hand on Lee's shoulder and gently squeezed. It was good to have at least one friend who still trusted him.

_..._

Kara went to the door of Laura's sitting room and knocked. When there was no answer, she stuck her head in. The room was empty. Laura's bedroom door was ajar. She had just turned to go when Bill walked out of the bedroom and closed the door. Kara noticed immediately that the top two buttons of his blue uniform tunic were unbuttoned. There were two empty drink glasses on the coffee table.

The surprise on Bill's face when he saw her was clear, but he recovered quickly. "Laura's asleep. She had a migraine. I convinced her to take one of her pills."

"Was that before or after you and her had a drink and went to the bedroom?" Kara asked, her tone bordering on hostility.

"Calm down. You're going down the wrong road right now."

"Wrong road? I find you coming out of Laura's bedroom with your uniform undone and _I'm_ going down the wrong road?"

"That's enough, lieutenant," Bill said coldly as he buttoned his tunic. "You've got no idea what happened today."

Kara wanted to say more, but something told her that it would be a big mistake. Something also told her that whatever was wrong with Laura had to do with her father so she bit back her angry words.

"I just came to tell you that dinner's ready."

"I can't stay for dinner tonight," Bill said. "I've been away from my desk for the better part of two days."

"What about Laura?"

"I hope she'll sleep through the night. I don't think it would be a good idea to wake her now. Is Lee here? I need to talk to him."

"He called about thirty minutes ago. He's going to be late. He said he and Major Parker were tied up with something."

"I'll catch him later," Bill said.

He left and Kara walked back to the dining room.

"It's just us tonight," she told Maya and Hunter. "Laura went to bed with a migraine and Admiral Adama is going back to his office."

She sat down and glumly began picking at her food. Hunter was holding his daughter who was gnawing on a teething biscuit. Maya was trying to coax Braedon into eating something, but Brae was still too fascinated with Esmari. He wanted Maya to give his food to her.

"She's too little to eat big boy food," Maya said.

"Mawi stay here."

"Yes," Maya said. "Esmari is going to stay here with you _if _you eat your food."

That did the trick and Braedon at last began eating.

Kara picked at her dinner some more until Hunter finally asked, "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing's wrong with me. Something's bad wrong with Laura."

"What do you mean?"

"I thought she would be glad to see my father."

"How do you know she isn't?" Hunter asked.

"She'd been crying," Kara said. "And now she's gone to bed and Admiral Adama was coming out of her bedroom and…"

"Whoa," Hunter said. "That is none of our business and really none of yours."

"Admiral Adama had my father handcuffed to a table," she said, anger rising in her again. "Dad was being a good sport about it, but…"

Maya looked shocked. "Handcuffed to a table?"

"Like my dad was going to hurt _me_. I think the admiral just did it to humiliate him. I think he's sorry my dad escaped. I think…"

Hunter cut her off. "I think you'd better not say anything else. If one of my men had been an enemy prisoner for as long as your father has been, I'd have taken every precaution as well."

"What would you do if you'd always had a thing for the man's wife?" Kara asked hotly. "Do you think you'd be a little bit rougher on him? Handcuff him to a table so he couldn't even put his arms around her?"

Hunter shrugged. "I'm not the Admiral. I don't know what was on his mind."

"Well I do," Kara said.

There was a long, uneasy silence and then Kara pushed back from the table. "I'm going to my room. If Lee shows up, tell him where I am."

"Sure," Maya said.

As Kara walked down the hall, she thought it would be interesting to be a spider on the wall in the dining room right now to hear what Maya and Hunter had to say. Despite the fact that her father had brought Esmari to him, she had no doubt whose side Hunter was going to take. She wondered if Maya would remain loyal to John or if she would side with the man she now loved.

…

By the time Lee arrived at Marble House, got through security and rode the elevator up to the second floor, it was nearly nine o'clock. When he'd left the airbase, John was settled in his apartment. Bianca had heard them out in the hall and had opened the door. The way she had greeted John had shown Lee how much affection there was between the pediatrician and Kara's father.

Maya and Hunter were on the couch in the sitting room when Lee got upstairs. Hunter had his arm around her. Braedon was on the floor in his pajamas. Lee could tell he was sleepy.

Maya stood and picked Braedon up.

"Where's Kara?" Lee asked her.

"In her room," Hunter said. "Where have you been?"

"Out at the airbase getting John settled. Major Parker overruled my dad about keeping John in the brig."

"Your father had John put in the _brig_?" Maya said in surprise.

"I think he was just being cautious."

"Kara told us that her father was handcuffed to a table. She's very upset about that."

"Dad probably over-reacted," Lee finally admitted. "I'm going to see Kara and try to defuse the situation."

"Time to get this big boy to bed," Maya said to Hunter. "I think Esmari's been asleep long enough that we won't wake her."

Lee knocked on Kara's door and heard a muffled, "Come in."

She was on her stomach on the bed. The only light came from the bathroom. Lee walked in and closed and locked the door behind him before he shrugged out of his uniform tunic, dropped it on a chair and kicked off his shoes. He lay down on the bed beside her.

"Did you get something to eat?" She asked him.

"I did the drive-thru at the Borus Burgers a mile from base. I ate while I was driving back into the city."

"How's my dad?"

"Much better. Parker and I got him settled into an apartment in the old O-Club. He's across the hall from the doctor. When I left, he and Major Parker were in her apartment. John was holding Rachel. He looked happy. Dr. Cardenas told me she's named after John's mother. He's her godfather or something."

"That's good."

Lee rubbed Kara's back. "Your enthusiasm overwhelms me."

"Did my dad say anything to you about Laura?"

"I'm not sure I should repeat it."

"Fine. I'll ask him myself the next time I see him. Did your Dad get in touch with you?"

"Yeah."

"What did he want?"

"Nothing important. He just wanted to ask how the orientation seminars were going. Then he said he'd like for me and Zak to have lunch with him soon." Lee chuckled softly. "Dad gets in these weird moods sometimes and suddenly remembers he has offspring."

"Oh, ha ha."

"You were happy when I talked to you earlier? What happened?"

"Where do I begin?"

"I think _this_ is a good place."

Lee kissed the back of Kara's neck and slid his hand under her t-shirt. He felt for the clasp of her bra. Kara let him fumble for a minute before she rolled over.

"It's in the front on this one."

"I guess that means you have no objections."

She pulled him down to her and kissed him. "None at all."

Everything that had happened that day began to fade for Lee as desire took its place. Kara had always had that effect on him. The first time they had made love, she'd told him she had waited for him because he was her destiny. His belief in their love was the closest thing to faith that Lee Adama knew.

...

The next morning Laura got up when her alarm went off and looked at her face in the bathroom mirror. Her eyes were still puffy from her tears the night before and she looked pale, but the paleness could be remedied with a little extra blush and the puffiness would be gone by lunch. She stepped into the shower and afterward took pains with her hair. It was very important to her that she looked good. Today she was going before the press and announce that her husband was home. She could then put that task behind her.

The day before she had cried most of the way from the airbase to Marble House as Bill had held her in his arms, not talking, not trying to make excuses for John, not telling her that the Cylon was probably lying, just letting her get the initial shock and pain out of her system. Bill had told her driver to take them to the underground garage. From there she could take an elevator directly to the second floor and bypass the main one. Edgar had said nothing until he'd opened the door of the limousine for her. He had clearly been distressed by her tears.

"Is there _anything_ I can do for you, ma'am?"

She had placed her hand gently on his arm. "You do it every day in the way you protect me…and guard my privacy, and I can't thank you enough for it."

Her message had been clear. This was a private moment for her and had nothing to do with her job as President.

Edgar and Bill were a lot alike…two strong, tough men taking care of a woman who had momentarily fallen apart.

Now she went to her closet and chose a dark beige summer suit and paired it with a pale blue silk blouse. She was tempted to wear black, but that would send the wrong message and today was all about the message she wanted to send.

The night before she had removed her wedding ring and put it on the dresser. Now she put it back on. It would certainly be noticed if it was missing. She chose pearl earrings and the pearl bracelet with the small pavé diamond heart at the clasp, John's gift to her on their first anniversary. That happy occasion now seemed like it had happened a hundred years ago.

She stopped by the dining room long enough to speak to Maya and to see her son.

"Another high chair is being delivered today," Laura said as she saw Esmari on Maya's lap.

"Wow," Maya said. "You look especially beautiful. Is something going on?"

"I'm going to have Billy call a press conference for this afternoon and I'm going to announce that John is home. If I don't, someone will leak it and then we'll look like we're trying to hide something. I'd rather be proactive and deal with it now before we have to do damage control."

"I hope you plan to have extra staff manning the switchboard. This will be bigger than when you told everybody about us going to Nereid."

"Yes. But the reply to everyone who wants more information will consist of a few words. _President Roslin has no comment at the moment. _I don't plan to take questions at the press conference either."

"Just be prepared. The media will go crazy."

"Cwazy," Braedon giggled as Laura stroked his soft brown hair.

"Are you sure you don't want something to eat?" Maya asked.

"I'll get something later. I've got a speech to write."

Downstairs she walked briskly through her outer office. It was 7:15 and no one was in yet. She sat down at her desk and sent Billy a text message to come see her immediately on arriving. He showed up in her doorway fifteen minutes later.

"Is something wrong?"

She forced a smile. "Please call a press conference for two o'clock this afternoon. I'm going to announce John's escape from Nereid. Make it clear that I will not be taking questions afterward nor will this office or anyone else be answering the prying, invasive personal questions that I know are going to come. Don't say it exactly like that. You have a very good way of phrasing things so they understand."

"Did you see John yesterday?" Billy asked hesitantly.

"Yes. Except for a few stitches in the back of his head and some obvious weight loss, he's well physically…" Her voice wavered. She looked down at her desk a moment and regained her composure. "His imprisonment has changed him...however I absolutely will not discuss any of this with the press."

"I understand," Billy said.

"Could you fix me a cup of tea after you get your coffee?"

"Sure," he smiled. "I'll do it before I get my coffee."

Laura waited until the cup was on her desk and then picked up her private line. She called Bill's mobile number.

"How are you this morning?" He asked.

"Much better than yesterday. I want to thank you for everything you did for me."

"Laura, I…"

"You are the shoulder on which I will lean during the next few weeks. I want you to know that right now. I also want you to let me know if that's not a role you're prepared to play."

"I'll always be here for you…in whatever capacity you need."

"Good. I'm going to make an announcement to the press this afternoon. I would like for you to read it first to make sure I'm not revealing something I shouldn't. Can you come to lunch? Let's make it 11:45."

"I'll be there."

...

Major Parker had told the MP guards at each end of the hall that John could visit Bianca's apartment so that's where he was the next morning when Parker arrived with Bill. Parker was carrying a large aluminum attaché case. John was feeding Rachel her bottle so Bianca could eat breakfast.

Parker smiled and greeted them warmly. Bill nodded in his usual taciturn way.

Parker said, "I've got technicians putting the final touches on a room downstairs that we'll use for your debriefings. They've assured me that they'll be through by lunch and we can get started right after. In the meantime John, I've arranged for you to have a complete physical exam this morning with your doctor here at the medical facility on base. I know Dr. Cottle checked you on the _Galactica_, but we'd like a complete exam done just in case he missed something."

Bianca said nothing, but it was clear to John that she liked Major Parker. Her feelings toward Bill were not quite as warm. She had figured out very quickly why John had spent time in the brig the previous afternoon and evening.

"I'd like to talk to John privately and off the record," Bill said. "We'll go across the hall."

Parker unlocked his briefcase. He retrieved a large manila envelope and handed it to Bill.

Bianca stopped eating and reached for Rachel, but Parker stepped in. "Finish your breakfast. I'll take her. I fed many a bottle to my own children."

John led the way to his apartment. Inside he remained standing until Bill asked, "Do you have any coffee in this place?"

"Some groceries and toiletries were delivered last night along with some clothes. I think there's some coffee in the grocery box."

John followed Bill into the kitchen where Bill placed the envelope on the table and then rummaged in the box until he came up with a can of coffee. The coffee maker on the kitchen counter was old, but it came on when Bill plugged it in. In only a short time the fragrant aroma of brewing coffee filled the small room. John stood leaning back against the sink with his arms crossed while Bill opened cabinet doors and found two mugs. Only when the coffee was ready and poured did he sit at the table and gesture for John to do the same.

"Open the envelope, please."

John undid the clasp and slipped out the document inside...five pages fastened with a staple. The cover page had only a date and time and the words _Interview with Cylon prisoner number Three aka D'Anna [no last name given]_. The word _Confidential _had been stamped diagonally across the page in large red-outline letters. At the bottom of the page someone had printed in black ink _Security Clearance: Level 8 and above only._

"Laura insisted on talking to the Cylon yesterday," Bill said. "I shouldn't have let her do it, but she was determined. What you've got in your hand is the transcript of everything that was said."

John hadn't looked beyond the first page. "So D'Anna's cell is under surveillance?"

"Audio and visual, twenty-four seven. What I'd like for you to do is read that and tell me if she's telling the truth."

John flipped the page and began reading, anger rising in him the more he read. It wasn't anger at D'Anna for the amount of information she'd revealed. She was so naïve that he was sure she'd thought nothing of saying what she did. His anger was directed at Bill that he'd let it happen…that he'd allowed Laura to be subjected to hearing it."

He struggled with his emotions until he got to the end. "You son of a bitch," he finally said.

"Watch yourself, John. You're here and not in a cell only because I listened to Major Parker about your state of mind. He's the one with the degree in psychology."

The implied threat was clear. Step out of line and Bill would send him back to the brig.

John carefully slipped the transcript back into the envelope. He looked up at Bill, anger still roiling through him, but he managed to control it in his voice.

"It's true. Everything D'Anna said is true except the part about me killing Sonja. Leoben shot Sonja, but only because I couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger. D'Anna didn't see what happened. She just saw me get on the Heavy Raider with the pistol and assumed I'd killed them both. But the rest of it is accurate. Just so you'll know, I told Laura yesterday what I'd done…not exactly the way D'Anna told it, but I did tell Laura I'd slept with both women and that I hadn't been drugged when I did it. You still get the pleasure of running back to her and confirming what a selfish, self-serving bastard I am."

Bill stood and picked up the envelope. John could tell he was trying to decide what to say. He couldn't seem to come up with anything, so John continued.

"Now I've got a question for you. How long did you wait after my memorial service before you made a move on my wife? How long after that before you actually slept with her?"

John knew he'd hit a nerve because of the way Bill's eyes changed. Guilt was there for an instant and then it was gone. Bill's jaw twitched. Another sign. The impulse to hit a man he had once regarded as a friend reverberated through him until he remembered that Laura and Bill had no idea he was alive until Kara had returned from Nereid. How could he blame either one of them? The anger evaporated and the only thing left was the pain of what he had lost.

He took a deep breath against it. Bill turned to go.

"Wait a minute," John said. "Are you going to let a doctor look at D'Anna?"

Bill's eyes said it all. "She'll get the same medical care that anyone else in the brig gets."

"I'll make a bargain with you. You allow a specialist to see D'Anna and I'll give Laura what she wants…and what you want. I'll give her a divorce, no questions asked. I'll be the bad guy and file for it so it doesn't look like the President is dumping her _hero_ husband. And I say _hero_ sarcastically in case you didn't pick up on it. The only thing I want is to be allowed to help raise Braedon. Then after a reasonable amount of time, you and Laura can get married. The new Admiral and Mrs. William Adama. Sounds good, doesn't it?"

The shock was evident on Bill's face. "You'd give up Laura in return for medical care for your Cylon? Are you _that_ besotted with her?"

"Not her," John said sadly. "The child is the important one. That baby deserves every chance to live."

Bill's look changed to disgust and then changed again to puzzlement. "I don't understand your obsession with that child."

"I wouldn't expect _you _to understand. When Lee and Zak were young, you had to go to the dictionary to figure out the meaning of the word _father_."

Bill took a step back into the kitchen, hot anger flaring in his eyes, and then he stopped. John knew he'd hit another nerve.

"I'm cutting you a lot of slack, John, because of what you've been through. Stop pushing me."

There was the implied threat again. Bill and Cavil had obviously read the same book on how to control their captives.

John took a deep breath. "Look, I know you would have died on Nereid before you'd have done the things I did. You're a man of honor. I've always believed that about you. I'm sorry."

The ghost of a smile played about Bill's lips. "You accuse me of sleeping with your wife and now you call me a man of honor. One precludes the other, don't you think?"

"Do we have a bargain? D'Anna gets seen by a specialist and you give me your word of honor as an officer and a gentleman to do whatever that doctor recommends for her. In return you get Laura without a fight from me."

"Don't you want to discuss this with your wife? She might have other ideas."

"What's the point? I saw the look in her eyes yesterday when I told her what I'd done. And after she heard what D'Anna had to say, Laura will jump at the chance to dump me quietly and have it look like it's my idea. So this stays between you and me. One man to another. You've always loved her and she's always had feelings for you so everybody gets what they want."

At the door Bill looked back at him. There was nothing in his eyes now but pity.

John turned and looked out the window over the sink as the door closed. The familiar love and longing he'd felt for Laura at the prison was an ache in his chest. Everybody got what they wanted but him.

...

Laura faced the reporters and the cameras and began her press conference with the words, "Thank you all for coming today on such short notice." She paused for five or six long seconds and let them wonder what she was going to say.

"For those of you who believe in miracles, one happened last November when my husband flew his Raptor into the Cylon basestar above Caprica and engaged the FTL drive. By jumping his Raptor inside the basestar and near another ship that was filled with explosives, he caused those explosives to detonate and destroy the baseship. He saved the lives of everyone on Caprica. We all believed that his Raptor had been destroyed in the blast and that he had been killed. Instead his badly damaged ship was thrown out of our solar system and into the solar system of the Cylon homeworld. He was captured by them and imprisoned. We know this because the second miracle occurred two mornings ago when John managed to escape from his captors and bring one of their Heavy Raiders back to Caprica."

The explosion of questions was immediate. Laura waited for the noise to abate. When it didn't, she finally raised her hand.

"Please, let me continue and maybe I'll answer some of your questions. John is in reasonably good health despite being held in the Cylon prison. Right now he's staying at a safe location where he will be given medical care and will be able to recover from his ordeal. He will also answer a great many questions that will further aid our military in planning the assault on the Cylon homeworld."

She managed a smile while there were more shouted questions. Again she waited for the noise to abate.

"I have seen him and talked to him and he's in good spirits all things considered. I'm making this announcement today because I always want to be up front with the people of Caprica. Now, I would ask that you respect my privacy and allow my family some time to adjust to this wonderful news. Thank you."

She turned and left the small podium with shouts of _Madame President, just one question_ ringing in her ears. Bill was waiting for her in the outer office where her secretary and several others of her staff had watched on a television. There was applause and comments of _good job_ from everyone. Bill followed her into her private office.

"How did I really do?" She asked.

Bill nodded. "Better than I could do with all of them shouting questions."

She lowered her voice. "Do you think John was allowed to watch?"

"I would imagine so. I told Major Parker about the press conference when I talked to him this morning."

"How is John today?"

"I asked him to read the transcript of your encounter with D'Anna. He basically verified that everything she said was true. I'm sorry. I know that's not what you wanted to hear."

"I really didn't need John's verification. I knew she was telling the truth. She's got a naiveté about her. I hesitate to say childishness, but I think you know what I mean. I sensed no deception or duplicity in her at all. I will manage to come to terms with what John did. It's just going to take some time."

"Does that mean you're going to try to make your marriage work?"

"I don't know yet. A great deal depends on what he wants to do about D'Anna and the baby. There's no way I will share him if he really wants to raise a child with her. He can't possibly expect that of me."

"In all fairness to John, I think he's far more concerned about the child than he is about the mother."

"He said that to you?"

"He said something about the fate of the child being what was important. He also said something about it being his responsibility. I'm not going to judge him until I get Parker's take on it. He told me this morning he thinks John is suffering from Knossos syndrome. He thinks John has begun to identify with his captors. It's not uncommon in prisoners subjected to what we think John was."

Laura sighed. "And add the fact that John obviously believes the prophecy. The scripture doesn't mention the gender of the child, but D'Anna says it's a boy."

Bill sounded disgusted. "Boy or girl, it's an ordinary baby, Laura, no different from the one that Sharon Agathon had…no different from the one that Dr. Cardenas is taking care of. I understand D'Anna's child will be a half-breed, but it's still just a baby. It bothers me that you want to imbue this child with religious significance."

She sighed again. "In one sense I'm sure you're right, however in another sense these children are miracles…all of them."

"There was a time when you thought the idea of a hybrid child was an abomination."

"Yes, I did…when Dr. Baltar and the Simon here on Caprica were conducting their experiments trying to create them in the lab. Now I tend to agree with you. In one sense they _are_ just babies, but in another…" her voice trailed off. She could not find the words to express exactly what she was feeling at the moment so she continued. "I need to talk to Elosha. I want to know her take on the scripture."

Bill nodded and for a moment Laura saw defeat in his eyes. He had not been able to sway her belief in the prophecy and he knew it.

"You did very well today in your press conference. You should be proud."

"Thank you. Will you be coming back for dinner tonight?"

He half-smiled. "There's still a stack of paper on my desk that isn't getting any lower. Maybe later in the week."

They stood looking at each other for a moment that quickly turned awkward as she remembered how completely she'd fallen apart in his arms the previous day. She walked around and sat behind her desk.

"If you see John, please tell him that I'll be in touch. He asked to see Braedon and I promised I'd let him. Whatever John may have done in regards to our marriage vows, he's a wonderful father. I could never deny him his son or deny Braedon his father."

"I'll pass along your message," Bill said as he left.

Laura looked at the photograph on her desk, her favorite, the one of her dancing with John at their wedding reception. She was looking up at him and he was gazing into her eyes and smiling. No image had ever captured the love they shared like that one photograph.

John had come into her life because he was Lee's friend. They'd met at Lee's Academy graduation. John had given her a son with eyes the color of the sea, eyes like his own, and his same brown hair and beautiful smile. He'd supported her through everything she'd done, standing quietly in the background, caring for Braedon so she could run a Presidential campaign, providing her with a refuge when it had all become too much for her. When he took her in his arms, he was the lover who had never disappointed her. And last November he'd been willing to give his life so that she and their son and daughter could live. As tears filled her eyes, she looked away from the picture. If John chose D'Anna and the child he was having with her, Laura wondered how she would ever be able to stop loving him.

...

The morning after Laura's press conference, Jackson Spencer called Kara to the front of the ready room after he had posted the flight roster and made the day's usual announcements. It was her first day back at the base since her father had returned.

She had no idea what it was about until he said, "I'm sure all of you saw the President's press conference yesterday. It was replayed on the news a dozen times last night and I hear it's all over the internet as is a lot of rampant speculation, very little of which is even remotely factual. As you're all aware, President Roslin's husband is also Kara's father. The reason I asked her to stand up here with me is to emphasize that she _cannot_ talk about her father or his escape. I don't want _any of you_ bothering her with questions because she's under orders not to talk about it. She's got training flights and other work to do just like the rest of you. I don't want to hear that any of you cornered her and started trying to pry information out of her. Do your jobs and let her do hers. Is that understood?"

There was a low rumbling of _yes, sir_ around the room. Kara felt her cheeks grow warm like they always did when she had to stand in front of a group.

"Dismissed," Spencer said to the pilots.

"Thank you, sir," Kara said quietly.

"The base is buzzing with all kinds of rumors. Some of these pilots are skilled in the cockpit but have bingo brains about other things. Because you're a fellow pilot, they'd think nothing of asking prying questions that are none of their business. I wanted to head it off before it got started."

Kara nodded. "Just for the record, sir, nobody ordered me not to say anything."

Spencer smiled. "I know that. Do you feel like flying today?"

"I'm fine, sir."

"Stay sharp, lieutenant, or Jessups will nail you."

She managed a small smile. "Don't I know that, sir."

"Good hunting. Dismissed."

Kara tried. She really tried to stay focused, but less than twenty minutes after she'd taken her Mark VII up, Jessups got a missile lock on her.

She heard him say, "_Take it down, Lieutenant Thrace,"_ in her helmet receiver.

She landed and waited for Jessups to follow. She was standing beside the Viper waiting for him.

"I made a dumb mistake," she said before he could speak.

"You're damned right you did. It's a good thing I wasn't a Cylon Raider."

"Yes, sir."

"I expect dumb mistakes from my nuggets. You're not a nugget."

Kara clenched her jaw. "No, sir."

"When you're in that Viper in a combat situation, you can't afford to have _anything_ _else _on your mind. Not even your father's situation. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir. It won't happen again."

They both knew it wouldn't.

"You're one of my best pilots, maybe _the best_. I heard Spencer told the others to lay off you. It's not that I don't understand. I know you've got a lot on your mind."

"That's no excuse, sir."

"I know it's tough to leave it behind when you're flying, but you've got to discipline yourself to do it. It's one of the things that made your dad such a great pilot."

"Maybe he can give me a few pointers, sir."

Jessups smiled. "Tell him he still owes me a drink."

Kara grinned. "He intends to buy it as soon as Admiral Adama lets him go."

As she walked toward the locker room, she amended what she had just told Buzz Jessups. _If Admiral Adama lets him go_.

…

Karl was waiting for her when she came out of the locker room thirty minutes later. "Let's get some lunch."

They walked together to the cafeteria. "Jessups got me this morning," Kara said glumly. "It was my fault. I couldn't keep my concentration. I zoned out for five seconds and he had me."

Karl nudged her gently with his elbow as they walked. "Must be something in the water. I've been the same way."

"I don't want to sit in the cafeteria with everybody staring at me like I've got three heads. Colonel Spencer told the Viper pilots to lay off. He didn't tell everybody on the whole base. Let's get something and go watch the ships take off and land."

Twenty minutes later they were settled on a bench near the admin building. Their view of the runways wasn't the best, but at least they were in the shade and away from most of the foot traffic. Kara unwrapped her hamburger and took a bite.

Karl hadn't touched his food. "My dad's alive. He's on Nereid."

Kara choked in mid-swallow. Karl pounded her on the back until she got the food down and had finished coughing. She took several swallows of her drink.

"How do you know that?" She squeaked.

"Your father met him."

Kara sucked in her breath and started coughing again. "Dad didn't tell me that when I saw him in Hunter's valley. I swear. I'd have told you."

"I know you would have. He said they'd just met a few weeks ago."

"What about my mother?"

"He didn't mention her. He just said that my father had lost an arm and an eye during the fighting on Picon and the Cylons had taken him to their prison. His face is scarred, too…and he's married again."

"Damn," Kara said. "How did they meet? I mean our dads."

"He didn't say. Admiral Adama gave us one whole frakking minute to talk before he ordered me and Saunders to start our preflight. That's all Major Gallagher had time to say…except that he hadn't mentioned Sharon."

"Have you told Sharon?"

"Of course. But you're the only other person I've told so far. I think I need to tell Saunders. I made a dumb mistake yesterday and he covered for me."

"I'll keep it to myself. Saunders will, too, but you know it'll come out in Dad's debriefing. Major Parker will know and Admiral Adama and Lee."

"I don't even know how I feel about it. Sharon was so excited when I told her. She said now Hera would get to know her grandfather. I didn't have the heart to point out that it might not be a joyous reunion. Your dad said my dad had been in the Cylon prison for a couple of years. I can imagine how he feels about them."

"Oh, man," Kara said. "Things are so frakked up now. You used to have such a good relationship with your father. I was envious of you. When we were kids growing up, I thought your dad was the perfect father. He was always doing things with you and Marie and your mom. When you took me camping with you, I used to pretend he was my father, too. He treated me just like he did you and Marie."

"My mom and dad both loved you, Kara."

"They knew my mom wouldn't ever win a Mother-of-the-Year award and they knew that Dreilide had taken off for parts unknown. Your mom and dad both really tried to make up for that."

They sat in silence for a while. Kara got down another bite of her hamburger. Karl picked at his fries.

"I'd buried him," Karl finally said. "Him and my mother and Marie. Years ago I said goodbye and buried them all. When we were living in the little stone house, I used to go into the woods and pretend I was visiting their graves. I even put three stones near that pond where we used to fish. And now I find out he's alive."

"It's like what happened with my dad…twice. Once when Zarek hijacked his ship and then again after he blew up that basestar. I thought I'd lost him both times and I hadn't. When I was in the refugee camp, I went to that altar in the woods and prayed for Mom and Dad both. I'd accepted their deaths. That's why I wore the dead Viper pilot's ring on the chain with my mother's dog tags. I understand what you're going through."

"Part of me wants to see him again so much…but how am I going to tell him about Sharon…and Hera? What will I do if he turns his back on me…or worse?"

"I'll tell him I've got a half-Cylon brother and if I'm okay with it, he can be okay with a half-Cylon granddaughter."

"You don't have a half-Cylon brother."

Kara shrugged. "I will as soon as D'Anna has her baby. We're in this together, Karl, just like we've always been. You and me."

Karl unwrapped his hamburger and took a bite before he reached out and bumped fists with her.

She smiled. "Even if I get a half-Cylon brother, he'll never mean more to me than you do."

Karl finally grinned. "He'd better not."

...

The MPs had brought D'Anna to the interrogation room in the brig in shackles the same way that Sharon Agathon had once been brought there, and just like that time, Lee had insisted that the shackles be removed. In the long run, it hadn't mattered. D'Anna had refused to talk unless she was allowed to see John. No amount of cajoling or promising that he'd do what he could to accommodate her wish had worked. She had sat stubbornly staring at him until finally after thirty minutes of hearing himself ask question after question without an answer from her, he had given up and D'Anna had been taken back to her cell.

In his own conversation afterward with Major Parker, Lee had learned of Laura's order forbidding contact between her husband and D'Anna. After dinner that evening, Lee had asked Laura if he might speak with her privately. She had agreed and they had gone to her sitting room.

Now that Lee had her alone, he was unsure of how he should broach the subject. After all Parker had not authorized the request he was about to make of the President.

"Please, won't you sit down," Laura said.

Lee sat in one of the armchairs while Laura sat on the end of the couch. She waited.

"Could I get you a drink?" Lee asked.

Laura smiled. "I'm going to give my son a bath very shortly and get him ready for bed. Then I'll read him a story. I don't want him smelling alcohol on my breath. John and I were always careful not to have a drink before…" she gestured. "You'll understand when you and Kara have children one day."

"I already understand," Lee said. "All I remember when I think of my mother is the smell of alcohol."

"What can I do for you tonight?"

"I've been tasked with questioning the Cy…D'Anna." He saw Laura's pleasant expression change and harden, but he forged ahead. "I didn't do too well this afternoon with her. She refused to talk to me."

"How odd," Laura said coolly. "When I talked to her she couldn't seem to shut up. She was an absolute fountain of information."

"I know. I read the transcript. She wants to see John. That's her condition for answering any of my questions. Major Parker told me you'd forbid any contact between her and John."

"Yes, I have."

"You won't change your mind?"

"No, I won't."

"We need her input."

"Then dangle the promise of a possible future meeting."

"I tried that a couple of times. It didn't work."

"I'm sorry, Lee. You'll have to find another way to get her to talk."

"She has valuable information that neither John nor Dr. Cardenas has. We really need her cooperation."

Laura stood and paced around the room. "Let me think about it. Now if there's nothing else, I need to help Maya."

Lee stood. "You'll let me know if you change your mind?"

She smiled sweetly. "You'll be the _first one_ I call."

Lee walked down the hall to Kara's room. Once inside he shut the door.

"Let's get out of here, maybe go to Zeno's and have a beer, maybe spend the night at my apartment."

Kara grinned and said, "On a school night?"

"I'm not in the mood to stay here."

"Okay." She put on one sneaker and fished around under the bed until she found the other one. "Are we coming back here or should I take my uniform with me?"

"What do you want to do?"

"Let's be rebels and make a break for it." After they were in his car and had left Marble House, she said, "Now tell me what's really wrong."

He told her.

"Damn," Kara said. "I knew Laura was upset the other night. I didn't realize how upset. So she's playing hardball about D'Anna."

Lee nodded glumly.

"You think D'Anna would talk to another interrogator?"

"I doubt it. They're not going to be able to produce John any more than I could."

"Think she'd talk to another Cylon?"

"Such as?"

"Start with Leoben. He's the most religious of the three who are left here on Caprica. Then again she might relate to Sharon because of the baby thing. If all else fails, then sic Natasi on her. I'm sure she wants another weekend with that jerk Baltar."

"No, I don't think that would be a good idea," Lee said quickly."You said Sonja has platinum hair just like Natasi and…there was some bad blood between D'Anna and Sonja over your dad."

"I knew that bitch was…I just knew when I saw them together in the valley that something was going on. My dad said something about keeping his end of a bargain he'd made with her. I think that bargain involved letting me go in return for…ugh. I can't even think about it. It totally grosses me out."

Kara took out her phone.

"Who are you calling?"

"Leoben. Head toward the university."

"Wait a minute. I don't know if I can get that past my dad and Major Parker."

"If Leoben says he won't do it, it doesn't matter. Shouldn't he say _yes_ or _no_ first?"

"Just remember that Laura didn't say anything in her press conference about John bringing anyone home with him so you can't tell Leoben."

"He's not going to say anything to anyone, but you could always call Major Parker and ask him for permission. He and the admiral want answers. Laura won't let D'Anna see my dad. You're going to have to be creative."

Lee pulled up in front of the bookstore and parked. He took out his phone and called Parker's mobile. He explained what Kara had suggested and then waited while Parker thought about it.

"Let me call you back," Parker said. "I want to run it by your dad."

"We wait," Lee told Kara. "At least he didn't turn me down flat."

Fifteen minutes later Lee's phone chirped. "Bill said, '_Why not_?' He knows President Roslin has tied our hands by saying D'Anna can't see John, but he won't override her even though both John and D'Anna are in military custody."

"I tried to get Laura to change her mind tonight. No luck. Kara and I are outside the bookstore right now. Leoben may or may not want to help us."

"Give it a shot. Call me and let me know what he says. If it's _yes_, I'll get a visitor pass made for him. You can bring him out tomorrow afternoon."

"We might have to do it in the evening. He's got a business to run."

"If he'll help us, then we'll accommodate him."

"Yes, sir, whatever it takes." Lee ended the call and looked over at Kara. "Call him."

When Leoben answered, Kara said, "Hi, we need your help."

There was a pause and he said, "I watched President Roslin's press conference yesterday. Does this involve your dad in any way?"

"Lee and I are outside. Can we come up or do you want to come down?"

"How long do you think this will take?"

"Not long."

"I'll come down."

A few minutes later he exited the bookstore and locked the door behind him. He opened the back door of Lee's car and got in.

Kara said, "My dad didn't come back alone. He brought a Three with him. She's pregnant."

"So now we know the peacemaker is on the way," Leoben finally said. "How does this involve me?"

Lee said, "We'd like for D'Anna to answer some of our questions about the homeworld, but she's refused unless she's allowed to see John. The President has said no, so we thought…"

"You thought she might talk to me."

Kara said. "We know it's a long shot, but…we'll never know unless we try. We thought about Sharon and even Natasi, but you're our first choice."

"Even if I agree to do this, I'm no interrogator," Leoben said.

"We'll go over a list of questions," Lee said. "If you could just get her to say anything, just talk about the homeworld. She knows things that John doesn't. That's where we think she can benefit us."

Kara said, "I know this is a lot to ask."

"She carries the peacemaker," Leoben said. "What's going to happen to her?"

"Nothing," Lee answered. "Being a Cylon isn't a crime."

"Where is she?"

"She's being held out at the airbase because of security concerns."

"You didn't really answer my question. What's going to happen to her?"

"That won't be my call," Lee answered.

Leoben opened the car door. "When you've got an answer to my question, call me."

"Wait," Kara said. "I'll talk to Laura. D'Anna hasn't done anything wrong. I think I'll be able to persuade her to let D'Anna go back to Nereid."

"You think?"

"Do you believe Laura will want D'Anna around with my father's kid, whether it's the peacemaker or not? Help Lee get the information they need and I'll talk to Laura."

Slowly Leoben closed the car door. "I think our fates might still be entwined. What do you want me to do?"

Lee said, "I know you close the bookstore at five o'clock. How soon after that can you be ready?"

"I've started staying open until six, but I'll close early tomorrow. Be here at five."

"Thank you," Kara said.

Leoben opened the door and this time he got out of the car. They watched him enter the bookstore and lock the door behind him.

Lee was several blocks away before he spoke. "How do you think he'll react when he finds out you lied to him?"

"I didn't lie. I didn't promise him anything. I just said I'd talk to Laura and I will. Do you think she's going to want D'Anna and the baby around? As soon as Nereid is secured, she'll put D'Anna on the first ship headed that way."

"You don't think John will get any say in the matter?"

Kara shrugged. "Let's forget about all this tonight. Let's go to your apartment and sit on the couch and listen to one of Dreilide's CDs since I doubt I'll see you tomorrow night."

Lee reached for her hand. "You're right. If I don't pick up Leoben until five, we probably won't get started with D'Anna's questions until after seven."

"Will you call me no matter how late you are? I don't care if you wake me up."

"You know I will."

At the next stoplight Kara pulled his head over and kissed him. The guy behind them had to blow his horn when the light turned green.

...

Leoben touched the small wireless earpiece that a technician had just put in his left ear. They were in a surveillance room next to the interrogation room where D'Anna was waiting.

"You'll do fine," Lee said.

The cameras in the room were almost invisible as were the microphones. There was no two-way mirror. The room looked like an ordinary conference room with several chairs on either side of the table. Only someone skilled in looking for the monitoring devices would be able to find them.

Leoben made a final adjustment to the earpiece. Lee reached out and unclipped the visitor pass from Leoben's shirt. He looked just like he did when Lee had picked him up nearly two hours earlier.

"Basically we just want her to talk about the homeworld. Try to keep her on that subject."

"You realize I regard her as special and the child she carries as even more special."

"I got no problem with that. If she wants to talk about the kid for a while, that's fine. Just remember we're looking for info about the way the Cylons run things on Nereid."

Lee walked into the hall with Leoben and waited while Leoben opened the door and entered the room. Then Lee went back to the room next door where he could watch them on the large-screen monitor.

D'Anna's eyes clearly lit up when she saw Leoben. "Brother," she said happily.

Instead of sitting down across from her, Leoben knelt by her chair and placed one of his hands on her abdomen.

D'Anna smiled, and the warmth of her smile took Lee by surprise. He had never regarded D'Anna Biers as beautiful, but this D'Anna's presence seemed to give the stark interrogation room a radiance that had nothing to do with the overhead lighting. She looked like the painting of one of the monotheist saints that he had seen at the Caprica Museum of Art.

Major Parker walked in and sat beside Lee. "What's going on?"

"Don't worry. Leoben knows what he's doing."

"You think he's conning her?"

Lee shook his head. "No. He genuinely believes this child she carries is their peacemaker."

Leoben stayed on his knees for a full minute before he got up and sat across from D'Anna.

"John told me you come from our homeworld," Leoben said to her.

"You know John?"

"I know John and Kara both. Kara believes in your child the same way John does. She came to see me a week or so ago. We read the scripture together. Kara understands the role your son will play in the future of our two races."

D'Anna beamed. "I want to meet her. I want to meet all of John's family. Can you bring her to see me?"

"I'll see what I can do. Let's talk about the homeworld. I don't remember our homeworld because the Cavil who brought us here wiped my memories and replaced them with random memories of a life on Caprica. He did it because I came to believe that he was wrong in trying to exterminate the human race. I alone stood up to him. He had one of his centurions kill me and when I downloaded on the baseship, I had no memories of my real past. None. I thought I was a human bookseller. If it wasn't for Kara and her father, I might never have known the truth. I've prayed many times that I would one day know my roots. You can give me back some of those memories. Will you do that? Will you help me remember my birthplace? Will you tell me about our homeworld? Are you the answer to my prayers?"

D'Anna's look softened. "What do you want to know, brother?"

"Everything you can tell me."

TBC…


	50. Sisters and Brothers Under the Skin

Chapter 50

Sisters and Brothers Under the Skin?

_Random observations:_

_Day 1: We made our first jump today. I asked one of the crew why it took so many jumps to reach our destination. I was told that the computers that made the calculations could only plot a jump so far. It will take us several days to get there and several more of these dizzying jumps since thirty light years covers over a hundred eighty trillion miles. Who knows what might be between us and our destination? I applaud the caution no matter how the jump feels._

_Day 2: I spoke with the other two physicians who are on board and neither of them is interested in going to the surface of the planet when we get there. They were happy that I wanted to accompany the landing party. They seemed perfectly content to stay safely aboard the _Hyperion _and play triad and sample Captain Prolmar's ample stock of fine wines and liquors._

_Day 4: I have been searching the ship's reference databases for information on the Thirteenth Tribe and have so far found nothing, but perhaps that's because I'm hopeless with computers. A communication technician volunteered to help me. Her name is Irina Galatova, a sweet and beautiful and quite knowledgeable young woman. Since we know the Thirteenth Tribe were the earliest monotheists in recorded history, Irina suggested I read their scriptures for clues to their origins. She helped me download the entire document. I know what I will be doing with my evenings for quite a while._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

"That was a good idea letting Leoben talk to D'Anna," Major Parker said as he and Lee ate breakfast in the cafeteria at the airbase. They had retreated to a table in a corner, far enough from others that their words would not be overheard.

"It was Kara's idea," Lee said.

Parker smiled. "Bill has mentioned her ability to think outside of the box."

Lee chuckled. "I told her one time she's lived most of her life outside the box."

They ate in silence for a while and then Parker said. "The transcript of everything D'Anna and Leoben said will be ready later this morning. I left word for it to be couriered to your father…his request. I'd rather this report stay out of the electronic system no matter how secure we think it is. Having one Cylon debrief another is unorthodox to say the least."

Lee nodded, thinking of Kendra Shaw's skills at getting into encrypted documents. He knew she wasn't the only one with that ability.

Parker continued, "Bill doesn't rate D'Anna's information very highly. He's far more interested in what Major Gallagher has to say. He doesn't think Dr. Cardenas will have much information that we can use in the invasion either."

"I disagree with him," Lee said.

"In a way he's correct. D'Anna is technically considered _the enemy_. Her information would never be taken as gospel without corroboration from a reliable source and those are in short supply. Plus Bill had some dealings over the years with D'Anna Biers, the reporter who died in the bunker. He knows she was capable of duplicity. Major Gallagher told me yesterday afternoon that this copy is very different from the one we knew. After listening to her talk to Leoben, I can see why he said that. He also told me that this copy had been boxed at the time the destruction of the Colonies was planned. She knows nothing about that at all."

"What does that mean…_boxed_?"

"Apparently it means they're in a sort of suspended animation in one of the resurrection tanks. Even Major Gallagher doesn't fully understand it. The body is kept alive but the brain or consciousness or whatever is switched off. You heard D'Anna last night. She talked about their creators like they're alive when both Kara and Major Gallagher have said they were killed almost seven years ago. I played back the video portion of the recording several times in slow motion and watched D'Anna's facial expressions and eye movements carefully when she said it. She's being truthful. She really believes they're still alive."

"Why doesn't my dad trust the doctor?"

"It's not a matter of trust. Dr. Cardenas will be invaluable in telling us about the settlement and the human population, but we doubt she knows much about their defense network."

"My dad and John used to be friends," Lee said sadly.

Parker sat for a minute like he was debating what to say. "The situation with your father and Major Gallagher and President Roslin is a complicated one. It probably always has been, but it's more complicated now. I don't think I need to say any more than that."

Lee looked down at his empty coffee cup and shook his head. He'd known since he was sixteen years old that his father had been in love with Laura. When they had all believed that John had died in the explosion of the basestar, Bill must have thought he and Laura would get that second chance.

Parker broke his train of thought. "Your father is one of the best military minds we've probably ever seen. He deserves credit for a brilliant plan that freed Caprica from Cylon control. He'll also get credit for our plan to free the human slaves on Nereid."

"John deserves credit for destroying that basestar."

"Yes, he does. Your father knows that. If Major Gallagher hadn't brought a Cylon back with him, I think Bill would have handled things very differently. I think the major's devotion to D'Anna or more specificially their unborn child has been very off-putting for Bill if for no other reason than how it's hurt President Roslin. The fact that Gallagher attacked a superior officer over D'Anna made it even worse. Cain was wrong in consigning D'Anna to an airlock, but John was wrong in attacking her. By all rights he should be in the brig."

"Do you think my dad is going to bring charges against John for what he did?"

"I'm not sure, but Bill is now faced with some sort of disciplinary action against one of his best commanders. Not to mention that it's a very bad time to lose a seasoned officer who was the first one to jump her battlestar back here last November. You and Kara both probably owe your lives to her getting back here and getting all of _Galalctica's _Vipers into the fight. I'm sure at least subconsciously your father blames Major Gallagher for the situation he now faces concerning the commander. Whether or not you like her personally, you've got to admit she's got guts. She's not afraid to make a tough call."

"Cain should have put John and D'Anna in the brig and let my father deal with it."

"I agree. She should have, but she didn't, so Bill is faced with the consequences of both hers and Gallagher's actions. Like I said, this is a complicated situation and unfortunately it's a highly-charged emotional one, too."

"I know my dad can't understand John's feelings. He still regards the Cylons as machines."

"As do most people. But Major Gallagher seems to regard them as our equals. That doesn't sit too well with Bill either."

"Do you think John is…" Lee couldn't bring himself to say the word. _Crazy_.

"He's definitely gone through a number of experiences that have changed him. I talked to Bill for a long time last night before I started replaying D'Anna's chat with Leboen. I explained my belief about Major Gallgaher's state of mind, the Knossos syndrome that he's no doubt suffering from, and something else. Again, this is just a theory, so take it as that. During his debriefing yesterday afternoon Gallagher and I talked about the prison. I wanted to get the worst over at the beginning. He understood. He was very cooperative even though I could tell how difficult it was for him to revisit those four months. Some of the things done to him were horrific and there were a lot of drug induced hallucinations. There's no doubt in my mind that he suffered terribly at their hands both physically and psychologically. I also don't believe he told me everything that was done to him. Whether he's blocking some of it or simply won't talk about it, I don't know. I didn't push him because he'd already told me enough. His story echoes many of those who were liberated from the Cylon prison here on Caprica last November."

"Did you tell that to my dad?" Lee asked.

"Not in great detail, but yes. Major Gallagher and I haven't even begun to talk about his experiences after the prison, but for what it's worth, here's what I think. I believe that he wants D'Anna's child to live because in his mind it somehow makes the suffering that he went through worthwhile. Apparently many of the Cylons regard the child as very special and he knows the child is part of him. It's almost like he can say to them, _you couldn't make this child yourself. I had to do it for you._ His feelings for Rachel play into it, too, but we haven't talked about her yet."

Lee nodded. "John's a very good father. How do you explain his conversion to their faith?"

Parker shook his head. "I don't have enough information yet. Was he a religious man prior to Nereid?"

"Not extremely. I know he believes…_believed_ in the gods, but I don't know anything beyond that. He and Laura married in Elosha's temple and they had Braedon's dedication and naming ceremony there."

"Faith is deeply felt and emotional. Major Gallagher may have had what some would call a _conversion experience _due to something that happened to him on the planet. I'm sure I'll get some more insight as we talk."

"Kara will be particularly interested in what caused him to embrace the monotheistic religion. She's accepted the idea of a half-breed baby. She's still having trouble with the other. I know she plans to talk to John about it when the time is right."

Parker glanced at his watch. "I'm sure we could sit here all morning talking about these issues, but we need to get going. I'd like for you to go over the D'Anna-Leoben recording and make notes of anything you think that will be useful to us for planning the invasion. Pay particular attention to how they govern themselves and to any hierarchy she mentions, especially in regard to the centurions. Disregard everything else for right now. We'll revisit her other information later. I'm going to continue Major Gallagher's debriefing. Starting mid-afternoon we'll let the major rest and you can talk to Dr. Cardenas. Bill told me last night that he'd spoken to President Roslin and she's going to let Kara bring Braedon out here later today to see his father."

"John will love that," Lee said.

Parker smiled. "I'm sure he will. Several times he's mentioned how his love for his family was all that pulled him through while he was in the prison."

Lee thought of a line that a character had once uttered in a movie he'd seen or maybe a book he'd read. _The future is always in motion…impossible to see. _

He got a cup of coffee and left the mess hall, thoughts of the future evaporating as he went to face his day in the present.

...

John was feeding Rachel when Major Parker arrived, alone this time. Bianca immediately got up and poured another cup of coffee.

"Thank you," Parker said as he sat at the table with them.

"I guess you're ready to get started," John said.

"I'll be glad to sit here and chat for a minute. It looks like Rachel is almost through with her bottle." He leaned over and looked at her. "How old is she?"

John had to stop and think. How long had it been since the day he'd helped Petra get Rika back to the apartment building where she'd then given birth to her little girl, the day she'd tried to run away because she wanted to be with the young man she loved and had deluded herself into thinking was her child's father.

"I'm not sure. Six weeks, maybe seven, maybe as many as eight. Days on Nereid run together for me. I never saw a calendar the whole time I was there."

Bianca said, "From her size and development I'd judge her to be around two months old. We need to think about her first vaccinations. I'm sure whoever is helping Hunter care for his child will do the same. We didn't have any vaccines on Nereid. I held my breath every time a child was brought to the clinic with a rash. An outbreak of measles would have been bad for the children born there in the last six years because none of them had been vaccinated. You'll need to think about that, Major Parker, before you bring any of those children back to Caprica."

"I'm sure we'll take a complete medical team with us replete with pediatricians."

"I'd like to go back on the first ship," she said. "My husband is there."

"We'll certainly consider your request. Do you want to take Rachel back with you?"

"I think Rachel should be returned to Petra once her life is no longer in danger."

"You don't think her mother would want to come to Caprica?" Parker asked.

John glanced at Bianca and she said, "Petra is married to a Four. From everything I could tell, he was fine with raising Rachel just like the child he and Petra have together. I hope you don't plan to go in and kill all of them."

"We hope we don't have to kill anyone, but I don't think that's realistic."

"No, I'm sure it's not. They won't all surrender will they, John?"

"No, but the skin…the humanoid ones don't do a lot of fighting. Of course that's not saying they won't defend themselves. Some of them used to go into the forest to fight Hunter's people, but the rest of them are content to live in the city and the settlements. Why should they fight? They've got a hundred thousand centurions to do their fighting for them."

Parker glanced at his watch. "We need to get started."

John put the empty bottle on the table and placed Rachel in Bianca's arms before he refilled Parker's coffee mug and then his own. "See you at lunch," he said to Bianca and then he and Parker walked downstairs to the debriefing room that had been set up.

He sat at the table while Parker got the audio-visual equipment started. Parker opened a notebook and turned it to a clean page. Yesterday as John had talked about his four months in the Cylon prison, he had noticed Parker taking quite a few notes.

"I hope we're through talking about the prison," John said.

"We are…unless there's anything you'd like to add."

John shook his head. For the first time in over a week, he'd had the nightmare about the firing squad. He'd been awake since four in the morning.

Parker took a sip of his coffee. "I've debated about where to go next with your debriefing, whether to stick with a chronological timeline or let you tell me anything you think is more important than the rest. After hearing you say they had a hundred thousand centurions, I think we'll start there. Where did you get that number?"

"From Natalie. She lives in Settlement Alpha. She's their First Six, the first copy of the model ever created and the only one of that particular copy. According to her that hundred thousand doesn't include the centurions on the three baseships over the planet. There's four or five thousand on each ship. There's also about six thousand of the old U-87s on the planet but they're not front-line defense. They mostly do inside jobs. In the city, they do the skilled interior work once the new centurions get a building finished. They paint and install plumbing and electricity, lay carpet and flooring…that sort of thing…just like they did here in the Colonies."

"Would they fight?"

"Probably…if somebody put a weapon in their hands. They don't have them built in like the new ones do. Same for the humanoids. I never saw anything in the city that looked like an armory, but that doesn't mean there's not one there. I asked Sonja if she kept a weapon in her apartment. She said she didn't. I know weapons are available to them because one of the Twos executed a young man with a pistol. I didn't see it happen, but I got there right afterward. The Two was still waving the gun around. It was Rachel's father, a Two, who shot the young human lover of Rachel's mother. He's the same Two I shot at the airfiled the night we escaped."

Parker was writing quickly. "We'll get back to that shortly. Let's keep on with numbers. How many humans and skinjobs?"

"Again according to Natalie there's about forty-five thousand humans in eight settlements and the city not counting births during the last six years. Settlement Alpha where I spent almost a month had over twenty thousand. Alpha is the biggest agricultural settlement. Most of the humans work in the fields or in something to do with food processing and distribution. The rest work in small garment shops or in large daycares. I think some are personal household staff for some of the humanoids. There's a complete kitchen staff in every barracks, but there aren't any frills in Alpha…no nightlife, no restaurants, no entertainment. Everything shuts down and everybody is home before the sun goes down. There are heavy centurion patrols at night. You wouldn't dare go out without being with a Cylon…except maybe to walk across the backyard and visit with a neighbor."

"In other words, you stayed off the streets."

"Unless you had one of them with you."

"So Alpha grows all its food? What about the other settlements?"

"Alpha is a big operation but doesn't grow all the food. Alpha gets imports of fruits and coffee from another settlement. Almost half of Alpha's food is exported to the city and other settlements. Alpha gets imports of cotton and wool from some of the other settlements…also dairy products and meat. It's a complicated and well-organized operation."

"How many Cylons are in Alpha?"

"According to Natalie about two thousand humanoids and almost forty thousand centurions. The city and the rest of the settlements have about that many humanoids each. They usually have roughly two centurions for every human."

Parker finally stopped writing and looked up at him. "How much do you trust this information?"

"I believe Natalie. I can't think of any reason that she would lie to me."

"Even though technically you're the enemy?"

"She's planning a rebellion and she wanted my help. Look, none of this is going to make much sense unless I start with something that happened in the city. I need to start with the day we had Rachel's naming ceremony and I met Buddy. He's the centurion who carries Lucy's avatar. He also has the programming of one of the old U-87s but it's all housed in a new centurion body. He's got the new centurion programming, too, but he can switch between them when he needs to."

Parker stood. "I'll be back in a couple of minutes." He left, taking the notebook with him. John drank the last of his coffee. He'd been used to drinking tea in the city and in the settlements. He felt the buzz from the caffeine in three cups of coffee.

When Parker returned ten minutes later, John said, "I guess the numbers I gave you didn't jive with those you got from Hunter."

Parker shook his head.

"Higher or lower?"

"Much higher. More than double the number of humans and about thirty thousand more centurions on the planet. Both those numbers are significant."

"You told Bill."

"I just got off the phone with him. Kara found evidence of about fifty ships under the snow in their north polar region. We could only identify one of them, but we extrapolated some figures for fifty ships and came up with anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five thousand total passengers and crew depending on the type of ship. That matched Hunter's estimate based on the one settlement he was familiar with and his contact's estimate of the city."

"They didn't just take humans from those ships. After the bombings of the Colonies before the radiation had spread, they landed ships on a few of the planets and took humans and equipment, mostly farm equipment and animals, so they could start a couple of cattle ranches and dairy farms as well as agricultural farms."

Parker was making notes. "Hunter wasn't aware they'd taken humans from any of the planets. He had a contact from the city, but apparently his knowledge was limited."

"After I realized that there was the smallest chance I might not die on Nereid, I asked questions when I could get away with it. Natalie was the most knowledgeable about everything. Sonja…she knew a lot about the city but not much about the settlements. D'Anna had only been unboxed about a year. She knows almost nothing except their religion. She's a walking encyclopedia of monotheism. And her faith is very strong. When we were in the airlock, she kept telling me God would protect our child."

"Bill is going to have our battle plans revised to reflect the increased numbers of Cylons and centurions. What I'd like for you to do now is give me an idea of what happened to you immediately after you were taken from the prison. You don't need to go into a lot of detail. Just hit the high points until you get to how you came into contact with the centurion you call Buddy."

John tried to be as brief as he could, but Parker kept asking questions and it was nearly lunch before he reached the part of his story about Rika and Yusef and the birth of little Rachel. For the first time since he'd started talking that morning, John found himself struggling to relate what had happened. It was much more difficult for him to talk about Rika's and Yusef's deaths than it was to talk about what he'd endured in the prison.

"It's okay," Parker said. "Take your time."

He managed to relate finding Rika dead in the rain that horrible morning. "I thought I was holding Kara," John said, his voice beginning to crack. "I thought I'd lost my daughter. They look so much alike."

"Would you like to take a break?"

"No. I want to get through this so I don't have to talk about it again. Sonja found me in the park holding Rika's body. It was raining and I was freezing. I don't remember a lot after that except Sonja took me to her apartment and put me to bed." He took a deep breath. "Later that day she kept Cavil from sending me back to prison. I'd already decided that I wouldn't go back. I'd make them kill me first. After that I didn't fight Sonja anymore. I slept with her whenever she wanted."

"Did you ever initiate any of these sexual encounters?"

John shook his head.

"How would you characterize your relationship with her?"

"What do you mean?"

"Was it just sex? Friends with benefits? A love affair?"

"Definitely not option three. Something between one and two. I actually enjoyed her company part of the time. Sometimes she really got on my nerves and other times…she's a beautiful woman, very sexy, very seductive. Sometimes I could resist her and other times…" He shrugged. "I guess a lot of men would shrug it off and say they just used her, but I've never been able to relate to a woman that way. And Sonja was my handler so staying on her good side had certain advantages."

"Such as?"

"Freedom to roam around the city. It's because of her that I could draw that detailed map for you and Bill. She took me to the ancient temple and the valley and then later to Settlement Alpha so that's where those maps came from, too. She let me get my daughter to her ship so she could get off the planet. I wouldn't have gotten to do any of that without…cooperating with Sonja."

"What about D'Anna? Describe your relationship with her."

John sat for a long time. "That's a tougher one because of the baby. She and Sonja are night and day. At first with D'Anna I was afraid she'd give me that drug again if I didn't have sex with her. Doolittle had told me what the long-term effects were and I didn't want to wind up a drooling vegetable sitting in my own piss, begging somebody to kill me, so I just…did what I'd been brought to the city to do. It went on for about a month. Then as soon as she found out she was pregnant…" John shrugged again. "I'd fulfilled my purpose. That was the end of it. She wasn't interested in me any longer."

"The end of the sex or the end of the relationship?"

"The sex. I still went to see her. Some days she didn't feel like talking. She was sick a lot. What conversations we had revolved around religion and the baby."

"Did you tell her you wanted to raise the child with her?"

"That was before I had any idea I would ever escape from Nereid."

"And now? Do you still want to raise the child with her?"

"I can't say I want to raise the child _with her_, but that baby is still my responsibility. I'll do whatever it takes to make sure he's cared for. What kind of man would it make me if I turned my back on an innocent baby I'd helped create? I made a choice back there on Nereid. I chose to live and in making that choice and doing what D'Anna wanted, we created a child. I have to accept the consequences. I brought her here to save the baby's life. In doing that I doomed her if anything goes wrong since she's way out of range of any res facility. I've got to accept the responsibility for that, too."

Parker slowly nodded and John saw understanding and real empathy in his eyes. Brandon Parker understood something that Bill Adama never would.

"I know this is difficult for you to talk about Major Gallagher. I appreciate your candor."

"I really wish you'd call me John. Please, just drop the formality."

Parker smiled. "Okay, but only if you'll call me Brad."

"I thought Bill said your name was Brandon."

"It is, but I've been called Brad all my life. I have…had a sister a year older who couldn't say Brandon. She called me Brad and everybody else picked it up. All my friends call me Brad. And I think we should break for lunch now. We'll come back afterward and give it another hour or two and then let Lee talk to Dr. Cardenas."

John smiled. "If Lee's not careful, she'll wind up controlling the interview. Bianca tells me I remind her of the son she lost when the Cylons destroyed Aerilon."

"I've picked up a bit of the mother-son dynamic with you two."

"Bianca and her husband are the best kind of people not to mention I owe them my life. They saved me when I was dying of pneumonia thanks to being held underwater in the prison. Bianca was the first sight I saw when I finally woke up after being out of it for nearly two days."

"She and I talked yesterday while you were getting your physical. She said if they'd gotten you much later there wouldn't have been anything they could have done for you. She credits your will to live with a lot of it."

"They told me the same thing. I've got nothing but respect for them. Those doctors risked their lives in the beginning when they let the Cylons set them up in the clinic. Some humans called them collaborators and even traitors because they worked with _the enemy_, but they had both taken the oath doctors take. They couldn't stand by and watch humans suffer and die if they could help."

Parker nodded. "I'm sure it took a lot of courage."

"I'm not even sure they thought about their own safety in those early days. They did what their training and compassion compelled them to do."

"Speaking of doctors, Bill told me last night that he's going to allow a specialist to see D'Anna. He's going to find out who took care of Sharon Agathon and ask him or her to check D'Anna."

As Parker shut off the recording equipment, John said, "Bill is a man of his word. I respect that. After lunch would you call him and let me talk to him?"

Parker frowned. "Could I ask what about?"

"I'd like to ask him not to do anything to Commander Cain for…" John shrugged and pointed to his head. "She and I both made mistakes. She's a good commander. My daughter served under her. She's tough but fair. She needs to be in command of a battlestar when we go to Nereid."

"Let me talk to Bill. He's well aware of Cain's credentials. Maybe he can work something out."

"While I'm on a roll, could I ask for something else?"

"Shoot."

"I'd like to start walking around the base…not far…just to keep in shape. I walked a lot on Nereid. I don't care if a couple of Marines walk with me. I just need to get some exercise."

"That's a reasonable request. Let me talk to Bill."

John smiled. "What's for lunch today?"

"I haven't got a clue. The mess hall special, probably."

"At least we aren't sharing it with the roaches."

...

"You're much more handsome than your father," Bianca said to Lee as they both sat at the table in the debriefing room. "The gods were as kind to you when it came to handing out good looks as they were to John."

Lee felt warmth in his cheeks. "Thank you."

She smiled. "John told me to go easy on you. He said you and your father are not much alike."

"No, we're not."

"And you're the one who's in love with John's daughter."

"I am."

"Well, ask your questions. Major Parker told us that Kara is bringing John's son to see him this afternoon. I need to be back so I can take care of Rachel."

Lee smiled. "I don't want this to feel like an interrogation so what I'd like for you to do is just tell me how you came to be on Nereid. You don't need to go into a lot of detail."

Bianca talked for a number of minutes about how she and her husband were celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary on the _Astral Princess _when the ship was surrounded by Cylon Raiders and forced to jump to Nereid.

"We had no idea what was happening at first. We didn't know for hours after the jump, not until the Cylons boarded the ship and the captain was allowed to make an announcement. Even then we had a hard time believing it."

"Was the _Astral Princess_ taken to the surface of Nereid?"

"No. We were taken to the planet a dozen at a time in smaller ships and processed into a place we later learned was called Settlement Alpha. They took us from the ship in very orderly fashion, emptying the lower decks first. Laszlo, my husband, had booked a stateroom for us. He's not usually so extravagant, but…thirty years together is something to celebrate. We were on the uppermost deck so we were among the last passengers to be taken to the planet. The crew was processed last."

"How long did it take to process the whole ship?"

"Nearly three weeks. With passengers and crew, the _Astral Princess_ had over five thousand people. While we were still on the ship, we were allowed to leave our rooms twice a day for meals. We were always under heavy centurion guard." She looked down for a few moments and then back up. "Several people on our deck became very belligerent at our treatment even though no one was being physically harmed. They hadn't yet accepted that all their power and wealth in the Colonies meant nothing to the Cylons. They were taken away. I never saw them again."

"Do you think they were killed?"

"They were probably taken to the prison and used as subjects for the Cylons' drug experiments. The drug they used on John that caused his terrible hallucinations was developed by experimenting on prisoners."

"We'll talk about that a little later. Let's continue with what happened during the first several weeks. What else was involved in being _processed_?"

"When our turn came to go to the planet, we were each allowed to take one suitcase packed with clothing only. Everything else we had to leave behind."

"Such as?"

"Any electronic devices, radios, CD players, mobile phones, computers. Our luggage was scanned and then manually searched. We were also personally searched quite thoroughly. Children were allowed to keep soft toys. All others were confiscated."

"What about books?"

"We had to leave all our books behind, both paper and electronic, even our books of scripture if they weren't monotheistic. I later found out that most of the books wound up with various Cylons. John told me that Sonja had a large bookcase in her apartment filled with Colonial books. Natalie has a much smaller one." She took a deep breath. "Perhaps I shouldn't mention this next thing as I have no first-hand knowledge of its truth, but I think it's an interesting aside to what at least one group of Cylons did before they scuttled the _Astral Princess_."

"They didn't scuttle it. They parked it in the arctic. And I think all of your observations are worth listening to so please proceed."

"As I said, I have no firsthand knowledge. It was told to me while I was treating a crew member for a broken bone nearly a year afterward. He told me that like all huge luxury liners, the _Astral Princess _offered a certain type of entertainment on their in-room viewing channels. It cost extra of course."

"You're speaking of pornographic movies?" Lee asked.

A disgusted look passed over her face. "I am. The crewmember told me that a One had him download the entire digital library of the ship's porn and give it to him. The crew member had heard that it was regularly watched by the Ones and Fives. And they think they're so much better than we are," she ended angrily.

"Did you ever hear that they went further than watching these movies?"

"What do you mean?"

Lee managed to look her in the eyes and asked, "Did they force any women to have sex with them...or any men either for that matter?"

"I don't think _force_ was involved, at least not in the physical sense. The only case of rape we're aware of was a young woman we treated at the clinic several months after we arrived on the planet. She had been beaten and raped by a human male, apparently someone she had met on the ship that brought them to Nereid. He was immediately taken to the prison."

"Without a trial?"

"He was caught running away. Her blood was still on his hands. So no, there wasn't any trial."

"So the male skinjobs didn't rape any of the women?"

"Not that I'm personally aware of although John told me that Rachel was conceived during the rape of her mother in the city by a Two. The male Cylons in our settlement found women who were willing to…service them in return for favors…no work in the fields, extra food rations, that sort of thing. I never heard of the Fives doing anything like that although several of them have young men who live with them as _personal servants_. Interpret that any way you'd like. Many of the Cylon women took male human lovers but I never heard of anything like the drug that was used on John in the city."

"Did all of the Cylons take up with humans?"

"Most but not all of them. Natalie never took a human lover. The Simon who runs our clinic didn't have anything romantic to do with the humans until he met a woman, Giana who has a young daughter Jemmy. We met her when she brought Jemmy in for her fifth or sixth bout of tonsillitis a year or so ago. Laszlo finally took the child's tonsils out. Now Simon and Giana are talking about getting married. He spends more time with her than he does at the clinic. One thing that did happen in the early years at the settlement was the Cylons from the city came and picked young men or women to take back with them to function as breeders. Some were returned if they didn't work out. Others never came back. They haven't taken any in the last year or so or I would have heard."

"Could you elaborate on what you mean by _didn't work out_?"

"It meant they either failed as breeders or failed to please the Cylon who took them. One thing about the clinic is that many of our patients are very talkative. Laszlo and I hear a lot of gossip."

"Tell me about the clinic and how you and your husband came to work there."

"As we were brought off the transport on the planet's surface, we had to show our interplanetary passports and any other identifying papers. Because our occupation was listed as physicians, Laszlo and I were taken immediately to the clinic. We were given a small four-room apartment on the first floor as living quarters and told we would be allowed to treat the humans. I later found out our little apartment was luxurious compared to the living quarters most other passengers were given. Most of the married couples were allowed to stay together in tiny one-room apartments. If they had children, they were given a two-room place. The singles were housed in large barracks that are scattered throughout the settlement. They have a bed and a locker. Men and women are housed separately. In most cases the barracks aren't near each other. Communication isn't allowed. The single men and women are only allowed to co-mingle on the one day they have off although it's always under centurion guard."

"Where do the children go while their parents work?"

"Those under the age of nine are kept in large communal daycares by a number of human women who are always overseen by Cylons, mostly the Sixes and Eights. The Threes come in every day and spend an hour indoctrinating those ages six to eight in the monotheistic religion. Jobs are found for the children nine and older."

Lee was appalled. "They put nine-year-olds to work."

"Yes."

"Doing what?"

"Whatever they can physically handle. Many of them go to the fields with their parents. Others clean the barracks and the Cylons' dwellings. Others run errands for the Cylons."

"All things that could be done by centurions."

"Yes. The Cylons have a philosophy about _idle human hands_."

"Were you the only physicians on board the _Astral Princess_?"

"No. There were a few others as well as the ship's doctor. He was retired from a teaching hospital. I'm sure in his day he was top-notch, but he had a problem with the bottle. He was taken to the city. We heard he died of cirrhosis during that first year."

"What happened to the other physicians?"

"On all the ships I think there were several dozen physicians and a number of other medical personnel. They were divided among the settlements and the city. We had a young man just out of medical school with us for nearly a year, but he…" Bianca sighed deeply. "He was on his way to Libran on another one of the transports to get married. His fiancé was waiting for him. He fell into a deep depression after we found out what had happened to the Colonies and he realized that she was dead. Laszlo and I tried to help him, but we didn't have any anti-depressant medications so we had no way to treat him medically. One morning he was gone. He'd left during the night. I told Laszlo we should prepare ourselves for the worst. Later that morning two centurions brought his body back. They'd fished him out of one of the irrigation canals surrounding the fields."

"Suicide?"

"My guess is he took his own life since I saw no evidence of bullet wounds. We had a lot of suicides that first year. I mentioned to John that a number of people were addicted to one form of recreational drug or another. Some managed to weather their cold-turkey withdrawals, but some didn't. Others simply couldn't face what they saw as the bleakness of our future as the Cylon's captives. We had more suicides in that first year than during the last five years combined. The Simon who runs our clinic used to gloat and say it proved our human weakness. Laszlo and I both despise him, but the Simon who is married to Petra, the woman who has taken Rachel, seemed like a very decent person. The various models may have all been cut from the same cloth in the beginning, but they've changed and evolved very differently. Even our Simon seems to be mellowing a bit under Giana's influence."

"Would you say you regard any of them as friends?"

Bianca pursed her lips. "Yes, I'd definitely say we regard Natalie as a friend. She's worked hard to improve conditions for the humans."

"Which model is she?"

"A Six. The First Six. She doesn't look like the others that I've met. Her hair is honey blond and longer than Sonja's. She's very intelligent and very compassionate as well as very beautiful. She and John formed a close bond."

Lee looked up in surprise. "They were lovers?"

"Oh, no. I never saw any evidence of that although they would make a stunning couple. John loves his wife. Natalie loves another Cylon, the one who was destroyed, or she thought he was destroyed until John told her about the one surviving copy in Hunter's valley, the only remaining Seven in existence. Since they came back from that first trip to the valley, Natalie has had a certain look, a bit haunted, very sad. I can only describe it as a woman in a hopeless romantic situation."

"Daniel."

"Yes. Daniel, but Daniel loves Lucy who is nothing but an avatar now being carried around in Buddy, John's centurion friend. It's almost too complicated for my poor brain."

"Lucy who?" Lee asked.

"I never heard her last name or if I did, I've forgotten it. Perhaps John knows. She was one of the creators and died with the others before the holocaust. Natalie and John were going to do something to some of the centurions to allow them free will. Natalie felt like once they knew what had been done to their creators and their Sevens, the centurions would join the rebellion."

Lee stared at her. "But you don't know what they were going to do to them?"

"John can tell you. So many things happened in the few days before we left. It really started with the fire when someone tried to burn down the house where D'Anna and John were living. If John had been there and the fire bomb had been thrown through the bedroom window, they would both have died. They're certain it was a Five, but Natalie wasn't able to obtain the proof they needed to confront Cavil. Then a few days later Sonja brought Rachel to us. The Cavil in the city had tried to kidnap her. Sonja was afraid he would have her dissected."

Lee was astonished and repulsed. "Dissected? Why?"

"They believe she's one of the protectors of the peacemaker so that makes her special. Apparently some of them think they would be able to find something by slicing her up. The idea was so repulsive to Sonja and Rachel's biological father that they persuaded Petra and Simon to bring her to the settlement. Once John and Natalie saw the direction everything was taking, there was only one thing to do. Get them off Nereid."

"So all of this is related to the prophecy about D'Anna's unborn child?"

"Yes."

"Do you believe the prophecy?"

"I had my doubts until Sonja and Leoben showed up with Rachel. What I now believe is that somebody went to a great deal of trouble to try to kill John and D'Anna and their unborn child and have it look like an accidental house fire. D'Anna would have downloaded, but John and the baby wouldn't have. But my opinion doesn't matter. Whether the child will one day fulfill some sort of prophecy isn't even the point, it's the perception in the minds of others that matters right now. My honest opinion is that the child is no different from any other half-human, half-Cylon child. It's no different from Rachel only it will be born of a Cylon mother…if D'Anna manages to carry it near enough to term that it survives."

Lee said, "Would you like to take a break? Get something to drink maybe?"

"No. There's always the possibility that things went badly for Natalie. They have a procedure they call boxing. I believe D'Anna was boxed for a number of years. Natalie once told me that as the First Six, she would never be boxed, but I'm no longer sure of anything."

Lee glanced over his notes. "Tell me a little bit about your clinic."

"It was their original lab or so Natalie told us, the one where the creators worked. Cavil took most of the equipment to the lab at the prison to make everyone believe the creators went with it. He left us only the basics. We have an x-ray machine, but no MRI or CT scanner. We have enough lab equipment to do basic specimen analysis but not much else."

"What about medications?"

"Nothing in the beginning. Then we were brought some that had been gleaned from the captured ships and a pharmacy they raided on one of the planets. The same with basic supplies such as sutures and bandages and surgical equipment. Everything they took was divided among the eight settlements and the city. The drug distribution especially was very uneven. We lost many of our diabetic patients and those with high blood pressure and heart disease in the first twelve to sixteen months. The Cylons considered it no great loss. Ill humans couldn't work the fields."

"Besides the rapist did any humans get sent to the prison?"

"Some refused to work. They were sent. We also had several men and one couple try to escape. They were all killed and their bodies brought back to the settlement to serve as a warning."

"How many would you say died during that first sixteen months?"

"Counting the suicides, executions and natural deaths, over four hundred. Since then we've lost roughly thirty each year to various causes."

"How many births?"

"During the first two years nearly a hundred each year. It's declined steadily since then. The people are forced to work six days a week. The fatigue is gradually taking its toll. Miscarriages are on the rise as well. The people aren't starved but they expend a great many calories so many of them are rather thin. In women of child-bearing age this can lead to amenorrhea which is the absence of the menstrual cycle. No pregnancies will result even if the woman is sexually active. Not allowing the young single men and women to freely mingle is also contributing to the lower birth rate."

"Does that matter at all to the Cylons…I mean the low number of births?"

"It does to Natalie. She understands that we lost nearly two percent of the settlement's population in sixteen months and gained half a percent. She realizes that couldn't go on if they want the settlement to thrive. She wants to get some changes made such as a two-day rest period each week and more co-mingling, but she doesn't have enough support in all the councils. The sad fact is that much of what the humans do in the fields could easily be done by the centurions as I've said. But Cavil and most of the council believe that humans with idle hands are sure to begin causing trouble. I think Natalie was just about to the point of getting an easier work week for some of the young women. I think she had just about convinced the others that the humans on Nereid would eventually die out if they aren't able to reproduce."

"Do you think the other Cylons care?"

"That's a good question. I can see why the answer matters to you. Believe me, Captain Adama, I'm ahead of you on that one. You're concerned that if the Cylons don't care about their human slaves, and if they're faced with losing Nereid as their homeworld, that they might simply slaughter all the humans."

"We've discussed that scenario more than once in our meetings. What do you think?"

"I think they would be divided. Some would have no qualms at all about ordering the centurions to slaughter us. Others would hesitate and others like Natalie would try to stop it. I can't speak for the other settlements or the city."

"How integrated would you say the centurions are with the human population?"

"During the day they're mixed in very thoroughly with the ones in the fields especially. During the night it's different. All the dwelling places are still guarded very closely, but the centurions are on patrol. They move around all night."

"Do any of the skinjobs patrol with the centurions?"

"At first they did, but during the last year or so I've not seen any. They've either gotten trusting or lazy. John may know more since he always spent his breaks talking to that centurion he calls Buddy. I'm sure Buddy knows their routine. Of course now that John has escaped, that might all have changed."

Lee closed his notebook. "Thank you, Dr. Cardenas. You've been a big help today. I know some of this was difficult for you to talk about. I hope you won't mind talking to me again in a few days."

"I'll be happy to…as long as you keep your father from putting John back in jail."

"That's not going to happen."

"John wouldn't tell me what he and your father discussed privately yesterday morning, but he's been depressed since then."

"I don't know what they discussed either," Lee said. "I hope seeing Kara and Braedon later today will cheer him up."

"Why is Kara bringing his son to see him and not his wife?" Bianca asked shrewdly.

"Laura is very busy. She _is_ the President."

"She's also his wife, the wife he dreamed about and talked about from the day I met him. I can't believe she'd be content with the five-minute visit they had two days ago. Has she turned her back on him because of D'Anna and the child?"

"Of course not," Lee said with as much conviction as he could muster.

Bianca stood. "And you wouldn't say so even if you knew it were true. I suppose I'll see you later. You don't need to escort me back upstairs. I can find my way."

Lee stood also and opened the door for her. "Thank you again for your cooperation today."

As he turned off the recording equipment and closed his notebook, he realized that Dr. Bianca Cardenas was a strong woman and a shrewd judge of character. In some ways she was very much like Laura. He firmly believed that should they ever meet, Dr. Bianca Cardenas would for stand up to the President of the Colonies to defend the man she obviously loved like a son.

...

"Stop at the door," Kara called to Braedon as he ran down the first floor corridor toward the portico entrance. The Marine guard in dress uniform stepped in front of the door so Brae wouldn't run into it. Brae stopped and looked up at him.

"Thank you," Kara said as she caught up with her brother and picked him up.

Brae squirmed to get down. "Dada. Go see Dada."

"Yes, we're going to see Dada," Kara said as the Marine opened the door for them.

Edgar and several of his security team were waiting beside the SUV. He opened the back door. "We got his car seat secured."

"Me do it," Brae said as he crawled across the seat and climbed into his waiting security seat. He fumbled with the straps. Kara slid across the seat and snapped them. Brae tried to rock the seat. "Go now."

Kara put the diaper bag on the floor and fastened her own seatbelt. Edgar turned and smiled. "Everyone ready."

"Go," Braedon said.

"Say please," Kara whispered.

"Pwease."

Edgar chuckled and spoke to the driver. "You heard him. Let's go."

A car pulled out in front and their driver followed. Another car was behind them. Traffic was heavy as they navigated through the city and finally reached the I-6.

When they got to the main gate into the base, the driver showed his pass and they were waved through. Once inside, Kara had to direct him. She'd never been inside the old Officer's Club but she knew its location.

As they pulled up, she saw Lee's car parked beside a jeep. They were the only two vehicles in the parking lot.

As soon as their SUV stopped, Brae began pulling at the straps. "Out," he whined.

"Okay. Okay. You've got to be patient."

She got him out and slung the diaper bag over her shoulder.

Edgar opened the front door of the club and walked through in front of her. He stopped and looked around.

"Was someone meeting you?"

The downstairs was dimly lit and deserted. Everything that could be moved to the new O-Club had been moved. A door at the back opened and light shone in. Lee stepped through and fumbled until he found the light switch. One side of the room was illuminated.

Edgar recognized Lee. "We'll be waiting outside," he said to Kara. "You've got my mobile number if you need me."

"Thank you."

Lee had reached her by then. "Hi," he said and kissed her on the cheek. They walked to the back, climbed the stairs and were in a hallway. She noted the MPs at the two exits. Lee pointed to a door on the left. "Your dad's apartment." Lee opened the door. "He's waiting for you. I'll be across the hall with Dr. Cardenas and Rachel."

…

John heard the door the minute the knob turned. The door opened. Kara walked inside and Lee closed the door behind her. Brae was clinging to her.

"Look over there," Kara said. "Who's that?"

"I don't want to scare him," John said softly.

Kara walked across the small room. Brae had suddenly gotten very shy. He tucked his face into her neck and peeked. John was struggling with his emotions. He reached out and gently stroked his son's hair.

"He's gotten so big."

"He's running around everywhere. He's talking a lot better, too, but I think the cat's got his tongue right now." Braedon was still peeking at John. "That's your dada," Kara whispered to him. "Your real Dada. Not a picture. Your dada's the one who brought Mawi here." She looked at her father. "That's what he calls Esmari. He's fallen in love."

"I can understand why," John smiled. "Esmari is a sweetheart."

"Mawi stay here," Braedon said.

"Yes," Kara said. "Mawi's going to stay here for a while. Will you let your dada hold you so he can see what a big boy you've gotten to be?"

Braedon let go of Kara and reached for his father. John had his son in his arms and all his resolve to stay strong melted. He felt the tears forming.

"I should have known I wouldn't make it through this without falling apart," John said.

Tears came to Kara's eyes. She rubbed the top of his arm.

Braedon touched his father's cheek. "Dada cry. Make better."

"You know how to make Dada better," Kara managed to say. "Give Dada a kiss."

Braedon planted a wet kiss on John's cheek and then wiggled to get down. The emotion of their meeting was completely lost on him.

"Toys," he said.

Kara wiped her tears and opened the diaper bag. "We brought a couple of his toys."

John blotted his eyes with his sleeve and put his arms around his daughter.

"I didn't get to hug you the other day," he managed to whisper. "I've missed you, baby. You and Brae. I've missed you so much."

Kara wrapped her arms around her father. "I never lost faith," she said. "As soon as I realized what Yolanda was trying to tell me, I never lost faith that I'd see you again."

"Up," Braedon said and tugged on the leg of Kara's pants. She smiled at her father and reached down for Brae. He had his Raptor and held it toward John.

"I remember when I bought that for him," John said as he took the toy. "Laura told me he was too young."

Kara chuckled softly. "He was six weeks old. It's his favorite toy now. He'd sleep with it if we'd let him."

"Dada," Braedon said and pointed to the Raptor.

John held it up. "That's right. Dada went away in one of these."

Braedon squirmed to get down again and began to explore the small apartment. John had closed both the bedroom and bathroom doors in anticipation. The living room opened into a small kitchen and couldn't be closed off. Brae made a beeline for the refrigerator and stood on tiptoe to reach the handle. He wasn't quite tall enough.

"Juice," he said.

Kara picked up the diaper bag. "We've got some juice in here."

"No. Dada's juice."

"There's nothing in there but some soft drinks," John said.

"Then don't let him see them. Laura won't let him have soft drinks. Too much sugar and caffeine."

John picked up his son. "You want to go see a baby? Her name is Rachel. Can you say _Rachel_?"

"Wachel," Braedon said.

Kara said, "He's still working on his Rs. He gets some of them."

"Let's go across the hall," John said. "I want to introduce you to the doctor who saved my life. She wants to meet you, too."

They walked over and John opened the door. Lee and Bianca were sitting on the couch watching the news on a small television. Bianca was feeding Rachel a bottle. Bianca looked tired, but as soon as she saw them, she smiled.

Lee smiled and stood.

Brae pointed and said, "Yee."

"He's still working on his Ls, too," Kara told her father.

John introduced Kara to Bianca.

"Hi," Kara said.

Bianca nodded. "Forgive me for not standing. You're as beautiful as your father described you."

"Thank you."

"And this is my son, Braedon. Brae, this is Bianca."

Braedon tucked his head shyly into John's neck and said, "Baby."

John sat down beside Bianca so that Brae could see the baby. "That's Rachel."

"No bottle," Brae said.

John looked questioningly at Kara.

"Brae is such a big boy now that he doesn't need a bottle. He drinks out of a sippy cup."

"Play," Braedon said as he showed Rachel his toy Raptor.

"She's too little to play," John told him. "She's not a big boy like you."

"Mawi play."

Kara smiled. "He thinks Esmari plays with his toys. All she does is gnaw on them. She's teething. When she sees Brae, she gives him a huge smile. Sometimes she reaches for him. We had to stop him from trying to pick her up. He doesn't understand why she's not walking."

"Esmari smiles at him because he looks like your father," Bianca said. "Esmari always wants John to hold her."

"I miss her," John said. "How's she doing?"

Kara said, "She's doing great. I think Laura plans to have everybody for lunch on Sunday. She wants to meet Dr. Cardenas and see Rachel."

Bianca said, "Oh, my dear, I'm afraid I have nothing good enough to wear. I left Nereid wearing a pair of scrubs and my lab coat. I was brought some sweatpants and shirts, but I hardly think that will do for lunch with the President of the Colonies."

Kara brightened. "Maya wants to go shopping on Saturday. We'll come get you. Dad can watch Rachel."

"I'll be glad to," John said. "Does that mean I'm invited to lunch, too?"

Kara gave him one of her looks. "Duh, Dad. Did that whack on your head make you ask dumb questions?"

"See what I mean about the smart mouth?" John said in an aside to Bianca.

"Whack mole," Braedon said and giggled. "Hunta whack mole."

"Brae's got a game called Whack-a-Mole," Kara said. "He and Hunter play it. Little rubber moles pop up through little plastic trapdoors. The object is to push the door shut before the next mole pops up. You wouldn't believe how fast Brae can do it. He's almost as good as Hunter."

Lee winked at her, "He probably inherited somebody's hand-eye coordination and good reflexes. Maybe John and Brae can play on Sunday."

John said, "I'm short on clothes, too. Maybe Kara could go by the apartment and bring me one of my suits and a shirt and tie. Bring me some dress shoes and socks, too…and a belt. I won't be able to keep the pants up otherwise."

"I'll bring you some things tomorrow when I come out here," Lee said. "After all, Hunter and I are living there."

Bianca said, "I appreciate the invitation, Kara, but I'm afraid I can't go shopping with you. I have no money."

Kara grinned. "I do, and I can't think of anything I'd rather spend it on than the doctor who saved my dad's life. We'll get some new clothes for Rachel, too. Maya's going to get Esmari a couple of dresses."

Brae came over to the sofa, climbed up and got on John's lap. His son was already acting like they had never been apart, and John wondered how the mind of a two-year-old processed the passage of time. Maybe the last eight months had been like the blink of an eye to him, like his father was gone one day and back the next. Whatever the reason, father and son were happily reunited and that's all that mattered to him.

He and Kara had so many things to talk about, but the few hours they had together tonight belonged to his son. For a brief moment John thought about another child, a child yet unborn that D'Anna said would be blond and blue-eyed, a child who might look very much like Rachel.

Then Brae slid off his lap and got a toy truck out of the diaper bag and began rolling it around on the carpet. John returned to the present moment. Brae made motor sounds, the sounds that little boys seemed to be born knowing how to make. He ran the truck into John's shoe and looked up mischievously at his father. John smiled at his son, at the little boy who had not been planned, but who had been conceived in love and who now owned as much of his heart as Kara did.

...

Kara lay in Lee's arms in her bed at Marble House on Saturday night. Their lovemaking had been subdued because Lee had hurt his ankle playing soccer that morning. He shifted gingerly to get more comfortable.

"You knew when you went out there this morning how Zak plays soccer."

"He plays like it's a championship game."

"Hunter told Maya that Zak had a couple of Marine buddies who were as good as him."

"I would have been fine if I hadn't stepped in a damned gopher hole or something."

"Sure," Kara teased. "Blame some poor little gopher who isn't around to defend himself. It's a good thing you aren't still flying a Mark II. You'd never be able to handle the rudder with a sprained ankle."

"How was the shopping trip?"

"We had fun. Dr. Cardenas is nice. No wonder my dad likes her. She's outspoken, though. She made a comment about the fact that they've been here nearly a week and Laura hasn't made any attempt to see Dad after that first day."

"What did you buy?"

"Don't change the subject. I really think Laura just needed some time to come to terms with D'Anna and the kid. She's obviously ready to see Dad again or she wouldn't have invited him to lunch tomorrow."

"So am I going to get to see you in a new dress?"

"I didn't buy anything. I'm wearing the same dress that I wore to Shelley's wedding. I'm two dresses over my limit. Dr. Cardenas got a nice dress and stockings and shoes. We got Rachel and Esmari little pink girly dresses. Maya and Dr. Cardenas got some makeup. They really hit it off. Then we went to lunch at Mamma Cordoba's. Dr. Cardenas talked about Nereid a lot. I'm sure it was stuff you've already heard. She misses her husband and is worried about him. When she wasn't talking about Nereid, her and Maya were talking about babies. I mostly listened. Did you know that my dad was working in their clinic when he escaped?"

"Ummm," Lee murmured.

"Are you going to sleep on me?"

"Trying not to. What else did you do?"

"Nothing much. Sharon called me while we were eating. She said your father had somebody on his staff call her to get her doctor's name. He didn't say why. It freaked her out. She wanted to know if her doctor was in some kind of trouble and I told her that your dad knew somebody who needed a specialist and he wanted the best. That seemed to calm her down. She wanted to know when we were coming back to see them. I told her we had a lot going on right now. I think she's lonesome. She's there with Hera all day by herself. We need to find time to get over there."

"Isn't Hera big enough to go to daycare now?"

"They're afraid to send her. I think I'll call Keshia and see if she'll go visit Sharon. Maybe she'll watch Hera for an hour so Sharon can go for a walk or something."

"What is Sharon afraid of? Millions of kids have gone to daycare."

"Sharon remembers what happened when her and Karl's other apartment got trashed. If somebody recognizes her…can you imagine how bad it would be if somebody took Hera or worse? Sharon isn't going to take the chance."

Lee didn't say anything for a minute and then he said, "It's too bad she's not on Nereid. She'd fit right in. John said there's a group of mothers who live with their Cylon husbands in one apartment building in the city. They all have half-breeds. They get together and go to the park and help take care of each other's kids."

Kara yawned. "Laura wants Nereid to be some kind of utopia for humans and Cylons to exist together in peace."

Lee rubbed her shoulder and kissed her before he sat up. "I admire her optimism."

"You don't think it'll happen?"

"No." He stood. "I'm going to round up Hunter and head back to the apartment."

He gingerly put weight on his ankle. It hurt but the pain was bearable. He found his underwear.

Kara propped on one elbow. "Put some ice on the ankle. Keep it elevated."

"Yeah, yeah."

"I wish you didn't have to go."

"When your dad moves into Marble House with Laura, we might not even be able to do _this_."

"There's always your apartment. Why do you think Dad will be moving in here? Do you really think your dad will release him after making such a big deal about thinking he was brainwashed by the Cylons and programmed to kill Laura? I mean how could the Cylons program him to kill Laura when they didn't have a clue he was married to the President. Even Dr. Cardenas didn't know until Dr. Cottle told her."

"Kara, my dad was just exercising due diligence with someone who had been a prisoner of an enemy for over eight months. I know that person just happens to be your father and you'd never believe anything bad about him, but I agree that my dad did the right thing. Just be glad he's forgetting about charging John with assaulting a superior officer. John did go for Cain's throat in front of fifty witnesses."

"I know," Kara said glumly, "but only because Cain was going to airlock the Cylon and kill an innocent baby."

"Look," Lee said with an edge in his voice, "We already gone round and round about this couple of times. No need to do it again."

"Hunter told Maya that your dad is going to reassign Cain to the _Pegasus_ effective immediately as the XO. Last I heard, the _Peggy_ already has an XO."

"Admiral Thurman is retiring before we go to Nereid. As soon as that happens, Cain will become commander of the ship."

"How do you think that will make Barry Garner feel? He's been the XO for a long time."

"Cain's got seniority. Plus she's a commander. He's a colonel. It's the military, Kara. It's the way things work. My dad is taking command of the _G_ when we go to Nereid. He wants Cain commanding a ship. She's too valuable to be back here on Caprica riding a desk."

"Cain was going to kill my dad and D'Anna and basically she gets her hand slapped."

"Look who's talking about getting her hand slapped."

Kara angrily wrapped her arms around her knees. Lee was right, but she couldn't let it go.

"I didn't come close to killing two people."

"Yes, you did," Lee said softly. "You came close to getting yourself and Narcho killed...a couple of times if I remember correctly."

Kara knew she wasn't going to win this one. She flopped back on the bed.

Lee leaned over and kissed her. "John talked to my dad. He specifically asked him _not_ to punish Cain. John said they were both wrong in what they did. He's willing to let it go. Maybe you should do the same thing."

"So I guess in this case, two wrongs _do_ make a right," Kara said sarcastically.

He kissed her again. "Nobody is saying that. Dad realized he needs John and Cain _both_ when we go to Nereid. He made the best choice he could given the circumstances. Admiral Thurman will retire in a month or so and Cain will become the commander of a battlestar again, a newer one than the _G_. Hopefully while she functions as a second XO for Thurman, some of his command style will rub off on her."

"Is Cain all right with your father's decision?"

"She'll have to be. She did tell Dad that she wants to talk to John again before she leaves for the _Peggy_. I guess she wants to apologize."

Kara snorted. "Don't count on it. If your Dad decides to let her do it, I hope the MPs search her for weapons beforehand."

"Helena Cain isn't that stupid. She probably wants to quiz him about Lucy."

"You're not supposed to know about Lucy. Major Parker specifically ordered me not to mention Lucy Cain to anybody."

"I know, but things changed when your dad met a centurion on Nereid who contains Lucy's avatar."

"You're kidding," Kara said in shock.

"No. John said that Lucy knows how the skinjobs were created. She told him that if she could get to the lab at the prison and get all the equipment functioning again, she could make a new body for herself and transfer her consciousness into it."

"That's just what we need. A whole batch of new skinjobs."

"You're missing the whole point of what I just said."

"What am I missing, Lee?" Kara asked angrily. "I think we've got enough skinjobs on Nereid to worry about without creating more."

"You've got to admit the idea of creating a new life form is fascinating."

"I never thought I'd hear Lee Adama defending the Cylons."

"I'm not defending them," Lee said angrily. "What they did in attacking the Colonies was wrong. What they did making the humans into slaves on Nereid was wrong. What they did to John at the prison and afterward was wrong. I'm just saying would it change our point of view if we knew that those plans must have had at least some origin in a _human_ brain that was loaded into an avatar that was later loaded into a skinjob brain."

"I don't give a frak how Cavil got his brain. All of this is pure speculation anyway. The creators are dead. You'll never be able to prove anything anyway."

"Lucy knows."

"Like somebody is going to believe the words that come out of a centurion's mouth."

Lee chuckled. "They don't have mouths or didn't you notice."

"Whatever." She rolled over onto her stomach. "Have you mentioned this theory to your father?"

"Are you kidding? He'd probably ask me to undergo a psych evaluation."

"Weren't you on your way home?"

"Are you angry at _me_ because I voiced my thoughts on the matter?"

"No," she said in a pouty tone.

"It doesn't change my opinion of their actions one bit. I'd just like to know. There are huge historical implications."

"Maybe you need to get together with Hugh Connelly and talk about it…one historian to another."

"Maybe I will," Lee said in a tired voice. He stood and picked up his shirt from the chair. "See you tomorrow."

Kara rolled back over. "I don't want us to fight."

"I just don't understand how you can call Sharon and Leoben friends and not care where they came from."

"So maybe Sharon and I are sisters under the skin. Maybe Leoben is my long lost brother. Maybe twenty-five generations ago we all share a common ancestor. It's not going to change things. The bad ones are going down. We're going to free the humans on Nereid. End of story."

"You're right. We're going to free the humans. But the story won't end there."

She got out of bed and put her arms around him. "Wherever they came from, they're not worth us fighting about."

Lee kissed her. Even as tired as he was, feeling her naked body against him had an immediate effect. "Maybe I won't leave just yet."

Kara smiled. "Maybe I won't ask you to go as long as you don't mention the words _Cylon _or_ skinjob _or_ avatar_."

Lee was still trying to think of a good comeback when she pulled him onto the bed and he forgot all about Cylons and avatars…and his ankle…as he kissed the woman he loved.

TBC…


	51. One Day at a Time

Chapter 51

One Day at a Time

_Day 14: We have been in orbit over the planet for nine days now and have so far done nothing but take photographs—or rather the ship's high resolution cameras have taken them. I haven't been allowed to see anything yet, but according to one of the ship's technicians whom I have been discretely treating for a common sexually transmitted disease he acquired on a three-day orgy of wine and women prior to leaving for this year-long mission, the captain and other ranking officers are trying to determine if there is any human presence on the planet before a landing party is sent down. The last thing we want is to be surprised by some heavily armed inhabitants (whether those arms are guns or spears) and have to fight our way out. So far no evidence of current human habitation has been found although there are several large cemeteries and mausoleums near the temple ruins. _

_Day 16: Captain Prolmar announced today that we are entering a geosynchronous orbit (or GSO as he calls it) far above the ruined city. The excitement at his announcement was palpable and set tongues wagging about what might be found there._

_Day 17: Yesterday's excitement is today's melancholy for me. Our landing party will be taken to the surface in three days, but we will not establish our base camp in or even near the city. Rather we will set up camp approximately a hundred miles to the northwest. Our engineers have studied photographs of a dam that they say is probably not structurally sound. Penetrating dradis scans of the surface composition show a major geological fault line barely fifty miles east of the city. An earthquake, even a mild one, would certainly fracture the dam and flood much of the city so we will camp in the hills above, out of harm's way. I cannot express the depth of my disappointment. If there is any evidence that this planet was the home of the Thirteenth Tribe, I think that proof will only be found in or near the city and the ruined temple. The captain has kept my hope alive, however, by saying that expeditions will be allowed to go to the city just not right away._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

John was deeply asleep, and the sound was not one that he could immediately identify. His first coherent thought was _clock radio. _He rolled over searching the bedside table and found nothing but the small lamp. He finally recognized the sound just as it stopped. It had been over eight months since he had heard it. His mobile phone, that now sat plugged into its charger, was playing the ring tone that Kara had loaded into it when he'd started teaching Viper simulation classes at the Academy…the throbbing beat of the theme song from a movie about a Viper pilot during the First War, something about a _danger zone_. She had thought her action was hilariously funny. Innocently sitting on the couch in the den at the apartment, she'd called him just to see his face when his phone started blaring the testosterone-fueled score. She had thought it was even funnier when he couldn't figure out how to change it and they'd both ended up laughing so hard that his stomach muscles had hurt. Even Colonel Burgher had gotten a big kick out of it. Now John wouldn't change it for any reason.

The evening before he had given his locker combination to Major Parker and Parker had retrieved the phone and John's billfold and the uniform he had been wearing on the night he had left Caprica. He'd also gotten his keys and a really good pair of sunglasses. John was surprised the locker hadn't been cleaned out since that was standard procedure when a pilot was killed, but Lee had told him that he hadn't been officially listed as killed at first. He'd been listed as missing in action. As word of his sacrifice that night had spread, the locker had become sacrosanct, like the jersey number of a star pyramid player that gets retired.

John swung his feet out of bed and onto the floor and rubbed his face. He had missed the call, but the song began again almost immediately. This time he got it.

Bill said, "I woke you."

"I'm sure it's time to get up."

John picked up his old watch, the one that Lee had brought to him from the apartment. His new one, the one that Laura had given to him on their first anniversary, had been taken from him on Nereid and never returned. He looked at the time. It was 06:22.

Bill didn't waste any time on greetings. "In two hours Commander Cain is due on board a Raptor bound for the _Pegasus_. She'd like to talk to you. I told her I'd leave it up to you."

John sat down on the side of the bed. "I'll talk to her, but I'm not going to lie to her."

"Did you tell Major Parker everything you know about Lucy?"

"Yes."

"Also everything that Lucy told you?"

"Everything that I can remember."

Finally Bill said, "Lucy was her sister."

"She still is," John said.

"Cain's got a right to know. We won't stay long. You started this on the _Galactica _when you told her about her sister. Now it's time to finish it. I don't think we need to worry about her talking to anyone about it. We'll be there in thirty minutes."

The line went dead.

John showered and made coffee. He was seated at the kitchen table when Bill knocked. He called for them to come in and made a point of not standing up even though he was in the presence of two higher-ranking officers who were both in uniform. He gestured to the mugs on the table.

"Help yourself."

Cain sat across from him. Bill poured two cups, gave one to Cain and took his to the sink where he looked out the window. He was making it clear that this was between John and the commander. The silence stretched.

Finally Cain asked, "How's your head?"

"Tender. I got the stitches out yesterday."

"Did Dr. Cardenas do it for you?" Bill asked.

"One of the MPs drove me over to the infirmary."

Another long silence and Cain asked, "How did you meet Lucy?"

"I didn't meet _her_. She's sharing a body with a centurion. I met the centurion. I didn't find out she was in there until I found a way to communicate with him. The new ones can't talk, but I'm sure you know that."

"How _did_ you communicate with her?"

"Sign language at first. A friend acted as our interpreter. Later somebody gave me a wireless device. The centurion transmitted and words appeared on a screen. I spent some time with the centurion so Lucy and I got a chance to talk a number of times."

"The centurion was your guard?"

John shrugged. "In a manner of speaking. When I met him he was guarding one of the entrances to the park in the city. One of his functions was protecting the human mothers and their children. Lucy's avatar had been in him for nearly nine years by then but it was in stasis. She'd put it in there before Cavil had her killed. She was smart enough to be suspicious of him."

Cain phrased her next question carefully and slowly. "Why…would Cavil be interested…in a child the old centurions had taken from the Colonies?"

"How old was she when she was taken?"

"Ten, almost eleven."

"By the time she was killed, she was a woman. And I think you know why Cavil had her killed. He killed all of their creators. Lucy helped create the last two Cylon models, the Sevens and Eights."

Cain absorbed his words like they were a physical blow. She flinched and then shook her head.

"I don't believe you."

"I probably wouldn't want to believe it either if I were in your shoes. They're not all alike. There was a big difference between D'Anna Biers the reporter who was complicit in the decision to destroy the Colonies and the naïve, deeply religious woman you tried to kill."

"Stick to talking about Lucy," Bill said. "Leave the personal comments out of it. That's not the purpose of this visit."

"There's more," John addressed Bill. "I'll tell the commander if she wants to hear it, but not if she's going to call me a liar with every other breath." He looked at Cain. "Your choice. I've already told all this to Major Parker. I don't need to go over it again. I'm doing this as a favor to Bill."

Cain looked down and nodded. "Tell me," she half whispered.

"The Sevens are gone now…all except one…killed by Cavil at the same time he killed the creators. Lucy and the last Seven got away, but Cavil and his centurions caught up with them outside the city. He thought he'd killed both of them, but the Seven survived. He's living in Hunter's valley. They think he's a human. His name is Daniel. He's an artist. If you know the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, you know the story of Lucy and Daniel."

He stopped and let Cain digest his words. He could tell from the way her expression changed that something had resonated with her.

She finally said, "My mother's younger sister and her husband were artists, bohemians really, colorful, exotic birds in a family of dull, little sparrows. They lived in a big loft in Tauron City that was filled with their paintings and sculpture. Lucy thought it was a magical place. She would have gone there every day after school if my parents had let her."

John said nothing, but a small piece of the puzzle that was Lucy Cain fell into place for him.

She continued. "Lucy loved the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. It was her favorite. She was in love with Daniel, wasn't she? She was in love with her creation." It was more a statement than a question.

"She still is…and he's still in love with her."

"You can't really call that…that thing inside a centurion my sister."

John rubbed his cheek and felt the stubble. He'd gotten lazy about shaving every day, but he would do it today before he went to lunch at Marble House. He looked at Helena Cain, at her tormented eyes. In a way he agreed with her. How could they call a disembodied voice Lucy Cain…not even a voice, really, just words that scrolled across a small viewing screen. _I am Lucy. _Was her avatar any more human than the Cylons?

But Bill had told him to keep his personal comments to himself so he said, "That's all I know to tell you about Lucy's situation. She asked about you. She was very glad to find out you were still alive and had done well with your career. She wanted to know about your personal life, but I didn't know anything to tell her."

He had heard the rumors about Cain's sexual preference. Kara had told him that according to Louanne Katraine, Cain had a blond girlfriend who worked in some sort of computer-related job for a security firm on Caprica. One of the teachers at the Academy had told John the same thing. But that made no difference to him. He'd never judged any person by who they chose to love.

He continued, "Lucy wanted me to tell you that she loves you in case something happens to her…I mean something more than already has happened to her."

Cain knew what he meant. She made a sound, almost like she was choking.

John continued, "One of the reasons I want to go back to Nereid when the fleet goes is to make sure nothing happens to that centurion. If we lose him, we lose your sister."

Behind them Bill spoke to Cain. "Did you find out what you want to know?"

"Just one more thing," Cain said. "Who took care of her when she was growing up on Nereid? Who taught her how to…make a skinjob?"

"Daniel and Amanda Graystone…and their daughter Zoe after they managed to load her avatar into a humanoid body. Zoe and Lucy were friends. Zoe was killed with the others. Your sister named the Seventh model Daniel in honor of the man who had helped raise her. He and Amanda died natural deaths before the others were killed so at least they were spared knowing what their AI _children_ had done."

Cain nodded.

"Daniel would like to meet you," he added. "He knows Lucy better than anyone still alive. He's done some nice drawings and paintings of her, too. I believe he'd like to share them with you."

Cain stood. "Thank you," she said stiffly.

He knew he should keep his mouth shut since he was voicing a personal opinion, but he couldn't resist. Cain had nearly killed him and an innocent child along with D'Anna.

John smiled. "They're not _all_ bad, you know."

Bill walked toward the door and Cain followed him. The question and answer session was obviously over.

"I'll see you at lunch," Bill said to John and walked into the hall.

At the door Cain turned. "Maybe one day…" Then she was gone and Bill closed the door behind her.

John finished his cup of coffee even though it was now barely warm. _Maybe one day_…what? She'd thanked him for the information he'd given her, but neither had apologized to the other for what had happened on the _Galactica_. John realized that he should have been man enough to do it whether she had or not. He'd let the opportunity pass and there probably wouldn't be another, at least not anytime soon since Cain was on her way to the _Pegasus_.

He turned off the coffee maker, rinsed their cups and set them in the sink before he went across the hall to cook breakfast for himself and Dr. Cardenas. He hoped the sight of Rachel's cherubic little face would erase the dour, unsmiling one of Helena Cain from his mind.

...

Lee and Hunter ate breakfast at a Mister Omelet on Sunday morning. Their suits were hanging in the back of the car. Both were wearing jeans and t-shirts. Lee had stopped at a 24-hour pharmacy on the way back to the apartment the night before and had gotten an elastic bandage for his ankle. He was no longer limping although he felt like he'd hardly gotten to sleep before he'd heard Hunter's alarm clock go off down the hall. Feeling grumpy but not expressing it, he'd gotten up, taken a shower and gotten dressed. Hunter wanted to get to Marble House in time to help Maya dress his little girl in the new outfit Maya had bought the day before.

Lee could tell Hunter was controlling his impatience while Lee finished a second cup of coffee.

"Okay, let's go," Lee said, throwing enough cubits on the table to cover the bill and leave a generous tip.

When they were in the car, Hunter said, "I asked Maya to marry me last night."

"And you're just now getting around to mentioning it?"

"We're going to announce it at lunch today, but I wanted to tell you first since I'd like for you to stand up with me."

"I'd be honored, but what happened to seeing if you made it through the fight on Nereid before you proposed?"

"That was before Kara's father brought Esmari here. If something happens to me, I want Maya to raise my little girl. It'll be a lot less complicated if she's my wife."

Lee grinned. "So love has nothing to do with it." He didn't get an answer, but then he hadn't expected one. He'd seen the way Hunter and Maya looked at each other. He knew how Hunter felt.

"So I guess she said _yes,_" Lee continued.

"Even thought I didn't have a ring to give her. While you were out at the airbase doing your thing questioning Dr. Cardenas, I met Zak for lunch downtown one day. We stopped by a jewelry store. I had no idea how much engagement rings cost. I looked at plain bands. That's all I can afford on my consultant's salary."

"Maya is like Kara. They're not into the big rocks. Kara told me that it's not what's on your hand that counts…it's what's in your heart. I mean how many times have you seen some celebrity flaunting a big chunk of ice on her finger and the next picture you see of her, she's getting a divorce."

Hunter snorted. "When was the last time you saw me looking at pictures of celebrities?"

"Okay. Never mind. So when's the wedding?"

"I'm leaving that up to Maya. Maybe in five or six weeks. It'll be small. Maya's going to ask Kara to be her maid of honor."

They rode in silence for a while until Lee asked, "What's the news with Zak and Maggie?"

Hunter shrugged. "No news."

"You had lunch together and Zak didn't mention Maggie?"

"No. We talked about soccer. We talked about Nereid. I told him a little bit about how we used to fight in the forest. We talked about the weapons I'll start training on soon. While I was looking at rings, Zak said _he_ wasn't going to go ring shopping anytime soon. Despite everything he's been through, he's happy with his career in the Marines right now. I took that to mean he and Maggie aren't ready to take that step yet."

"I'm not surprised."

"Zak's a good soldier. I'm going to ask for him on the team we take to Nereid ahead of the rest of the fleet. He wants to go, too."

"My father hasn't approved anything like that yet."

"I think he will."

"Do you know something I don't know?"

"The only time your father talks about Nereid to me is when we're all in meetings together. I know the number of centurions and humans on the planet have been revised due to Major Gallagher's information. Some of us know about the prophecy. I'm guessing the ones on Nereid do, too. Something happened that caused some Cylons to help him escape. My guess is it has to do with the Three and the half-breed that he brought back with him as well as the child she's pregnant with. Add all that together and I think the situation on Nereid is different than it was when Kara and I left. This is just my gut, Lee, but I think a small group of us should go back ahead of the rest and do some recon. I don't think we need to go in blind."

"Have you said anything to Major Parker?"

"I will the next time I see him. He's been involved in debriefing your father for the last week. I'm going to mention it to Major Gallagher, too, if I get the chance to do it privately. I'm looking forward to seeing him and thanking him for bringing Esmari to me. I want to meet the doctor, too, and find out about Seléne."

"Just don't forget to make that announcement."

Hunter grinned, "I don't think Maya is going to let me forget."

...

Laura had put out a new pantsuit to wear for lunch that day and then changed her mind. She had never been a woman who dressed for a man, but John liked her in skirts and dresses. He'd never said so in those exact words. He respected her ability to choose her own wardrobe, but she had seen his eyes often enough when she'd been wearing a dress and he never failed to compliment her on how she looked.

Today would be very different than their meeting on Tuesday had been. There would be others around. They would both have distractions. John would want to spend time with Braedon and Kara. He would want to see Esmari and talk to Hunter and Maya. And she wanted to see Rachel and spend some time talking to Dr. Cardenas since both Kara and Maya had been very complimentary of her.

She looked at the dresses in her closet, so carefully maintained by a personal maid on the staff of Marble House. It was simply one of the perks of being President. Richard Adar and those before him had always had personal butlers to keep their wardrobes ready for wear at a moment's notice.

She slid the hangars down the rod, eliminating dresses as she went. No. No. No. What was wrong with her? She was not usually indecisive. She finally selected a sleeveless wrap dress in a periwinkle blue that fit her perfectly.

As she carefully applied her makeup, she thought of John and D'Anna again. She knew that she could request the transcripts of John's debriefing and although Bill would probably advise her against reading them, he would make them available to her. But she hadn't done it. Part of her wanted to know what, if anything, he'd said about D'Anna, but another part of her said to let it go. He'd told her in the five minutes they'd spent together on Tuesday that he didn't love D'Anna or Sonja and she believed him. That didn't mean this meeting between them was going to be any easier. In fact the knowledge she now had was going to make it more difficult.

Then Laura Roslin thought of everything she'd overcome in her life and she straightened her shoulders. She would survive this latest personal crisis no matter what it took or what the outcome might be.

...

John smiled at Bianca. "Wow," he teased. "If Doc Cottle had seen you in that dress and wearing makeup, he'd probably have proposed on the spot. I noticed how he personally carried Esmari to the hangar deck when he could have sent one of his med techs. I think he wanted to spend a few more minutes with you."

"Oh, hush," Bianca said. "You look very handsome in your suit and tie. If that doesn't melt your wife's heart, nothing will."

"I think it's going to take more than the sight of me in a suit," John said as he ran his index finger under the collar. He'd almost forgotten how it felt to wear a tie with a starched shirt.

"Yesterday at lunch I expressed my opinion of your wife's absence this week to Kara and Maya. They might have said something to her so if she's a bit cool to me today, you'll understand why."

"I know my daughter. I seriously doubt that she mentioned it, but even if one of them did, Laura's far too gracious to let something like that affect her. She appreciates honesty."

There was a knock at the door. John opened it to one of the MPs. "Your car is downstairs, sir."

John picked up the infant carrier with the sleeping Rachel inside. Major Parker had retrieved it from his attic where it had been put after his daughter outgrew it. It was in remarkably good condition and was made almost identical to the one John and Laura had used for Braedon. Parker had also brought the bottom half that allowed the carrier to be used as a stroller. For the last two evenings he and Bianca had taken Rachel for a walk after dinner. They were accompanied by the two MPs and didn't go far, but it still got them out for some exercise.

Parker's wife had also sent a big box of baby clothes suitable for a two to three-month-old child along with blankets and several stuffed toys. Kara had stopped at the base exchange and bought diapers and baby shampoo and soap and some other things for Rachel. Their kindness had brought tears to Bianca's eyes.

The MP escorted them downstairs and out into the heat of the mid-July day. A man in a dark suit wearing sunglasses and an ear wire was standing beside the limousine. He held out his hand and John shook it.

"I'm Edgar Myles," he said. "I'm President Roslin's head of security. Welcome back, sir."

"Thank you. This is Dr. Bianca Cardenas."

"Yes, sir. We were briefed. Ma'am, if you'll let me, I'll fix the child's seat so we can go."

It took Edgar only a short time to secure the infant carrier in the back seat. John could tell he'd had experience. He let Bianca slide in on one side of the child and John walked around to the other side. Edgar got into the front and they were off.

Traffic was light on a Sunday morning and they made good time. He knew Bianca had never been to Caprica City before so after they exited the I-6, John began pointing out a few sights.

"That's the temple where Laura and I were married," John said, as they passed the small, ancient stone structure that stood between two much larger and newer buildings. "It's the oldest temple in Caprica City. Kara told me it's where they had my memorial service."

Bianca smiled. "A bit premature."

"I owe a friend a drink for all the nice things he said about me."

"Just one?" she teased.

The limousine turned down the broad avenue where many of the government buildings were located.

"We call this Embassy Row. The ambassadors from the other Colonies have residences here. That's the Libran Embassy. Three years ago Laura and I went there on our first real date to President Adar's birthday party. It was black tie and I was scared to death I'd say or do something that would embarrass her. She cut her teeth on parties like that since her father was an ambassador. Me…I was so far out of my league it wasn't even funny."

"But everything worked out, didn't it?"

"That was a night that changed my life…in more ways than one. I found out that Kara was still alive."

Rachel stirred and Bianca put the pacifier back in her mouth. The child sucked a few times and settled.

Bianca said, "Dear gods, how the mothers of Nereid have missed these things. You could win hearts all over the planet if you carried a couple of cases of _binkies_ back with you."

The limousine turned onto another broad avenue.

"It looks like we're going in the front door," John said. "That's Marble House up ahead."

The car pulled around to the side portico and Edgar got out. He opened John's door while the driver opened Bianca's. John unfastened the carrier and carefully got it out of the car. The Marine guard snapped to attention and saluted John before he opened the residence door for them. John nodded appreciatively, and then they were inside and out of the heat. Edgar followed them. Brae and Kara were waiting in the corridor. Bianca took the carrier so John could take his son.

"Hi, Dr. Cardenas," Kara said. "Let me get that diaper bag for you."

Braedon looked down at the carrier and pointed. "My baby."

Kara said, "Ever since we got back from seeing you the other day, he's been talking about his baby." She shrugged. "I don't have a clue what he means except that he thinks Rachel is his."

"My baby," Braedon said proudly as they walked down the corridor to the elevator. When they all got on, Braedon reached for the control panel and said, "Me do it."

Kara said, "Let him push the button."

"He knows which one?"

"Two," Kara said to Braedon. John held him down at the panel and Braedon made the correct selection. "He knows the difference between one and two."

"That's very good for a twenty-month-old child," Bianca said.

John smiled. "He gets his brains from his mother."

Kara said, "I don't think he understands what the numbers mean, since we have to tell him to push one or two, but once you say the number he gets it right. We all live on the second floor. We're eating in the smaller dining room today instead of the big one downstairs. That seats a couple hundred people. This smaller one only seats a dozen, maybe sixteen."

The elevator door opened and John held the door while they exited.

"Turn left," Kara said. "We're two doors down. Everybody is in Laura's sitting room."

The scene that greeted them was one that John had tried to imagine all morning. He was first struck by the size of the room. It was half again as large as the den in their apartment and he thought that room was large. The decorations were from several different eras of Colonial history, but all meshed seamlessly in a rich blend of colors and styles and textures. His eye went immediately to a centuries-old sideboard and the heavy silver tray on top that held several bottles of various liquors and a number of glasses.

Maya was sitting on one of the couches beside Hunter who held Esmari. Lee was in an arm chair. Bill and Laura stood together talking quietly over by an antique writing desk.

Kara said, "Look what the cats dragged in."

Braedon squirmed to get down and John put his son on the floor where he immediately looked into the carrier and proudly announced, "My baby."

Maya jumped to her feet, crossed the room and hugged John. There were tears in her eyes.

"I'm so glad you made it back," she whispered before she let go of him.

"Not half as glad as I am," he said.

She wiped her eyes. Hunter stood and walked over to them. As he and John shook hands, Maya said, "Thank you for bringing Esmari to us."

Hunter was holding his daughter who was wearing in a white cotton dress with a smocked front. It was trimmed in pink and had little matching bloomers.

"I owe you for getting her off Nereid," Hunter said.

"I owe my daughter's life to you," John said, "so I think we can call it even." He looked at Esmari. "Hey, sweetheart." He smiled at her. "Somebody's trying to make a little lady out of you getting you all dolled up in that pretty dress."

He was rewarded with one of Esmari's big smiles. She reached for him and Hunter relinquished her.

Kara smiled. "My dad gives a whole new meaning to the term _babe magnet_."

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she was sorry she had spoken. Laura probably wanted to shoot her.

Bianca came to her rescue. "I think I'll have to agree with you. John certainly has a way with children. Now, will someone please introduce me to the President?"

"Forgive my bad manners," John said. "I forgot you two haven't met."

Bill had remained near the writing desk, but Laura had walked across the room and now stood near the small circle of people. Hunter stepped back and made room for her. John made the introductions.

Laura held out her hand. "My pleasure, Dr. Cardenas."

"I'm honored, Madame President. I must say a week ago no one could ever have convinced me that I would soon meet the President of the Colonies."

Laura smiled. "On the second floor of Marble House, I'm not _Madame President_. I'm Laura."

"Please call me Bianca…all of you…and this sleeping child is Rachel."

Laura leaned over and looked into the carrier. Rachel had fuzzy blond hair and Laura was sure her eyes, when she opened them, would be blue. Rachel was the child of a Two and a human mother who was now dead. She knew nothing beyond that, other than this child was supposed to play some part in the prophecy and that her life had been in danger on Nereid. Maternal feelings washed over Laura along with anger that was directed at whoever had wanted to hurt this innocent child. How could anyone want to harm a baby? John had done the right thing in getting Rachel off Nereid…in getting both Rachel and his unborn child off Nereid.

"My baby," Braedon said again.

Kara said, "He's hung up on this _my baby_ thing."

Lee, who had remained silent until then said, "Maybe since Hunter has his daughter with him now, Brae thinks he should have a baby, too."

Laura smiled. "That's as good an explanation as any. Now, could I interest anyone in lunch?"

John handed Esmari back to her father. "She's a sweetheart," he said.

"Let's go eat," Kara said, "before everybody gets all mushy."

John put his arm around his daughter and squeezed her shoulder before he looked meaningfully at her. "Well, we don't want you getting all mushy on us. Why don't you and Lee take Brae and lead the way? Laura and I will follow."

She caught on and picked Brae up. Gradually they all exited the room until Laura and John were the only two left in it.

"It's good to see you again," he said.

"I should have gotten out to the airbase…"

"It's all right, Laura. You look…so beautiful today. Of course you always look beautiful."

"Thank you. You look very good, too."

He touched her arm almost hesitantly. Her skin was as soft as silk. "I'm not wearing handcuffs today. Would you…let me hug you like I wanted to do on Tuesday?"

"Oh, John." She stepped into his open arms.

It was like slipping into a dream for him, the dream he'd had so many times at the prison. He kissed her forehead and gently caressed her shoulder. They stayed in the embrace until it was on the verge of morphing into something else. Desire, so long denied, was only a heartbeat away for him.

He released her, the soft scent of her still with him as he took a deep breath. "Maybe we'd better…join the others," he managed to say.

Laura was as shaken by the embrace as he was. "Yes. We'll get a chance to talk privately later. I know we really need to talk."

He took her hand and laced his fingers through hers. Together they walked down the hall to the dining room. He couldn't think of anything to say. Neither could she. Once inside the room, he released her hand.

Laura walked to the head of the table. The seat to her right was vacant, obviously meant for him. Bill sat on her left which put him directly across the table. John helped Laura with her chair before he sat down. Laura said a brief blessing to the goddesses Hestia and Demeter for the food and then another to Zeus for the safe return of her husband and for the special women and the two children he had brought with him.

As she said her prayer of blessing, John also said a silent prayer to God for all of them. He asked God especially to be with D'Anna and to help him in what he would ask Laura for today. Things were so very fragile between them right now that he knew he was probably going to wreck everything, but he was also determined to ask.

The meal got off to a chaotic start thanks to his son. Braedon wanted his high chair put beside his father, but he also wanted the carrier where he could see Rachel. They couldn't manage both without disturbing everyone, so John moved Braedon's high chair to the corner of the table between him and Laura.

It then became apparent that Braedon was too excited to eat. He didn't want anything from his own plate, but wanted John's plate. Laura shook her head in such a way that John knew she had been through this before. John tried to coax him to eat his own food. Brae's frequent use of the word _no_ quickly escalated into wails.

"He's in the terrible twos a little early," Kara said quietly to John. "He's a strong-willed and stubborn little kid and sometimes he really shows it."

John smiled. "Like somebody else I remember."

Kara grinned. "Are you talking about _me_?"

Maya back pushed her chair, but John beat her to it. He lifted his red-faced, crying son from the high chair and carried him down the hall to the sitting room and closed the door where he sat on the couch, holding Brae while the child struggled. All the while John wondered if his eight-month absence had anything to do with Brae's temper. He continued to hold his son and tell him how much he loved him and had missed him. Brae eventually quieted.

"My woom," He snubbed.

"What?"

"Go my woom."

John didn't understand if Braedon wanted to go to his room or if that was the usual consequences of a tantrum.

"Where is your room?"

Braedon wiggled off his lap and went to the door. John opened it and followed his son to the next door down the hall. He opened that onto a room similar to but smaller than Laura's sitting room. The floor was scattered with toys. John saw his framed picture sitting on one of the tables. He wandered around. There were two bedrooms off the sitting room. Since the doors were open, he glanced inside. One contained two cribs. The other was obviously Maya's room.

He sat on the couch and watched his son play until Kara came in. She had taken off the dress and put on jeans. "Go eat," she said. "I'll watch Brae." She dumped a box of little blocks on the floor and then started snapping a few together. "Come on, Brae, let's build a Viper for your dada while he goes to eat lunch with the big people." She looked up at her father and winked. "Maya's getting ready to make an announcement. I've already heard it. Go…or you'll miss it."

John walked down the hall and entered the dining room.

"You got him quieted," Laura said.

John nodded, sat and put the linen napkin back on his lap. "So what did I miss?"

"Nothing of importance. I sent your plate back to the kitchen so they could keep it warm." She picked up her mobile phone and made a discreet call. In several minutes a waiter entered with a tray. He removed the cover and put the plate in front of John. John and Laura both thanked him. It was only then that John really looked at the food. Everything on the plate was a favorite of his, from the rare prime rib to the roast potatoes in a light butter sauce.

"You didn't need to go to all this trouble," he said. He started to comment that he had gotten used to cold food at the prison, but didn't. Instead he said, "Keep talking or I'm going to think everyone is watching me eat."

Maya cleared her throat and looked at Laura. "I don't think this will come as any surprise, but Hunter and I are getting married. He proposed last night."

There were congratulations all around and Laura smiled. "I'm not really surprised, but I'm sure you know I can't let you go."

"She doesn't intend to leave right away," Hunter said.

Laura was still smiling. "I had a feeling this was going to happen and I couldn't be happier for you both."

"I was going to ask her anyway," Hunter said, "if I made it back from Nereid, but with Esmari here, well…I want Maya to be her mother and raise her if…"

Maya shook her head. "Please don't say anything else. You're going to come back."

"Of course he is," Laura said. "You're all going to come back."

John looked at Bill and their eyes locked for a moment.

"John brought us some valuable information about Nereid and the Cylons," Bill said.

"If you're going to talk shop, then I think Dr. Cardenas and I will excuse ourselves," Maya said. "I think Esmari needs a diaper change."

The two women left with the children. Laura ordered coffee served and they waited until they were alone again before Hunter continued.

"I think we should send a small group in ahead of the fleet."

Lee said, "I agree with him. Things might have changed on the planet after John's escape."

"I'll second that," John said. He glanced around. "Is this room under surveillance?"

"No," Laura answered. "The only security cameras on the second floor are in the halls and the elevators."

Bill didn't immediately nix the idea. Instead he asked, "I assume you're talking about a stealth mission?"

"I am," Hunter answered.

"And this stealth mission would involve the Heavy Raider that John brought us?"

"Don't forget we've actually got _two_ Heavy Raiders," Lee said. "The one John escaped in and the one that shot down me and Kendra and Saunders. It was never returned to the mines on Tauron. It's out at the boneyard. Kevin and Dr. Rafferty are studying the technology."

"Suppose we consider your idea," Bill said to Hunter. "Where would you land your mission?"

"In the valley."

"That'd be the safest place," John said. "If things fell apart at Settlement Alpha after I left, it would be too risky going back there. The city would be risky, too.

Hunter said, "The only problem is that there's no place to hide those Heavy Raiders in the valley. If the Cylons are monitoring us from orbit, they might spot them."

"Camouflage netting," John said. "We'll have Dr. Rafferty and his crew disable the transponders and we jump in with all communications dark. We do it at dusk when visibility isn't that great for being observed but is still light enough to visually land a ship."

"They monitor everything with infrared scanners," Hunter said.

"It's the middle of the summer on Nereid," Lee said. "The ground at dusk should still be radiating ambient heat. The ships should blend right in. They'll cool off naturally during the night."

Bill said, "If…and I say _if_…we consider such a mission, I'll only consider sending one Heavy Raider."

"That's reasonable," John said. "It's not going to take _a lot_ of people to determine what the situation is. It's just going to take the _right_ people."

Laura who had listened to the conversation without question or comment now asked, "And what would be the purpose of such a mission other than to possibly get all of you killed or captured?"

John looked at Bill. "How much have you told her?"

Bill shook his head. "Nothing about your claim that a Cylon civil war is brewing."

"A Cylon civil war?" Laura said in shock.

John took a deep breath. "I don't know why that's so hard for Bill to believe considering that they revered their creators and the Cavil who's here on Caprica led a group that killed them because they tried to stop him from killing a whole Cylon model, the Sevens."

Laura glanced at Bill. "None of you told John, did you?"

"Told me what?"

"Other than Natasi and Sharon and Leoben, all the Cylons we had in custody were killed several months ago when a suicide bomber entered the bunker where we were holding them."

"Tucker Clellan," Lee said.

"Tucker Clellan was the suicide bomber?" John asked in shock.

"Yes."

"Lords of Kobol. Why?"

"His fiancé Nora Farmer was killed the night we defeated the Cylons. None of us realized how much it had affected Tucker," Lee said. "It wasn't a spur of the moment thing. He planned it very carefully. He had a lot of help. We think he got the explosives from someone in the Sons of Ares, but we haven't been able to trace the connection. He was very careful in covering his tracks."

"Were Sharon and Leoben in custody then?"

"No," Lee answered.

John sat and digested the information. No one said anything for several moments until he asked, "How did Natasi escape dying?"

"She had been moved earlier," Laura said. "She cooperated with us in answering certain questions. She's cooperated with us several times and has been rewarded each time."

John could tell that there was something Laura wasn't saying but he didn't push it. "What was the reaction on Caprica to the bombing?"

"About what you'd expect," Bill said. "Most people rejoiced. Laura was already taking heat for not putting them on trial. In fact some of the bleeding heart web sites accused her and the government of staging the whole thing to avoid the expense of a trial."

"There have been some temple bombings in Sovana," Lee said. "We can't say they're totally unrelated to all the other trouble going on up there, but a group called the Right Hand of God has claimed credit for a couple of them. They're a radicalized arm of the Soldiers of the One. Now the Sons of Ares are building a compound in the mountains a hundred miles outside Sovana. Besides the war lords and drug dealers, Sovana is becoming the epicenter of a religious war as well."

"So things haven't been all peace and light since I've been gone," John said.

"Sadly no," Laura sighed.

Hunter tried to get the conversation back to the mission. He asked Bill, "Will you consider my idea about some of us going to Nereid ahead of the rest?"

"I'll consider it," Bill answered and stood. "Now I'll ask everyone to excuse me. I'm still working on resources for our revised battle plan. I also have a little matter to take care of for the President."

John noticed that Bill and Laura shared a long look. The look didn't exactly burn of passion, but there was definitely some emotion in it.

"If we can get some of the centurions fighting with us," John said, "it'll make our jobs a lot easier."

"I'll keep that in mind," Bill said.

When he was gone, Laura looked at John. "I'm sure Lee and Hunter are anxious to rejoin Kara and Maya. Would you like a tour of Marble House?"

"I would. Bianca might like to come with us."

For the next thirty minutes the three of them wandered around the building that had been home to the President since the Twelve separate Colonies had signed the Articles of Colonization fifty-eight years earlier and had agreed to be governed by a President and a Quorum of Twelve with an elected representative coming from each Colony.

After Laura had shown them her office, Bianca thanked her and said she needed to get back to Rachel. She winked at John and he understood that she was giving him the opportunity to be alone with his wife.

After they had walked Bianca to the elevator, Laura took John's hand and led him to the walled terrace that contained the Posiden fountain.

"My favorite place," she said. "I come here often when I want to think or sometimes just to be alone. It was out here that Elosha and I first talked about the possibility that you'd survived. She's been praying for you ever since."

"I'd like to see her."

"We'll have another lunch soon. I'll invite her. She drew the parallel between us and Penelope and Odysseus. We even talked about Circe and the child she bore to Odysseus. Little did I know…"

John started to speak, but she stopped him. "No. It's all right. I've realized that the woman who is pregnant with your child is not the Circe of our story. I believe the role of the seductress belongs to Sonja. D'Anna has the role of Nausicaa, the naïve maiden who first saw Odysseus naked and fell for him. D'Anna even told me that you were the first human she'd seen without his clothes."

"Laura, please..."

"No. I need for you to know that I don't blame you for what happened. I need to apologize to you for many things…my lack of faith in you among them."

"You don't owe me an apology for anything. I want you to know that I understand about you and Bill. I don't blame you for…anything you did. I don't blame you or him."

"What are you talking about?"

"You both thought I was dead. He's always loved you. I don't blame you."

"You think Bill and I have…or had an affair?"

"You didn't?"

Laura looked away for a moment remembering the night she and Bill had kissed. It could easily have crossed the line into an affair if Bill hadn't stopped.

"I won't lie to you. One night we kissed. We'd both had several drinks. Things were headed in that direction and then Dr. Rafferty told us there was a slim chance you'd survived. That was the end of whatever was developing between Bill and me. I'm not sure it would have been any good anyway. Bill is very dear to me. He always will be, but he's not you."

John didn't say anything because the guilt and relief that were washing him were so strong. He realized he'd made a fool of himself with Bill that first morning and Bill had let him, but that was okay. Act like an idiot and you deserve to be treated like one. Bill had been gentleman enough not to laugh in his face.

He walked over to the fountain and studied the marble figures while he listened to the water spouting from the dolphins' mouths.

He heard Laura speaking quietly into her mobile phone. She walked up beside him. "I've ordered us some iced lemonade. It's hot out here."

"Would you like to go back inside?"

"No, it's also very private. That's one of the reasons I like it so much."

John took off his jacket and folded it over the back of a chair. He loosened his tie and unfastened his top shirt button. Then he rolled up his sleeves several times.

He smiled. "That's better. It's hard to get used to a tie again. The closest I came to wearing a tie on Nereid was when the Cylons…"

He shook his head. Laura didn't need to hear about the way they had put a thick cloth noose around his neck and tightened it until he passed out. It wasn't as bad as holding his head underwater, but it was close.

Laura intuited that whatever he had started to say was bad. "Why do you want to go back there where you suffered so much?" She asked in an anguished voice.

"I don't _want _to go back, but I've got to. They're going to need me. I have contacts in the city and at Settlement Alpha. If we need to get someone inside, I can do it. We don't know what we're going to find now."

"Ah, yes, the Cylon civil war that no one thought to mention to me."

"It's real, Laura. I don't care whether Bill thinks I imagined it or not. Natalie isn't going to accept their Cavil's part in killing their creators and the Sevens. She was in love with one of them. She still is."

"Bill has mentioned Natalie. I know the others consider her a leader. I know Dr. Cardenas considers her a friend."

"She's the First Six, the original of her model. There's only one of her."

"Does she look like Natasi?"

"No. Her face does, but her hair is darker blond and longer. Their personalities are very different. I hope you get to meet her one day. I think you'll like her. She's not afraid to go to bat for something she believes."

"So you consider her an ally?"

"Yes. And a friend. She allowed me to move to the settlement. She brought Esmari back with her from the valley because Esmari was sick and Natalie wanted Bianca to figure out what was wrong with her. Her action saved Esmari's life."

A white jacketed waiter brought a pitcher of lemonade on a tray with two glasses. The glasses were filled with shaved ice. The waiter poured and then left them. John and Laura sat at the table and both sipped the cold drink.

"So what happens next?" Laura asked. "Is Major Parker through debriefing you?"

"Not yet. He's going back over the transcripts of everything we talked about and zeroing in on areas he wants me to elaborate on. I think we've got a couple of more days of talking."

What he didn't tell her was that Parker also wanted him to undergo a complete psych evaluation by a psychiatrist. That was scheduled for Wednesday morning.

"I know Lee's been talking to Dr. Cardenas," Laura said. "He's told us some of what the humans have endured during their enslavement. She's been very helpful and cooperative. Are you aware that D'Anna wouldn't talk to anyone because we wouldn't let her see you?"

John didn't say anything for a while. "Parker told me they'd allowed Leoben to talk to her. I know you were the one who wouldn't allow her to see me."

"Yes. It was my decision."

"You've got nothing to be jealous of, Laura. Nothing."

_Except the fact that she's carrying your child_, Laura thought. _Through that baby she's tied you to her._

But she said none of that aloud. Instead she asked, "Do you _want_ to see her?"

"Just leave me out of the equation for a minute and think about D'Anna. She's alone here, cut off from everyone she knows."

"As were her brothers and sisters."

"She didn't _do_ anything," John said with conviction in his voice. "She's not a criminal. She doesn't deserve the kind of treatment she's being given."

"She's not being _mistreated_ if that's what you're implying," Laura retorted, feeling anger wash over her. "She threatened you with a drug in order to gain your…cooperation, and yet you continue to defend her. You attacked Commander Cain over her. Am I really supposed to believe you have no feelings for her?"

John took a deep breath. "I'm going to tell you the ugly truth just like I told Brad Parker. On Nereid I made a decision to live and that meant doing what D'Anna wanted. There was no love involved in what happened between me and her. It was mechanical for me. I serviced her, Laura, just like a gigolo services a client only there was no money involved. In return for my services I got to live in a nice apartment and got three good meals a day. In the process she and I created a child…an innocent child. I can't turn my back on that baby therefore I can't turn my back on D'Anna since she's carrying it. I don't love D'Anna, but I don't hate her either. And she doesn't love me. In her concept of destiny, I fulfilled the role she'd seen in a vision. That's all I was to her. Her whole life is about the child now, about bringing that child into the world. I believe my part now is to help her do that...whatever it takes."

"I think I understand that much."

"D'Anna is innocent of any involvement in what happened to the Colonies. She was boxed at the time the other Cylons made the decision to destroy humanity. And now she sits alone in a cell that's monitored twenty-four seven. I know how that feels and believe me, it sucks. For God's sake, Laura, where's the compassion that made you fight so hard for the people in the refugee camps six years ago? Where's the courage that made you stand between Cavil and his centurions and a group of unarmed students out at the University one afternoon a year later?"

"What do you want me to do, John?" She asked softly.

"Move D'Anna into one of those apartments near me and Bianca. It's not like there's anything between us. I swear to you I haven't touched her since she found out she was pregnant...nor have I wanted to."

"Is that all you want…to have D'Anna moved into an apartment near you."

"Bill told me that Sharon's doctor had agreed to see D'Anna after regular office hours on Monday afternoon. I'd like to go with her so she won't be frightened. Her blood pressure is already too high."

"Anything else?"

"No, that's all."

"After everything the Cylons did to you…I simply don't understand your concern."

"_She_ didn't do it to me. She didn't even know how to use the drug she gave me that one time. And I owe her my life. If she hadn't taken me from the prison when she did, I would have died of pneumonia. Ask Bianca if you don't believe me."

"I believe you."

"Bill will listen to you. If you tell him to relocate D'Anna to the o-club, he'll do it. In return she'll talk to Parker if I ask her to. I don't think there's much she can tell him, but she'll answer the questions she can. Please believe me. She's no danger to anyone. It's a win-win."

"Would that make you happy?"

"What would make me _happy_ is for you and me and Kara and Brae to be a family again, but I know that's not possible right now."

"Are you asking that D'Anna be given special treatment because you believe in the prophecy about her child…your child?"

"All I want is for the child to have a chance at life. Not a single Cylon female on Nereid has been able to carry a child that lived. Most of them miscarry before the end of the first trimester. Others have carried longer and had stillbirths. There have been a large number of ectopic pregnancies that often resulted in the death of the mother. Bianca told me that just a few months ago a child was born two months early to an Eight that might have lived if they'd had some neonatal equipment. Bianca and her husband did everything they could and still had to watch that baby struggle to breathe and then die."

John stopped talking. Laura reached out and gently squeezed his hand. Finally he went on.

"Natalie knew all of the creators personally and said they had no plans for the Cylons to give birth. With resurrection technology, they don't need to…or such was their thinking. Their plans were to continue to create humanoid versions…hundreds of them…thousands…a whole civilization of them to populate the planet of the Thirteenth Tribe. Nereid was going to become the first planet populated by nothing but Cylons. It was to be their homeworld. That's why the creators never paid much attention to the…reproductive parts."

"You've told this to Major Parker?"

"It's one of the issues we're going to revisit. I didn't go into detail because it doesn't directly affect what's happening on the planet right now. The knowledge to create the humanoids died with the creators. Lucy might have it but she's just an avatar and she couldn't do anything without the equipment anyway. The only thing she wants to do is create a humanoid body so she can be with Daniel."

They sat in silence for a long time, each sipping lemonade.

Laura said, "You met Edgar, my security chief?"

"Yes. He seems like a very nice guy."

"He's an ex-Marine." She smiled. "He's very tough and very protective of me and very experienced. He served President Adar for eight years. He isn't happy when I want to make unannounced trips around Caprica City at night. He's very much a planner. He likes to know everything ahead of time. I'm afraid I drive him crazy."

"Do you think unplanned trips are a good idea?"

She was still smiling. "I think they're actually safer than the planned ones, but Edgar disagrees. Last night I had him take me to Elosha's temple. She and I discussed your return and D'Anna's child and the prophecy. In fact most of our conversation was about the prophecy. Are you aware that Pythia has also prophesied a peacemaker…a child born of a non-believer?"

"Hunter's grandfather mentioned it to me. His information had come from an old Oracle who had died years before, but she told him that he and Hunter's aunt would live to see the birth of a peacemaker. In the settlement I talked to a wise old priest, a monotheist named Yoshimo, who is very knowledgeable of both religions. He mentioned the Pythian prophecy. Kara said Yolanda Brenn mentioned another child the night she died. She didn't say anything about a peacemaker, but she said the child _must live_."

"Before you got here this morning I talked to Bill. He consented to move D'Anna to the same place you and Bianca are staying. He doesn't want to do it and he isn't happy about it, but D'Anna is _not_ a military prisoner and doesn't fall under his jurisdiction. I was prepared to make it a Presidential order, but he saw the light. She should be there when you and Dr. Cardenas get back this evening. I expect you'll see more than two MPs guarding the place as well."

"Why didn't you just tell me this fifteen minutes ago?" John asked angrily. "Why make me beg you to show some compassion?"

She took a deep breath. "Because I had to know your true feelings about D'Anna and the child."

"Satisfied?"

"Yes."

"I'm not in love with her, Laura. I don't know how many times I have to say it."

"What do you plan to do after the baby is born?"

"I haven't tried to make plans that far ahead. For over eight months I've lived my life one day at a time. If the baby makes it and survives, part of me wants to raise him with Brae, but part of me knows that he belongs on Nereid. Only a fool would think that one little baby could bring peace to _this_ planet, especially not a child that's half Cylon. You know as well as I do that the radicals on both sides wouldn't want people believing in a peacemaker. What would happen to their holy war then?"

"It seems we've got ourselves a real dilemma, doesn't it?"

"Before we start stressing over anything else, let's wait and see what the doctor tells us tomorrow."

"Sharon's child was born six weeks early and lived. Hera is thriving now."

"There's a big difference between six weeks early and five months early."

"So where do we go from here, John?"

"I'm still being debriefed so I'll stay at the airbase. That way if word leaks out about D'Anna and the baby, there will be enough distance between us that you can say we're separated and it will be believable."

Laura felt her breath catch. "Is that what you want…a separation?"

"What I want is to protect you from the fallout of what I've done. Don't you understand that there's no good solution for this? None. I won't abandon D'Anna and the child and I won't bring your Presidency down by letting you defend me." He got up and walked to the fountain. He felt like he was drowning. He turned and looked at Laura. "I wish the hell I'd died that night on the basestar instead of bringing this mess home for you to have to deal with. I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought…I don't know what I thought."

Laura got up and put her arms around him. "We'll work through this. It will take time, but we will. When we stood before Elosha and spoke our vows, I said for better or for worse. I meant it. I loved you then and I still do."

He nodded.

"We'll take it one day at a time, John, just like you've been doing. None of us knows what will happen tomorrow much less in six weeks or six months."

He wrapped his arms around her. "Most women would have told me what a bastard I am and kicked me to the curb."

"I'm not most women."

He smiled at her. "That, Madame President, is probably the biggest understatement I've heard since I've been back."

...

Kara put her arm across the back of Lee's bucket seat and stretched. They had just left the parking lot at Marble House.

"I could tell Dad didn't want to leave tonight," she said.

"At least he got to help get Brae to bed."

"I don't see why he doesn't just move in with Laura after his debriefing is over. I don't understand all that crap about him staying out at the airbase. It makes it look like him and Laura are living apart."

"They are…and I'm sure they've got very good reasons. It's none of my business or yours either. There is a little unresolved matter called D'Anna and her baby…which is also your father's baby. So take my advice and stay out of it. Let them deal with it. This is not something that you can _fix_, Kara."

She took a deep breath. "I love my father. I hate to see him hurting like he is now."

"I know." They rode in silence for a block before Lee asked, "What do you think about Maya and Hunter getting married?"

"I wasn't exactly shocked when Maya told me. Hunter wants her to raise Esmari if something happens to him. She loves him. It makes sense."

"You don't think he loves her?"

Kara shrugged. "I think he loves her as much as he can. Hunter is basically a warrior. I think he's been fighting the Cylons so long or thinking about fighting them that I worry about what he'll do when it's all over. The only reason he's doing okay now is that he knows it's just a matter of time before he'll get to fight again."

"I've been living with him for a couple of months, now, Kara. I know he's looking forward to going back."

Kara sighed. "Do we really have to go by your father's place tonight before we go to your apartment?"

"I called him and told him we're coming by. We won't stay long. I want to get those boxes that my grandfather's law firm sent over. Mostly it's his personal stuff…journals, notes, that kind of thing. The firm kept anything to do with active cases."

"Why do you want a bunch of old notes and journals?"

"Because Daniel Graystone was not only a friend of my grandfather's, he was a client as well. John confirmed that the Graystones were two of the original creators. Maybe there's something about them in those records."

"Have you told your father why you want them?"

"No."

"Is he still living in my dad's old apartment?"

"Yes."

"What did Hunter mean when he said things might have changed on Nereid since we left?"

"Your dad brought us intel that some of the Cylons might have started fighting each other."

"Because Cavil and his buds killed the creators and the Sevens?"

"Yes, but I think my dad is still skeptical. I don't blame him. The Cylons who controlled Caprica bickered among themselves all the time, but they didn't go to war over it. Natasi couldn't stand the Cavil here or the Doral. While I was watching the recording of Baltar's second conjugal visit with her, she said Cavil was the biggest mistake their creators made and that Aaron Doral was the second biggest. That's just her opinion, but…"

"For once I agree with her."

"Natasi said Cavil was supposed to be the elder statesman, the wise and benevolent leader. Instead they got a bitter megalomaniac who fancied himself a dictator or else a snide nihilistic atheist." He chuckled. "I didn't know Natasi knew such big words."

"It's probably the platinum hair. A lot of men think blondes are dumb. And the fact that she dresses like a hooker."

"Somebody has toned down her wardrobe since she'd been in custody. She's not wearing a prison jumpsuit but she's not in the stilettos and tight dresses either. It's more slacks and blouses and flip-flops."

Kara snickered. "So you've decided she might have half a brain now that she doesn't dress like a bimbo?"

Lee ignored her question.

"I keep wondering how the Graystones could have made such big mistakes," Lee said. "In my opinion none of the Cylons have a lot to recommend them…except Sharon and Leoben and maybe Natasi."

"You don't know about the ones on Nereid. The Leoben I met there was as bad as the Cavil here."

"John has said many times in his debriefing that there are good and bad ones. If anybody should know, it's him."

"And you think you'll find something in your grandfather's stuff that will explain Daniel Graystone's thinking."

"I hope."

"Good luck. It sounds like you'll be reading a lot of boring legal junk on the remote chance of finding a needle in a haystack."

"That boring legal junk might help if I decide to go to law school. Major Parker has a friend who's an AJA lawyer. He said I should give him a call. The military will pay my tuition if I give them ten years in return."

"Are you really considering doing that?"

"Maybe in a year or so…after Nereid is settled…if I can pass the entrance exam."

"Like that would be a big problem for you, Mr. Academy Valedictorian."

Lee turned in the driveway to his father's place and followed it around behind the tall hedge. Bill's car sat in front of the separate three-car garage that belonged to one of the larger mansions in Caprica City's historic district.

Lee pulled up beside his father's car and he and Kara got out. The stairs leading to the garage apartment were on the outside. Bill had left the light on over the door. Lee knocked and his father let them in. The apartment smelled of furniture polish and floor cleaner.

Bill was wearing his duty blue uniform slacks and a white t-shirt. The back of a kitchen chair served as a coat hanger for the jacket. He had a glass of whiskey in his hand. Lee knew his father probably never finished an evening without at least one drink. Some nights he was sure it took more than one. Lee had often tried to figure out how to broach the subject with him, but he didn't know how. Asking Bill directly how much he was drinking would get him a _That's none of your business, son. _If he pushed the issue, Bill would say, _That's enough, son._ Lee had learned long ago that his father discussed only those issues with him that he wanted to discuss and anything personal was not among them.

"Come in," Bill said. "Have a seat."

Kara was still looking around. There was one main room with a small fireplace on the back wall. A kitchen was through an open archway. There were two closed doors that were certainly a bedroom and a bathroom.

"Would you like a drink?"

"I'm driving," Lee said. "We can't stay long. I've got to get Kara back to Marble House. Tomorrow is a work day. Of course you think _every day_ is a work day."

"It goes with the territory. You'll understand if you make admiral."

"Do lawyers get to be admirals?" Kara asked.

"The top man in the AJA is an admiral," Bill said. "Why do you ask?"

Lee said, "I mentioned the possibility of law school after we…get through whatever is coming next."

Bill held up his drink to the light. "I'm sure your grandfather is smiling right now."

"I haven't made a decision yet."

"Tell me again why you want those boxes of his?"

"I think reading his journals might help me make up my mind."

"Good luck, son."

"Thanks. We won't bother you. It looks like you were in the middle of something."

"I'm always in the middle of something."

Kara said, "Thank you for letting my dad visit us today. Being with Brae means a lot to him."

Bill nodded and turned up the drink, finishing it in one swallow. "John's brought us some valuable information. I'll have to say I don't envy him the pickle he's in right now, but I'm sure he and Laura will work it out."

Kara stood. The empty glass in Bill Adama's hand had obviously been refilled several times that night. She had no doubt it would be refilled as soon as they left. The crisp edge was gone from the admiral's words although he wasn't yet slurring them.

"I'll help you with the boxes," she said to Lee.

It took them three trips. At the bottom of the steps, Lee turned and looked up at his father who was standing in the doorway, the interior light casting him in silhouette.

"Get some sleep tonight," he called to his father. "That work will still be there in the morning."

Just before Lee pulled out of the driveway, Kara said, "He's almost drunk."

"He's had a few…but he's nowhere near drunk. I've seen him drunk...the night after my mother died. My father is an ugly drunk. He's definitely not drunk tonight."

"I feel sorry for him."

"Last week you were furious at him."

"I thought he was being unfair to my father. Now I think he was just doing what he thought was right…misguided as it was."

Lee reached over and took her hand. "It's not over yet, Kara…not for them or for us...or for him. In a lot of ways my father is a warrior just like Hunter."

"So are you going to volunteer to go back to Nereid ahead of the fleet with _the secret mission_?"

"Hunter should have kept his mouth shut."

"I'm glad he didn't. Answer my question."

"I know a little something about the planet. I also know how to fly a Heavy Raider. You never go into any mission like that without a backup pilot."

"I'm going, too."

"I don't think so. You'll be on the _Galactica_. You'll be in a Viper in case any of the basestars manage to launch their Raiders."

"You think you'll be able to stop me from going on the mission? You're not my CO."

"No, but your father will."

"He's not my CO either."

Lee sighed. "Let's not fight over something my father hasn't even approved yet."

Kara smiled. "You're right. We don't need to drive all the way across town to your apartment when the place you're staying is two blocks from here. I'll help you get those boxes upstairs. Are you still sleeping in my bed?"

"Where else would I be sleeping?"

Lee pulled into the underground garage and parked beside John's car. As far as Kara knew, the car hadn't been moved since the previous November.

"I should get Dad's car washed and serviced for him," she said softly. "He might need it if your father ever lets him go."

Lee put his hand behind her neck and massaged. "You can be really nice when you want to be."

She leaned over and kissed him. "Then you'd better take advantage of my good mood tonight. I'm surprised I feel so generous since you think I shouldn't go to Nereid with the _boys_ on your _secret mission_."

"When does what I think matter to you?"

"Do you want to debate that or go upstairs?"

"You think I'm a real pushover, don't you?"

She smiled. "For me. You always have been."

TBC…


	52. Sons and Daughters

Chapter 52

Sons and Daughters

_The Planet_

_Day 18: Today the alpha team left for the surface of the planet. Alpha team is composed of sixteen mercenaries, a leader, twenty crew members, eight scientists, an engineer and twelve robots. The robots have been provided by the Vergis Corporation. As I understand the robots were provided at no charge if an engineer from Vergis was allowed to accompany them. Captain Prolmar explained that the robots were here to do the 'heavy lifting'. They are voice activated and understand simple commands. The engineer said he can modify their programming 'on the fly' as new tasks are found for them to perform. They will help clear the area and establish a base camp. Only when base camp is ready will the rest of us be allowed on the surface of the planet._

_Day 22: We go tomorrow. The tents are pitched. The cots are set up and supplies are stocked. The perimeter of the camp is secured. After the better part of a month spent on the _Hyperion_, I am very excited about standing on the surface of another world. Tonight I ate dinner with Irina. We shared a bottle of wine and she confessed to me that she has a crush on one of the young scientists who has already gone to the surface. His name is Joshua Hoshi. She asked me to keep an eye on him and let her know if he flirts with anyone. Poor girl. I hope her affections are eventually returned._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

As their car approached the old Officer's Club, John knew D'Anna would be waiting for them inside. Instead of the usual one MP jeep, there were three of them nosed into the curb in the parking lot.

John got the infant carrier from the seat and slung the diaper bag over his shoulder. He could tell that Bianca was tired. She picked up his coat and tie.

"I think we've got everything," she said and checked the back seat of the limo one more time.

John thanked Edgar and their driver. An MP let them in the door downstairs and they climbed up to the second floor. The two MPs at the exit doors were there as usual, but there were also an additional two outside the apartment at the far end of the hall. There had been two others on the downstairs door.

"As if you couldn't guess," he said to Bianca, "D'Anna's already here."

"I didn't think the welcoming committee was for us."

"I'm going to see her," John said after he had carried Rachel into Bianca's apartment. "I'll check on you later."

"There's no need. I'm going to put Rachel in her crib and then I'm going to take a bath and go to bed."

"I know today was a long one for you."

"I wouldn't change a thing. It was such a joy to watch you with your son and Esmari, and I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Laura and Kara and Maya and the young men. It's probably none of my business, but will you be moving soon?"

"Moving where?"

"Into Marble house with your wife."

John shook his head. "No. Right now I'm still…I'm not sure what you'd call it. I'm not exactly under arrest, but I'm not free to go where I want to, either. It's better for me to stay where I am. I'm going to stay here even if Bill releases me."

"Why?"

He smiled. "Because I couldn't leave you and Rachel here alone. I'd miss you both too much."

Bianca was having none of his teasing. "That is ridiculous and you know it. You belong with your family. Now tell me the real reason."

"Because when word gets out about D'Anna and the baby and my part in it, it will be much better for Laura that we're separated."

Bianca sighed. "How unfair to you. And to her, too."

"Laura told me that she'll let Edgar bring Brae out several afternoons a week. Kara will visit me, too. Lee and Hunter both think Bill will start including me in their meetings about the return to Nereid."

"Will Laura not visit you or you visit her?"

"It's really better if we stay away from each other. She knows I've got my mobile phone now. She can call if she wants to talk to me."

"Do you not want to see her?"

"It's hard to be around her and not want to…" he stopped. Bianca was perceptive. He was sure she understood.

"Dear gods," she said in an exasperated tone. "After all you've been through and now _this_. You and your wife should be together. You should be able to make love to each other." She put her hand on his arm. "Forgive me. It's really none of my business. I should stay out of it."

"I always want you to be frank with me. For right now, though, I'll just have to be content with dreaming about her."

"That's so unfair…to both of you."

He shrugged. "Is Rachel waking you up much at night? Because if she is, I'll be glad to take her for a night or two. I don't sleep much anyway."

"She's fine. Several times she's slept through the night."

"I'll be over in the morning to cook breakfast. I'm going to check on D'Anna right now. Tomorrow evening she has an appointment with a Dr. Debra Delos who is a high-risk pregnancy specialist. I don't know if anyone thought to tell D'Anna."

"Is she the physician who delivered the preterm baby for the Eight?"

"That's her. According to Kara, Dr. Delos is the best."

Bianca sighed. "I'm beginning to see that you're really in a no-win situation."

He smiled. "Maybe some of D'Anna's strong faith will rub off on me."

"If those guards will let me, I'll go visit her in the morning while you're talking to Major Parker. If someone could get me a monitor, I can take her blood pressure like we were doing at the clinic on Nereid."

"I'll see what I can do. Call me tonight if you need me for anything."

John turned and walked down to the end of the hall. The two Marines came to attention and one of them opened the apartment door.

"Is Dr. Cardenas allowed to visit as well?"

"Yes, sir," one of them answered. "But the Cylon can't leave this apartment unless Major Parker okays it."

"Thank you. It always helps to know the rules."

John went through the doorway and the Marine closed the door behind him.

D'Anna was sitting on the couch wearing a baggy gray jumpsuit that was clearly a size too large for her. The only place it fit was across her abdomen. Her face brightened when she saw him. He put the coat and tie he was carrying across the back of a chair and sat beside her.

"Did they tell you why you were being moved?" He asked her.

"No."

"I talked to Laura today, but she'd already decided to have you moved out of the brig. She was upset at first about…a lot of things. Once she calmed down, she realized that holding you as a prisoner was wrong. This is better than the brig, isn't it?"

She nodded and reached for his hand. "When they came for me, I was afraid because nobody said where they were taking me or why, but I had faith that God would protect me and our child."

"Admiral Adama got you an appointment with a doctor for tomorrow evening, a specialist here in Caprica City. She's going to see you after her regular office hours. Her name is Debra Delos and Kara says she's the best. She got an Eight here on Caprica through her pregnancy. Sharon delivered early, but her little girl is doing fine now."

"Admiral Adama did this for me?"

"No, actually he did it for me. Bill and I were good friends back before…never mind. I asked him and he did it. That's what's important."

"Will you go with me?"

"That's part of the agreement. And you won't be sitting alone here in this apartment all the time, either. Dr. Cardenas is going to visit with you tomorrow morning. She'll bring Rachel."

"Will you visit me, too?"

"I talk to Major Parker in the mornings. He'd like to talk to you, too. If I sit with you, will you answer some questions for him?"

"He won't send me back to jail afterward, will he?"

"No. This will be your home for a while. I'm not sure about the future. After the baby comes…we'll just have to see. I can't make plans that far ahead right now."

"Can you stay with me tonight?"

John took a deep breath. "No. I've got my own apartment."

She accepted his answer although it seemed like she was disappointed.

"I'll see if I can get you something to read. Have you checked out the television?"

She looked at him blankly and he realized that on Nereid she'd never seen a working television. Many of the apartments in the city had sets that had no doubt been taken off a transport ship or maybe off the big cruise ships, but since there were no broadcasting stations, the televisions displayed nothing but gray static. He went over to the set and retrieved the remote control. He showed her how to turn the set on and off and change channels. He found the guide channel and went through them until he found the one that was the home of a monotheist group that had branches in Caprica City and Delphi.

D'Anna was enthralled.

"I don't know if they're on twenty-four hours a day or not. Just remember the channel number if you want to watch something else."

He sat with her for twenty minutes and they listened to a priest with a Gemenese accent who talked about a passage in their book of scriptures that related one of the many persecutions of the Thirteenth Tribe on Kobol. The priest drew comparisons to the persecution of some of their members living today on Caprica and talked about how God would one day liberate them from their suffering. He got very fired up talking about a New Exodus.

"Is that true?" D'Anna finally asked. "The monotheists are hounded and not allowed to worship here?"

"There might have been a few incidents in other places, but here in Caprica City one of your sisters, a Six named Natasi, preached the monotheistic faith in an old warehouse near the waterfront. I never heard about her having any problems."

"What happened to Natasi? Is she dead?"

"No, she's living somewhere in the city."

"Could she visit me? Maybe Leoben could come back and bring the Sharon who has the baby."

"I'll ask," John said. "I don't know if I should push it right now. Let's wait a couple of days. I don't want to seem ungrateful for what we've gotten so far."

"Are you sure you can't stay tonight?"

John stood and picked up his coat and tie. "I'm sure. Don't stay up all night watching television. I'll check on you in the morning."

D'Anna's eyes had already drifted back to the television and the handsome, charismatic preacher who reminded John a little bit of Tom Zarek. The television audience seemed to be composed mostly of women.

He walked down the hall to his apartment. For the first time since he'd been home he really wanted a drink. He took out his phone and called Kara. She'd turned off her phone because it went to voicemail immediately. He left her a message.

"Hi, baby. I'm sure you and Lee are together now. I just wanted to tell my favorite daughter good night. And ask you to bring me a bottle of booze if you can. And no lectures. I enjoyed spending time with you and Brae today and hope I can do it again soon. I love you."

...

Kara listened to her father's voice message as she walked from the guard's gatehouse at the rear parking lot of Marble House to the rear entrance. So her dad wanted a bottle of booze. That was no surprise. She wondered if there had been any booze in the city on Nereid. Some of the Cylons drank alcohol and some didn't. Laura kept plenty of booze in her sitting room although Kara thought the person who drank most of it was Admiral Adama. She would ask Laura if she could take one. She couldn't imagine Laura would say _no_.

As Kara passed Laura's sitting room, she saw that the door was partially open. She heard voices and caught a glimpse of Maya.

"Come in and join us," Maya called.

Kara walked in and flopped on the end of the couch.

Laura said, "Brae did _not_ want to go to bed tonight. He kept asking me where his dada was. I just got him settled so Maya and I are putting our feet up for a few minutes. Would you like something to drink?"

"I'll pass tonight. Could I take a bottle of whiskey or something to Dad? He left me a voice message. I guess when they moved everything to the new o-club, they took the booze."

"That would be fine," Laura said. "I wonder why he didn't call and ask me."

Kara shrugged and bit her tongue and managed to keep her mouth shut. Her father had asked her to stay out of whatever issues were between him and Laura.

"So I guess you've got a wedding to plan," Kara said and watched the smile suffuse Maya's face.

"Will you go shopping with me next Saturday?" Maya asked. "I saw a dress when we were in Maximillion's. It wasn't very fancy. I'd like to go back and try it on."

"Sure. I'll go. You can tell me what you want me to wear. I don't mind buying something new." She grinned. "For your wedding I'll go another dress over my limit. Lee's lucky. He's going to wear his dress uniform so he doesn't have to do anything."

"Have you talked to Hunter about renting a tuxedo?" Laura asked.

"I mentioned it. Maybe Lee can help him," Maya answered.

"I'm sure he will," Kara said. "Are you going to have a reception?"

"We thought maybe a quiet dinner afterward for a few friends."

"Which will be served here at Marble House," Laura said.

"Oh, no, I couldn't ask you to do that."

"I'm afraid I'm going to insist. Our chef and his staff are experts. A wedding reception will be a joy for them to plan and prepare, especially since it's yours."

Tears came to Maya's eyes. "I never dreamed…" she couldn't continue.

"Maya, if anyone deserves happiness, it's you. If I can contribute in any way, it would give me a great deal of pleasure."

"But to get a man like Hunter and a beautiful little girl like Esmari…I just never dreamed…"

"You sound like my dad," Kara said and then stopped.

"What do you mean?" Laura asked.

"Nothing. I should keep my mouth shut."

Maya said to Laura, "John doesn't think he deserves you. He never did."

"He told you that?" Laura asked in surprise.

"No. He didn't have to. He used to tell me how he always thanked the gods for his good fortune. He met you and found Kara and you have a beautiful little boy. He…sometimes I think he was afraid something would happen and it would all be taken away from him."

They sat silently for a few minutes. Laura sipped her drink. She wondered if the others were thinking the same thing she was. Something _had_ happened and it had been taken away from him. But he was back now.

Kara stood. "On that note I'm going to hit the sack." At the door she turned and spoke to Laura. "If it's okay with you, I'm going to have Dad's car washed and serviced. If Admiral Adama lets him go, he's going to need transportation."

"That's fine," Laura said.

"I haven't driven a car since I lived in Kinsdale," Maya said. "I was at the grocery store with my little girl the day the Cylons started bombing us. All I could think about was getting home. I tried over and over to call Peter. I didn't know that his office building had been one of the first ones hit. The roads were clogged with vehicles and nobody was moving. We finally started abandoning our cars. I walked for over a mile and then I met some people who told me that the bridge into the city had been destroyed. I couldn't get home. I didn't even know if I had a home to go to by then. Hanna and I spent that first night huddled with fifty or sixty others in the dark basement of a big department store while people looted above us. They had no idea that the stuff they took would be useless in the days to come. What good are televisions with no electricity?"

She stopped talking and looked at Kara, at the one who understood what had happened to the people who had become refugees in the days after the bombing. Then she shook her head.

"I shouldn't have brought that up. I haven't thought about those days in a long time."

Kara said. "I haven't either."

"It's all in the past," Laura said gently.

Tears came to Maya's eyes. "I know I'll never be able to replace my Hanna, but Esmari is so sweet and she's the same age as Hanna when I lost her. I look at Esmari sometimes and I see my Hanna. Am I wrong to feel like the gods have given me a second chance?"

A wave of empathy swept Laura and she found her own eyes were filling with tears. She couldn't imagine what losing her son would do to her, especially under the circumstances which Maya had lost her little girl.

"No," she said gently. "You're not wrong. For years I loved Bill Adama even after he had rejected me very cruelly. When I met John, I felt like the gods had given me a second chance at love. You're not wrong, Maya, to take a second chance and to cherish it."

"Are you going to destroy the city on Nereid like the Cylons did some of our cities?" Maya asked. "Will there be refugee camps for the Cylons like there were for us?"

"That's not the plan," Laura said. "I envision Hunter's homeworld as a place where there can be a peaceful co-existence between us and the Cylons. I'm sure you'll agree that could never happen on this planet. Dear gods, we humans can't even get along with each other. Look at Sovana. And I'm not talking about just the monotheists and the polytheists."

Kara didn't say anything for a minute. Then she asked, "So how are you going to turn Nereid into this paradise where humans and Cylons and monotheists and polytheists and atheists all live together like one big happy family?"

"You sound like you don't think it can be done."

Kara shrugged. "I've got my doubts, but maybe I'm wrong."

"Several of the Cylons helped your father."

"I heard. I think the operative word there is _several_. From what Lee told me, there's roughly two thousand skinjobs per settlement and the city. Eight settlements plus one city. That's eighteen thousand skinjobs. I'm no math genius, but even I can figure out that a couple of skinjobs is a very small percentage. I don't see how a few of them helping my dad makes you think they'll all agree to live together with humans and play nice?"

Maya said, "I think you and Hunter have been comparing notes. He said the same thing."

"Hunter has fought them since he was fourteen years old. I'd consider him the resident expert on how Nereid's Cylons feel about humans."

"What do _you_ suggest we do?" Laura asked.

"I don't know. That's up to you and Admiral Adama. I just don't think the Cylons on Nereid are going to roll over and let us free their human slaves and then embrace us with open arms. I think you've got your head in the clouds if you believe they will."

"You may be right," Laura said. "This might turn into a fight to the death for them. I hope not, but _we will _free those humans. Then we'll pick up the pieces and go from there. You're still young, Kara, but one thing you must have realized about the human race is that our will to survive is very strong. You not only saw it in the refugee camp, you lived it."

Kara shrugged. There was no need to go on and on about the obvious so she asked, "How does the theoretical Cylon civil war figure into all this?"

"When John left Nereid, he said the war hadn't started yet. Depending on what happened to the Cylons who helped him, it might not be happening."

"I'd be nice to know," Kara said and smiled. "Oh, I forgot. That's what the guys will find out when they make their secret recon mission to Nereid. Right?"

"Bill hasn't blessed anything like that. I'm leaving the planning of the military side of this operation to him. If he thinks such a mission is warranted, he'll plan it."

"You know who needs to go besides Hunter and my dad and Lee and a few Marines is a Cylon or two. It's too bad Sharon just had a baby or she would volunteer. I talked to Leoben and he's not much on leaving Caprica. It seems like Leoben thinks of this as his home. Lee has a theory about why that is, but we won't get into it right now. So I guess that leaves Natasi. I can't believe I'm asking this, but how do you think she'd feel about helping us in return for her freedom?"

Maya said, "I'd trust her about as far as I could throw her. Send her to the planet with our men and she'll betray them."

"That won't get her a life spent with Gaius Baltar," Laura said shrewdly. "And right now that's what she wants. Because of her love for him, she's already betrayed her people. She might go if we promise to set them up in a permanent little love nest and keep Gaius happily employed."

Maya said, "So you see Nereid as a chance for us to start over and try to get it right this time."

"Something like that. If there are only a few Cylons who join us and want a peaceful coexistence, then we'll start with those few."

"What are you going to do with the rest?" Maya asked. "Kill them? They'll just download."

"John mentioned something called _boxing_. They download but are then switched off. I don't really understand it, but I would think that would be a possibility."

"So you box the ones who don't want to play nice. Then what?" Kara asked.

"Until we can figure out something, I suppose we'd leave them boxed. John told me that D'Anna had been boxed for a number of years because of her religious fanaticism. A One or a Four kept tweaking her programming until they got the fanaticism toned down but left her religious convictions intact."

Kara asked. "What about the humans on Nereid after we free them?"

"The ones who want to stay on Nereid under a blended government will be allowed to stay. The rest of them will be allowed to immigrate to Caprica. Then we'll allow Capricans who want to live on Nereid to apply to go there. We'll screen out the criminals and adventurers and those who want to exploit the planet. We'll look for tolerance and a willingness to work with another race and…"

"Whoa," Kara said, "who's going to pick these _perfect_ people? You?"

"I'll admit I really haven't gotten that far with my plan yet. The Caprican Bureau of Immigration still employs a small staff although there has been very little for them to do since the holocaust. Perhaps we'll put them to work screening visa applications for Nereid."

"You've still got a couple of months. No _big_ rush." Kara walked to the door. "I've got to hit the sack. I'm now fully qualified on the Mark VII Viper. I start flying CAPs tomorrow. I need to be sharp."

Laura watched her stepdaughter exit the room. After a minute she sighed.

"I don't believe Kara has any faith in my plan."

"You've got to admit she's got good reason given the Cylon's track record here and on Nereid in dealing with us."

"Do you agree with her?"

"I don't know. I hope you're right for all our sakes, but..."

Laura sighed. She could understand Kara and Maya's concerns. "Have you and Hunter discussed where you will live after everything is over? Are you seriously considering moving to Nereid and living in a primitive valley without electricity?"

"It couldn't be any worse than the refugee camp."

"But Maya, what if Esmari gets sick? What if…any number of things happen?"

"I don't know." Maya rubbed her forehead. "I just don't know. I want to be with Hunter, but I'm not so keen on living like a pioneer when there's a city not that far away."

"I would really like for Hunter to be a part of the new government and that would involve living in the city. Do you think he would consider moving?"

"He might. But the even bigger question is whether he'd be willing to work with the Cylons to form a coalition government. Kara is right. For Hunter they've never been anything but the enemy."

"Which is all the more reason I need his support for my plan. The symbolism of a man who was once a warrior fighting them and is now a leader working with them would be worth more than all the platitudes about peace and harmony that I could ever say."

"Then maybe you should talk to him…just the two of you."

"Humans first came to this solar system over two thousand years ago. Since then we've fought many wars. Some were between different Colonies and some were civil wars on the same Colony. Most went on until one side won, but there were several that were fought to a stalemate and ended only when the leaders on both sides sat down and forged an agreement, an alliance. That's what I hope we'll see happen on Nereid. I don't expect everything to be sweetness and light at the beginning, but I believe if we want it enough and work hard enough to achieve it, it will eventually happen."

Maya stood and picked up the monitor for the room where Brae and Esmari slept. "It's been a long day. I'm going to follow Kara's example and call it a night."

After Maya left, Laura got up and poured another drink. She had always believed that people could find a way to work and live together if they really tried…if they wanted it badly enough. She realized how many obstacles she faced in implementing her plan on Nereid, but if the humans and Cylons couldn't work out their differences now, they were doomed to continue the struggle to exterminate each other.

Learning to live together was their _only_ hope. After all was said and done, the Cylons were still the creations of humanity and good parents did not kill their children.

Laura closed the door of her sitting room and turned off all the lamps except a small one on the desk. She went into the bedroom and closed that door also before she placed her phone on the table beside the bed. The clock said 11:04. She wondered if John was still with D'Anna or if he had gone to his own apartment. She wanted to hear his voice and picked up her phone…then decided against calling him. Today had clearly shown her that the love that had brought them together in the beginning was still there. She didn't really want to know if he was with D'Anna. She had to trust him to do the right thing.

Sadly she put the phone back down and looked at the picture of them on her bedside table. She had never wanted his arms around her as much as she did at that moment, but remembering the happiness they had shared would have to be enough for now.

Then Laura's thoughts returned to D'Anna and she had something of an epiphany. She couldn't believe she hadn't thought of it before. The child D'Anna carried, John's child, was foretold by both the monotheistic scriptures and their own Sacred Scrolls. Even those Cylons on Nereid who would not welcome a coalition government might accept one that brought their prophesied peacemaker back to them. Laura suddenly saw the child in a different light, not as a mystical being or as a painful symbol of what her husband had done on Nereid, but as a means to achieve what some of them ardently wanted…a lasting peace. Her plan now had a second important component. Along with Hunter's acceptance of a coalition government, it now included the Cylon peacemaker. The moment was an intensely spiritual and emotional one for her.

As she said her prayers that night, she included a special one to Zeus's wife Hera who safeguarded women through pregnancy and childbirth. She prayed that Hera would keep D'Anna in her care and that she would watch over the unborn child. For the first time since Laura Roslin had received the agonizing news that a Cylon was carrying her husband's child, she went to sleep with a measure of peace in her heart.

...

The car that picked up John and D'Anna late the next afternoon was neither a jeep like the MPs drove nor a limousine like Laura had sent for him and Dr. Cardenas the day before. It was a standard issue military vehicle, dark blue and three years old.

D'Anna was wearing the dark slacks and white blouse that she had worn on the night they'd left Nereid. The outfit had been laundered and returned to her. He'd left Kara a message that afternoon asking her to pick up a few more things for D'Anna to wear.

Now he helped D'Anna into the back seat. An MP got into the front with the driver, a young ensign.

"So you drive for Bill Adama," John asked him.

"Yes, sir. Most of the time."

Traffic was heavy and they crawled along the I-6. D'Anna looked dazed at the thousands of vehicles and the many lanes of traffic although the lanes leaving the city were clogged and moving slower than those heading into it.

"Do we have far to go?" She finally asked.

"About ten more miles and then we'll leave the freeway. Fortunately the place we're going is not too far off the exit."

It was another thirty minutes before they pulled up outside the Hobarth Medical Plaza and the conglomerate of buildings that made up the largest cluster of physicians' offices and other treatment facilities in the city. The huge Kings Bay Medical Center was two blocks away. John had been here to the Hobarth Building a number of times. His doctor had an office in one of the buildings and both Laura's and Brae's doctors were also located there.

He felt a strange sense of both the past and present as he helped D'Anna out of the car. The MP also got out and accompanied them inside. John read the directory in the lobby. Dr. Delos was on the twenty-third floor. They rode the elevator up in silence with D'Anna gripping his hand like it was a life-line.

The outer office door was locked, but the MP knocked and in less than a minute the door was opened by an attractive red-haired woman that John judged to be about his age. She was wearing scrubs and a knee-length white jacket.

When they were all inside, she locked the door. She looked at the MP. "You can wait out here. I can assure you I'll bring them back as soon as we're finished."

"You've got my word," John said to the MP. "We're not going to try to escape. Where would we go?"

For a moment he thought the MP was going to insist on going into the exam with them, but he finally said, "Yes, sir."

Dr. Delos led them through a door and a short distance down a hall. They went into her office and she closed the door. She finally held out her hand. "Debra Delos."

John shook her hand and introduced himself and D'Anna.

"Admiral Adama's office gave me very minimal information so I'll have a few questions. I have to put D'Anna into the system so I can track her pregnancy as it progresses. I'll need a last name since the computer won't accept a blank."

John looked at D'Anna. "Do you have a last name?"

She shook her head. "I never had a first name until you gave one to me before I took you to the city."

"D'Anna Biers," John said to Dr. Delos who entered it into her computer. He gave the airbase as her address and Admiral William Adama as the emergency contact. They made up a date of birth since the computer required that as well. D'Anna suddenly became thirty years old since they didn't want to use her Cylon age of twelve as measured since her copy's creation. Dr. Delos told them that would trigger all kinds of red flags in the system and prompt a visit from Social Services since legally a pregnant twelve-year-old was considered a victim of abuse.

"Before I get to the medical questions," Delos said to John, "I assume you're here with her because you're her child's father."

"That's right."

"Do you want your name listed on the birth certificate?"

"Yes."

"I'll need your full name."

"John Spenser Gallagher."

Delos entered the information then looked up and smiled. "I'm sorry I'm a little slow at this. Normally intake forms are processed by one of my staff."

"We're not in a hurry," John said. "We really appreciate you staying tonight to see us."

Dr. Delos looked at D'Anna. "I'd like to get an idea of how advanced the pregnancy is. We're going to do an ultrasound tonight and knowing how far along you are will help me determine how everything should look. Can you tell me the date of your last menstrual period?"

"I've been pregnant a hundred and thirty-one days," D'Anna answered.

Dr. Delos looked skeptical. "You seem very certain."

"It happened the third time that John pleasured me. Sonja told me that it would be good, but I didn't know how good until John…"

"Dr. Delos doesn't really need to know all that," John said as he felt his face grow warm.

Delos was making notes on a piece of paper now. She kept her head down for a moment as she scribbled, but John could tell she was smiling. She finally looked up.

"So we'll say roughly eighteen weeks. Have you had any problems? Spotting or cramping for example?"

D'Anna said, "About six weeks ago I had a little spotting but Dr. Cardenas put me to bed and it stopped. I haven't had any since. Sometimes I have headaches. Dr. Cardenas said my blood pressure is high."

John quickly explained who Bianca Cardenas was.

"Do you have a headache now?" Dr. Delos asked.

"A little one. It's not bad."

Delos nodded and made some more notes. "Okay, what I'm going to do now is ask you to step next door with me to an examining room. Have you ever had a pelvic exam?"

"Simon did one on our homeworld and then Dr. Cardenas did one. She said everything looked all right. She's just worried about my blood pressure."

Dr. Delos stood and they followed her next door. John waited in the hall while Delos handed D'Anna a hospital gown and asked her to take off her clothes and put on the gown. Then Dr. Delos joined him in the hall and closed the door.

"If I hadn't recognized your face, I would certainly have recognized your name," Delos said. "I assume President Roslin is fully aware of this and it has her blessing."

John took a deep breath. "I can't say it has her blessing, but she's fully aware of it and decided to allow it. So did Admiral Adama."

Delos paced a short distance away and then turned. "Normally I would never ask such a personally invasive question, but how do you feel about D'Anna? Are you in love with her?"

John shook his head.

"I ask because the only other Cylon woman I've treated was married and in a very stable and loving relationship. I feel like that went a long way toward getting her pregnancy as far along as we did. She had the complete support of a husband."

"I know Sharon and Karl Agathon. But I love my wife and that's not going to change. D'Anna knows it, too. I'll support her as best I can, but we're not living as husband and wife. In fact as soon as she found out she was pregnant, that was the end of the physical relationship we had. Look, I can't really talk about what happened to me on her homeworld, but we weren't together because it was my idea. I was taken out of the prison and to the city to be her breeder. And that's all I can or will say about it. But now that she's pregnant, I want the baby to have a chance at life. He's my child, too."

"He?"

"She says she knows it's a boy."

"We might be able to find out today when I do the sonogram. How long has her blood pressure been high?"

"At least two months."

He then explained to her about D'Anna's morning sickness and the headaches and dizziness that had helped convince her to seek the medical care of a human instead of the Four who saw the rest of the Cylons.

"I'm beginning to get a clearer picture of the situation," Dr. Delos said. "Now let's get the exam done and then we'll do the sonogram."

"I'll wait out here."

But that's not what D'Anna wanted. She wanted John holding her hand while Dr. Delos examined her. Delos took her temperature and blood pressure and listened to her heart. She placed the stethoscope on D'Anna's abdomen. Then she covered the lower half of D'Anna's body with a sheet and had her slide down and put her feet in the stirrups. John kept his eyes on a life-sized plastic model of a full-term fetus in the womb that sat on a counter beside the exam table.

After a few minutes Dr. Delos peeled off her latex gloves and told D'Anna that she could scoot back up on the table. John's eyes met the doctor's.

"Everything looks good," Delos said, "with the exception of her blood pressure. Ideally it should be 120 over 80 or lower. D'Anna's is 144 over 93. That's not dangerously high, but it doesn't leave us much room to work with."

"That's roughly what it was every time Dr. Cardenas took it," John told her. "She was concerned about preeclampsia."

"Her concern is legitimate. With preeclampsia there will be an elevated protein level in the urine. Do you know if Dr. Cardenas did a urine test?"

"She said they didn't have the test strips to make that determination. They had almost nothing in the way of equipment to work with."

"We'll do a complete lab workup at D'Anna's next visit. I'll have to keep my lab tech here. If we don't find elevated protein levels, then my diagnosis will be gestational hypertension. If we do find protein, then that will complicate things. Now let's walk down the hall and do that sonogram." She addressed D'Anna. "Did you have a sonogram on your homeworld?"

"They didn't have that kind of equipment either," John said.

When D'Anna was on the table in the room with the ultrasound machine, Dr. Delos told her. "What I'm going to do is put some clear jelly on your abdomen and run a small wand over it that will let us see your baby with sound waves. It's a painless procedure. The worst part is that the jelly is a bit cold."

A few minutes later John and D'Anna were watching a computer screen as Dr. Delos moved the wand slowly over D'Anna's abdomen. John saw the skull and then what had to be a shoulder and then he saw his son's heart beating. It was a very emotional moment for him, as emotional as when he and Laura had first seen Brae's heart beating. Dr. Delos was very thorough and finally printed two images for them to see. She gave one to D'Anna and the other one to John.

"I'm reasonably certain you're carrying a boy," Delos told them. "Your son's heartbeat is strong. He's almost six inches long and weighs about half a pound which means you're in your eighteenth week just as you said. The position of the placenta looks good, the amount of amniotic fluid looks good. At this point I don't see anything abnormal."

D'Anna clasped the ultrasound picture of her son like it was a priceless Monclair painting.

"He's perfect," she breathed.

"He's very active right now. You should be able to feel him move."

"Yes," D'Anna smiled. "He moves a lot."

Dr. Delos took a towel and rubbed the gel off D'Anna's abdomen. "Why don't you go put your clothes on and we'll talk in my office."

In her office Delos took a packet of pills out of her drawer. "Here's a week's supply of prenatal vitamins. You can buy them at any pharmacy. You need to take one of these every day. Here are some pamphlets about the stages of pregnancy and what to expect. There's another one about diet and exercise, but I'd like for you to take it easy and rest as much as you can although a short walk each day would probably be good for you. I'm concerned about your blood pressure, but I don't want to take one reading and make a diagnosis. I'd like to see you again in a week and we'll do some lab work. Will you be able to come back?"

"I'll see that she gets here," John said.

"Do you have any questions for me?"

John hesitated and then asked, "If anything were to happen soon, would the baby stand a chance?"

Delos pondered her reply. "By soon I assume you mean in the next few weeks or month."

John nodded.

"I never like to answer questions like that with a definite _yes_ or _no_. If D'Anna can make it six more weeks, and right now I don't see why she shouldn't, the baby_ might_ stand a chance. I delivered a little girl who survived just shy of twenty-four weeks, but the child has numerous problems. We'd like for D'Anna to make it at least thirty-seven weeks. She's barely half that far along now, and each week we get closer to thirty-seven, the better chance the baby has."

D'Anna was still gazing at the ultrasound picture. "He has blond hair and blue eyes," she said. "He's the peacemaker. He's very special."

Dr. Delos glanced at John again and then back at D'Anna. She smiled.

"All children are special, D'Anna, every single one of them."

...

Lee and Hunter sat in the conference room near his father's office. Six of his senior staff officers, four colonels and two majors, waited with them. Two of the colonels and one major were females. Also seated at the table was General Nathan Vargas who would head the contingent of Marines deployed to the planet. Bill entered the room and sat at the head of the table.

"We'll wait a few minutes," he said. "We're expecting two more."

Lee glanced at Hunter just as Major Parker and John walked in. John was wearing his duty blue uniform as were the rest of them with the exception of Hunter. Lee wasn't sure why, but the uniform seemed to accentuate the weight that John had lost.

"Sorry we're late, sir," Parker said to Bill. "Traffic was heavier than I expected."

Bill nodded. "I don't think I need to introduce the gentleman with Major Parker. He's the man who brought us a great deal of information about Nereid. I asked him to join us in our Friday meeting this week because his intel was largely responsible for convincing me that we need to send a very small recon team to the planet ahead of the main strike force."

Lee could sense the surprise in some of the senior officers.

"Aren't you afraid that will tip our hand," one of the colonels said.

"We think we can pull it off without doing that," Bill said. "We have two Cylon Heavy Raiders, but I'm only going to allow one of them to be used."

"How will they communicate their findings?" The female major asked. "If we wait for them to return and something happens to them, what do we do then? How would we even know?"

"I'm going to park a couple of battlestars at the far edge of our solar system. They'll relay any communication."

Another colonel asked, "You're going to park battlestars in the Armistice Zone?"

"Beyond it. Between us and the Prolmar sector there's an area of space that conceivably belongs to both. It's not like there's a fence between their solar system and ours."

"Do you not think they'll be patrolling that area of space?"

"It's a possibility, but we're going to have to take a chance. We're not going to send the recon mission until we're a hundred percent ready to make our move on the planet."

John glanced at Bill and Bill said, "Do you have something you'd like to add Major Gallagher?"

"The Cylons have no idea that their brothers and sisters are no longer in control of this planet. My opinion, for what it's worth, is that they're either overconfident or they've gotten slack. While I was in their city, I overheard a conversation between a Six and a One. After my Raptor wound up there last November, some of them got concerned that an attack force was on the way. They sent a basestar all the way to the Armistice Zone and found nothing except the debris of the Armistice Station. Later I asked the Six if they regularly patrolled that deep into space. She told me they didn't. They're keeping their baseships close to home."

"And you believe her?" One of the Colonels asked suspiciously.

"I'll tell you all like I told Admiral Adama and Major Parker. At the time none of them had any reason to think I'd ever leave Nereid. I don't know why she would have bothered to lie to me."

"Because she's a Cylon?" Another colonel said and got a chuckle from several others.

"Won't they pick up our communication from their planet?" The female colonel asked. "They wouldn't have to be monitoring deep space to do that?"

Bill took a deep breath. "We have the Cylon Raider that did the original recon of the planet. We're going to send it along with the Heavy Raider. The Raider will bring us back the information we need. There will be no wireless communication. We know from their own admission that the Cylons can't detect a jump if it occurs below the tree line of a forest. We know that when Lieutenant Thrace returned in the Raider the last time, the Cylons were not aware of her departure."

"Will Lieutenant Thrace be piloting the Raider this time?"

"She's already volunteered," Bill said.

"No, sir," John said. "My daughter is not going back to that planet."

"I can pilot the Raider," Lee said.

"We'll have that discussion off line," Bill told them. "This is not the time or the place. Lieutenant Thrace also had another idea that I have given careful consideration and just today gave President Roslin the okay to go ahead with it. We're going to ask Natasi and Leoben to accompany the mission back to the planet. I personally have my doubts that either of them will cooperate, but they will be asked."

"Before we go any further, what do you hope to accomplish with this recon mission?" A colonel asked. "We know where the city is. We know where the settlements are. We know the approximate strength of the enemy. I don't see why we can't proceed with destroying them like we originally planned…take out their basestars and then put boots on the ground to start taking out their centurions and liberating the humans."

Bill looked at John and he realized that Bill wanted him to say it.

"Because they might already be involved in a civil war," John said. "If that's the case, we might be killing the very ones who will side with us."

"Meaning no disrespect to you, Major Gallagher, but does anyone else have a hard time taking the word of a man who just two weeks ago was their prisoner?"

There was subdued agreement from several of the officers.

"How do we know," the colonel continued, "that we wouldn't be flying into a trap?"

"Because I'm going with them," John said.

"You're leading the mission?"

"I'll be the senior military officer. It will be a joint mission with Hunter and some of his soldiers."

"I don't like it," the colonel said, his tone edging toward aggression.

"Meaning no disrespect, sir," John said, keeping his cool, "but Lee Adama will be on the mission. Do you really think I would put the life of the man my daughter is going to marry in danger?"

"How long do you think the mission will take?" The female colonel asked.

"Several days to a week, maybe slightly more," Bill answered. "We'll set an arbitrary time limit based on our best guess of how long it will take the team to determine the situation. If we haven't gotten word in that amount of time, we'll proceed with the plan to jump in, destroy the basestars and then start landing our troops."

A colonel who had not yet spoken and who had a softer voice than the rest asked, "In your opinion, Major Gallagher, do you think the Cylons will fight?"

"Yes, sir. I think some of them will fight, but not all of them. There's a big difference between the humanoids who run the prison and those in the city."

"Don't you think they'll rely on their centurions to do the fighting for them?"

"Most of them will," John said and then he thought of Jade, "but some of the humanoids fought Hunter's men in the forest. I think those will fight."

"Out of an estimated eighteen thousand, how many do you think that is?"

John glanced at Hunter and Hunter said, "Every time we killed one, it downloaded. I couldn't say if we were fighting different ones or the same ones over and over. They seemed to learn from their mistakes, but that might be because they were sharing with each other in that datastream they use to communicate. We could have been fighting a few or many."

"So if they shared their information, they might all know how to fight."

"Theoretically," Bill said. "I think we all know we're going into a situation with no guarantees of what's going to happen. It's the first time in Colonial history that we've fought an enemy under these circumstances."

"Is it even worth the losses we're going to take?" The soft-spoken colonel asked.

"The President thinks it is and so do I," Bill said. "If you were one of those forty-five thousands human slaves on the planet, I think you'd agree. We'll meet again next Friday when we've firmed up some things. Same time. Same place."

Everyone stood and the other officers exited the room except Lee, Hunter, Bill, John and Parker.

"About Kara going to Nereid," John started.

Bill held up his hand. "Lee can't function as your copilot and fly that Raider, too."

"We don't need the Raider," Lee said.

"The Raider is our backup," Bill said. "It doubles the odds that one of you will make it back."

"I will not let you risk my daughter's life," John said hotly.

Bill asked, "You'd rather have her in a Viper fighting Raiders over the planet when we go in to destroy those basestars? She's a fighter pilot, John." Then his voice softened. "I'm a father, too. I understand your feelings, but she's got a skill we can use."

John looked at Lee and half-smiled. "Why aren't you helping me?"

"Because if Kara has volunteered and my father has approved it, it's a done deal. You won't talk them out of it."

John looked at Bill. "And you know if I was lying about the situation on Nereid and was going to deliver the mission to the Cylons, I sure as hell wouldn't do it with my daughter along."

Major Parker, who had been silent until then, said, "John, nobody is questioning your loyalty or your patriotism. Kara has a skill that no one else has. Bill would be remiss not to use it. We're playing for all the marbles this time. We need every resource we've got."

"You're right," John said. "I'm sorry. I have a hard time being objective when my daughter's life is on the line."

"I have an idea," Lee said. "It's almost four. Why don't we all head out to the airbase and go to the new officer's club? I'll call Kara and tell her to meet us there. You need to come, too, Dad."

Lee thought his father would refuse and then Bill said, "Maybe for an hour. I'll go call my driver." A hint of a smile curved his mouth. "We can't have our mission team locked up for DUIs on the eve of going to war, can we?"

...

Romo Lampkin sat in Laura Roslin's office while her secretary brought both of them a cup of tea. They waited until the secretary had retreated and closed the door behind her.

The previous night had brought a thunderstorm over the city that had knocked out power in several places and caused flash flooding in others, but the heat that had plagued them for nearly two weeks had finally broken.

The late afternoon sun slanted through the gardens outside the huge bay window behind Laura's chair. Bees and hummingbirds moved from flower to flower. She saw Lampkin's eyes taking in the scene of pastoral beauty, a stark contrast to the subject he was here to discuss.

"So you think Natasi will cooperate with us and agree to accompany the recon team to Nereid."

"She didn't turn me down flat. She wants more details about what her _reward_ will be if she agrees to do it."

"You told her we would set her and Gaius Baltar up in a home of their choosing and make sure Gaius stayed gainfully employed in a good job."

"I told her. I said she could choose anywhere here on Caprica or Nereid."

"And she still wouldn't commit."

"She's toying with us. She knows she's in the driver's seat on this one. I think perhaps if you were to go see her and…"

"Beg her?" Laura asked trying to hide her distaste at the thought.

Lampkin couldn't look at her. His eyes drifted back to the flowers. He knew how disgusting the suggestion was to Laura.

She took several deep breaths and opened the electronic tablet that lay on her desk. She touched her calendar and then touched the following Monday. It opened. The entire morning was blocked off as always for her weekly meeting with the Quorum of Twelve. She picked up her phone and buzzed her secretary.

"Shift our Monday afternoon staff meeting to Tuesday and notify everyone. And call Edgar and tell him I'll need transportation to safe house number one at four o'clock."

After she ended the call, Lampkin asked, "You want me to let Natasi know you're coming or are you going to surprise her?"

"Get in touch with her security detail first thing Monday morning and have them notify her. That should give her just about the right amount of time to anticipate and relish her victory."

Lampkin was studying her. "Ah, Madame President, you have something up your sleeve."

Laura smiled. "Yes, I do."

"Would you care to share it with me?"

"Natasi is obviously quite religious. So much so that she preached their faith in an old warehouse to anyone who would listen to her."

"Yes. I know. At her request, we've given her both a book of the monotheistic scriptures and some prayer beads along with a biography of the first Reverend Mother."

"Then you've no doubt she believes the prophecy about the peacemaker."

Lampkin eyes lit for a moment and then his look darkened. "She doesn't trust you. What makes you think she'll believe you?"

"She might not believe me, but she would probably believe D'Anna. She'd believe her sister if she saw her nice round belly."

Lampkin's mouth curved in a sly smile. "You're a devious woman."

"I'm just doing my part to insure the success of our mission. The beauty of it is that I don't have to tell a single lie. My conscience will be clear."

"I'd like to be with you when you talk to her."

"Of course. That was my plan all along." Her phone buzzed and she recognized Billy's extension. She held up a finger to Lampkin and picked up the receiver.

Billy said, "I've got James McManus on line three. He's very insistent. I think you need to talk to him."

"Did he say what he wants?"

"He says a very reliable source has told him that your husband brought a pregnant Cylon home with him. He says he's doing you the courtesy of letting you know before he goes to press with it and wants to know if you have a comment."

"Tell him I'm just finishing a meeting and will call him back in five minutes. Get a number where he can be reached."

"Will do."

Laura hung up the phone.

"What's wrong?" Lampkin asked.

"What I knew would happen sooner or later. Far too many people are aware of the situation with John and D'Anna and the baby. Everybody on the _Galactica_ knows and I'm sure by now everyone who works in the brig plus the MPs at the airbase. James McManus has gotten wind of it. He's always disliked me. There's not a snowball's chance in Hades that I could talk him out of publishing it."

"Then use it to your advantage."

"How can this possibly be used to our advantage?"

"Spin it like it was prophesied in Pythia."

"Which is was."

"If it is the will of the gods, all of them including the Cylon one God, who can blame either the Cylons or your husband."

"Do you really think the average Caprican will buy it?"

"Laura, most of Caprica sees you as a believer, as a spiritual woman. The skeptics and atheists will have a field day, but no one will be able to fault you for your beliefs."

The phone buzzed again and Billy gave her a number. She jotted it on a pad.

"Should I leave?" Lampkin asked.

"No, I'm not going to talk to him tonight. I'm going to offer him an exclusive interview tomorrow. What do you want to bet he'll go for it." She put her phone on speaker and punched in the numbers. When McManus answered, she said sweetly, "Hello, Mr. McManus. What can I do for you?

"I've got a very reliable source who has told me that your husband brought two women back from the Cylon homeworld with him. One of them is a Cylon who is pregnant with his child. The other woman is a doctor who brought a half-breed baby with her."

"What do you want from me?" Laura asked in the sweet tone.

"Confirmation. Comments. I'm going to run this story with or without your approval."

Laura sighed audibly enough that he could hear her. "Would I be asking too much for you to tell me who brought this news to you?"

"You know I can't reveal my sources. I'd never get another tip in this town. What do you have to say, Madame President? Confirm or deny?"

"How would you like an exclusive interview with me tomorrow morning in my office?"

There was a long silence on the other end. Laura tried to imagine the look on James McManus's face. It was all she could do not to laugh.

"Let me get this straight," he said. "You're offering _me_ an _exclusive_ interview."

"Yes. But there are two stipulations. You submit a list of questions to me beforehand and you agree to hold the story until Sunday morning."

Another silence. "I'll hold the story until Sunday but I want a level of spontaneity so I'll say _no_ to the list of questions."

"Then you'll have to be prepared for me to say _no comment_ if I think your questions are too personal so please keep that in mind. If you abuse my trust, I'll end the interview. Believe me when I say this, the public will be on my side from the beginning."

"Agreed," he said quickly.

"I'll see you in the morning at ten o'clock. Please come to the back gate. I'll leave word for you to be admitted."

"You won't regret this, Madame President."

"I hope not," Laura said sweetly. She ended the call and smiled at Lampkin. "How did I do?"

"You'll have him eating out of your hand."

Laura walked to the door with Lampkin. "Be here Monday afternoon by 3:30. We'll go see Natasi together."

"It'll be my pleasure."

Back at her desk Laura picked up her phone and punched in Billy's extension. "Get Leoben Conoy on the phone for me please. I think he's listed under Conoy's New and Used Books. I have some questions I need to ask him."

As she waited for Billy to buzz her with Leoben on the line, she thought about what she planned to do. She needed to discuss it with John. She would call him later. She couldn't let him be blindsided.

Her phone buzzed. Billy said, "Leoben Conoy is on line three."

Laura switched lines. "Hello, Mr. Conoy. I hope this is not a bad time for you. I have several questions to ask you about the peacemaker prophecy. I need to make sure I have my facts straight."

...

Thirty minutes after Bill's staff meeting broke up, Lee, Hunter, Bill and John walked into the new officer's club at the airbase. Major Parker had declined their invitation because he'd made reservations to take his wife out to dinner that night.

Kara was already sitting at a table in a corner near the back. She had a beer. She stood as they got to the table. John put his arm around her and kissed her forehead. Lee went to the bar and asked the bartender to bring mugs and a large pitcher of beer.

When they were all seated and had a mug, Lee said, "To the mission."

They raised their glasses and touched them together. As Kara looked at her father, she knew that Admiral Adama had told him about her volunteering to pilot the Raider to Nereid.

Another officer fed some cubits into the jukebox and a slow song began playing. She looked at Lee and knew he had read her mind or her maybe her look. He stood and held out his hand. Without a word to the others and in their own world, they walked to the small open space near the jukebox. She put her arms around his neck. He put his around her waist and they began to move slowly, neither speaking, just feeling everything that had passed between them, everything they had shared, the fights, the passion, the differences, the love.

Kara finally said, "Your father told everybody about me taking the Raider to Nereid with you."

"Yeah."

"Don't say it."

Lee's arms tightened around her slightly. "I won't. Trying to stop you from doing something is like trying to stop the planet from spinning on its axis. I knew you'd find a way to go."

"You didn't seriously think I could stand by and let two of the people I love the most go off to war without me, did you?"

"I knew. I think John knew, too."

"He argued with your dad, didn't he?"

"Of course, but then I think he realized he was fighting a losing battle." He chuckled softly. "You cause the stars to align in your favor. You change the orbit of planets. You call meteors down from the heavens."

"Oh, shut up," she said. They knew what they were facing and she also knew that joking about it was the only way Lee could handle it right now.

He brought his mouth close to her ear. "I love you."

"I know," she said. "'Til the rivers all run dry, 'til the mountains fall into the sea."

"Until you start singing in my ear," he said.

"Oh, shut up," she whispered and pressed herself a little closer to him.

…

At the table John watched Kara and Lee dance. Bill's eyes were also on them as were Hunter's. Even though the backgrounds of the three men were very different, they were all warriors and they were all fathers. They all knew how it felt to watch a woman's body grow and change with their child, and then see that child brought into the world to become subject to the whims of fate.

John looked at Kara. He hadn't even known he had a daughter until she was almost five months old, but the instant he had seen her, she had taken his heart. And now she was old enough to have children of her own. He was sure one day she would. He felt mellow and incredibly sentimental.

"One day we'll watch them dance at their wedding," he said.

"I hope so," Bill echoed.

"Do you think the next generation might be free from war?"

"That's why we fight. So life will be better for our children and for their children."

"I wonder how many fathers on Kobol said the same thing five thousand years ago," John mused. "We've been fighting ever since."

Carefully he slipped the ultrasound picture of D'Anna's child out of his jacket pocket. He placed it on the table in front of Bill.

"My son," he said. "He's six inches long and weighs half a pound right now. He wasn't conceived in love the way Kara and Brae were, but he's my son just the same."

Bill picked up the image and studied it. "I think I remember Carolanne showing me one of these with Lee or maybe it was Zak. I was there when Lee was born. I missed Zak's birth by six hours. Carolanne went into labor a week before her due date. I was on Picon at Fleet Headquarters. I couldn't get back in time."

"I was with Laura when Brae was born, but I didn't see Kara until she was almost five months old. I didn't even know her mother was pregnant. She'd broken up with me before she started showing."

Hunter said, "Esmari was almost three months old before I saw her. I knew about her, but her grandmother wouldn't let me see her. Dessa would come back from visiting and talk on and on about how pretty she was. It tore me up. I stayed in the forest fighting as much as I could. I used to dream about getting killed and seeing Esmari's mother in the Elysian Fields and have her look at me like I was scum because I wasn't taking care of our daughter."

Bill drained the mug of beer, went to the bar and came back with a tumbler of whiskey. None of them spoke again until the glass was half empty.

"Lee wasn't conceived in love either," Bill said with a candor that surprised John. "But I do love my son. I love both my sons. They aren't responsible for the mistakes I made. Just because a man doesn't love his children's mother the way he should, it doesn't mean he can't love his children."

_He's telling me he understands about what I did on Nereid_, John thought.

Carefully Bill slid the sonogram back across the table. "Watch after my sons on Nereid," he said. "They're all I've got now."

"Until those grandchildren start coming along," Hunter said. His statement broke the somber mood.

John smiled and so did Bill. They looked at their children start back toward the table after the song ended.

"I guess that means we're going to be stuck with each other for a long time," John said to Bill.

"I hope so," Bill said.

Lee and Kara sat at the table and each picked up a mug of beer. They looked at each other. Then Kara reached over and picked up the sonogram. She studied it for a few minutes before she smiled at her father and handed it to him.

_Here we sit, five warriors and three fathers_, John thought. Someday he hoped the warriors were a thing of the past. He hoped it would be four fathers and one mother...and two grandfathers.

TBC…


	53. Children of the Stars

Chapter 53

Children of the Stars

_The Planet_

_Day 23: Some sort of problem was found with the transport that was to take us to the planet's surface and we were delayed for almost two hours while repairs were made. The others who were scheduled to go down today gathered in the nearest break room. I sat at a small table with a physicist, an astronomer and a priest. I know that sounds like the beginning of a very bad joke, but their conversation was by far the most interesting one I have been privy to since I began this mission and I will be forever grateful for the accident of fate that delayed our departure._

_Our astronomer, who was already deep in conversation with the priest when I sat down with my cup of tea, had just remarked that we are all made of stardust. '__Children of the stars' __is what he said. I found his comment poetic in the extreme for an astronomer, however he was speaking literally. He said the atoms in our bodies came from the primordial remains of stars that had died billions of years ago when our universe was much younger than it is now. The physicist elaborated that in the heart of a star the elements of hydrogen and helium fuse to form heavier elements and that when a star goes nova and explodes, even heavier elements such as iron and nickel are formed. I couldn't follow everything these two men were saying since my knowledge of their science is limited, but according to them all life in the universe owes its beginnings to stars hence the poetic sound of his statement. _

_In that regard, said the astronomer, then all creatures are brothers for all of us, even the robots we brought with us, are made of these elemental atoms, the dust of long-dead stars._

_Naturally our priest argued that all life in the universe was a gift from the gods, but could offer no scientific proof to substantiate his claims. In this humble man I saw the raw definition of the word '__faith__', that ability to accept the written word of the scriptures as all the proof he needs. When asked for my opinion, I demurred and said I could see both sides of the argument but did not want to be asked to 'take a side'. As a physician I am a woman of science yet I am also a woman of faith. One of the reasons I undertook this journey was to challenge myself on both._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

Laura carried her son down to the portico and out to the waiting limousine. Edgar opened the door and she put Braedon into the back seat. He happily crawled over and got into his car seat. Laura strapped him in and kissed his cheek.

"Edgar will take you to your dada."

"Go," Brae said. "Go, pwease."

Laura slid out and a smiling Edgar got in, settling the big diaper bag on the floor.

"Thank you," she said to him. "Tell John I'll see him later."

"I guess that means you plan to ride with us when we go to pick Braedon up this afternoon?"

"Yes. I need to talk to John about something and I need to do it face to face." Laura waved at her son. "Be good for your dada."

After the limo had pulled away, she turned and walked back into Marble House. She rode the elevator upstairs and put on her favorite blue silk blouse and a pair of gray slacks. She did her makeup carefully and brushed her hair down around her shoulders instead of pulling it back or putting it up like she usually did for work. She wanted a softer look today, less stiff, less formal. She wanted James McManus and the people of Caprica to see her as a woman and a wife and a mother as well as their elected leader.

She was downstairs in her office when he arrived with a cameraman. Billy escorted them in. She gestured to the two wing chairs that sat in front of the white marble fireplace on the wall opposite her desk.

"Please, come in and have a seat, Mr. McManus."

He looked around. "So this is the inner sanctum."

She smiled sweetly. "This is my office. I'm sure you've seen pictures of it."

Billy showed the cameraman where he could set up his tripod near their own camera that would also record the interview. Laura accepted the small clip-on microphone from him and fastened it to the neck of her blouse.

She offered McManus and his cameraman coffee or tea which they refused. She had anticipated the refusal since a drink during an interview was a distraction, but she wanted to set the tone of hospitality and generosity.

McManus handed her a piece of paper with the statement from his confidential source and asked her to verify whether or not it was true. It was very accurate as far as it went, but it made no mention of the fact that John, D'Anna and Bianca were now living in the old o-club on the base. It had to have come from someone in the military, but someone whose knowledge was either limited or who had omitted certain facts on purpose. She handed the paper back to him.

"Yes. Everything on that page is true."

"Why did you not mention this when you made the announcement about your husband's escape?"

"At the time I made the announcement about John's escape, I didn't have any facts about the others."

"And you have the facts now?"

"Some of them. John and the women are still being debriefed."

"Where are they?"

"I'm sure you'll understand that for security reasons, I can't divulge their exact location."

"Are they in custody?"

"Again for security reasons, I can't discuss their exact situation." He seemed to be trying to decide what to ask next so Laura continued. "Do you believe in the gods, Mr. McManus?"

He seemed taken aback. "What do my religious beliefs have to do with your husband's situation?"

Laura picked up the book version of the Sacred Scrolls from the small table that sat between their two chairs. She opened it to the first bookmark.

"I'd like to read something so please bear with me. It comes from the _Book of Pythia, _chapter 12, verse 22. _Pythia said to the daughters of the temple, 'After the blaze at the dawn of the third age of mankind, a child shall be born of a non-believer and he will bring peace to the warring tribes.' _There are also a number of lesser known prophetic books in the Scrolls. One of these is the _Book of Sibyl_. This is from chapter 3, verse 8. _And a child shall be conceived of a non-believer who shall say to the people, 'Behold my son will soon be born. Lay down your arms for the days of peace are at hand.'"_ Laura closed the book. "Are you familiar with these verses, Mr. McManus?"

"I can't say that I am."

"There are several others, but I won't try your patience by reading all of them. Billy has prepared a list for you to take with you if you're interested. Let me read just one more. This comes from the sixth chapter of the _Book of Xander_ in the monotheistic scriptures, verses 7 and 11. _The days will come again when our people shall be persecuted for worshipping one God. And He shall hear their cries and send to them a peacemaker, a child of two races but one faith. And he shall be borne of the three and protected by the six. _The emphasis on _the three_ is mine._"_

Laura saw the light finally dawn in McManus's eyes. "Are you saying that the Cylon who is pregnant with your husband's child is carrying a baby prophesied by the scriptures? Seriously, Madame President?"

"I'm a woman of faith. I cannot disregard something that not only several of our own Oracles foresaw but was also foreseen by a revered prophet of the monotheists, especially since the Cylon in question is a Three. If you'd like a more detailed discussion of the verses I've just read, then perhaps you'd like to interview the priest of the temple I attend, the Temple of Athena on Third Street. Her name is Elosha. I spoke with her this morning. She'll be glad to talk to you. Or perhaps you could interview a professor of theology at the university. I understand you're close friends with one of them."

Laura could see that she had completely taken the wind out of James McManus's sails. He looked at the paper in his hand.

"How do you feel about the fact that a Cylon is pregnant with your husband's child?"

"Shouldn't your question rather be how do I feel that my husband was chosen by the gods to father a child who will bring peace to warring nations…to us and the Cylons?" Laura casually positioned her left hand so that her wedding ring was clearly visible. "If you're trying to get me to say anything disloyal about a man who was willing to sacrifice his life to destroy the Cylon basestar over our planet last November and who suffered terribly as their prisoner for many months, then you won't succeed."

"So you're going to play the good wife and stand by him."

"He's a good husband and very loving father to our children. There was a reason he survived that explosion. There was a reason he was _forced_ to function as a breeder for the Cylons. Who am I to question the will of the gods?"

"I believe that your husband is a decorated Viper pilot from the First War. How does he feel about this so-called prophecy of peace that would unite humans and those he once fought?"

"There comes a time, Mr. McManus, when even warriors will be called upon to beat their swords into plows."

"Are you quoting him?"

"No. Those are my words."

"I'd like to interview him and find out his feelings."

"I'm afraid that won't be possible. He's still being debriefed by the military. They would never consent to make him available to the press so you'll have to direct your questions to me."

"Have you seen him and talked to him?"

"Of course."

"Have you seen the Cylon and talked to her?"

"Yes."

"Can you tell us what you talked about?"

Laura smiled sweetly again. "Our conversation was personal and will remain private. I will tell you, though, that she is a very spiritual woman. Her belief in their God and the prophecy is absolute and unshakeable."

"Another woman of faith?"

"Yes. We do share that trait. Different faiths, but we both believe."

"Tell us about the doctor and the half-breed child your husband brought back with him."

"The woman is a pediatrician who was treating the humans in one of the settlements on the Cylon homeworld. The child was born to a human mother and Cylon father. Both are dead. Many of the Cylons believe that the baby is one of the protectors of the peacemaker, one of _the six_. There are Cylons on their homeworld just as there are humans here who don't want our races to find a peaceful solution to our differences. The child's life was in danger. That's all I can tell you. I can assure you that both of the women and the child are being very well treated and well cared for."

"How old is the baby?"

"Two months."

The disbelief was evident in his voice. "And you're saying that the Cylons on their homeworld felt threatened by a two-month-old child?"

"She won't be a baby forever, Mr. McManus. If you're a student of history, you'll recall that on Kobol many thousands of years ago, a Mithraic ruler once had every child one year-old and under slaughtered because one of his advisors had a dream that the ruler would be overthrown and killed by a baby born since their last harvest."

"So where do you go from here?"

"The sun will continue to rise in the east and life will go on. We will continue to make plans to go to Nereid and free the humans that the Cylons have enslaved. I'll continue to perform my duties as President and I'm sure you'll continue to report the news to the people of Caprica. None of _us_ can foresee the future, Mr. McManus, unless, of course, we have the sight of an Oracle. I am not so blessed…or cursed… and neither, I think, are you."

He looked at the piece of paper again and then back at her. "I don't seem to have any more questions or let me rephrase. I don't have any more questions that I think you'll answer so I'll quit while I'm ahead. Thank you for granting me this interview."

Laura unclipped the small microphone. "Remember your promise. You sit on this story until tomorrow."

He finally smiled. "I'm the lead story on the _Caprica Today_ show. It airs at nine in the morning."

She returned his smile. "I imagine your story will be the topic of discussion for a great many people tomorrow. Your ratings should go through the roof. All I ask is that you show this interview in its entirety or you show none of it. Remember we also have a copy. If you selectively edit it in any way, I'm sure one of your rivals will be glad to get the unedited version."

"If you miss the show, check the video on the web site of the _Caprica Times_. It will be the lead story there as well. I imagine by lunch tomorrow, it will have gone viral."

"I will. I have one last question for you. I'm not asking for a name, but will you tell me if your source is someone in the military?"

He finally answered, "My source _is not_ someone in the military."

"You hesitated. Do you not verify your sources?"

"I do. Let me just say that there might be an indirect connection to the military."

"I thought so. We're not going to try to ferret anyone out. As long as what you print is factual and doesn't compromise our security or our ability to run the government, I will not interfere with your freedom to print it. But there is a line, Mr. McManus that deals with respect for me and my family and the office that I hold. I trust you not to cross it. What you are going to reveal tomorrow morning will no doubt put both my husband and the Cylon in the crosshairs of a lot of radicals on both sides of the issue, but the people have a right to know certain things and the fact that we don't intend to completely annihilate the Cylons is one of them. The fact that we want to create a blended settlement on Nereid is another."

"You seem very sure of that." He smiled. "I didn't think you could see the future."

"I may not be able to see it, but I do believe in it. John and I have a son who is not yet two years old. I don't want to send him off to war one day the way I will shortly send our daughter."

...

Kara stood in the bridal section of Maximillian's waiting for Maya and the saleswoman who was helping her to come out of the dressing room. She felt incredibly uncomfortable amidst the lace and tulle and satin and taffeta and silk and pearls and crystals that made up the dresses on display.

In an effort to stay off the dradis of the other saleswoman who was patrolling the area, she casually inched her way toward the section that held the bridesmaids' dresses and maneuvered behind a mannequin whose skirt was big enough to hide a Raptor. She already had a long dress she had worn in her father and Laura's wedding. It was wine-colored and strapless although it had a lace jacket that she had worn in the temple. She would be perfectly content wearing it again since she'd worn it exactly once in her life…but it was probably sure to bring the bride bad luck if her maid of honor wore the same dress she'd worn before. Kara had to admit that her knowledge about planning weddings was zero. She snickered. Lee was the planner and organizer. One day she'd tell him to plan the wedding and just let her know when and where to show up.

With her mind on the following Tuesday when she would start practicing strafing runs at the Argos Bombing Range three hundred miles north of the city, she absent-mindedly pushed hangers down the rack and looked at dresses without really seeing them.

Maya hadn't given her any ideas about color or style. Since Kara would be her only attendant, Maya said it didn't matter, to pick something she liked. She wished Maya would just say, g_et the blue one _or g_et the lavendar one_ and thus relieve Kara of the responsibility. She temporarily stopped paying attention to her surroundings and the saleswoman zeroed in on her quicker than Major Jessups. She got a lock on Kara before she could take evasive action.

"Bride or bridesmaid?" The woman asked nicely.

She started to say_, groom_ just to see what kind of reaction she got. Instead she said, "Maid of honor."

"For the beautiful young woman who is in dressing room number four?"

"Look, I'm not into the dress thing, but Maya is a friend and I want to get something she'll like."

The woman started firing questions at her faster than a kinetic energy weapon spewed bullets. "Is the wedding going to be large or small? Are there other attendants? Does the bride have a color scheme? Is there going to be a reception? Will the ceremony be traditional or contemporary? Indoor or outdoor?"

Kara fired back. "Small. She hasn't mentioned a color scheme. I'm her only attendant. I think it'll be a traditional ceremony in a temple. There'll be a reception afterwards…a small one…just dinner for a few friends."

"At a hotel or a country club?"

"The reception will be at a private residence." Kara wasn't about to mention Marble House_._

"Let's see what our bride chooses. You're very pretty. It's never good for the maid of honor to outshine the bride."

Kara said. "I'd wear my dress uniform like the best man if I could."

The saleswoman looked at her like she'd just said she'd go naked to the wedding if she could.

"I'm sure we can find _something_ you'll like."

"Maya is the one who needs to _like it_," Kara said. "Whatever she wants me to wear is fine with me."

They waited until Maya came out. The dress she had on wasn't the one that had first caught her attention, but Kara realized it was perfect for the kind of wedding Maya wanted. The full-length gown was ivory silk crepe with a cowl neck and cap sleeves, both of which were edged with lace. Although it was too long and would need to be hemmed, the dress fit Maya's slim body like it had been made for her. It had no train, exactly what Maya wanted. The saleswoman motioned to her and Maya turned around. The back was cut in a modest V with silk covered buttons instead of a zipper.

Maya smiled and asked, "What do you think? Is this _me_ or what?"

"Wow," Kara said, while the two saleswomen beamed their approval.

Maya blushed. "Do you think Hunter will like it?"

"I think Lee will be picking Hunter's jaw off the floor."

"What should I wear on my head?"

Kara zoned out while Maya discussed veils and other options with the two saleswomen. She knew that one day she'd be where Maya now stood, but she wasn't ready to take that step yet. Instead she was mentally in her Viper aiming at a target on the ground. It took her back to the days she and Karl had played video games on Picon.

The saleswoman's voice broke her reverie. "What do you think about this?" When Kara turned around, her saleswoman was holding a dress. "Let's go try it on. It's one of the ones suggested by the designer for that bridal gown."

The saleswoman called the color _peach parfait_. It had a low neck and cap sleeves and slim skirt. The only problem is that it was a size too small. The woman could barely get it zipped. Kara's breasts bulged over the low neckline.

"Nope," Kara said. "It shows way too much of the girls plus I can't breathe."

"We can order one in the next size. It will take about three weeks to arrive."

"That's cutting it too close. The wedding is in four weeks. Let's keep looking."

Kara ended up with a dress of similar design in a color called _watermelon_. Maya loved it. They left both dresses to be hemmed. Maya said she'd pick them up the following Saturday.

Then came the best part for Kara. They met Lee and Hunter for lunch at the same restaurant they had visited with Bianca the week before. Lee was smiling. He winked at Kara.

"This is good practice. Hunter got measured for his tuxedo and we went ring shopping."

"Practice for what?" Kara asked…and then it hit her. "I'm slow today. I was thinking about Laura letting that jerk McManus interview her this morning. I can't wait to hear what he says about my dad. I might have to wait for him outside the _Caprica Times_ building and punch out his lights."

"Kara, you can't…" Lee started.

She smiled and started looking at the menu. "Just kidding."

Lee sometimes marveled that Kara had made it through the Academy with only one incident that had resulted in demerits and a month of confinement to campus. Kara's short fuse was even shorter if somebody said something bad about her father.

"So is Maya going to move in with you and Lee after the wedding?" Kara asked Hunter in a joking tone of voice.

Maya answered her question. "We're not going to try to find a place since Hunter will be leaving a week or two after we get back from our honeymoon. I'm going to stay at Marble House and continue caring for Brae and Esmari. We won't make any changes until the war is over."

"If I come back, we'll talk about it then," Hunter said.

Maya said, "Please stop saying _if_. Please say _when_. We'll talk about it _when_ you come back."

Hunter smiled.

But Kara noticed he didn't repeat the sentence. She'd always thought it was bad luck to talk about the end of a mission before you left for it. The most the pilots ever said to each other was _good hunting_. But Maya didn't know that. Maya had lost one man she loved to the Cylons during the Second War. Kara knew she couldn't even think about losing another.

Kara said, "Laura's going to talk to Hunter about her plans to make Nereid into one big human-cylon commune. Don't worry. She'll straighten him out."

Hunter was still smiling. "Like she's straightened you out?"

Kara grinned. "I'm hopeless and she knows it."

"Second that," Lee added which earned him a playful elbow in the ribs from Kara.

After lunch Maya and Hunter went back to the jewelry store to make a final decision on rings, and Lee and Kara drove to his apartment building. Kara had told Karl the day before that they'd drop by to visit after lunch. She saw Karl out at the airbase almost every day. She hadn't seen Sharon for several weeks.

Karl let them in. He had Hera in his arms. She was now nearly two months old, but she was still very small compared to Rachel who was the same age. Then Kara remembered that if Hera had come on her due date, she would be only a few weeks old. She still had some catching up to do.

Kara stuck her sunglasses in her shirt pocket and looked into Hera's dark eyes. "What does she weigh now?"

"When Sharon took her to the doctor on Thursday for her weekly checkup, she weighed six pounds six ounces. We take the monitor off while we're holding her, but we put it back on when she's sleeping. Dr. Junius said since she'd never had a problem with her breathing, we could probably leave it off now, but Sharon…"

Sharon walked into the living room from the kitchen. "I'm being an over-protective mother. Do you blame me?"

"Nope," Kara said. "How are you getting along?"

"My incision is healed. I feel great." She glanced at Karl and then smiled at Kara. Kara knew exactly what she meant. If they weren't being careful, Hera might get a brother or a sister.

Sharon said, "We're going to take Hera out in her stroller later this afternoon."

Lee said, "We're not going to stay long."

"I'm not trying to run you off," Sharon retorted.

"We know you aren't," Kara said. "I've got to get back because I told Laura I'd ride out to the airbase with her when she goes to pick up Brae. Laura's wants to talk to my dad about something so she asked me to go along to babysit."

Karl said, "I saw your father yesterday afternoon. I was coming out of the gym at the base. He was on his way in with Major Parker. They were getting ready to work out. Your dad asked about Sharon and Hera. I asked him a little more about meeting my dad on Nereid. He couldn't tell me much because they'd only talked twice. I asked him about my dad's wife. All Major Gallagher said was that she'd been the first officer on a big transport ship. Her name is Kate. He said she probably saved my dad's life after he was released from the Cylon prison."

"Karl's already got his orders," Sharon said changing the subject. "He's been assigned to the _Galactica_ for the mission. He and Dwight Saunders will be providing support and rescue for the Vipers and anybody else who needs it. They go on board in a month. I wish I could go with him."

"No way I'd want you on a battlestar," Karl said.

"What about when it's over?" Lee asked. "Would you consider going to Nereid then? Dad said there would have to be a peacekeeping force on the planet for a while."

"Why would we want to do that?" Karl asked.

Kara answered him. "Because Laura wants to create a place where humans and Cylons can all live in peace. I'm pretty sure Hunter and Maya will take his little girl and go there to live. My dad said that none of the Cylon women on the planet have had a baby that survived. The only babies like Hera have been born to human mothers and Cylon fathers. You'd be a hero to your sisters."

"Isn't the Three your dad brought back with him pregnant?"

"She's just over four months. I saw the sonogram. The baby only weighs half a pound. No way he'd survive if he was born now. I know your doctor is taking care of D'Anna, but she can only do so much. D'Anna's blood pressure is already high. The doctor is going to do some tests on Monday to try to find out why."

Sharon asked, "What's going to happen to D'Anna if the baby lives? Is she going to be allowed to go back? Will your father let her take the baby with her?"

Kara shrugged. "I don't know. That's not something we've talked about. Since he escaped, he's had this _one-day-at-a-time_ attitude."

"What about you two?" Karl asked. "Are you going to stay on Nereid after the fighting?"

"We'll worry about the future when we're sure we're going to have one," Kara answered. She turned to Sharon. "Would you like to visit D'Anna…and take Hera to visit her?"

"Is that an _official_ invitation?" Sharon asked.

"It could be. If you'd like to do it, I'll ask Laura. Leoben met D'Anna and talked to her. He left me a voice message a couple of days ago saying he'd like to see her again. They've moved her out of the brig into an apartment near my dad, but she's got to be lonely."

Sharon looked at Karl and then back at Kara. "Okay. I'll do it. I'll take Hera to meet her."

"I think they're going to let Natasi visit her. Laura wants Natasi's help. She thinks the fact that D'Anna is carrying the peacekeeper will make Natasi want to do it…her being so religious."

"Do you believe in the prophecy?" Sharon asked.

"Yes," Kara said at the same time Lee said, "No."

"Maya and Hunter are getting married in a month," Kara said, changing the subject again. Then she rolled her eyes. "I went _dress shopping_ with her today. I'm her maid of honor. Elosha is going to do the honors for them just like she did for you."

Sharon smiled. "And when is she going to do the honors for you two?"

"Whenever Kara says _yes_," Lee said.

"I told him we'd talk about it after this thing on Nereid is settled. One wedding before we leave is enough."

Karl said, "So how's Zak doing? Is he still dating Maggie?"

Lee shook his head. "I'm not sure. I've asked the last couple of times I've seen him or talked to him. All he'll say is they're trying to work through some issues."

"Like what?" Sharon asked.

"I really don't know," Lee answered. "Zak used to talk to me about everything. Since he's come back from Sovana, he hasn't had much to say about his personal life."

Kara said, "In the locker room yesterday Showboat was bitching to Shark because she thought Maggie was acting too friendly with Crashdown in the ready room. I'm sure Crash was eating it up even though he and Showboat have been dating. He's always had a thing for Maggs. When Showboat realized I was listening, she shut up." Kara looked at Karl. "Have you heard anything?"

"Nobody mentions Maggie to me since she got in my face that time about Sharon."

"Maybe you should call Kendra," Kara said to Lee. "I'll bet she knows."

In the elevator after they left Kara said, "Your floor or the parking garage?"

"Your decision," he answered. "You're the one who has to get back."

She grinned and pushed eight.

Instead of feeling sleepy after they made love like she usually did, Kara felt restless. Lee was the one who fell asleep. Kara nestled in his arms thinking about what lay ahead for them, about how the combat on Nereid was going to be like the wars the Colonies had fought when the centurions had first been created long before she was born. The First War had been fought in space, but it had also been fought on the ground on some of the planets.

She tried to remember when she'd first learned about Cylon centurions and the old-style Raiders. She knew by the time she got the Viper pedal car because she routinely pretended to shoot them down. Her mother wouldn't talk about them except to tell her that they'd killed her own Marine father in the last year of the First War.

Now on Nereid she'd be killing Raiders in the air and centurions on the ground.

She leaned up and looked at the clock beside the bed. It was almost 15:15. She'd told Laura she would be back by 16:00. Quietly she got out of bed, went to the bathroom and took a quick shower. Lee was awake when she walked out wrapped in a towel. She tossed it on the bed and began putting on her clothes.

"You're beautiful," he said.

She leaned over and kissed him. "Don't get up. I'll take a transport back to Marble House. I'll see you later tonight."

After she was gone, Lee lay in bed and thought about the last several days. He'd been crazy to think Kara would accept being left behind when the recon mission went to Nereid.

Something was clearly on her mind.

Rather than brood about it, he got up, took a shower and went into his kitchen where he had stacked the six boxes from Joseph Adama's law office. He had taken all of the handwritten journals and organized them by date. The journals filled almost two boxes. His grandfather had been a prolific writer, at times devoting pages to what Lee considered trivial information. Lee got very proficient at skimming his grandfather's neat but small handwriting.

In the last week he'd made his way through two journals that covered Joseph's move from Tauron to Caprica which was the point at which his grandfather had chosen to start chronicling his life and that of his family. He had meticulously dated every entry. He mentioned his brother Sam often. He even mentioned Sam's domestic partner Larry, but there was never a reference to their affiliation with the Ha'la'tha. He'd learned about that from his mother.

What Lee had never told anyone was that before his mother's suicide attempt when he was sixteen and during one of her manic, drunken rages following a conversation with his grandmother Evelyn, his mother had told him that his precious grandfather had for years done business with Tauron's largest criminal organiztion, the Ha'la'tha, that Joseph's brother Sam Adama had been a Ha'la'tha enforcer and had killed so many men he'd lost track of the number. She had also told him that Sam had smuggled some old U-87 centurions to Tauron for use by the Ha'la'tha and had later sold some more to the radical monotheists on Gemenon.

Lee couldn't imagine how his law-abiding, straight-laced, patriotic father would feel about his own father and favorite uncle selling centurions to a criminal organization on Tauron and to religious terrorists on Gemenon.

Now he wondered if his mother had been right. Maybe it was all part of a drunken fantasy designed to disillusion Lee about a man he respected, a man who was more of a father to him than his own had ever been.

Lee skimmed a dozen routine pages that covered a period of a week. Then there was a two-sentence entry and nothing else for several weeks.

_My beloved wife Shannon and my beautiful daughter Tamara, died today in a terror attack that destroyed a mag lev train. Soldiers of the One claimed responsibility._

Lee was shocked. Until that moment he'd had no idea that his grandmother Evelyn was Joseph's second wife. Even his mother at her drunkest had never talked about Joseph having a wife or daughter who had died in a terrorist act.

Lee booted his laptop and easily found several articles about the mag lev bombing over fifty years earlier. They all dealt with the terror group Soldiers of the One that had planned and executed the attack. He kept searching, though, and eventually found an old memorial that mentioned the deceased by name. There they were…_Shannon Adama and daughter Tamara, survived by husband Joseph and son William 'Willie' Adama._

Lee took another look at the dates. Shannon Adama had died several years before his father had been born. There was only one possible answer. Willie and Bill weren't the same person. Joseph and Evelyn had followed an ancient Tuaron tradition and named their son after his deceased half-brother.

Lee turned the page. The next journal entry was another mind-blowing one for him. His grandfather had written,

_Today I met the father of another young woman who died on the train. His name is Daniel Graystone and his daughter was named Zoe._

...

The Presidential limo sped up the I-6 toward the airbase. The driver kept only a short distance between the lead vehicle, which was filled with more security personnel. The same distance was kept by the trailing vehicle.

Behind the bullet-proof glass, the highways sounds were muted almost to the point of being silent. Kara thought about how different it was when she was riding her motorcycle. She felt every bump and heard the wind whistling around her helmet. On her motorcycle she felt almost the same way that she felt in her Viper. She had zoned out again when she realized that Laura was talking to her.

"Is something wrong?"

"No. Nothing's wrong. I was thinking about Viper training next week. After we've mopped up the Raiders, we'll be providing ground support for the Marines."

Laura took a deep breath. Kara talked so casually of her duties. It was almost as if she refused to acknowledge how fraught with danger they were.

"Did you and Maya have any luck this morning?"

"I'll let her tell you about the dress she found. I think it's perfect. I almost told her I'd wear the same dress I wore when you and Dad got married, but I didn't want to do something wrong. What do you call it? A social faux pas?"

"Maya probably wouldn't have cared. What color is the dress you picked out?"

"The saleslady called it _watermelon_. I call it dark pink."

"I'm sure it will look very good on you. You can wear pinks with your hair and eyes and skin tone."

"How did your interview with McManus go?" Kara asked.

"Exactly like I wanted it to go. I brought a copy to show your father. I'm not sure how he'll react."

"Sharon said she'd like to bring Hera and visit with D'Anna."

"I'll tell Romo to arrange it."

They rode in silence for a few minutes.

"Dad's started working out at the gym. Karl ran into him and Major Parker yesterday afternoon. I guess he's trying to get into shape for the mission."

"Are you sure you want to go with…" Laura started.

"Yes! Admiral Adama is right. Two ships double the chance that one of us will be able to make it back to the fleet with intel. My dad told me that the Cylons never knew when I jumped the Raider away from Nereid because I did it below the tree line and over a river. The spatial displacement didn't leave any permanent evidence in the water like it would have if I'd jumped that close to the ground. Dad said the crazy Cavil who came to the valley was obsessed with finding me and Narcho. He kept searching the forest over and over for us. If I'd jumped over land, eventually he'd have found the spot and recognized it."

"You're very clever."

"Not so much," Kara admitted. "It was one-tenth clever, nine-tenths panic at wanting to get out of there before the Cylons caught me. As soon as I cleared that waterfall, I jumped."

"You followed your instinct," Laura said. "We all do it every day with most of the decisions we make. Sometimes those decisions later turn out to be wrong, but hopefully more often than not, they turn out to be right."

"Have you forgiven my dad for what he did with D'Anna?"

"Yes."

"And you told him?"

"Yes."

"Then why is he still living at the airbase?"

Laura took a breath. "He made the decision in part to protect me from the consequences of his actions. I hope I've shifted the balance a bit in his favor with the interview I gave McManus this morning."

The car stopped and Edgar got out of the front. Laura and Kara waited until the rest of the security team had given him the okay before he opened the door. They went inside and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The two MPs outside Bianca's door came to attention the minute they recognized Laura. One of them opened the door and Kara understood why they were there.

Everyone was in Bianca's apartment including D'Anna who was holding Rachel. Laura stopped in the doorway and Kara almost bumped into her.

John was sitting on the floor with some of Brae's toys scattered around them. He and his son were building a fort from the plastic blocks that snapped together.

Brae ran over to Laura. "Mamma, look."

She picked him up and stepped into the room. Kara walked past her and stood near the doorway to the kitchen.

John got to his feet and made an effort to put everyone at ease. He smiled at his wife and then looked at his daughter. "Did you and Maya find dresses?"

"Yep."

There was an awkward silence. "Where's Dr. Cardenas?" Laura asked.

"Taking a nap," John said. "Rachel was fretful last night and kept her up a lot."

"I need to talk to you," Laura said to John. "Alone."

"I'll stay here with Brae," Kara said.

Braedon protested. "No. Go with dada."

"What if I push you in the stroller and we go see a Raptor? A real Raptor?"

Braedon wiggled to get down. "Go see Wapta."

Kara smiled. "It works every time. Come on."

Braedon let her pick him up.

"Edgar will insist that several of his men accompany you."

"That's fine," Kara said as she exited with her brother in her arms.

Laura looked at D'Anna. She was wearing a loose-fitting blue top and some dark slacks. "Hello, D'Anna. How are you feeling?"

"You can go talk to John. I don't mind. I'll take care of Rachel."

John walked across the hall and Laura followed him.

"I'm sorry that was awkward for you," he said when they were inside and the door was closed. "D'Anna's lonely. So is Bianca. They've been spending some time together. I'm gone most of the day."

"You don't need to explain anything to me. I don't mind as long as you and D'Anna are in separate apartments at night. Are you through with your debriefing?"

"Yes. I'm working with Brad and the group that's planning the recon mission. We've got to get to Nereid and assess the situation before we'll know how to proceed. We've got the landing planned for the valley. We've decided on supplies, but that's about as far as we can go until we know what happened after I left. The more time that passes, the greater the potential for change. Right now we're trying to come up with all possible scenarios and get a plan together for each."

"I wish you didn't have to go."

"I'll be back."

"You told me that the last time." Emotion washed over Laura. "I thought I'd lost you."

John took a deep breath. "I'm sorry. Just about everything went wrong that night that could go wrong. I was the backup pilot. I was never supposed to fly that Raptor, but when Bill couldn't get in touch with his number one pick, I was it. Then the timer on the explosives didn't work so I had to go back to the basestar. I couldn't even detonate them from twenty feet away. Parker said Dr. Rafferty theorized that something inside the basestar was either jamming or absorbing the signal. Jumping that Raptor inside their launch bay right over the explosives was the only other choice I had to destroy that ship. Sometimes things just don't happen the way we plan."

"Maybe they do if you believe the prophecy about yours and D'Anna's child."

John didn't say anything. He couldn't figure out exactly what Laura was telling him.

She continued. "Kara tells me that you have a sonogram of your son. I'd like to see it."

John went into the bedroom, opened the top dresser drawer and took the sonogram from his book of scriptures.

Laura gazed at it, at the tiny being already recognizable as a baby. "May I borrow this?"

"Sure. Why?"

"I'm going to talk to Natasi tomorrow afternoon about her accompanying you and the recon team to Nereid. I'd like to show this to her."

"I know Admiral Adama has signed off on her going. Leoben too, if he will, but the men who are going on the mission don't want either one of them. They don't trust them. They're Cylons for God's sake. We can't spare the men to watch them all the time."

"I'm sure once you land in the valley there will be plenty of men to watch them. Besides, I won't agree to her going if I don't believe she sincerely wants to help us. Natasi is deeply religious. I think the fact that the mother of their peacemaker is now in our hands will sway her."

John glanced at the sonogram in her hands. "There's nothing on that picture that says _future peacemaker_. I doubt she'll believe you."

"She will when we allow her to visit D'Anna."

John didn't say anything. Laura and Bill probably thought they had a right to use D'Anna to further their agenda. It was pointless to voice his opinion since they would do it anyway.

"I gave James McManus an interview this morning," Laura continued. "I did it because someone leaked the information about D'Anna and her pregnancy. The only information he didn't have is where you are right now."

John felt anger wash over him. "That sleazy bastard. He's always opposed you. He was the one who made a big deal out of you being pregnant with Brae when we got married. He played the morality card over and over during your campaign at the same time he was running around on his wife. He's a liar and a hypocrite. You should have told him to go frak himself_._"

"That was my first inclination, but he would have published his information anyway along with his view that I was trying to hide the facts or cover them up. For our protection Billy also recorded the interview. I'd like for you to watch it. McManus is going to air it in the morning on the news show _Caprica Today_."

Laura removed the small USB drive from her pocket, turned on the television and plugged it in. They sat on the couch and watched. Billy had kept his camera running after McManus's cameraman stopped his. The recording ended when Laura made the remark about not wanting to send her son off to war one day.

John felt waves of strong emotion…anger chief among them. He didn't trust himself to speak. He stood up and walked to the kitchen doorway.

"Say something, please," Laura finally said.

"What in the _hell_ did you hope to accomplish by that? You told him D'Anna and I would be in the crosshairs of radicals on both sides. Did you not stop to think you've put yourself there as well?"

"Everything I said is the truth," Laura answered defensively. "The words of the prophecy are in the scriptures. I believe them."

"That might have meant something a hundred years ago, but according to something I read last year, only half of the people now on Caprica have any religious affiliation or attend any kind of worship service. Frak, Laura. Don't you realize that at least half your constituents are going to look at you and say, '_Poor President Roslin. She's so desperate to make excuses for her husband that she's listening to seers and prophets_.' They're going to think you've started losing it."

Laura felt tears sting her eyes. "I didn't think you would take it this way. You know I don't blame you for what happened with D'Anna. What do you think I should have done? Should I have simply acknowledged the truth of McManus's statement and then said, '_Oh, and by the way John and I are living apart._'"

"At least that would have gotten most of the women of Caprica on your side. I'm not the important one in this situation. Don't you understand that? You are. You're the leader they elected in a landslide last November. The minute you said you believe in the prophecy of a half-breed child being the peacemaker and that you don't intend to annihilate the Cylons, you probably lost the support of the majority of the planet."

Laura's lips were trembling. "I think you're wrong."

"I hope the hell I am for your sake."

"Why are you so angry at me?"

"I'm not angry at you. It's me. I'm the one who frakked everything up for you. You've still got time. Call McManus and tell him that I've asked you for a separation. Let me take the blame in this. Put some distance between us."

"No."

"If you won't call him, I will. He said he wanted to talk to me anyway."

"Oh, John, please, please don't do that. My interview will make headlines tomorrow. Everybody will talk about it for a few days. McManus will interview some professor of theology about the prophecy who will discuss all the other verses of scripture dealing with the peacemaker. Then something else will come along and grab the headlines. Another temple will be bombed in Sovana or a famous sports star will get arrested for using drugs or some film star will announce she's getting a divorce and my interview will be largely forgotten. The people of Caprica are extremely fickle. Nothing holds their attention for very long."

"You really believe that, don't you?"

"Yes."

"I love you too much to let you sacrifice the Presidency for me. You've worked too hard to get this far. I couldn't live with myself if I thought I'd brought it all crashing down for you."

Laura walked over to her husband. He was telling her the truth. The love was still there in his eyes, still so clear that she could see it. It was like looking through a window into his heart. Her tears spilled over and she hastily wiped them away. All her doubts about him vanished.

She reached up and touched his cheek. "Don't you understand that there is something going on right now that is more important than we are? There's a great deal that isn't clear to me yet, but we've each got a part to play. D'Anna has a part and so does the child."

"I wish I had your faith."

"Do you remember the first time you kissed me?" She asked softly.

"Do you think I could ever forget that?"

"We were on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building."

"And it had just started to snow. It was our fifth date and I'd almost given up that it was going to happen."

"But it did. And not long after that you took me to your cottage on the island and one night on a blanket under the stars we made Brae. Then before we even knew we were having a boy, Yolanda Brenn told you that one day our son would map the stars on the way to Earth. Right before she died, Yolanda told Kara that there would be another child for you and that it must live. My point is that both of your sons have a part in this, John. As does Rachel. The lives of all these children are in our hands right now. What we do next is very important. I think our role is to protect them and nurture them. Our children are destined for the stars, John, and one day we'll have to let them go, but until then, it's our duty to show them that our two races don't have to kill each other."

He captured her slender hand in his, brought her palm to his lips and kissed it. The gesture was his acknowledgement that she was right…at least about the children.

She looked up at him. Her look said it all. He put his other hand on her cheek, leaned down and kissed her, a slow, gentle soul-melting kiss just like their first one. She had just put her arms around his neck when they heard a commotion in the hall and the wailing of their son. Laura reached the door first.

Kara was flustered and nearly in tears. She had Braedon in her arms. Edgar was right behind Kara with a big first aid kit. Laura could see blood on her son's chin that had run down his neck and onto the front of his shirt.

"He fell out of his stroller," Kara said over Braedon's wails. Her voice was quivering. "I didn't know he could get out of it that fast. He did a face plant. He's got a cut on his chin but I think he's okay."

Brae reached for his mother and Laura took her son, rocking him back and forth in her arms, saying soothing words to him, knowing the blood now staining her favorite blue blouse would never come out and not caring at all. The only thing that mattered to her at the moment was her child.

"Take him into my apartment," John said. "I'll go get Bianca. She'll know if we should get him to an urgent care facility."

Bianca opened the door to her apartment before John knocked. He quickly explained what had happened and together they crossed the hall. Edgar handed her the first aid kit and followed her into John's apartment.

Not wanting to add to the confusion, Kara went into Bianca's apartment. D'Anna was still sitting on the couch holding a sleeping Rachel.

"What's wrong?"

Kara could hear Braedon screaming. Her father and Laura were probably holding him so that Dr. Cardenas could clean and examine the cut. Kara could no longer hold back her tears. "I frakked up and let my little brother fall out of his stroller. He cut his chin."

"Why are you crying? Did you get hurt, too?"

"You don't know much about humans, do you?"

"I don't understand why you're crying if you didn't get hurt."

"Because he was my responsibility. I was looking for a Raptor taking off so I could show him and I quit watching him. He tried to stand up and he fell. He got hurt on my watch."

She choked back another sob.

D'Anna seemed to partially comprehend. "You're afraid your father and Laura will be angry at you."

"They _should_ be angry at me…but they won't be. They'll say it was an accident."

"Was it not an accident?"

"It's one that wouldn't have happened if I'd been paying attention to him like I should have been."

"My son won't do anything like that."

Kara rolled her eyes. "Oh, give me a frakking break. There's about a million ways kids can get hurt, but it's one of the ways they learn. Brae's smart. I bet he won't try to stand up in his stroller again, but that doesn't mean he won't do something else that could get him hurt. He likes to climb on the furniture. Right after they moved into Marble House, Maya said she was picking up some toys in his bedroom. She turned her back for about a minute. She found him in the little kitchen. He'd pushed the stepping stool over to the counter and was already up on it. He was trying to get to some cookies that he'd seen Maya put on top of the refrigerator."

"We were all programmed not to do dangerous things that might harm us."

"It doesn't work that way with humans. We learn the old fashioned way. It's a frakking miracle Karl and I survived childhood considering some of the stupid things we did on our skateboards."

"Who is Karl?"

"My best friend. He's like a brother."

"Wasn't someone watching you?"

"No. My mother was a Marine. She went to work every day."

"What about John?"

"He wasn't around either. Karl and I were mostly on our own every day after school and in the summer. We did a lot of crazy stuff."

D'Anna smiled. "I'll watch my son all the time."

"You can't be too protective. That's not good either."

"I don't understand. Do I need to watch him or not?"

"Just listen to my dad. He knows what he's doing."

"Do you think he'll let Braedon and my son play together?"

"Sure. My friend Karl is married to the Eight who has a little girl, Hera. They want to come visit you."

"When?"

"As soon as Laura can work it out with security. Leoben wants to come back, too. And there's a Six. Her name is Natasi. They all want to visit you."

"I'd like that."

They sat in silence until Rachel began to stir and then to fret.

"What's wrong with her?" D'Anna asked.

"She's probably wet. She might be hungry, too. Do you know how to change her diaper?"

"I watched Bianca do it once. I've never done it myself."

"Come on," Kara said. "This is a good time to learn. Changing diapers is part of baby basic training."

They had just finished changing the diaper when John came to the door.

"How bad?" Kara asked.

John shook his head. "He's got some bruises and a cut on his chin. Bianca cleaned it and put two small butterflies and a bandage on it. She says he'll be fine."

"We heard him screaming. I thought she was doing major surgery or something."

John smiled. "He's got a set of lungs. I knew that as soon as he was born."

Kara felt the tears start again. "Is Laura mad at me?"

"No. Accidents happen…especially to hard-headed little boys. Laura said she and Maya have been telling him not to stand up in his stroller."

Kara brushed away a tear. "I'm so sorry."

He walked over and put his arms around her. "Don't beat yourself up over this, baby. You had your share of cuts and scrapes when you were his age. You survived."

D'Anna was watching them. "Why do you call her _baby_? She's not a baby."

John winked at Kara. "Because she'll always be my baby girl." He turned to D'Anna. "It's a term of endearment."

"Like a nickname?"

"Sort of," Kara said.

Rachel started to fret again and D'Anna picked her up.

"I'll go warm her bottle," John said.

Bianca and Laura came through the door just as they walked back into the living room.

"Rachel's hungry," D'Anna said.

Braedon had cried so much that he had the hiccups. Kara saw the bandage on his chin.

"We need to go," Laura said to Kara.

Kara nodded.

Bianca went into the kitchen and took over the bottle warming duties so John could walk downstairs with them. At the car he kissed his son on the head.

"I'll see you soon. Be a brave boy for your mother. Dada loves you."

Laura asked Kara to get the pacifier out of Brae's diaper bag. He never got it during the day now and they were working on weaning him off it at night, but this afternoon was an exception. After Laura got him strapped into his car seat, she stepped back out of the car for a moment. She and John wrapped their arms around each other.

"He'll be all right," John said. "He's a tough little boy."

Laura gently touched the scar over his eyebrow. "I know. He's your son. I'll see you soon."

John watched the three-car motorcade drive away and wondered how far his and Laura's kiss would have gone if their son hadn't gotten hurt.

Halfway back to the city, Braedon fell asleep. The pacifier slipped from his mouth and Laura gently took it.

"I'm sorry," Kara said again.

"Kara, please stop apologizing. My son is a hard-headed little boy. He knows he's not supposed to stand up in his stroller and he does it anyway. I don't blame you."

"I'm worried about D'Anna and my dad's kid. She doesn't know jack about babies. I mean nothing. She doesn't know much about humans, either."

"I knew almost nothing about babies when I found out I was pregnant with Brae." Laura smiled. "Why do you think I have a dozen books about raising children on my bookshelves?"

"It's weird," Kara mused. "Sharon didn't know anything either. Karl said she asked the doctor and their childbirth instructor a gazillion questions. I don't guess the creators included child rearing info in their programming."

"Maybe their creators had no plans for them to reproduce. Maybe that's why their female models have so much trouble with pregnancies. I wonder if we'll ever know anything about how they were made since their creators are now dead."

"Let's hope nothing happens to that centurion that's got Lucy Cain's avatar in it."

"Yes," Laura said as Kara's remark gave her another thought of how to appeal to Natasi. "Let's hope."

...

On Monday afternoon Laura chose to have that talk with Natasi in the kitchen of the safe apartment where she was being kept instead of the interview room where everything was recorded. She wanted it to seem social instead of official.

Romo Lampkin placed a purchased cup of coffee on the table in front of Natasi before he leaned back against the kitchen counter. The blend was her favorite.

"May I sit down?" Laura asked.

Natasi looked at her suspiciously and shrugged. "Why do you even ask? You can do as you please."

"Did you watch the show _Caprica Today_ yesterday morning?" Lampkin asked.

"Yes, my guard insisted. Was that for my benefit or was it broadcast all over Caprica."

Laura smiled slightly. "Oh, I can assure you that it was broadcast. You only had to look at the news shows afterward to know that. It's all over the internet, too."

Natasi gave Laura one of her condescending smiles. "How do you think I could have seen anything on the internet?"

"The point is that most of Caprica is now aware that a Cylon is pregnant with a child prophesied in the scriptures."

"Why are you here? You can't think I had anything to do with it?"

Laura glanced at Romo and he took the sonogram from his jacket pocket. Laura handed it to Natasi.

"A little boy." She gave the Cylon time to study the picture.

Natasi finally looked up and Laura caught a glimpse of hunger in her eyes before it was gone. She had never before that moment considered that Natasi might want to have a child.

"Would you like to visit your sister?" Laura asked gently.

"I know better than to think you're offering me something for nothing. What do you want in return?"

Romo pulled out a chair and sat at the table. "We'd like for you to accompany a recon mission to your homeworld and help them in any way you can."

"So my betrayal of my people on this world wasn't enough for you. You want me to go back to my homeworld and betray them there as well."

Romo said, "President Roslin has a vision for your homeworld. She sees it as a place where Cylons and humans can live and work together in peace. She sees a coalition government. And because she's the President of the Colonies, she's in a position to make it happen. The Three who is pregnant with the peacemaker told Leoben about a park in the city where the mothers of the hybrid children gather. Rachel was named there in a ceremony with D'Anna and Sonja both present. Does the idea of a place like that not appeal to you? A park where hybrid and human children can play together…where perhaps one day your own child could play?"

Natasi sat for a long time and sipped her coffee. "I only visited the city once. When I left my homeworld, the city was still mostly a ruin. The park was overgrown. We never even tried to go in there. The centurions had just started to work on clearing the ruined buildings. Most of us lived in the original settlement."

"A great deal has been done in the city since then," Laura said.

"Put it all on the table," Natasi said. "What are you offering me in return for helping you?"

"Your freedom and a life with Gaius Baltar wherever you want to go. We'll even throw in a nice house and a good job for Gaius. A job for you also if you want to be a part of the coalition government."

Romo quickly added. "Or your own temple if you want to continue preaching like you were doing at the warehouse."

"How do I know that you're not lying? I might help you and find myself brought right back here and placed in custody."

"You have our word," Romo said.

"At some point we're going to have to trust each other," Laura added. "You might agree to help us and then betray the mission."

"What's going to happen to D'Anna and the child?"

"We intend to let her choose. I think she will want to return to your homeworld after her child is delivered here. As soon as it's deemed medically safe for her and the child to travel, she'll be allowed to return."

"Would you like some time to think about it?" Romo asked. "We aren't demanding an answer today, but the mission is in the advanced planning stages. We need to know whether or not to include you."

She smiled knowingly. "Because my presence will significantly alter the mission dynamic."

"Yes. There is a possibility that Leoben will decide to go also," Laura said. "I spoke with him several nights ago. He hasn't gotten back to me so I assume he's still considering my request."

"Who will be the mission commander?"

"My husband and a young man who accompanied Kara back from Nereid will co-command."

Natasi's smile grew broader. Her tone was slightly mocking. "You husband, also known as the father of our peacemaker?"

"The same," Laura kept her composure. "He has the most knowledge of the planet."

"And I would be _under_ his control? Do you think he might give me my own little peacemaker?" Her tone was sly and mocking.

It was all Laura could do to keep her cool. "He would determine how best to utilize your help."

"Could Gaius go with us?"

"Not on this initial trip. Perhaps he can join you later. There's something else that you should know. D'Anna can verify it if you don't believe me. There's a centurion now with Natalie in Settlement Alpha that contains the avatar of Lucy Cain."

Natasi gasped. "I hoped she had escaped, but Cavil said he killed her...after he had killed the other creators. After we came to the Colonies, we all put our hands in the datastream. He was telling the truth."

"He did kill her physical body. I don't understand the technology involved. Perhaps you do, but prior to her death, Lucy downloaded an avatar of herself into a centurion and sent it to the city for safekeeping. My husband discovered the centurion and _befriended it_, if those words are the appropriate ones to use. That means there is still hope that you can retrieve the secrets of your creation."

"I'll do it," Natasi said suddenly as she picked up the sonogram. "When can I see my sister D'Anna?"

"I'll arrange it for tomorrow afternoon. You can see Sharon Agathon as well. She and her daughter will be there. I've extended the invitation to Leoben as well. If he shows up, it will be a Cylon family reunion."

Later as Laura entered the presidential limousine, Romo asked, "Are you sure the tech guys will have D'Anna's apartment wired to record by then?"

"Major Parker assured me they would."

"Does she know what they're doing?"

"D'Anna has been spending her days with Bianca. Major Parker told her that there was an electrical problem. She thinks the men are electricians."

"That wouldn't fool Natasi."

"No," Laura smiled. "But D'Anna is very naïve. I'm sure she believes it."

"Does it bother you using her that way?"

"I try to keep the big picture in mind, the reason we're doing all of this."

Romo lowered his voice which made his accent more pronounced. "Have you ever thought about visiting their homeworld…after the fighting is over, of course?"

Laura hesitated and then told him the truth. "Yes. I've thought about it a great deal."

...

The sun had not yet cleared the horizon when Lee and Kara headed for the airbase on Tuesday morning. He had picked her up at the back gate of Marble House ten minutes earlier. If it had not been for the traffic report on the radio, there would have been complete silence in the car. Other than a brief greeting and a quick kiss which tasted of toothpaste for both, neither had spoken.

They reached the exit to the I-6 before Lee broke the silence. "Are you on auto-pilot or is something wrong?"

"Mostly auto-pilot," she replied. "When I'm riding my motorcycle I'm mostly oblivious to everything but the traffic around me. Some of these drivers are certifiable nut jobs. I have to stay alert for anything some idiot might do."

"I agree," Lee said.

"I talked to my dad late last night. D'Anna had her lab tests. He said the results _weren't encouraging_. Something about the protein levels in her urine. They're elevated which means instead of a diagnosis of gestational hypertension, Dr. Delos is now saying that Bianca was right. D'Anna has something called pre-eclampsia. I don't understand everything, but that's a lot more serious."

"You mean she might lose the baby?"

"All I could get dad to say was that while D'Anna was getting dressed after the exam, Dr. Delos took him aside and told him that D'Anna needs to be monitored very closely. If her blood pressure keeps rising, the only way to save her life would be to…to take the baby."

"Is D'Anna aware of that?"

"Dad said he'd asked Dr. Delos not to mention it just yet. While they were still back on Nereid, Bianca told D'Anna that it might come to that and D'Anna said, _No way. Not going to happen. Not ever_. She said her child would be born whatever the cost to her."

They rode in silence for a while. Lee finally said, "Evelyn wasn't my grandfather Joseph's first wife. He was married to a woman named Shannon. They had a daughter named Tamara and a son named William that they called Willie."

Kara said. "I guess you've started reading those journals."

"I finally got enough nerve to ask my Dad about it. All he would tell me is that Willie died before he was born. He acted like that's all he knew, but I think he knows more than he's saying. Not only that, Shannon and Tamara died when a mag lev train was blown up by the terrorist group Soldiers of the One. Not long after that Joseph met Daniel Graystone. His daughter Zoe had died in the same explosion."

"The Graystones were the main creators of the skinjobs."

"I know…based on what your father said. I've started reading everything I can find on the Graystones. He was a scientist and an inventor. His wife Amanda was a reconstructive surgeon, what most people call a _plastic surgeon_. She would have been able to obtain synthetic skin and stem cells to grow organs and all kinds of stuff. While she was at the university, she worked for a big biotech firm. She had all kinds of contacts in the biomedical field. It's all beginning to fall into place for me."

"How does your grandfather fit in?"

"I don't know, yet, but I'm going to try to find out. I think that's why my dad seems so reluctant to talk about that part of my grandfather's life. He's afraid if he digs too deep…" Lee couldn't bring himself to say it.

Kara finished the sentence for him. "He's afraid he'll find out that his own father somehow aided in the creation of the AI race that destroyed nine-tenths of the human race."

They reached the exit for the airbase. Kara brightened. "So how did you get on today's roster to fly up to Argos and shoot up some old tanks and stuff with us?"

Lee smiled. "Sometimes it pays to be the son of the king. After I asked Dad about Willie and he changed the subject, I told him I'd really like to start my ground training early this week…like today. He called Colonel Spencer and asked him to shuffle the roster."

Kara punched him playfully on the arm. "So the crown prince finally asked his father for a favor after all these years of wanting to do everything on his own."

"I was going to have to do this anyway. I just asked to change the days."

"You should know better than to go up against me," she smirked. "You're going to lose."

"Bombing practice is not a contest."

"Yes it is because we get scored for closest to target. You know I'll win. I went on-line last night and played a couple of games. I haven't lost my touch."

Lee slowed down and stopped when he reached the gate. They showed their IDs and were allowed through. Lee didn't answer until he had parked the car. "It's not about you beating me. It's about both of us beating the enemy."

"You're right. If you'll notice, I never put those little Raider decals on my old Mark II for the ones I killed when we fought them before. I took some heat about that since most of the rest of the pilots plastered those dead-Raider decals on their Vipers. Even Narcho. I told him I didn't want to weigh my Viper down with all the paper it would take, but that wasn't really it."

"What was it?"

"I'm not sure. It just didn't feel right. I know we're supposed to get all pumped up when we kill an enemy, but…I don't know. It just didn't feel right so I didn't do it."

"Maybe it's because of Sadie and knowing the Raiders are partially organic," Lee said as they walked down the hall toward the locker rooms.

"Maybe…any maybe I realized that none of those Raiders would have gone back and pasted little Vipers on their sides for those of us they killed like Pike and Seelix."

"They're not that smart."

"I know, but…I don't know, Lee. It felt petty to me…bragging that you'd killed something."

"That something was an enemy that was trying its damndest to kill you. Have you never seen that picture of your father beside his old Mark II? The whole side of his ship was covered with decals of the old Raiders."

"I've seen it. So how come you didn't put the decals on your Viper?"

"Because my Viper wound up on the bottom of the ocean."

"Look, just forget it. Maybe I've been hanging around Laura too much. Maybe this peacemaker thing is on my mind."

"That's not going to affect you when we're on Nereid or over Nereid, is it?"

They were almost to the locker rooms. Kara grabbed his arm and angrily spun him around.

"I can't believe you just said that. When we go to Nereid, I'll do whatever I have to do, just like I did the last time we fought. I'm just not going to go strutting around like a peacock afterward telling everybody to look at how many I killed."

"Okay, okay. Calm down."

She managed a grin. "Just see if I don't beat the socks off you today."

The men's locker room door opened and Saunders and Karl walked out clad in their flight suits.

"You two Viper jocks better get moving," Saunders said. "You're going to be late to the ready room and you know how Colonel Spencer feels about coming in late."

"Like Jessups feels about a certain pilot coming in hot," Karl joked.

"Eat my tylium exhaust," Kara joked and went through the door.

When the two Raptor pilots were halfway down the hall, Lee pushed the door to the women's locker room open a foot and called after Kara, "I love you anyway." Then he hurried into the men's lockers to change.

Lyla Elway was zipping up her flight suit. "Who was that?"

Kara shrugged and tried to keep a straight face. "Some pilot who's been stalking me. No matter how many times I frak him, he keeps coming back."

Maggie, who had recognized Lee's voice, started laughing. "Only you could come up with a line like that, Starbuck. How did the mighty Apollo get assigned to the run today?"

"Luck of the draw, I guess," Kara said. "My scores will be the ones everybody will want to beat."

Lyla had finally caught on. "Even the admiral's son?" She asked as she grabbed her helmet and headed for the door.

Kara grinned. "Especially him."

TBC…


	54. Countdown to Thunderbolt

Chapter 54

Countdown to Thunderbolt

_The Planet_

_Day 24: Our transport down to the planet from the ship was met by several of the gun-carrying mercenaries who regularly patrol through the camp. One would think that they fear at any moment murderous natives might burst from the trees and attempt to slaughter us or perhaps it is wild animals they fear. I can't imagine where I got the idea that these men might help us with our gear, but I've learned very quickly that on the surface, it's very much every man (or woman) for himself (or herself)._

_My first afternoon was spent setting up quarters in the big medical tent. Privacy is rather limited and the walls of our "rooms" consist of flaps strung around our cots. I am the only physician. I have two medical assistants, one of whom is trained in surgical procedures. Should a catastrophe occur, however, we will evacuate the injured to the _Hyperion _instead of trying to deal with them here on the surface. _

_Day 30: I have so far treated insect stings and a non-poisonous snake bite which in my opinion could have been avoided since the man bitten was observed carrying the snake around and using it to taunt some of the crew. I have given out anti-diarrheal medication, stitched up several minor cuts and removed splinters. In short, no medical crises have occurred. _

_Expeditions go out daily in small ships to look for mineral deposits and other "wealth" that might make this planet worthwhile for commercial purposes. Other expeditions are gathering samples of the flora and fauna. I understand these will be analyzed for genetic similarities to our own planets. Others look for evidence of prior settlements other than the ruined city._

_The most exciting find in my opinion came from yesterday's mission that explored a small clearing not too far from here. Stone foundations were found for what might have been a small temple built from wood. Several shards of pottery were also found as well as part of a candlestick. What wasn't found were any statues of the gods of the Twelve Tribes. That makes me even more certain that the vanished inhabitants worshiped one God. Now to find the proof._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

The surveillance equipment had been set up downstairs at the old officer's club in a smaller room that had once housed several triad tables and a small bar. The tables and bar had been moved to the new officer's club, but the years of cigar and cigarette smoke that had been absorbed by the carpet now gave back a stale, musty odor. A long table containing several monitors and other equipment had been placed against the back wall. The technicians had worked all night to get the setup completed and had gotten the job done. The kitchen, living room and hallway of D'Anna's apartment were wired for sound and video.

When John entered the room shortly after noon, Major Parker was already seated in front of one of the monitors.

"How did the planning session go this morning?" Parker asked.

"The rest of them aren't happy about the addition to our team. I tried to tell Laura that nobody trusts Natasi. I don't trust her either, but we're stuck with her."

"She's got a strong incentive to help us."

"The only one of the Sixes I really trust is Natalie…and maybe Sonja. She did help us get away. If the government is so sure of Natasi's loyalty, why isn't she free like Sharon and Leoben?"

"Because she has yet to admit any regret for the holocaust. In the beginning she refused to cooperate with any of us. It wasn't until Attorney General Lampkin talked to her that we got anything from her. It seems he knew the two magic words. _Gaius Baltar_."

"Gaius Baltar won't be with us on this mission."

"But he'll be waiting for her when it's over."

John gave Parker a skeptical look. "How sure would that make you feel if you were being asked to trust her with the lives of your team?"

Parker was spared from answering the question because the door of D'Anna's apartment opened. D'Anna and Bianca walked in. D'Anna was carrying Rachel.

John lowered his voice even though he knew the audio wasn't two-way. "Bianca is showing D'Anna some things about babies."

"How is D'Anna doing?"

"She looks okay. She even says she feels okay, but Dr. Delos says she's got something called early onset pre-eclampsia. There's no cure for it except delivery."

"A teacher friend of Kim's had that. Sadly it didn't have a good outcome."

"Mother or baby?"

"Baby. It had to be delivered early to save the mother's life. It was too early."

"Dr. Delos said D'Anna needs to make it at least six more weeks for the baby to stand a chance. Even then it's questionable that the baby would survive a delivery that early. I'll be gone by then."

"I'm sure Dr. Cardenas will watch her carefully."

John said. "My son might be born while I'm away. Who knows when I'll be back or even if I'll come back? Who knows how long it will take us to free the human slaves on Nereid and secure the planet for the coalition government Laura wants to set up."

"None of us knows the future, John. You've got a choice. You can lead the mission or you can stay here. After all you went through on the planet, nobody will fault you if you decide to stay here."

"I will."

They sat in silence and watched Rachel cooing as Bianca sang a nursery rhyme to her. John marveled at the gift Bianca had with children…and adults, too. She had taken care of Braedon's cut chin Saturday afternoon and managed to calm him and Laura at the same time. She was a healer in the truest sense of the word. He'd made her a promise back on Nereid. He'd promised her she'd see her husband again one day. He intended to keep that promise.

"The Cylons don't know anything about babies," John said. "There was never anything in their programming about raising children. I met a young Eight on Nereid named Jade. She thinks their creators had no plans for them to procreate since they've given them the ability to download. Lucy said the creators had plans to continue creating different models. She never mentioned increasing their chances of having children by improving their plumbing."

There was a knock on the door of D'Anna's apartment. Bianca opened it to an MP who then stood back and allowed Sharon Agathon to enter the room. She had Hera in a baby sling that looked like a big apron top. They could see Hera's little feet in pink booties sticking out the bottom.

"Sister," D'Anna said with real warmth in her voice.

"Hello, D'Anna."

The MP retreated and shut the door.

"I'm Bianca Cardenas. May we see your little girl? I hear she's a dark-eyed little beauty."

"We think so," Sharon beamed as she sat down between Bianca and D'Anna and unfastened the sling. "Hera is almost nine weeks old but she came six weeks early. She's still small."

"Rachel is the same age," Bianca said.

The two children were now side by side and John could see the difference in their sizes. Rachel was clearly bigger than Hera.

Parker said, "Hera looks a lot like Leah did when she was born, but then Kim and Sharon have similar features…except Kim is about five inches shorter than Sharon."

"You know in the monotheistic scriptures," John said, "Leah is one of the protectors of the peacemaker."

Parker didn't say anything for a while. "Leah is a popular name on Caprica right now. There's another little girl in my daughter's kindergarten class named Leah."

John said. "Lots of Leahs to choose from."

Sharon had handed Hera to Bianca who was talking to her. Hera clasped her little hands together and gave Bianca a gurgling smile.

"What do we expect to learn today?" John asked.

"We're not sure, but we couldn't pass up the opportunity. I've asked Bianca to leave when Natasi arrives. I'd like for D'Anna and Natasi and Sharon to be able to spend some time together. I think if there's going to be anything worth listening to, it will happen when the three Cylons are alone."

Twenty minutes later the door opened again and Natasi was admitted. She was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt and looked so much like Sonja that John felt like he was seeing a ghost. Memories of his and Sonja's tumultuous relationship filled his thought for a moment and then he reminded himself that this Cylon was not Sonja.

As if reading his mind, Parker said, "There's no denying she's a beautiful woman. If it makes you feel any better, I'm not sure under the same circumstances that I could have resisted her either."

John nodded slightly in acknowledgement. Parker was a nice-looking man. Sonja would no doubt have attempted to seduce him.

"Sisters," Natasi said. "This must be the doctor Romo told me about." She looked Bianca up and down. "You remind me a little bit of someone, but she was much older than you when I knew her."

"Who?" D'Anna asked.

Natasi smiled. "Amanda Graystone, one of the creators. Search your memory, sisters. She's the First Mother. She should be in your minds."

D'Anna shook her head. "I was boxed for a long time. Too much was done to me. I know the voices of the creators when I put my hand in the datastream, but I can't remember their faces."

Sharon looked at Bianca closely and finally said, "Yes, I see it now. The shape of her face and her eyes. The First Mother died very shortly after I was created. The First Father died seven months later."

"I knew them," Natasi said. "They had brilliant minds but neither was as brilliant as their daughter Zoe in creating the centurions."

"I remember her," Sharon said. "Zoe was one of my creators. So was Lucy."

Natasi smiled and addressed Bianca. "My brothers and sisters on the homeworld were kind to you, were they not?"

Bianca stood. "They allowed my husband and me to treat the sick humans. We were never beaten or made to work in the fields, but out supplies were woefully inadequate for the task we faced. Now I should take Rachel and let you three have some time alone."

"Please leave her with us for a few minutes," Natasi said. "I'd like to hold her."

"I don't like it," John said and stood.

Parker held up his hand. "Hold on a minute. Rachel will be okay. She's half-Cylon just like Hera. Natasi won't hurt her."

"I hope the hell not…or us taking a Cylon on the mission won't be a concern anymore. I couldn't pull the trigger with Sonja, but if this one hurts Rachel, I'll kill her with my bare hands."

"Sit down, John," Parker said. "You're over-reacting. If we had any indication that she would harm the child, she wouldn't be here. You should know I wouldn't put that baby's life in danger."

John sat. Parker was right. He'd overreacted. "Sorry," he muttered.

"Rachel will be fine with us," D'Anna said. "She's our sister, too, just like Hera."

"I'll be back in half an hour to get her," Bianca said and left.

Natasi sat down between Sharon and D'Anna. Her voice took on a softness that John had never heard in Sonja's.

"I haven't held a child since I was preaching in the old warehouse. Please. Let me hold one of them."

Sharon carefully placed Hera in her arms, but where Bianca had gotten a smile from the baby, Natasi got the opposite. If any residual memory had been triggered in Hera by Bianca's resemblance to Amanda Graystone, there was no memory of the Six. Hera's little face puckered and she began to cry. Sharon took her and Hera quieted.

Rachel was far more used to being held by different people. D'Anna placed the child in Natasi's arms, and John watched the Cylon's face transform.

"I hoped it would happen for me and Gaius," she said so softly that the audio barely picked up her words. "Every time Gaius and I are together, I pray that it's happened and every month I'm disappointed."

"You want a baby?" Sharon asked.

"Why does that surprise you?" Natasi asked in her normal tone of voice.

"Everybody thinks I was trying to get pregnant," Sharon said. "I had no idea it would happen with me and Karl. Then I had a lot of problems."

"I was trying," D'Anna said. She smiled at her sister. "Is Gaius a good lover? John is a very good lover. Sonja couldn't get enough of him and she's had a lot of men. I was never with anyone but John."

"Do I have to listen to this?" John asked.

"No."

"I'm going to make coffee. Do you want some?"

"Sure."

John went up to his apartment, put on a fresh pot of coffee and sat down to wait. The women were in D'Anna's apartment just down the hall from him. He started to go across the hall and talk to Bianca and changed his mind. He didn't want anyone to open the door and catch him up there. When the coffee was ready, he poured two mugs, turned off the coffee maker and went back downstairs. He tapped the door with his foot and Parker let him in.

"Anything important?"

"No," Parker said. "They've been talking about babies. Sharon related all the details of her issues and how Dr. Delos saved her life and little Hera's. She's a fountain of information compared to the other two. She even showed them how she breastfeeds, but Hera wasn't too hungry."

"What's going to happen to Rachel?" Natasi asked her sisters.

"I don't know," D'Anna answered. "Nobody has talked to me about that. On Nereid a human named Petra took her after her mother killed herself. Rachel's father was a Two. John had to kill him so we could escape. I'm sure he downloaded."

"She belongs with us," Natasi said while she gently stroked Rachel's soft blond fuzzy hair. "She's one of the protectors of the peacemaker. Laura Roslin promised me that if I help them, she'll let Gaius and me go to the homeworld. I could raise her."

"What about the Two who's her biological father?" D'Anna asked.

"I'll talk to him. A child needs a mother and a father. He could visit her anytime he wants."

Sharon asked, "Have you discussed your plan with Dr. Baltar? Somehow I can't see him relishing the role of _daddy, _especially for a half-breed child that isn't his."

"I haven't seen Gaius in several weeks. I'm supposed to see him again this weekend and every weekend until the mission leaves. That's part of the bargain."

"Is he as self-centered and egotistical as everybody says he is?" Sharon asked.

"Everybody doesn't know him like I do," Natasi snapped. "Gaius Baltar is a brilliant man. He has so much on his mind that he just seems to be self-centered. He's very different when he's with me. In fact some of what looks like arrogance is really insecurity. He comes from very humble beginnings and he's ashamed of it. When he's with me, he knows I don't judge him except for the wonderful man he is."

John glanced at Parker who just shook his head as if to say, _how can an intelligent woman be so dumb about a man_?

"Are you really going to help our men?" Sharon asked.

"Yes. Laura has a plan for our homeworld. We're going to co-exist there. She's going to let D'Anna take our peacemaker back there to live."

"What about John?" D'Anna asked. "He's my baby's father. He wants to raise the child with me."

"She said John would go with you," Natasi said. "She realizes that his place is with you and your child. She and Romo told me that he would go back with you after your son is born."

"That's interesting," John said to Parker. "Laura never mentioned that to me."

"I'd take that statement with a grain of salt if I were you. Natasi is no fool. I'm sure she assumed D'Anna's apartment is under surveillance. Besides, even if Laura and Romo told her that, it was only to gain her cooperation."

"It would still have been nice if she'd mentioned it to me first."

"She didn't do herself any favors giving McManus that interview. I talked to Agent Darren this morning. One of the duties of his team is to monitor all the correspondence that comes into Marble House from the public…phone calls, emails and letters. Sentiment is running overwhelmingly against her decision to try to form a peaceful union with the Cylons after we free the human slaves on Nereid. Opinion on the prophecy is running about fifty-fifty but the strongly religious tend to make their opinions known on issues concerning faith so if you factor in the apathetic group who will never bother to express an opinion, it's about the same ratio."

"I told Laura she'd made a mistake. I think she should have told McManus to go frak himself and then let him publish what he wanted. Instead she goes and gives that sleaze-bag credibility."

"Darren and his men read and listen to everything. They don't investigate anyone unless they voice a threat."

Parker tapped a couple of keys on his laptop and then entered a user id and a password. He brought up a database and then a page full of small images. He selected one and it filled the screen. It was a picture of Laura making a speech. Someone had used photo-enhancing software to create the image of a very realistic crosshairs from a long-range rifle scope over her face.

"There was a sharp increase in images like this after McManus aired the interview," Parker said. "The Marble House email site got six similar images in the space of about an hour. All came from computers in large internet cafés. They're almost impossible to trace. We've suggested surveillance software to the proprietors or even just plain old security cameras, but we can't force them. They're private companies. They feel like surveillance would hurt business."

John was staring at the photo of Laura in the crosshairs. He had a hard time getting his breath for a minute. "Damn."

"There's a core group of loonies and radicals out there who send these to most public officials. There's an upsurge every Tuesday and Wednesday after the Quorum meets on Monday. After Adar surrendered to the Cylons, he got tens of thousands of them. The Cylons made no attempt catch the perpetrators. They wouldn't have cared if someone had shot him. The only thing we've got going for us is that while the Cylons were in power, they took a great many guns out of the hands of the people. Gun crimes were punishable with immediate centurion execution."

"Sovana is overrun with weapons right now so that doesn't make me feel much better."

Parker finally said, "I'm afraid that living with the threats of…dissidents, radicals, terrorists…whatever you want to call them…goes with the top job. This isn't the first time she's received threats. Increasing the military presence in Sovana brought a rash of them."

"Laura told me that the Quorum members were upset that she hadn't talked to them before she gave the interview. She said Tom Zarek was livid and accused her of running a dictatorship based on her personal religious beliefs. Sarah Porter, Marta Shaw and Marshall Bagot were more understanding. They all have children. Porter is very religious. The other members were somewhere in between them and Zarek."

"With the religious prophecy added to the mix, this has turned into a very divisive issue. I'm afraid we're going to be dealing with the fallout for months to come. I'm sure a lot of people won't settle down until everything is over and we bring those human slaves home. There's another group that will never settle down as long as there's a Cylon alive in the universe. Most of them are satisfied to send anonymous threats. It makes them feel like they're _doing something_ about issues over which they have virtually no control. Some of them are obviously mentally unbalanced. It's the small minority who don't threaten and aren't certifiably crazy that Darren and his agents have to try to second-guess. Edgar and his staff as well. The President's safety is their responsibility. You can bet he and Darren's team will be working closer than ever now."

"I wish our mission started tomorrow," John said. "I want to see those first human slaves getting off a transport on Caprica. I want to see some of them reunited with loved ones. Laura is a good and decent person. She cares about the people, especially the children. That's the kind of publicity she needs."

"I couldn't agree more," Parker said.

...

The Argos Bombing Range was a big scar on the landscape just before the beginning of the massive heartland of Caprica, the heartland that produced the planet's food and that had fortunately been largely untouched by the holocaust six years earlier.

Kara now navigated toward the range. Thirty years earlier a raging forest fire had burned hundreds of thousands of acres in an area near the military base of Fort Thalia. The burnt-out area had been turned into a bombing range rather than being replanted with trees. Some skeptics accused the military of torching the forest in order to gain a place to test new aerial weapons, but a panel made up of civilian scientists and an arson investigator had determined that the fire had been started by lightning and stoked by high winds and several seasons of near-drought conditions.

However the range had come into being, it was now almost seventy-five square miles of hillocks and gullies dotted with old burnt-out tanks and armored personnel carriers and other vehicles that had been stripped of parts and placed as practice targets in all kinds of terrain. During the Cylon occupation of Caprica, the range had been unused and Kara had heard that when it was once again activated, soldiers had to drive through the range for days attempting to run off the wildlife that had taken over the old shells of vehicles. She didn't doubt that at all. While she and Karl had lived at the little stone house, she'd seen how adaptive a lot of the local wildlife had become. She'd used it to her advantage when she'd been hunting for food with her slingshot.

As Kara circled north for her approach, she could see for many miles. In the far distance the land turned from eroded and sun-baked mud and scrub grass into a soft beige, the edge of a vast wheat field. In their briefing that morning as Colonel Spencer had projected maps of the area onto the screen, he had warned them to stay well south of the fields.

He had related a story about a farmer's ancient but operable tractor that was parked on the edge of the range having been mistaken for a target and shot up by a Viper pilot. Fortunately the farmer hadn't been on it at the time. The pilot, Spencer had said, was now flying cargo in and out of Antioch and Sovana. There had been a collective groan as he had warned them again to stay away from the wheat fields.

Kara reached the northern apex of her first run, banked her turn to the south and left her thoughts of the past behind. In less than a minute she was in a zone of concentration that was almost like tunnel vision. Her eyes flicked over the Mark VII's instruments reading numbers and gauges while she processed the information and calculated range to target. Her kinetic energy weapons were armed with live ammunition that she was actually going to get to use.

"Target acquired," she said into her helmet wireless as she kept the ground clearly in her sights. One wrong move at this altitude and she and her Viper would be a mass of twisted and smoking metal that would be indistinguishable from some of the other ruins on the ground.

Trying to pretend that the rusted-out tank was a group of hostile centurions, Kara flipped up the safety switch, slipped her finger over the weapon's trigger and eased it against the button. She realized there was a huge difference, though, in a rusted-out tank and a group of centurions. The old tank wasn't firing back at her.

The computer did its work. The guns were perfectly calibrated. She kept the Mark VII dead on target. Bullets chewed the ground and sliced through the already decimated metal. She was almost sure a big chuck fell off the tank as she flashed by and put the Viper into a steep climb, feeling the Gs force her back in the seat. She loved this. She loved everything about it and knew she always would.

Somewhere behind her she knew Lee was in the line of ships yet to try to hit one of the targets. He would do well. He was a good pilot. She'd flown with him. He wasn't quite as crazy as she was, nor quite as prone to take chances, but he was still good. She knew that they would do this many times for the next five or six weeks until the recon mission left for Nereid. They would be ready, as ready as they could possibly be.

...

"How's Braedon's chin?" Bill asked Laura as they sat on the couch in her sitting room Wednesday evening. "John told me about the accident."

"Healing nicely," Laura said. "It's was a major production Sunday night to change the bandage, but Maya and I managed it. Now he's just got a big Band-Aid on it. I think he's actually quite proud of himself. He shows everyone. I hope he's learned his lesson about standing up in his stroller."

Bill poured two drinks and handed her one. "I wouldn't count on it. Zak was always climbing on one thing or another even when he got hurt doing it. Before he was eight he'd broken an arm, given himself a concussion and sprained an ankle…all at different times. The concussion was the most serious, but he bounced back. I think he was seven. He was climbing a tree in our backyard and a limb broke. He went right down on his head. He's lucky he didn't break his neck. I was on Picon. I made it home in time to sit up all night in the hospital with him. Carolanne couldn't handle it. She took Lee to his grandparents' house and went home. Lee wanted to stay with Zak. I'll never forget him crying and begging me to let him stay. I think he thought I was sending him away to punish him for letting Zak fall out of the tree. I told him I didn't blame him but it didn't console him at all."

"My younger brother Andrew was far less adventurous," Laura said. "He was very good at math and all things computer-related. He was on the track team at school. He ran cross country, but he was far from the typical high school jock. I'm sure Andy had some sprains and strains but I don't remember any serious injuries. I always wondered what he would have done when he finished at the university if…" she sighed..."if he hadn't died along with my parents in that suicide bombing."

Bill took a swallow of his drink. "Lee's been reading my father's old journals. I'd never even opened those boxes from Dad's law office. I'm not sure I'd have given them to him if I'd known those journals were in there, but I can't blame him now that the Graystones have been revealed as the main creators of the skinjobs. Parker told me Natasi referred to them as First Father and First Mother."

"Is that why you didn't want Lee reading them?" Laura asked and smiled. "Or do think they contain some deep, dark family secrets?"

Bill smiled slightly. "A little of both. I had a brother, too, William, called Willie. He died before I was born. In the old Tauron tradition, I was given his name."

"What happened to him?" Laura asked gently.

"Neither of my parents told me the details, but it had something to do with my Uncle Sam. I always thought I'd ask him one day, but Sam moved back to Tauron when I was still young. He visited, but he never stayed long."

"Was he on Tauron when the Cylons attacked?"

"Tauron City. It took a direct hit from a number of bombs. I hope he never felt a thing."

"I'm sorry. Tauron is a place of pain for both of us."

Bill finished the drink. "Did you ever meet my mother Evelyn?" He asked without looking at her.

"Yes," Laura said and then sipped from her drink.

Evelyn Adama had promised her she'd never tell Bill about their meeting, but maybe she had. The moment stretched. Laura tried to decide if he knew and finally decided that he didn't.

She took another sip. "I went to see her after my father told me you'd gotten married. I won't say that I didn't believe him, but considering the circumstances under which you and I parted…" Laura let the sentence hang. She doubted Bill Adama would ever forget that day any more than she would. "Evelyn was very gracious. She asked me in and offered me tea. She liked a particular blend of green tea from Libran. I thought we had a connection because that was also my mother's favorite tea. Evelyn told me that it was true…you'd gotten married. She also told me why. She was kind but quite firm. She told me to forget you and get on with my life. She told me I had a great future ahead of me. She said all the things my own mother should have said to me but didn't. I'd disappointed my mother so much that she barely spoke to me for most of the semester."

"I disappointed Evelyn and my father both. She didn't have much to say to me until Lee was born. The minute she walked into the hospital and saw her grandson, the ice melted. She and Carolanne never got along, but a lot of that was Carolanne's fault." He sat for a minute lost in the past. "My mother never told me she'd talked to you."

"She promised me that she wouldn't. That was so long ago. I was a foolish young girl."

"You were never foolish, Laura. That honor belongs to me."

She smiled. "Billy managed to call me _foolish_ about six times today without saying the word. He was referring to my interview with James McManus. He said if he'd had any idea of what I was going to say beforehand, he'd have strongly advised against it. He said that when he prepared that list of scripture verses, he thought they were for my own use, not to be handed to someone like McManus. Billy said he's my press secretary and he felt hurt that I hadn't talked to him first about the content of the interview. He's right. I should have."

"I wish you hadn't talked to McManus either…simply because of the furor it's caused. You certainly gave Agent Darren's team enough to keep them busy for a long time."

"Yes, I'm sorry about that, but I feel like the people have a right to know what we're doing. How are the plans for the mission coming along?"

"We've made progress. Parker tells me that you and Lampkin agreed to allow Natasi to move in with D'Anna."

"It made sense. Natasi seemed eager to do it. Her security was turned over to the military at the same time she was. We've freed up the agents who were guarding her and also freed an apartment in the city. Bianca said D'Anna is happy to have a sister with her. Natasi is very glad to spend some time each day with Rachel. Natasi will be included in some of the planning meetings so the security concerns of getting her to and from the airbase are eliminated. Romo and I saw it as a win all the way around. Fortunately Major Parker agreed with us."

"Natasi's knowledge of their homeworld is over six years old." Bill reminded her.

"True, but she's one of the first model Sixes created…not _the_ first, but one of the first…or so says D'Anna. Natasi knows the minds of most of her brothers and sisters on Nereid far better than Sharon who was one of the last ones created. D'Anna has been boxed for most of her time on the planet and Leoben has no memory of their homeworld. Natasi's knowledge might be six years old, but at least she has some."

"Good point."

"Leoben made the decision not to accompany the mission team. Since he has no memories of the homeworld, he's afraid he'd prove to be a liability rather than an asset. The more I've thought about it, the more I agree with him. The last thing the mission needs is a reluctant team member."

"What makes you think Natasi is any more eager?"

"I told her she could take Gaius back to their homeworld when everything is settled. She in turn told John that I'd said he was going to be sent back there with D'Anna after her child is born. Romo is my witness. I said no such thing, but I'm not sure John believes me. He's…I don't know if he's confused or what's wrong with him. One moment he seems almost like the man I married and the next minute I hardly know him. I don't understand what's going on with him."

"I'm the wrong person to ask, Laura. Parker is the one who's spent the most time with John. Most of what I get is filtered through his eyes. I've talked to John. We've shared a few drinks. He seems like the man I remember. I think he'll be fine."

"You have that much faith in him?"

"I'm trusting him with the lives of both my sons. That should tell you something."

"That's one of the reasons you agreed to let Kara go, isn't it?"

"She has a skill we need."

"She also owns a big part of John's heart."

Bill got up and went to the sideboard where he poured another drink. "She knows the key players in Hunter's valley. Call her a good-will ambassador. Our men need the complete trust of the valley fighters. Kara is a big part of gaining that trust. They all have a part to play, Laura. We won't be any more ready than we are now. Hunter will get his wedding and honeymoon. I owe him that much. I'm sorry we can't allow him any more time with his bride, but the mission goes the day after he gets back."

...

Lee stood at the front of Elosha's little temple with Hunter standing beside him. The setting sun came through the high windows and bathed the interior in a soft golden glow that was accentuated by the lit candles.

Off to the other side, two musicians played a violin and a harp.

Elosha stood one step behind the railing. She was clad in her finest priestly robes with a beautiful gold brocade turban wrapped around her hair. She looked serious as she always did to him, but she also looked happy the way she had at John and Laura's wedding and at Braedon's dedication and naming ceremony.

John and Bianca sat on the second row. Maya had asked for the first rows on either side of the aisle to be left empty for the family she had lost in the Cylon bombing of Kinsdale, her former home, and also for Hunter's parents.

Conspicuously absent was Laura Roslin. After consulting with Edgar and her security team, they had decided that her presence at the small wedding would entail such a security detail, that it would spoil the intimacy of the occasion. But she had sent the Marble House videographer to record the entire ceremony. She had promised the first copy to Maya, but said she would get the second one. Laura would be hosting the dinner and dance that would be held at Marble House afterward.

Lee glanced over the guests and saw Kendra and Saunders on the row behind John and Bianca. Kara had told him that Natasi had volunteered to keep Rachel even though Gaius Baltar was spending the weekend with her. Natasi had apparently formed quite a bond with the little girl and wanted Gaius to get to know her, too. Major Parker was also on the row behind John. With him were his wife and two children. His son sat beside him. Leah sat on her father's lap. There were four Marines in dress uniform that Lee knew from the mission team. There were people from the staff of Marble House that he knew by sight but not by name. Sharon and Karl were sitting near the back with Hera. He supposed that was so they could quietly slip out if Hera began crying. Bill had told them he couldn't make the wedding but would see them at the reception.

It was almost time for the ceremony to begin when Zak walked in by himself and made his way to the row where his Marine friends sat. He was also in his dress uniform. Zak's solo appearance answered the question about him and Maggie. They must not have been able to work things out…or else they were still working on it.

The processional music began. Lee fought the temptation to check his pocket for Maya's ring. It had been there when he had checked five minutes earlier. Kara appeared at the back of the temple and started slowly down the aisle. She looked like a vision in the dark pink dress with her hair pulled partially back and fastened with a small cluster of flowers. The rest fell in waves and curls around her shoulders. He saw her so rarely dressed up and wearing makeup that her beauty overwhelmed him. He had to take a long, slow breath.

John had told him that on Nereid the Cylon Daniel had painted a portrait of Kara as Persephone, the goddess of spring. Here at the end of the Caprican summer, Lee didn't think he'd ever seen her looking more beautiful. When she'd walked in front of Laura down the same aisle over two years earlier, she'd been a girl. Now she was a woman, a few weeks from her nineteenth birthday. He took another deep breath.

She was smiling at him all the way down the aisle although when she reached John's pew, Lee saw her glance at her father and wink. Braedon might look like his father, but Lee knew that Kara was the child of John's pilot heart. He'd told Kara once that John had given her more than his green eyes. She'd known exactly what he meant.

When Kara got to the front, she turned around to face the guests.

The music changed again and Maya appeared at the back. Everyone stood. Lee heard Hunter take a quick deep breath. All eyes in the temple were on Hunter's bride as she began the short walk to the front. Maya's hair was styled similar to Kara's. The top part was pulled back and was pinned with a small cluster of flowers. The rest of her thick, dark hair cascaded around her shoulders. She wore no veil, but Lee decided that the flowers were perfect for her. Maya's skin was more olive in tone than Kara's and was set off to perfection by the ivory color of the dress. The two women were the goddess of spring and the goddess of the harvest.

To Lee they represented all the best that could be found in life. He hoped Hunter realized how lucky he was.

Maya's eyes never wavered from Hunter or his from her. When Maya reached the front, Hunter stepped up to her. They joined hands.

Elosha raised her arms over them and began the ceremony that had changed little since humans had first joined in marriage on the distant planet of their origins.

"_Lords of Kobol, bless the union today of this man and this woman who come before you to join their lives in the ancient ritual of matrimony. Sanctify their hearts with your love and their lives with your blessings._"

Lee looked at Kara again and she smiled. Her eyes said it all. Someday this would be them.

…

"Did you get your little boy to sleep?" Leah Parker asked John.

"Yes, I did…finally. He wanted to stay down here with everyone, but I could tell he was really tired. I didn't want him to have a tantrum."

"There's a girl in my kindergarten class who has tantrums. Her name is Chloe. I don't understand what her problem is. I told her she was too old to be acting like a baby."

John smiled at Brad and Kim Parker. He understood what Brad meant about Leah being five going on twenty.

"What does your teacher do when Chloe has tantrums?" John asked the little girl.

"She has to go to time out. One time her mother had to come to school to get her." Leah's eyes grew wide. "Chloe's mom yelled at the teacher and told her it was all her fault."

"I'll bet you're a good girl in school," John said. "I'll bet you listen to your teacher."

Leah looked proud. "I get a gold star every day."

"You shouldn't brag," Kim said.

"I'm not bragging. I'm telling the truth like Daddy always tells me. He asks people questions and they have to tell him the truth."

Laura walked over and put her hand on John's shoulder. "I hate that you had to leave the dinner with Braedon. Did you get enough to eat?"

John picked up his glass of champagne. "I'm fine. You outdid yourself tonight. Everything is wonderful. Maya and Hunter are a great couple. Lee and Kara are a great couple. Just look at them out there dancing like they don't have a care in the world."

"Would you like to dance with me?"

John smiled at the little girl again. "What do you think, Leah? Should I dance with this beautiful lady?"

"Yes," Leah said. "She's wearing a blue dress like my princess doll. You can be her prince."

John drained the champagne glass, stood and held out his hand to his wife. Everything about today had brought memories of his and Laura's wedding. Now they were going to dance.

They had seen very little of each other over the past month. Both had been busy. On the advice of her security team, Laura's trips outside Marble House and the Capitol Building had been greatly curtailed. Although Edgar had continued to bring Brae out to the airbase several times a week, Laura had not been since the day Braedon had cut his chin. John had called her the next night and the next to ask about their son. On the third night that he'd called, Bill had been there. They hadn't exactly had words, but he had asked her why she had to spend time with Bill after nine o'clock at night. Laura's defensive answer had been that it was often the only time he could bring her up to date on the status of the mission and other issues. John hadn't bought it. He was fairly certain Bill Adama hadn't visited Richard Adar that late at night.

Now Laura was in his arms again and he struggled to pretend that everything was all right with them. She had told him she'd forgiven him for D'Anna and Sonja and yet it didn't feel that way. Something was wrong, but he didn't want to ask again what it was. She'd only tell him _nothing_.

John finally decided that the deep trust issues that they had both struggled with during the early part of their marriage were back. He'd once thought they'd resolved things, but the specter of Bill and now D'Anna and Sonja had joined them in their dance.

Laura said, "I knew Bill was bringing Marta Shaw tonight, but he called yesterday morning and asked if he could bring an additional person, an old friend from the _Galactica_. I held my breath. I was afraid he was going to say Saul Tigh which of course meant Ellen. Thank the gods it wasn't Tigh."

"That's Dr. Sherman Cottle. He's here getting in a few days of shore leave before the mission starts. He's the one who stitched up my head on the _G_. The doc's a good man."

"He certainly seems taken with Bianca."

"I told him she's happily married. I don't think he's making a move on her. I just think he's lonely and enjoys the company of a pretty woman. Besides, they speak the same language."

"Divorced? Widowed? Never married?"

"I asked him if there was a Mrs. Cottle. All he said was '_not in a long time' _so either divorced or widowed_. _He was on the _G_ six years ago while we were fighting the Cylons over Caprica. I met him then."

"Ah, yes," she smiled. "You also met his med tech Lissa, did you not?"

"Thanks for reminding me."

The tension between them increased. John felt it and knew that she did, too. He didn't say anything. He was tired of apologizing and tired of her politely telling him that it was all right. He was tired of her telling him there was nothing between her and Bill when every other sentence out of her mouth seemed to be about the man she had once loved and probably still did.

John suddenly wanted the evening to be over and to get back to the airbase. He wanted to take off his shirt and tie and put on a t-shirt. He wanted to get the one small glass of whiskey that he allowed himself every night. He wanted to turn off the lights and open the drapes and sit in front of the window and watch the distant ships take off and land. He wanted to look at the stars and go over the mission plans one more time in his mind, looking for anywhere they could have made a mistake or a miscalculation. So much was riding on what would happen after they got to Nereid. So many lives would be his responsibility including his daughter's.

He was aware of Laura's soft voice. "Where are you, John?"

He didn't bother to answer, just took a deep breath. He was sure they both knew.

…

The bride and groom were on their way to Summerhill in the back of a limousine provided by Laura. Lee, Kara, her father and Bill Adama had chipped in and given Maya and Hunter a week at the exclusive resort as a wedding gift.

Most of the guests were gone, departing after showering the newlyweds with birdseed for luck. John and Bianca had left earlier with the Parkers whose sleepy children were already far past their bedtimes.

The members of the small band that had played for the reception were packing their instruments. The kitchen staff and clean-up crew were at work in the huge dining room.

Laura sat with Bill, Marta and Dr. Cottle at a table that had already been cleared. They all had drinks.

Lee and Kara sat with Saunders, Kendra and Zak at a table in the opposite corner. Lee had gotten a second piece of wedding cake before the leftovers were taken back to the kitchen.

"Little piggy," Zak teased his brother and then looked at Kara. "He's eaten enough tonight to feed a family of four for a week."

"Since when do you monitor my food intake?" Lee asked. "Besides, this is good cake. You better enjoy it while you can. It might be a long time before you eat cake like this again."

"I won't miss the cake," Zak said. He poured the last champagne from the bottle on the table into his glass. "But I might miss this stuff."

"You won't get _that_ in the valley," Kara said. "But they brew some really good mead."

Zak snickered. "I guess you would know. I'm sure you and Hunter drank enough of it while you were there."

"Damned straight. That's all everybody in the valley does. Drink mead and party. The crops plant themselves. The sheep shear themselves. Fish jump right out of the lake…"

"Easy on the sarcasm," Saunders said.

"You'll find out," Kara said to Zak. "Somebody just might hitch you to a plow."

Kendra laughed. "I'd pay a lot of cubits to see that."

"Children, children, quit bickering," Lee said after he swallowed the last mouthful of cake.

"I think you missed a couple of crumbs," Zak said. "Go ahead and lick the plate. I promise not to laugh…much."

"I've been working out," Lee said defensively. "I haven't gained a single pound."

Kara echoed. "My man has a great bod. Nice and hard-muscled in all the right places."

"Too much info," Zak said.

"Jealous," Lee shot back.

Kara said, "What say we give these nice cleaning people a break and call it a night? It's after midnight. Time for the maid of honor to kick off her shoes and get comfortable."

Kendra stifled a yawn. "You got my vote."

They all stood. Zak said, "There used to be a time when I was just starting to party at midnight."

"And then you joined the Marines and became a wimp," Lee joked.

"I highly resent the slur on my honor, sir. I demand satisfaction. We duel at dawn. Pistols or sabers. Your choice."

Saunders had his arm around Kendra. "None of us will be up at dawn. Can we drop you off somewhere?"

"I'm staying at Dad's apartment tonight. I've got to wait for him. I just hope he doesn't decide to ditch his date tonight and…" he seemed to realize what he was about to say and stopped.

Kara stepped in front of him. "Decide to _what_?"

"Nothing. Just running my mouth."

"That better be all the hell you were doing. Just because I'm wearing a dress doesn't mean I can't kick your butt. I did it once."

Lee put his arm firmly around her and held her. "Back off, Kara. Zak didn't mean anything."

"We're leaving," Kendra said. "I hate the sight of blood. It was a great wedding. Great reception. We had fun."

"We're glad you made it," Lee said. "I'm sure Maya and Hunter are, too."

Saunders winked at Kara. "Invite us to the next one."

After they were gone, Zak said, "Well, aren't we all awkward now? I'll just see if I can go break up the grown-ups. Dad doesn't need to knock back any more whiskey tonight."

"I don't think he's the only one who needs to lay off the booze," Kara said. "But then I guess you're both drinking to hide your broken hearts." Zak looked at her and suddenly Kara felt a wash of pity for him. "I'm sorry," she said. "Zakie, I'm really sorry."

"So it's Zakie now? Well, I think there were enough broken hearts to go around tonight. It doesn't take a genius to notice that your father's wife is sitting at a table drinking with my dad and your dad left two hours ago to go back out to the airbase and his Cylon or should I say Cylons…plural."

Kara didn't think. She swung. Only the fact that Lee still had his arm around her waist and managed to pull her off balance kept the blow from firmly connecting to Zak's jaw. Her fist barely grazed him.

There was a sudden silence in the room. All eyes including the cleaning crew were on them.

"Okay, that's enough," Lee said harshly. "Zak, that is clearly none of your business. You need to go."

Zak didn't say a word, just turned and walked toward his father's table.

Lee pulled Kara out of the dining room and past the security guards in the hall. She was trembling with anger.

In the elevator she said, "That son of a bitch."

"Stop it. Zak was wrong to say what he did, but he's still my brother. And I'm sure he didn't say anything that others haven't thought."

"My father is _not_ frakking either one of those Cylons."

"I know he's not. Zak knows it, too. He's hurting. Can't you see that?"

"And my father's not? He's responsible for our mission. D'Anna isn't doing so great. He's worried about their baby, and Laura is giving him the cold shoulder."

"They were dancing together tonight."

"One dance. One lousy frakking dance. She danced with you. She danced with Hunter. She danced with Dr. Cottle. She danced with your father…a couple of times. Bitch."

The elevator doors opened and they walked down the hall to Kara's room.

Inside Kara shut the door. "It wouldn't be so bad if Dad didn't still love Laura so much. All he wants is to be with her and Brae and for them to be a family again and she's treating him like he's got some kind of social disease. Maybe we should call it Cylonitis."

"Don't give up on them, Kara." Lee put his arms around her. "This mission won't last forever. If they've got problems, they need to work them out. You're not going to help things by treating Laura like everything is her fault. There might be a lot you don't know."

The fight went out of her and she realized suddenly how tired she was, physically and emotionally. She turned around hastily and lifted her hair. "Unzip my dress. Let's go to your apartment tonight. I want to get out of here before Laura shows up and starts asking questions. The way I feel right now there's no telling what I might say to her."

Lee unzipped the dress and Kara stepped out of it. She left it on the floor as she grabbed a pair of jeans out of a drawer and pulled them on. Lee picked up the dress and found a hanger in the closet.

"There's no need to be so careful with it," Kara said. "Bridesmaid dresses only get worn once."

Out in the hall she said, "Let's take the back stairs. I don't want to run into Laura at the elevator."

In the parking lot she asked him if he was okay to drive.

"I wasn't swilling champagne the way some people were."

They got in the car and Lee pulled her into his arms. He held her as best he could in the bucket seats. "Damned gearshift," she muttered. "Damned console."

"I know how to fix that." He started the engine and backed out of the parking space. "There's no gearshift or console at my apartment. We're not going to talk about this anymore tonight. We'll wait until tomorrow. Everything always looks better in the morning."

Kara huddled in the seat. She wanted to make love and then she wanted to sleep in his arms. She felt like she could sleep for days. She wished she could go to sleep and wake up and it would all be over. She wished a lot of things that couldn't possibly happen by sleeping them away.

But Lee was right. She would feel better in the morning. She could face Laura and keep her mouth shut in the morning.

"I love you," she said to him. "Sometimes I don't know why you put up with me."

He reached over and grasped her hand. "Because I love you, too. And you've put up with plenty from me."

…

"What was that all about, son?" Bill asked Zak as he approached the table and pulled out a chair.

"Nothing. Just fooling around."

"It didn't look like you were fooling around," Laura said. "It looked like Kara came very close to hitting you."

Zak picked up the champagne bottle on the table and poured the last of it into his glass.

"Just a little misunderstanding. You know how high-strung those fighter pilots are. It doesn't take much to set them off. We're cool. Tell her I'm sorry for what I said. I didn't mean it."

"What did you say?" Bill asked.

Zak shook his head. He obviously didn't intend to tell them. "Are you guys about ready to go? If not, I'll take a transport."

"We'll go," Bill said. "It's been a long day for everyone."

Laura walked to the portico with them where Bill had a car and driver waiting. "I'm very glad you could join us tonight," she said to them.

"It was our pleasure," Marta said. "Maya looked absolutely stunning and Hunter is such a handsome young man. I wish them all the best."

Laura shook Cottle's hand. "I'm so glad I got a chance to meet you. I appreciate the care you gave John. He thinks very highly of you."

Cottle nodded. "He's a good man. He's had more than his share of grief."

"Yes, he has."

Bill didn't say anything, but he took Laura's hand and briefly squeezed it.

She watched the car drive off and then went back inside and straight up to Kara's room where she knocked several times on the door. Getting no answer, she went to her room and called the gatehouse at the exit of the parking lot.

"Did Lee and Kara leave a short while ago?"

"Yes, ma'am. About five minutes ago."

"Thank you."

Slowly Laura walked down the hall to her son's bedroom. He and Esmari were sleeping soundly in their cribs. Mrs. Blythe who helped Maya during the day was sleeping in Maya's bed. The children were safe. She gently touched Braedon's soft brown hair and felt the love well up in her. She believed that she had forgiven John for D'Anna and the child and for his relationship with Sonja, but things were still not right between them. He'd all but accused her of having an affair with Bill. She tried not to despair that they would never be able to work out their problems.

She leaned over and gently kissed her sleeping son. Then she slowly and sadly walked back to her own bedroom and her empty bed.

...

The Heavy Raider had been stripped of everything that wasn't necessary to make it fly. So had the Raider. The two ships stood side by side on the tarmac near the runway at the boneyard. It was noon and the late summer sun was hot. Several knuckledraggers were loading gear and supplies into the Heavy Raider. They were being supervised by both Kevin Abinell and Dr. Rafferty.

The mission team was assembled inside the hangar. Kara, John and Lee were wearing flight suits. The Marines and Hunter were in camouflage BDUs. Natasi wore a black turtleneck and black pants. John and Hunter were at the front. John had taken a marker and written the sequence of events on a whiteboard…as if that was really necessary. In the last week they'd been over this so many times that Kara was rehearsing it in her sleep.

She knew the names of the five Marine team members, but nobody called them by their names. They all went by nicknames, their equivalent of call signs. Flash, Bug, Mars, Shark and Chop.

They were all in their twenties and all extremely fit. There were four corporals including Zak and one sergeant. There was a demolition expert, a communication expert, a weapons expert, an underwater expert and a martial arts expert. Zak aka Mars was the weapons expert although they had all cross-trained to some extent to do the job of any of the others.

She had met them earlier in the week at the start of the intense mission briefings. None of them knew about her previous recon missions to the planet. They had looked at her with skepticism at first. She could feel it. They probably thought she'd gotten the job because John was her father. She didn't care. They treated John and Hunter with a tremendous amount of respect. That's all that mattered to her.

Natasi stood off a little from the others. Kara barely glanced at her. She had disliked Natasi from the beginning and resented her presence on the mission. Her father had made it clear to all of them early during the planning that she was there to help them and though he couldn't make them treat her as a comrade, he damned well expected no overt hostility or disrespect from any of them. For several weeks Kara had watched her father interact with Natasi, looking for anything that would indicate a relationship beyond that of a professional one. With an increasing sense of relief she saw nothing beyond the respect that John showed the other team members. Only once had something happened that had flustered him a little bit. Her father had been talking about places to hide in the city and he'd called her Sonja. It had gotten a sly and knowing smile from Natasi that had only increased Kara's dislike of her. The only thing that gave her any comfort was the knowledge that Natasi was hung up on that two-timing jerk Gaius Baltar who would probably frak a dozen different women while she was gone.

They were one hour from mission start when Kevin came back inside with one of the crewmen. Both were sweating. Kevin's fair skin was flushed from the sun.

"We're two hundred pounds over the weight limit on the Heavy Raider," he said to John. "Every pound makes a difference. You'll burn through too much fuel getting to the jump point."

Kara knew what that meant…too little fuel left to do a lot of maneuvering once they reached the surface of Nereid. There was also the issue of the end of the jump. They were jumping in over the river and below the tree line. Too much weight before John could apply horizontal thrusters might mean he'd wind up in the river. Kevin and Dr. Rafferty had calibrated everything to the pound.

"Damn," John said. "Okay, men, what can we leave behind?"

One of the Marines glanced at Natasi.

She smiled sweetly. "I don't weigh two hundred pounds."

The minutes ticked by while they haggled, no one was willing to leave any of his equipment.

"I could take a man and fifty pounds on the Raider," Kara said. Nine heads including Natasi's swung in her direction. "Would that help?"

They had reached the thirty-minute window when they would either have to confirm a _go_ or scrub the mission for another day. Bill was on the _Galactica_ and was standing by waiting for the mission status.

John looked at Kevin. "Would that do it?"

"That would do it."

"What's the danger to Lieutenant Thrace?" John asked.

"As long as her passenger is careful not to touch anything…"

Kara said, "It will take me a little longer to get airborne, but fuel isn't as big an issue with the Raider."

"I'll do it," Hunter said.

"No. You really need to be with Major Gallagher in case he doesn't remember how to get back to the valley," Kara said. "Lee's the Heavy Raider's co-pilot so he's out." She looked at the five Marines. "Any volunteers? Somebody who's not claustrophobic?"

Zak stepped forward immediately. "I'll do it. I'm shorter than the rest of the guys. I'll fit better."

Kevin and the crewman hurried out to switch what equipment they could to the Raider.

"Okay, let's do it," John said to the men. "Mission is a go."

There was nothing left to say. They all exited the hangar.

Zak walked beside her out to the Raider. "About last Saturday night…"

"Not now, Zak. You can apologize all you want once we reach the valley."

He grinned. "Who says I was going to apologize?"

"And don't puke in my Raider, either."

"Who says I'm going to puke?"

"Jumping affects some people that way."

John and Lee caught up with them.

"Follow the plan," John started.

"I got it, Dad," Kara said. "It's tattooed on my brain."

She and Lee shared a long and meaningful look then she looked at her father. "See you both in the valley."

"God go with you, baby," her father said.

"You, too."

Then she turned and boosted herself through the hatch into the Raider and forgot about everything except her part of the mission. She positioned herself carefully and started through the pre-flight check of all her systems. It was hot inside the ship and the flight suit made her hotter. Moisture began to bead on her skin. Zak climbed aboard. Kevin closed the hatch and spun the wheel from the outside. The hatch indicator showed the pressure seal had engaged.

"Lords of Kobol," Zak said. "It looks bigger from the outside."

"Sorry you volunteered?"

"I can handle it."

"We won't be in here all that long. Hunter handled it like a man and he's really claustrophobic."

"What do I do if I need to pee?"

"Hold it."

Zak started laughing and she elbowed him in the ribs.

"Now, my feet are on the rudder pedals so keep your feet away from mine. Don't ask questions or touch anything. In fact, don't talk to me at all until we're in the valley. I've got to concentrate. I can't give you flying lessons."

"You're the boss."

She switched on her wireless which Kevin had tuned to match a frequency in the Heavy Raider.

"All systems check. Waiting on a go," she said since she would take off and jump first.

The flight corridor they would follow from the boneyard to the ocean had been cleared of all air traffic.

The minutes ticked by. The sweat ran down her face and prickled her scalp under her braid.

The wireless crackled. She heard her father's voice. "Sadie, you are a go."

Kara fired the vertical thrusters and watched the monitor until she was twenty feet off the ground and stabilized before she fired the horizontal thrusters. They began moving forward and climbing. Watching her instruments she stayed in the narrow flight corridor until she saw the ocean.

"Sadie is feet wet," she said as soon as she was over the water.

When she was five miles out at sea and twenty thousand feet in altitude, she keyed the wireless one last time before turning it off. They were jumping onto Nereid with all communications dark.

"Jumping in five," she said, killed the communication system and started counting down.

Kara's ship was a blip on the Heavy Raider's dradis, but John also had a visual. She was approximately two miles ahead of him when he got the transmission and then her communication channel registered nothing but static. They had just passed the point of no return. There would be no aborting the mission now for any reason. He counted down from five.

Lee was holding his breath when he saw the brief, bright flash, and then the sky was empty. Operation Thunderbolt had begun.

TBC…


	55. Bittersweet

Chapter 55

Bittersweet

_The Planet_

_Day 40: Today I met the young scientist Joshua Hoshi with whom my friend Irina Galatova is in love. He is a serious young man, dark-haired and very handsome, quite intelligent and soft-spoken, and of the unshakable opinion that the planet we are exploring was once the home of the vanished Thirteenth Tribe. We had a lively discussion tonight at dinner with some of our team members who think this planet is Kobol, the original home of mankind._

_Joshua has been to the ruined city and says that the temple is clearly monotheistic. He even found a place on the high altar that he says (based on the dimensions) could have held the Kobol Stone. He is also in possession of the letter that Dr. Prolmar received from the Gemenese priest who claims he has proof that the planet we now explore was called Eden and was the home of the Thirteenth. I asked him how he obtained it. He smiled and said he borrowed it and that Prolmar had never asked him to return it. He was kind enough to pass it along to me._

_Day 48: The foundation of another small wooden structure was found outside the ruined city along what had to once have been a road between the city and a high plateau to the east. High resolution imagery from the _Hyperion's _cameras shows the ruins of some type of structure on the plateau. I think it was another monotheistic temple, but several others say it was a temple to the sun god Apollo. It would certainly be the perfect place to build such a temple. It is possible, I suppose, that both monotheists and polytheists lived in harmony on the planet. We must try to discover what happened to them. _

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

The jump coordinates that Kevin Abinell had configured brought Kara onto Nereid ten miles downstream from the waterfall where she had left the planet over five months before. The unanimous consensus based on the recon photos had been that upriver near the waterfall there was not enough room to maneuver on exit from the jump. Ten miles downstream the river widened considerably and the rocky cliffs that edged it upstream were replaced by flatter banks and more trees.

Another thing they all agreed on is that there was a huge difference between coming out of an FTL jump in space and coming out of it low on the surface of a planet. A low planet entry was far more dangerous.

Kara realized later that if she'd come out of the jump near the waterfall, she and Zak would have died because she wasn't headed downstream but at an angle toward the riverbank.

Her quick reflexes saved them from going into the trees. She put the Raider into a steep climb and corrected their trajectory. As soon as they had cleared the trees, she turned and plunged downward and was soon skimming along just forty feet above the rushing, tumbling water.

She knew she had scared Zak because he was flattened out on his stomach beside her with both hands over his head. She had to give him credit, though. He hadn't uttered a sound.

"We're cool," she said as they approached the point where the river narrowed. She was now four miles from the waterfall. She climbed again and got them over the part of the mountain that contained the spider-filled tunnel that she and Hunter had walked through twice. On the other side was the small clearing where she would wait for her father, the same clearing where he had taken her and Hunter the day they had left Nereid.

The ship was stable and hovering over the clearing before she took her eyes off the monitors and instruments long enough for a quick glance at her passenger. Zak still had his hands over his head. She nudged him.

"Are you okay?"

"Are we there yet?"

"No. Remember the sequence on the whiteboard. We're in the clearing waiting on my dad. He was jumping ten minutes behind us."

Zak finally lifted his head and looked around. "Is something wrong with the ship? I didn't hear that noise back on Caprica."

Kara smiled. "Nothing is wrong with Sadie. It's raining. You want to tell me about Maggie?"

"There's nothing to tell. We talked. We talked some more. She started seeing somebody while I was still in Sovana…after I sent her that stupid email. She doesn't want to give him up. I'm not okay with that. End of story."

"Crashdown?"

"No. I asked her if it was him. She said she and Crash had gone out a couple of times before he started dating another pilot. They're just friends. I believe her. All she said was the guy she's seeing is not in the military and that he's '_a little older' _than she is. She didn't want to give me a name even after I promised I wouldn't do anything stupid."

"Married?" Kara asked skeptically. She could see Maggie dating an older guy, but she couldn't see her compromising her moral code by dating a married one.

"No. He's not married. I asked her that, too. She said she realized things weren't going to work for us when I sent her that email breaking up with her. I told her I wasn't myself when I sent it and that I didn't mean it. She said sometimes things happen for a reason. Apparently she met this guy at some kind of political rally a few days after I sent that stupid email."

"Since when did Maggs start going to political rallies?"

"A couple of months ago. I think it was after she heard the rumor that President Roslin doesn't intend to destroy the Cylons on their homeworld. You know how Maggie feels about the Cylons."

"The same way most of Caprica feels."

Zak propped his chin on his fists. "I really thought she was the one."

"So I guess it's back to hot girls like the twins for you."

"I've got a job to do first on this planet. If I'm lucky maybe afterward I might meet somebody who's right for me the way Maya is right for Hunter and the way you and Lee are right for each other."

"Okay, you don't have to lay it on that thick."

"I'm really sorry about what I said last Saturday night. I'd had too much to drink and you're right. I was hurting. I saw Maya and Hunter and I saw you and Lee and it got to me because I wanted to be with Maggie. I respect your dad. That afternoon after I found my mom dead, your dad sat with me for over an hour. He stayed with me while I was answering questions for that police detective, too. I don't think he's got anything going on with either one of the Cylons. I don't think Laura and my dad have anything going on either."

"I wish there was somebody in the valley I could introduce you to. Unfortunately…"

"I'm not here to meet girls. We're here to free our people and secure the planet."

"But first we've got to assess the situation and get a report ready for Admiral Adama. Then we fire up the little laptop that Kev fixed for us, write everything up, and I take it and jump to the coordinates of the fleet."

"We've got one week to get the job done here. If something happens and you or your dad don't get back to the _Galactica_, then my dad jumps eight battlestars here and starts taking out Cylon baseships."

"We should be able to find out what's going on in a week, especially if they've started fighting a civil war."

"It looks pretty peaceful here," Zak said.

"Because this is the middle of nowhere for them. The nearest settlement is a hundred miles south of here and the city is a hundred miles to the east. There might be a stray centurion around, but we're in a Raider."

Zak squirmed trying to get more comfortable. "You don't need to remind me."

…

The ten minutes between Kara's jump and their own was the longest ten minutes Lee thought he had ever spent. They had decided on a ten-minute lag because John wanted to make sure that once Kara was on the surface of Nereid, she had plenty of time to get out of the jump zone. A collision between their two ships would end the mission for all of them.

The tension in the cramped cockpit was evident to Lee, but there was no trace of it in John's voice when he announced Kara's jump to those waiting far above them in the _Galactica's_ CIC.

"Sadie is away. Papa Bear is jumping in ten minutes. Countdown commencing now."

The disembodied voice of a communication tech on the _Galactica_ replied. "Roger that Papa Bear. Countdown to jump is ten minutes."

Lee knew that in the atmosphere high above them the _Galactica_ was waiting for them to jump. Within minutes of the Heavy Raider's departure, nine jump keys would be inserted into their slots and the _Galactica_ and eight other battlestars would follow them to predefined coordinates in a sector of interstellar space closely adjoining the Prolmar Sector. It was far away from the Armistice Zone, far away from the part of space that he thought the Cylons would search if something aroused their suspicions. They had to play the odds. Even the Cylons weren't capable of searching every bit of the galaxy around their homeworld. By jumping to an area that was not on any direct path between the two solar systems, the Colonials hoped to minimize any chance of discovery.

To pass the time Lee mentally recited the eight battlestars that would be waiting for Kara to bring them intel about the status of the planet. The _Galactica_, which now had Admiral Adama on board was the flagship of the invasion fleet. With him would be the _Ajax_, the _Charybdis_, the _Columbia_, the _Minoan_, the _Orion_, the _Pegasus_, the _Sylla _and the newly outfitted_ Valkyrie_.

Bill had considered the space-worthiness of the ships as well as their ability to carry the twenty thousand Marines that had been chosen for the initial invasion of the planet. The Marines had been divided among the eight ships. Another big part of Bill's decision had simply been his faith in his commanders.

While all battlestars carried a small and permanent contingent of Marines, they had not been designed to carry large numbers of troops. There were other ships in the Colonial forces that were better designed and outfitted for that purpose. But those ships did not have long-range jump drives or the structural integrity to allow installing them. For thousands of years all the wars that the Colonials had fought had been among the twelve planets of their own solar system. Jumping many light years through space had never been a consideration in moving troops…until now. Every bit of extra space on the nine battlestars was being used to house the men and women who would put their lives on the line once the ground fighting started on the surface of Nereid.

"Thirty seconds," John said.

Together he and Lee watched the counter moving in reverse. John repeated Kara's words.

"_Galactica_ this is Papa Bear. Jumping in five."

Then he shut down the communication system that Kevin had recently installed in the Heavy Raider. When the counter reached zero, John minimized horizontal thrusters and engaged the Heavy Raider's jump drive. Immediately he felt the unpleasant sensation that always accompanied a jump. They materialized over the river and he applied maximum vertical thrusters. They were dangerously close to the river bank. He turned the ship enough to get it pointed downriver and slowly brought horizontal thrusters back online. His visibility was hampered by rain running off the canopy.

"Look at that," he said. "One thing we didn't talk about was arriving in the rain."

"Just our luck," Lee echoed. "Do you think Kara…"

"Kara's fine. She'll be waiting for us." He called back to the men and Natasi, "Everybody okay back there?"

Five male voices including Hunter's said, "Yes, sir."

He didn't hear Natasi answer, but decided someone would let him know if she wasn't okay. To lighten their weight and allow them to take more equipment, the Heavy Raider's metal passenger seats, designed for centurions, had been removed and replaced with smaller jump seats made of lightweight plastic. They had apparently come through the rigors of the jump intact.

John turned the Heavy Raider upstream and flew until he reached the waterfall then climbed over and around the side of the mountain. He saw the clearing and the Raider waiting for them.

"There she is," Lee said with relief in his voice.

"Told you," John said. "Now let's get to the valley and get these ships under wraps while we've still got some daylight left."

...

Laura sat at her desk in Marble House and waited. She had told her administrative staff to hold all her calls until further notice. She was waiting for a call from a battlestar, for word from Bill as to whether the mission had gone or not.

For the second time in two months she had asked her Vice President Scott Mickelson to handle the Quorum session that morning. Laura had sat for most of the day trying to look at all the material on her desk that needed her attention. Instead her thoughts were on John and Kara and Lee and the rest of the mission.

She kept remembering the previous night and the phone call she had finally made to her husband. She'd waited, thinking he would call as he often did before Brae went to bed so he could tell their son goodnight, but their son's bedtime had come and gone and still no call. Finally at ten o'clock she had called his mobile phone. He'd answered on the third ring.

Almost immediately he'd said, "I'm sorry I didn't call earlier. I just got back from the boneyard…some last minute preparations. I didn't want to call this late. I was going to take a shower and hit the sack."

"I thought you would call and say goodbye to your son."

"I told him yesterday afternoon that I wouldn't see him for a while. I don't think he's old enough to really understand although he did get his Raptor and show me."

The hurt had bled through in her voice. "You didn't tell me goodbye yesterday. You and Bianca and Rachel left while I was talking to Maya and Hunter."

"I didn't want to interrupt you. I…I wasn't sure it would matter to you."

"Oh, John. How can you say that?" She had heard him take a deep breath and had waited, but he hadn't answered her so she'd finally continued. "Kara and I had a confrontation after you left. Did she tell you?"

"No. We haven't had a chance to talk about anything except our mission. I'm sorry she was disrespectful. She knows I don't want that. She knows I've always wanted the two of you to get along."

"She was right in what she said. She took me to task for the way I've treated you. Then she went to her room and got her things together. She waited long enough to see Maya and Hunter. She kissed Brae and told him she was going to be gone for a while. Then she told Maya she was going to Lee's apartment and walked out." Suddenly Laura's voice had begun to tremble and she had started to cry. "I'm so sorry, John. This is not the way I wanted things to happen."

"Laura," he had said softly, "please don't cry. Please."

She had bitten her lip and had managed to quiet her sobs. "Promise me you'll come back. Promise me."

There had been another long silence. Then he'd said, "Would you do something for me?"

"Of course."

"I'd like for you to call Bianca every couple of days. I'm leaving my phone with her. Dr. Delos has D'Anna on complete bed rest now so Bianca is going to have to help with her and take care of Rachel, too. Natasi was helping a lot with both of them, but she'll be gone tomorrow. Maybe you could ask Bianca if she'll accept some help. I've talked to Brad. He's got no problem with someone coming out to the base for part of the day. He suggested a home health agency. I'll be glad to pay for it. You've still got authorization to my bank accounts."

"I'll be glad to get Bianca some help and it won't be necessary for you to pay for it. I'll take care of it. I'll call her tomorrow and we'll discuss it."

"Thank you. I'm alive because of Bianca and her husband. Anything I can do to help her, I will. Now I need to go, Laura. I'm beat." His voice had softened and she had heard some emotion at last. "Just remember that nothing's changed about the way I feel. I love you. I'll always love you. And God willing, I'll see you and Brae again."

Before he had ended the call, she'd managed to say the words to him that his mother had always said to his father.

"Fair winds and following seas, my love, and please come back to me."

Now she sat at her desk and dabbed her eyes with a tissue. She felt like she'd made so many mistakes with John. She'd let petty feelings of jealousy get in the way of the love they shared. She'd stood by and watched him slowly building a wall between them and she'd let him.

Angrily she banged her fist on her desk. She'd let him. She'd seen the way he was pulling away from her because he thought it was the only way to protect her and her political career…and she'd let him. She should have moved him into Marble House with her the minute his debriefing was over. She should have done whatever it took to make him believe that she still felt about him the same way she had when he'd left the planet the previous November. She shouldn't have let her doubts about his feelings or her initial hurt and anger at what he'd done on Nereid get in the way. When Brae had cut his chin, she should have asked John to come back to Marble House with them and before the evening was over, she should have finished the kiss they had started. She should have taken him to her bed and shown him that she was still his wife in every sense of the word. But she hadn't. And now he was leaving, was probably already gone and it was too late. All she could do was pray that he returned so she could make it up to him.

Her desk phone buzzed causing her to jump. She picked it up and recognized the momentary hollow sound of an incoming scrambled call.

"They've jumped to Nereid," Bill said. "Mission is a go. We'll be leaving in a few minutes."

"You'll get word back to me."

"As soon as I can. You understand that our jump takes us roughly twenty-nine light years away from Caprica. We'll be well out of communication range. I'm taking a smaller ship with a long-range jump drive to keep you informed, but it might be a week or more before we have anything worth reporting. John's team has a week to assess the situation and get the information to me."

"I understand. The gods be with you, Bill. Good hunting."

"Thank you, Laura."

He ended the call and Laura sat feeling numb. She knew that it was pointless for her to try to do anything for the rest of the day. She left her office and told her secretary that she was going upstairs. She gave Billy a slight nod to inform him the mission had left the planet.

When she got off the elevator, she went immediately to her son's room. He and Esmari were on the floor. Braedon was helping her put pieces into one of the big wooden puzzles that he had mastered long ago. Despite his penchant for the occasional tantrum, Brae was incredibly patient with Esmari. When they were together, he'd even reverted to crawling in an attempt to get her to follow him. Esmari could now get up on her hands and knees, but so far she simply rocked back and forth. She hadn't coordinated the hand and knee movements that would allow her to move forward. Brae seemed determined to change that.

"Mamma, look," he said and she praised him and Esmari both. The little girl looked up at her with Hunter's blue eyes and a pair of beautiful long dark eyelashes. She smiled and then looked back at the puzzle. Braedon pointed to one of the empty spaces and Esmari put in a star-shaped piece.

Maya was sitting on the couch with a box of tissues and red eyes. She blew her nose and Laura wondered if she'd been crying all day. Hunter and Maya had spent last night at the apartment in the city. Lee and Kara had gone to Lee's apartment. Laura had told Mrs. Blythe to go home. She had gotten both children into the tub and ready for bed.

Laura sat down on the couch beside Maya and put her arm around her in a gesture of comfort that they both needed. She again looked at her son and the child that Hunter had entrusted to the woman he loved, the woman he had one week earlier made his wife. Maya held out the box of tissues and Laura plucked one and dabbed her own eyes. Through her tears she saw the two children growing up together free from the shadow of war, and she was more firmly convinced than ever that the only way to ensure their future was to forge a lasting peace with their enemy.

...

John took the lead and Kara followed. Skimming the treetops, they headed toward the valley. Their low altitude was what they referred to as _flying_ _under the dradis_. It meant that their dradis signatures would blend so closely with the wireless waves bouncing back from the planet's surface as to be virtually indistinguishable to the Cylons in the baseships above.

Dr. Rafferty's crew had applied an organic resin compound that contained a carbon polymer to the surface of both ships. It was designed to scatter the broadcast waves, masking their shape and giving them additional stealth capability, but there was nothing that would make them totally invisible to dradis and infrared scans. That's why they wanted to get both ships on the ground, shut down and covered with the camouflage netting. The quicker they cooled off and blended into the landscape of the valley, the better. Even though Kara knew they'd all get soaked covering the ships, the rain would cool them faster.

By the time they reached Hunter's valley, though, the rainstorm had blown over and the setting sun shone under the clouds which served to illuminate the meadow where they had planned to land. It now held a large number of sheep.

"That's not good," Kara said.

"What?" Zak asked.

"Sheep on the airfield."

She watched her father deftly set the Heavy Raider down on the road, the propulsion wash from the vertical thrusters causing the sheep to move back from the fence. Kara set the Raider down a short distance behind the other ship.

"What do we do now?" Zak asked.

"Wait for my father to decide what to do. Mission protocol says we stay in the ship unless told to do otherwise."

…

John unstrapped himself and told Lee to stay put. "If I don't come back very shortly, you follow protocol. Get this ship out of here and jump to the coordinates where your father is waiting. Kara will follow."

Natasi was on her feet waiting for him. "I'll go with you."

Hunter unbuckled the straps and stood. "So will I. They're my people."

He started to tell Natasi to stay put, but then changed his mind and let her follow him and Hunter down the ramp. They hadn't walked far toward the dwellings when they met Targa, Beck, Narcho and Jade.

"Lords of Kobol," Targa said as Hunter greeted his uncles with tight hugs. "Where'd you get them fancy flowered duds?"

Hunter punched his uncle playfully on the arm. "This is camouflage, not flowers."

John grinned as the men shook hands with him. "I told you we'd bring him back, didn't I?"

"Where'd you find Sonja?" Beck asked. "Natalie said she was boxed by the One in the city."

Jade said, "That's not Sonja."

"Is, too," Beck said. "Look at her. She's even wearing that black outfit Sonja likes to wear."

"I know she looks just like her, but it's not Sonja," John said. "Her name is Natasi. We brought her with us from Caprica."

"Is that Kara in the Raider?" Narcho asked.

"Who else? We'll have plenty of time to talk. First things first. We've got to do something with the ships and our usual landing area is full of sheep."

"We brought the sheep down from the higher meadow," Narcho said. "We've been having problems with wolves again."

"So what do we do?" John asked. "We can't leave these ships in the road."

Targa and his brother looked at each other. Beck pointed toward the dwellings. "A mile or so north of here on the other side of the creek is a clearing. It's much smaller than the meadow. Better cover. No grazing animals."

"Yeah," Hunter said. "That's a good place." He turned to John. "Let's go while we've still got some daylight." Then he turned back to his uncles. "We've got five Marines, John's copilot Lee and Kara and Natasi. Think about where we're going to put them."

"We'll get a couple of torches and meet you in the clearing," Beck said.

…

Kara couldn't see what was happening on the road because the Heavy Raider was in the way. She debated getting out of her ship, but knew she would be breaking protocol. If anything went wrong, she was supposed to get the Raider out of there and jump to the location where Admiral Adama was now waiting with his battlestars.

"What's taking so long?" Zak asked.

"Don't know, but we stay put."

She was so antsy she could hardly lie still. Finally she saw her father coming back along the road. He made a motion for her to follow them. In only a few minutes they were airborne again.

They flew low over the meadow, crossed the creek and turned east. In a minute she could tell that he was preparing to put the Heavy Raider down. She circled until he was on the ground and then landed on the other side of a small clearing about eighty feet away. The sun was behind the mountains. The clearing was in deep shade.

She saw the Heavy Raider's ramp go down and her father, Lee and Hunter exit the ship. They were followed by Natasi and the four Marines.

"Now you can spin that wheel and open the hatch," she said to Zak. He wasted no time in doing it.

They all gathered in the area between the two ships and began talking about what to do with their supplies. In only a short time she heard several people coming through the woods. Targa and Beck each carried torches.

The last of the daylight was rapidly fading from the sky. They decided to get their personal gear and come back for the rest of the supplies the next morning. Kara and Zak walked back to the Raider to get their duffel bags. Narcho caught up with them and he and Kara hugged. It was only then that Kara noticed an Eight had tagged along with him. She looked just like Sharon but had a short, shaggy haircut. The Marines, Lee and Hunter had already gotten out the camouflage netting and were spreading it over the Heavy Raider. John was carrying duffel bags off the ship. Zak trotted over to help them.

The two women looked each other up and down.

"Kara, this is Jade," Narcho said.

"So is this your pilot girlfriend?" Jade asked. "The one who flies a Raider as good as a Cylon?"

"She's my pilot friend," Narcho said. "I used to fly as her wingman. Her boyfriend is over there helping the Marines cover the Heavy Raider. John is Kara's father."

"Your father told me he taught you how to fly."

"He did."

Kara climbed up in the Raider and handed out her bag and then Zak's before she closed the hatch and spun the wheel.

"Who is the other man with you?" Jade asked pointing across the clearing toward Zak.

"He's my boyfriend's brother, Zak."

"Does he have a girlfriend?"

"He used to but they broke up. Why? You want me to fix you up with him?"

Jade looked at Narcho. "What does that mean…fix me up?"

Kara answered. "It means do you want me to tell him you think he's cute?"

Jade shrugged. "Maybe I'll look the others over first. They might be cuter."

Kara looked at Narcho. "So you and Jade aren't a couple?"

"We're just friends," he said.

The Marines and Hunter came over with the netting to cover the Raider. Kara, Narcho and Jade moved out of their way. They had practiced doing it enough times on Caprica that it took only a few minutes.

"So how did a Cylon wind up here in the valley?" Kara asked Jade.

"John brought me here so I would learn about humans. I've been here since the funeral of the old woman who died in Settlement Alpha, the one who was taking care of the baby with the big blue eyes."

"Esmari's grandmother, Seléne," Narcho said. "She died."

"My dad told me."

"How's Hunter doing?"

Kara grinned. "He's a newly-married man as of a week ago. He left Esmari with her new mother."

"No kidding. That was fast work. You've only been gone for what…a couple of months?"

"Five months give or take a week. Dad escaped seven weeks ago."

"We know about your dad's escape," Narcho said. "We've had a couple of refugees hiding here in the valley since then. I'm sure one of them is going to be very glad to see your father."

"Who?" Kara asked suspiciously.

Jade answered. "Natalie. Our First Six. She brought her cat and her friend Buddy and three of his friends. The fourth centurion had to get the ship he stole back to the city before it was missed. We don't know what happened to that one. It never came back. Maybe it couldn't get out of the city. Things didn't go so good after your father escaped. Sonja got boxed at the prison and Cavil won't let Leoben come back from the res ship. Our friend Yoshimo got put in prison. Cavil was going to put the doctor in prison, too, but the council talked him out of it since there wouldn't be anyone to treat the sick humans. So the doctor has a centurion with him all the time."

"Damn," Kara said. "My dad is going to hate to hear that."

The Marines and the others had finished covering the Raider with the netting. They headed for the edge of the clearing. Lee motioned for them to follow.

"We need to get moving," Narcho said.

Her father was waiting for them at the tree line. "Everything okay?"

"Fine," Kara said. "Jade's got some news you're not going to be happy to hear."

"Beck's already told me that Natalie and Buddy are here with a few centurions. They're all living in the _Hyperion_. A third centurion is on a run to the city to find out what's going on. We're all going to stay in the _Hyperion_ tonight. Tomorrow we'll get the supplies from the ships and decide what to do next. Right now we need to get to the village."

They crossed the creek on a wooden footbridge. Kara recognized where they were. It was the place she had found Daniel the first day she'd gone looking for him, the day he'd admitted to her that he was a Cylon.

With Targa and Beck in the lead carrying torches and several of the Marines carrying flashlights, they made their way single file up the narrow path and finally exited the woods near the wooden steps leading to the concealed the entrance of the _Hyperion_.

Natalie and Buddy were waiting for them at the bottom of the steps. As soon as they saw John, they both walked over and greeted him in a three-way hug.

"That's Natalie," Jade said. "She likes your father but not like a boyfriend."

"What'd she do? Dye her hair dark blond? It's not much of a disguise."

"Her hair has always looked like that."

Natasi left the group and joined John and Natalie. "Hello, sister. It's been a long time."

Natalie's confusion was evident. She looked at John. "How is it that you have this sister Six with you? She went with the Angel of Death to destroy the Colonies."

Natasi smiled slyly. "Did John not tell you? The humans have controlled Caprica since last year. He disappeared during the battle when he destroyed our baseship over Caprica. He killed many thousands of our brothers and sisters. I escaped only because I was in Caprica City at the time. "

Natalie gasped. "Is that true?"

"Thanks, Natasi," John said. "I was going to tell her everything as soon as we got the chance to talk."

"You lied to me," Natalie said.

"No, I just omitted certain facts."

"That's the same thing," Natasi said slyly to her sister. "And you thought you could trust a human."

John turned on her angrily. "You stay the frak out of this." He looked at Buddy. "Will you escort this woman…somewhere so I can talk to Natalie without blabbermouth here butting in every two seconds?"

Buddy stepped over to Natasi and said, "Please come with me."

There was a stunned silence and then John said, "When did you get a voice?"

Buddy answered him. "In the seven weeks and four days since you've been gone, Leonard Markham has given me a voice synthesizer and hooked it to my neural circuits to allow me to speak." Buddy's voice changed and became feminine in tone. "He gave me a voice also."

"Lucy?"

"Yes. It doesn't sound like my voice used to, but it is me." The voice changed back to a masculine one as Buddy addressed Natasi. "Come with me so John can talk to Natalie."

Looking smug and pleased with herself, Natasi ambled back to Hunter and the Marines with Buddy by her side.

"I knew bringing that bitch was a mistake," Kara muttered to Narcho and Jade and Lee who had just joined them.

Jade said, "I'd say your father has some explaining to do for lying to Natalie."

"He didn't lie to her!" Kara said. "He just didn't tell her everything."

Jade shrugged again. "Huh. All humans lie."

"Yeah, well so do Cylons."

Lee said, "Ladies, let's not get off on the wrong foot. We've got to work together."

Jade looked him up and down. "What does that mean? The wrong foot? Which foot is the wrong foot?"

Narcho said, "That's just a human expression. It means let's try to be friends instead of argue."

Zak walked over to them. "Want to introduce me?"

"Gladly," Kara said. "This is Jade. Jade, this is Lee's brother Zak."

Zak smiled at Jade, "You look like you know something about this place. The guys are hungry. Maybe you could show us somewhere we could build a fire and heat some grub while the grownups trade stories."

Narcho said, "Beck stopped by and told Emmalyn you were here. She and Dessa are making bread and stew. It'll be ready soon."

"Emmalyn's bread is the best I've ever tasted," Kara said.

Lee said, "So let's go to Emmalyn's."

Narcho led the way and Zak and Jade followed. Lee took Kara's hand and they began walking up the path with the other four Marines behind them. Bringing up the rear were Buddy and Natasi. It pleased Kara to hear Natasi stumble on the path and Buddy tell her to watch her step and be more careful. In what had to be something of an inside joke, Buddy's voice sounded just like Leonard Markham. Kara snickered.

"What's so funny?" Lee asked.

"Tell you later," Kara said. "I think Natasi has met her match in Buddy."

When they reached Emmalyn's, Dessa rushed out and threw herself into Hunter's arms.

"His sister," Kara said to Lee.

Then Dessa rushed over to Kara and hugged her the same way.

"I told you I'd come back and bring Hunter with me," Kara said.

The greetings and hugs were repeated with Emmalyn who was wiping tears of joy from her eyes. Kara made the introductions for everyone. She had just finished when Emmalyn noticed the ring on Hunter's hand.

"Is this why you didn't bring your daughter back with you?"

Hunter grinned and looked sheepish. "I brought some pictures…of Esmari and my wedding and…"

Targa said, "I get to see them first."

"I'm the oldest," Beck retorted.

"There's plenty for everybody," Hunter said.

Kara grinned. "I think that's why their ship was two hundred pounds overweight. Hunter brought all his wedding pictures."

As they all crowded into Emmalyn's dwelling, Kara glanced at Lee and smiled. Already she was leaving Caprica behind and adjusting to life in the valley. In some ways she felt like she'd never been away.

…

John watched the rest of the mission team head toward the dwellings before he took Natalie's arm and walked over to the wooden steps with her. They sat down side by side.

"I should have told you the whole story before I left, but everything happened so fast on that last day. I just never got a chance."

She sat not speaking. He could feel her hurt. Finally she said, "No more lies. No more _omitting_. Tell me everything."

John managed to give her the abbreviated version in about fifteen minutes.

"So all of my brothers and sisters who went to the Colonies are dead."

"All except Natasi and an Eight named Sharon and a Leoben that Cavil wiped out his memory. They came to the Colonies to destroy humanity, Natalie. The One who killed your Daniel was their leader. Sharon and Leoben are the only Cylons I ever heard express any regret for their cold-blooded slaughter of billions of innocent humans. I think the murderers got what they deserved. Most of the rest of the humans feel the same way."

"Is that what your soldiers plan to do to us?"

"No. The President of the Colonies wants to form a coalition government with those of you who are willing to live with us in peace. I talked to her about you. She's very anxious to meet you. She wants you to play a part in the transition government."

"You personally spoke with the President of the Colonies?" Natalie asked with disbelief in her voice.

"That's the other thing I failed to mention. She's my wife."

Again there was a long silence. John knew he'd given her a lot to digest so he let her think while he unzipped the top part of his flight suit and slid his arms out of it. The evening was warm and humid and he was starting to sweat in the insulated suit.

She finally asked, "How is D'Anna? Is she in prison?"

"No. She's staying in an apartment near Bianca. She's seeing a specialist who has put her on complete bed rest. She's being given the best of care. If she has the baby now, there's the slimmest chance he'll survive. The Eight on Caprica, Sharon, is married to one of my daughter's friends. They have a baby, Hera, born six weeks early. The same doctor who is taking care of D'Anna saved Sharon's life and a neonatologist saved the baby. They're doing fine now."

"What are your plans for D'Anna and your child?"

"I don't know, yet. Now tell me about what happened here after I left."

"On the night you escaped, Buddy and I stayed at the airfield for several hours waiting for the centurion to bring Sonja and Leoben back in the Heavy Raider. Finally just before dawn I knew something had gone wrong and I went back to my house. Simon and Petra had stayed there with Cassie. The house was empty so I went to the clinic. Cavil was questioning Laszlo who maintained that you had kidnapped his wife. Dodona Selloi said the same thing but their words fell on deaf ears. Centurions had brought Yoshimo and Cavil was questioning him, too. The poor man knew nothing. I demanded that they be released but Cavil refused. I didn't know what to do. I was afraid to mention Simon and Petra since I didn't know what had happened to them. I hoped they had gotten away and were hiding. My hopes were pointless. They were brought in by centurions shortly after I got there. They'd hidden in the woods and were found."

With a feeling of terrible dread, John asked, "What did Cavil do to them?"

"Simon was executed and not allowed back on the planet. He's currently on the res ship. Petra was taken to the prison."

"No. Oh, God, no. What about Cassie?"

"Cavil gave her to one of his pet Eights who wanted to raise a child. I can still hear Cassie screaming when Cavil took the child from her mother after they'd killed her father. I begged him to let me have Cassie, but he refused."

John felt sick. "Where is she now?"

"Somewhere in the city. One of my three centurions is there gathering as much information as he can. I told him to try to find out where the Eight who took Cassie is living. My centurion will eventually find Cassie. He knows he has to be careful and not arouse suspicion. Now tell me what happened the night you escaped, John?"

Barely able to talk for thinking about Cavil's victims, John told her about their escape.

He finished by saying, "I should have taken Sonja and Leoben with me. At least they'd still be alive."

"Sonja is boxed at the res facility at the prison. Leoben and Petra's Simon are on the res ship. Only the first twelve copies of any model can download at the prison. Sonja is the tenth copy of our model."

"What about Natasi? What number is she?"

He heard disgust in Natalie's voice. "She's the Second Six."

"So if something happens to her here, she'd download at the prison."

"Yes. I'm not sure she knows it, though. You don't trust her, do you?"

"Not entirely. She's in love with a human on Caprica. My wife and the Attorney General promised Natasi that she could bring her lover here and make a life with him if she helped us. I guess it depends on which feeling is stronger…her love for Gaius Baltar or her desire to defeat the humans here. After the way she just tried to cause trouble between us, I don't know what to think."

Natalie sighed. "We Sixes feel emotion strongly although we may not always show it. If she's really in love with this man and wants to spend her life with him, she'll help us. If not, she'll look for the first opportunity to escape and betray us. I think we should watch her carefully."

"Maybe we can enlist Buddy's help or one of the liberated centurions."

"Buddy would do anything you ask him to do, John. When we got word that you'd landed on the road, I've never heard Buddy so happy."

"It's great that Markham gave him a voice…and Lucy. How are things going with you and Daniel…the real one, not your cat?"

"He spends most of his time talking to Lucy. I'm beginning to get used to it. I'm sure you and your wife had a happy reunion."

He shrugged. "D'Anna's presence caused a few problems, and I told Laura about Sonja so…we're working on our issues. I couldn't believe how much my son had grown. Seeing him or Kara was what I looked forward to the most each day. If there's one thing Laura and I agree on completely, it's that the children are our future."

"D'Anna and her son must return to us. You do understand that, don't you?"

"Yes. There's no place for them on Caprica. What our baby represents would be drowned out by the hatred and bitterness most humans feel because of the holocaust. This will be the world where we get a chance to start over and do it right."

Natalie put her hand gently on his arm. "You belong here also or haven't you figured that out yet."

He didn't want to say the words out loud because he couldn't bear to think of leaving Laura and Braedon and Kara and everyone else he loved behind. He tried to imagine splitting his life between two worlds and found he couldn't go there either. So he changed the subject.

"Do you think Cavil would do something to Sonja while she's boxed?"

"I don't know."

"How do you reverse the process…how do you _unbox_ her?"

"The tank must be activated by replacing the control box. The copy must have enough time to wake up and get out of the tank. It takes several minutes. Sonja will be naked and vulnerable. She might be very confused. She'll probably have a bad headache."

"Where is Cavil now?"

"He's probably back in the city. He's been here twice looking for me with his centurions. Jade and Buddy and I and the liberated centurions are living deep in the _Hyperion_. Thank God that Cavil has yet to figure out this mountain hides the ship. On his last trip he left four centurions that were to notify him if we showed up, but Buddy quickly liberated them. They understand the need to continue at their guard posts in case Cavil returns."

"How did you and Buddy and the others get here to the valley?"

"While Cavil was meeting with the council at the settlement, Buddy liberated another centurion who then got on board a transport that was taking produce to the city. Following Buddy's instructions, he borrowed a small transport and flew back here that night. I knew Cavil was going to have his centurions take me to his ship. He just didn't have the guts to do it in front of the council. As soon as we prevailed and saved Dr. Silva from being sent to the prison, our meeting broke up. Buddy and I returned to my house, got some clothes and my cat, and we hid in the woods near the airfield until after dark. The centurion landed just long enough to pick us up. We stayed under the dradis and he brought us here. Then he took the ship back to the city. He's supposed to be gathering information. We sent one of the other liberated centurions to the city last week. It's only a hundred miles. A centurion can easily cover it in less than a day. We're waiting for him to come back with news."

"Is Cavil still searching the forest for the pilots?"

"No. He's pulled all his centurions back into the city."

"I'm going to figure out a way to get to the prison and get Petra and Yoshimo. Then I'm going to get Sonja from the res facility."

"That will only get you and them killed."

"I don't think you understand. In one week or less an invasion force is going to jump into space over this planet. What do you think Cavil will do to them then?"

Natalie put her face in her hands. "He'll kill them rather than let them be rescued. He's become as vengeful and evil and crazy as the Angel of Death. The council saved Dr. Silva from being sent to prison, but we weren't so lucky with Yoshimo. Cavil has always hated Yoshimo's pacifist religious influence on us. Yoshimo was sacrificed to Cavil's pride as were Petra and Cassie and their Simon. They were made out as traitors for bringing Rachel here. Cavil had to make an example of them."

"Do you think he put Sonja's hand in the stream before he boxed her?"

"He wouldn't have to. When Sonja downloaded, her memories became part of the shared consciousness of the Sixes. All Cavil would have to do is have one of his pet Sixes access her sister's memories in the tank. That's the only way he could have found out so quickly that you took Rachel or that Petra and Simon were at my house. He was furious that both Rachel and D'Anna were beyond his grasp."

"If he was that angry, why didn't he hop in a ship and go to Caprica to get them?"

"Pride…for one thing. He was ashamed that he'd let the mother of the peacemaker and one of the protectors slip through his fingers. He would not have wanted to admit that horrible blunder to the Angel of Death for fear of being boxed himself. I've had a great deal of time to think about his state of mind. He had to stomp around and make a big show of punishing some of us, but I believe once he had a chance to cool off and think, he's glad he doesn't have to deal with D'Anna and Rachel anymore. I think he's glad to be rid of the whole peacemaker problem. That's another reason I think he's didn't follow you to Caprica to try to retrieve them. I wish now that he had. We'd be rid of him."

"So let me make sure I've got everything straight. Petra and Yoshimo are at the prison. Sonja is boxed at the prison res facility. Leoben and Simon are on a baseship and can't return to the planet. Laszlo is still working as the doctor in Settlement Alpha. Cassie was given to an Eight in the city but we don't know which one or where she is."

"Yes. That's right."

"I know Simon mentioned something about dissecting stillborn babies. He was afraid Cavil might have let a Four in the city do that to Rachel to try to determine what made her special. You don't think they would…" John couldn't bring himself to say it. The thought of something like that happening to Cassie was too much for him to contemplate.

"I don't think so," Natalie answered. "Cassie isn't special in the sense Cavil thinks Rachel is special. I just hope the Eight doesn't get tired of taking care of a child. Cassie wasn't a year old when she was taken from Petra. She still needs a great deal of care. Cavil's pet Eights are all rather immature and self-centered. I can't see them lovingly caring for a child any more than I can see Jade caring for one…at least not right now."

John was trying to decide where to start formulating a plan for the rescue of his friends when Kara walked up.

"Emmalyn sent me to find you."

John stood and put his arm around Kara's shoulders. She had also unzipped the top part of her flight suit and was in the dark tank top and sleeveless gray t-shirt like he was.

"My daughter, Kara," he said to Natalie. "She's the best human Raider pilot you'll find. She's also not half-bad in a Viper."

There was soft humor in Natalie's voice. "You're not proud of her, are you?"

Kara smiled and put her arm around her father's waist. "I learned from the best. So you're Natalie, the First Six he told me about."

Natalie extended her hand in the distinctly human greeting. Kara shook it. She didn't understand why she immediately liked this Six when she disliked Natasi so much.

"We've got a rescue to plan," her father said, "but we need to eat first."

Kara grinned. "Second that. Emmalyn is standing guard over some bread and stew. If you don't claim it soon, I think the Marines will overpower her and take it."

John smiled, "I'd like to see them try."

"I'm just kidding. They're treating her like she's their ranking officer. I've never heard so many _yes ma'ams_ in all my life. Two of them are washing dishes. Dessa and Emmalyn both started crying when Hunter showed them Maya's pictures from the wedding. Dessa wants a dress just like Maya's. Targa and Beck are teasing Hunter about his _fast work_ and Hunter's grandfather looks like the proudest man in the world even though he couldn't see what Maya looks like. He asked me to describe her." Kara snickered. "I told him he should ask Hunter. Targa thinks she looks like Dessa only with brown eyes. And I think I know why Narch and Jade never got anything going on. I think he's sweet on Dessa. She sure likes him."

"You like Hunter's people, don't you?" John asked. "I can hear it in your voice."

"You know I do."

"Then let's go spend a little time with them," her father said.

With Kara on one side carrying a flashlight and Natalie on John's other side, they walked down the path toward the dwellings. The late summer air was warm and full of moisture from the rain. It reminded John of the ocean after a storm. They would eat together tonight and share the hospitality of the people who had saved his daughter's life and who now hid three Cylons and their centurions. Later he would tell the mission team about what had happened and ask for their ideas about how to rescue two of their fellow humans and also unbox a Cylon who had saved his life. Then hopefully they might find a little girl who called him _Chon _and reunite her with her mother.

...

Laura had just put her son to bed and walked back to her sitting room when her mobile phone chirped. Even knowing her husband was thirty light years away and the call couldn't possibly be from him, her heart still leapt at seeing his name come up on the caller id. Then she remembered that John had left his phone with Bianca.

"I hope I'm not bothering you," Bianca said when Laura answered.

"No, not at all. I just put my son to bed. I do that as often as I can. Some days I feel like I do practically nothing. I'd be lost without Maya."

"How is she?"

"She's pulled herself together and is coping. She's a very tough, very strong young woman."

"How are _you_ doing?"

"I was totally useless today. I couldn't even meet with the Quorum, but tomorrow I'll have to pull myself together. The government of Caprica won't stop for my personal problems."

"Well, I certainly don't want to add to your burdens, but John asked me to keep you informed of any changes in D'Anna's condition."

Laura was aware that she had taken a quick, deep breath. "What happened?"

"I went with D'Anna to her doctor's appointment tonight. Dr. Delos admitted her to the hospital. I plan to stay with her, but I've gone down the hall to the physician's lounge to call you."

"What about Rachel?"

"Brad Parker was kind enough to take her home with him tonight. It's a good thing. D'Anna's blood pressure is dangerously high, so much so that we fear she'll have a stroke. Dr. Delos wants to deliver the child, but D'Anna is refusing. I don't think she understands that her condition has become life-threatening not only for her but for the child as well. D'Anna's kidneys are showing reduced output which means they're already starting to fail. If that happens, other organs will begin shutting down as well. Dr. Delos and her team are working right now to get D'Anna stabilized."

"Is there anything I can do to help?"

"I understand that legally the Cylons are considered machines and have no rights, but we don't want to completely ignore D'Anna's wishes. Are we correct about her legal status?"

"Yes, you're correct. While Cavil and the Cylons were in control here, he granted citizenship and all rights to his brothers and sisters, but in one of the first acts of the Quorum after the Cylon defeat, they rescinded those rights. I opposed such a hasty move, but was easily voted down."

Laura heard Bianca sigh deeply. Then she said, "Tell me what you think John would do at this point."

"Is there any chance the baby will survive being born this early?"

"D'Anna is slightly over twenty-four weeks. Her child weighs just over a pound. It's possible."

"Will delivery help D'Anna as well?"

"At this point it's the only thing that will save her. Her motive for delaying is very noble, but the longer she waits now, the worse it is for both her and the child."

"Then I think John would say to deliver the baby in order to save its life and D'Anna's."

"Thank you. If D'Anna can't be stabilized, then before the night is over, I think Dr. Delos will deliver John's son by c-section."

"Are you going to stay with D'Anna?"

"Yes. I won't leave her alone."

"Please keep me informed if anything happens…no matter what time it is."

"I will." Bianca seemed to hesitate. "Did John ever mention a first name for the baby? Dr. Delos said John wanted the child to have his last name. I asked D'Anna but she said John would name their child. I ask because…if the child is stillborn…he should still have a name."

"No. We…John and I…" a sob choked Laura for a moment. "No. He never mentioned a name to me. I should have asked but I didn't."

"Think about something John would like. I'll keep you informed," Bianca said softly.

"Thank you."

They ended the call. Laura sat on the couch in her sitting room for a long time with her thoughts in such a jumble that she couldn't grasp a coherent one.

Finally she lifted her phone, found Edgar's home number and called him. Before he could ask her if something was wrong, she said, "I apologize for bothering you at home. Everything is fine here at Marble House. I'm calling because I want to make a trip tomorrow morning."

Her long-suffering head of security said only one word. "Where?"

"King's Bay Medical Center. The maternity floor."

"Does this have something to do with the Cylon?"

"Yes. She was admitted tonight. Her condition is very serious. There's a chance Dr. Delos will have to deliver the baby tonight. I'd like to see D'Anna…just in case…"

"You know I'm going to advise against it. Hospitals have so much traffic in and out that it's hard to provide adequate security on such short notice."

"Yes, I know. But it's been well over a month since my interview with James McManus. Certainly things have calmed down a bit. I won't stay long. I'll be in and out before anyone knows I'm there." When Edgar didn't comment, she continued. "Will you arrange it for me?"

"What time?"

"Eight o'clock."

"I'll make the arrangements."

"Thank you."

She ended the call and forced her thoughts away from what Edgar must be saying right now. She was doing the right thing. That's what mattered. She closed her eyes and prayed again to Zeus's wife Hera who safeguarded women through pregnancy and childbirth. She prayed that Hera would guide D'Anna's decision about the birth of her son. She prayed that the child would live. Laura Roslin prayed as she had never prayed before that she would not have to tell her husband that the child he believed in and had fought so hard to save had not survived.

...

If Leonard Markham was either surprised or upset about his additional guests on the _Hyperion_, he didn't show it. Instead he led them through the ship to a hatch and down a level to a large bunk room where the men all stowed their duffel bags. Kara went into a smaller eight-bunk room with Natalie and Jade and threw her bag on an empty bunk. Then she noticed Natasi's bag and moved her own to the top bunk on the opposite side of the room.

They all gathered in the passageway and Markham led them to what passed as the nearest thing the _Hyperion_ had to a ready room. As well as the group that John had brought from Caprica, he had asked Hunter, Targa and Beck to attend along with Natalie, Jade and Buddy. Natasi was now being escorted by one of the liberated centurions. John couldn't decide if she was amused or furious. She was concealing her feelings behind a fixed smile.

Kara and Lee sat beside each other. Narcho slid into the seat beside Lee. Jade had plopped down in an aisle seat beside Zak. Kara glanced at Lee and gave him a little eye roll. Zak was already working his effortless charm on Jade. It took him about thirty seconds to get a shy smile from the Eight.

"You'd better talk to your brother about taking advantage of her," Kara whispered to Lee.

Lee was also watching Zak. "I'll talk to him. I think he's just showing off for his buddies, but then again, maybe he really likes her."

Kara glanced around. Targa and Beck stood at the back with their arms crossed. Buddy and Natalie were at the front of the room with John.

Lee leaned over and whispered to Kara, "Your father didn't waste any time. I thought he'd give us the night off."

"Something is up. I could tell by the way he and Natalie were talking."

John got everyone's attention. "I know everybody is tired and I'll keep this brief, but we've got to plan a rescue mission for some friends who helped me escape from this planet seven weeks ago. What I'd like to do tonight is give you the facts and let you all think about the scope of what we need to do. Then tomorrow we'll reconvene and start tossing out ideas. I'm not asking anybody to go with me on the mission, but I do need your help in planning it."

"What's the situation, sir?" One of the Marines asked.

John briefly told them about Petra, Yoshimo and Sonja. While he spoke, Buddy drew floor plans on a whiteboard at the front of the room. John pointed to the first structure.

"My friend Buddy has accessed the plans of the Cylon prison. How many levels, Buddy?"

"Two levels above ground. Four below. The top two levels contain living quarters for the human guards and some brothers and sisters. Also a kitchen and laundry. All cells are below ground and are accessible by two elevators and one set of stairs. The elevators and all doorways have keycard and keypad security."

"How many cells?"

"Sixty per level. Two hundred forty cells in all."

"How many guards?"

"At one time there were a dozen human guards, five hundred centurions and thirty brothers and sisters. I don't know how many they have there now. The database has not been updated in many months."

"Thank you," John said. He looked at his team and the others in the room. "Okay, the next one is easier. There's a facility beside the prison that is multi-purpose. It contains a large lab, some storage, some hospital rooms and a resurrection facility for a number of Cylons. I'm interested in one particular copy named Sonja that Cavil has boxed. She's a Six who looks identical to Natasi. Sonja saved my life in the city and then she helped me escape. How many guards are we talking about, Bud?"

"Eight centurions and three rebirth nurses who attend each download, a Three, a Six and an Eight. Their services are needed very infrequently since the number of copies there is now limited and they are rarely killed."

Kara asked her father, "And you think you're going to do this all on your own? No way. I'm going with you."

Lee said, "Me, too."

Hunter said, "We're with you, too…me and Targa and Beck."

Buddy said, "As am I."

Zak said. "We came here as a team. We do all jobs as a team."

"We'll talk about that tomorrow. So everybody think about it," John said. "Obviously we can't go up against that many centurions in a head-on confrontation so I'm looking for something different. We're going to have to think outside the box."

From the back of the room Natasi said, "I would think your approach should be obvious. You're absolutely correct that you don't have the numbers to go against the guards and centurions at the prison. What you need is a subterfuge…a sister and several centurions bringing in a new prisoner or two would work."

They all sat and pondered her words. Natalie finally said, "Jade and I are out since I'm sure the centurions have been ordered to shoot us on sight and then box us."

Natasi smiled. "That would leave me, then, wouldn't it?"

Kara started shaking her head. "No frakking way."

John looked at Kara. "Let's hear her out."

Natasi continued. "You can't shoot your way in and out because you're vastly outnumbered and the centurions would alert all their brothers in the area. If I took two of these liberated centurions and two or three men posing as prisoners, then I would be allowed in with them. I'd need several strong men because the prisoners you're going after will probably need to be carried out. In the meantime the centurions could begin liberating their brothers."

"What about the Cylons and the human guards?" John asked.

"Your choice. Lock them in cells or kill them."

John said, "We'll need another group to enter the res facility to get Sonja. The operations should occur at the same time. The less time we spend at that place the better. Since Natasi can't be in two places at once, we'll need a second plan."

"I'll go," Natalie said. "It's the only way."

"No," Jade said. "You're our leader. We can't risk you. I'll go. The sister nurses who tend the tanks aren't fighters. I could take all three of them if I had to."

Buddy said, "I could accompany Jade."

"No," Natalie said. "We can't risk you either because of Lucy. She's the last one who knows the secrets of the creators. It will have to be another centurion."

John said, "Okay, we've got some scenarios to think about. Let's call it a night and everybody sleep on it. In the morning after breakfast we'll go get the rest of our supplies from the ships and bring them here. We'll gather later and talk again."

Slowly everyone left the room. Kara and Lee followed John down the hall to the small room he was calling home.

John unzipped his bag, unrolled a bath towel and set a bottle of whiskey on the table. "I'd offer you both a drink but I don't see any glasses."

"Do you really intend to try to rescue those people?" Kara asked. "Why don't you just take that sidearm and shoot yourself right now? What you want to do is insane and you know it."

"Kara…" Lee started.

"No. I'm going to have my say. Dad can wait until Admiral Adama gets here with the fleet. _Then_ we'll rescue those people."

"I don't expect you to understand, baby," John said. "The truth is Cavil will have two innocent humans and a Cylon who saved my life killed before he'll let us rescue them. Natalie agrees with me."

"So you're going to risk the whole damn mission team to do it?"

"I think Natasi and I can do it with a couple of the centurions, maybe Targa and Beck to act as the prisoners."

"That's crazy and you know it. Admiral Adama would never okay a mission this dangerous. We came here to find out what's going on. We've already found out they're not fighting a civil war. If Natalie's centurion comes back from the city we should have enough intel that I can jump to the fleet and report. Nowhere is it written that we have to wait a whole week."

John walked over and put his arms around his daughter before he kissed her forehead. "Go to bed, baby…you and Lee both. We're all tired. We'll talk again in the morning."

Kara recognized from his tone of voice that she would get nowhere with him tonight. Since he'd come back from Nereid he had the ability to zone out and ignore what he didn't want to think about or talk about. He was shutting her out like he had shut Laura out. Suddenly Kara was ashamed of some of the things she had said to her stepmother. She'd laid the whole blame for their separation on Laura and she now realized that her father had been responsible, too.

"Get a good night's sleep," Lee said to John. "Don't sit in here drinking by yourself."

"One small glass a night," John said. "That's my reward for making it through another day."

Out in the corridor, they saw that Markham had turned down the lights. Patches of the fluorescing bacteria were glowing on the walls.

Lee put his arm around Kara's shoulders. "John said this stuff is slowly eating the ship."

"Not my problem," Kara said grumpily. "At least you don't have to sleep in the same room with a Cylon who might or might not slit your throat in the middle of the night."

"You're welcome to come sleep with me," he said lightly.

"I'm sure the guys would _love_ that." Kara kissed him lightly. "I'd better take my chances with the Cylons. Tomorrow you can help me talk Dad out of his insane plan."

Buddy was standing outside the women's bunkroom door. "Keep her safe," Lee said to the tall centurion.

"That's why I'm here," Buddy said, "to protect everyone and to keep Natasi from leaving."

She put her arms around Lee and kissed him harder. It didn't take long for the desire to claim them.

"Go to bed," Lee managed to say, "or Buddy is going to get an eyeful."

"I would be glad to turn my back if you want some privacy," Buddy said.

"Thanks, but Kara needs her sleep," Lee said.

She opened the hatch. The lights were dimmed. The three Cylons were already in bed. Kara pulled off her flight suit and wearing only her underwear, she crawled up onto the top bunk. She thought that by now her father would have said something to her about her confrontation with Laura. She thought that sharing a room with three Cylons would bother her. She thought that she would have a hard time going to sleep. She was wrong on all counts.

...

Laura and her security team were fifteen minutes late leaving Marble House because Edgar wouldn't budge until he had gotten an okay from the team that had been at the medical center since before five o'clock that morning.

Edgar sat in the seat beside her. Another agent was in the front as well as the heavily armed driver. The usual lead and trailing vehicles were in place when they rolled out of the long driveway.

Laura could hear the faint but constant updates that were coming over all the earpieces. Her driver didn't take the most direct route but took one that would have been difficult for someone to second-guess.

She had slept poorly the night before and the circles under her eyes were more evident. She felt the weight of her responsibilities and knew she should be at her desk dealing with Caprica's many issues. Yet a part of her knew how important her self-appointed mission to visit D'Anna was.

They approached the medical center from the rear and her vehicle was immediately given entrance to the gated physician's parking lot. They pulled up to the key-card access door. An agent with an assault rifle slung across his chest let them in. Edgar and two other agents rushed her to the staff elevator and they rode up to the maternity floor.

Bianca met them at the elevator and they walked to the nearby physician's lounge which was occupied by only one doctor. Bianca introduced her to Dr. Delos and Laura shook her hand.

"What's the situation this morning?" She asked.

Bianca deferred to Dr. Delos who said, "We've managed to stabilize D'Anna's blood pressure. It's not rising, but I'm not sure she'll make it through the rest of the day if we don't deliver the child. Her kidneys have failed almost completely and she's too weak for dialysis."

"She's still refusing to let you deliver the child?" Laura asked in amazement.

"Yes. I'm not sure she's fully cognizant of how serious the situation is. She thinks we're trying to take the baby to kill it."

"Oh, dear gods," Laura said. "Will you let me see her?"

Bianca said, "Do your best to convince her to let Dr. Delos deliver the child."

"Is she in a private room?"

"Yes. I've got a nurse with her right now, but there's no one else in the room. I'll ask the nurse to step outside and give you some privacy."

With Edgar at her side Laura walked down the hall and entered the room. Dr. Delos motioned for the nurse to leave. Edgar didn't like it, but Laura insisted on going in alone. She closed the door and walked over to the bed. Even to her untrained eye, it was obvious that D'Anna was in perilous condition. Her face and body were swollen and not just with the child. Even her eyelids were puffy.

"D'Anna," Laura said softly and the Cylon opened her eyes. "Do you remember me?"

"Laura," D'Anna's voice was barely above a whisper. "Where's John? Why hasn't he come to see me?"

"John is on a mission. I know he told you he was going."

D'Anna nodded. "I thought he would be back by now. He's been gone a long time."

Laura realized that D'Anna was confused. John had left the day before.

"He asked me to come in his place. He wants you to let Dr. Delos save your life and your baby's life. Please let her deliver the child."

"John told you that?"

"Yes. He knows that Dr. Delos saved Sharon's life and little Hera's, too. You've got to trust her. She'll deliver your son and you'll start feeling much better. Please."

Laura saw resignation fill D'Anna's eyes. "If that's what John wants. He was kind to me despite what my brothers and sisters did to him."

"He doesn't blame you for any of that," Laura said and struggled with the tears that were filling her eyes.

Suddenly D'Anna reached out, her hand groping toward Laura who took it and held it in both of hers.

"Take my baby," D'Anna whispered. "I'm giving him to you."

"You'll get better. You'll raise your son."

D'Anna's blue eyes closed. "No. But my son will live. He's strong like his father. Promise me you'll take care of him. Promise me you'll love him and protect him. Keep him safe. Promise me."

"You have my promise," Laura managed to say.

The hand in hers relaxed into limpness and Laura gently laid it on the bed. D'Anna's breathing was becoming erratic. Through her tears Laura made her way to the door. She nodded to Dr. Delos who rushed into the room with the nurse. With Bianca on one side and Edgar on the other, they got Laura back to the physician's lounge.

She managed to control her tears and looked at Edgar.

"This medical center employs several priests. Please ask one of your agents to find a monotheist and bring him…or her to me."

"What should we tell him…or her?"

"A very ill woman is about to give birth to a baby who must be named and blessed. D'Anna placed her child under my protection and care so that duty now falls to me."

"Are you sure you want a monotheist?" Edgar asked.

Laura took a deep breath. "It's what his mother…and father would want."

TBC…


	56. The Calm Before the Storm

Chapter 56

The Calm Before the Storm

_The Planet_

_Day 57: We had a death today, the first one that has occurred since our trip began. One of the men on an expeditionary party that was exploring some mining tunnels was trapped under a rockslide. His skull was crushed. This has led Captain Prolmar and the other leaders to reevaluate the scope of our mission since we are not adequately equipped for much of the exploration that is being done. _

_Prolmar met with a great deal of resistance from the group that wants only to examine this planet for the mineral wealth it can contribute to the Colonies, most specifically Libran since the government provided over half our funds. The rest was provided by a group of private investors and by the scientific community via a number of grants, one of which is paying for my year as a medical team member. Naturally those who represent the Libran government and the private consortium want us to return with news of great mineral wealth, most specifically gold and diamonds and tylium._

_Is that search worth a life? Human nature being what it is, I've no doubt Captain Prolmar and his cautionary friends will not prevail and the hunt for some sort of mineral treasure will continue. Only a few of us appreciate the true bounty this planet has to offer along with an unparalleled chance to study our past. _

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

Kara was dreaming about dogs, most specifically about the dog that had belonged to their next door neighbor when she and her mother and Dreilide had lived in the big old house on Picon. It was a yappy little dog and would stand at the fence and bark at Kara if she played in her backyard either alone or with some of the other kids. The only time the little dog shut up was if Dreilide came out. He would whistle a tune for a few minutes and the little mutt would stop barking. Kara had told the other kids that her father had cast a magic spell over the dog. One of the older boys had started calling him the _dog whistler_.

In Kara's dream she was now petting the yappy dog only instead of barking, a deep rumbling noise was coming from it. Slowly Kara opened her eyes. The light over the bunkroom's door cast enough of a glow that Kara could see a large furry lump on the blanket beside her. She could also feel its warmth. The rumbling noise was coming from it.

She heard a snicker and Jade said, "As soon as Natalie left this morning, her cat sniffed you out. It must be your blond hair."

"What an honor," Kara said sarcastically, but she gently rubbed the cat behind the ears. The rumbling increased and the cat's front paws made a motion on the blanket like it was kneading dough. "Where did Natalie go?"

"Who knows? She took the other Six with her…Natasi. I don't like her. She thinks she's hot stuff because she lived on Caprica and knew the Angel of Death. I don't understand why Natalie is being so nice to her."

"They're sisters. Maybe she thinks she can change Natasi for the better."

"Natasi is like Sonja."

Kara snickered. "Is Sonja a bitch, too?"

"Sometimes. When she was staying at Natalie's one time, she got all freaky because Natalie didn't have any silk underwear she could borrow. Ugh. I wanted to take her to the forest with me and make her wear the same underwear for a week."

Kara started laughing. She was beginning to really like Jade.

"Sonja always has to have a man," Jade added. "If your father rescues her, she'll try to sleep with him again."

"That's not going to happen. Where do you think Natalie took her?"

"Maybe to see Daniel. They were talking about him last night before you came to bed. We have to go out early in the morning or late in the afternoon because we don't want to be caught outside in case Cavil drops by."

"I guess they took Buddy with them."

"Of course. Your father told him to watch Natasi and not let her escape. Even she's not stupid enough to try to get away from a centurion. I think Natalie wants Lucy and Daniel to tell her their story of what Cavil did to them."

Kara sat up on her bunk and the cat jumped to the floor with a thump. He walked to the door with his plumy tail twitching and Jade let him out the hatch.

"He goes outside to do his business. He hunts rats in the ship, too. He doesn't eat them. He kills them and brings them back to Natalie as a present. That's why that little shovel is by the door. She takes the rats outside and throws them in a field. The crows eat them."

"When I was living in the refugee camp I used to shoot rats with a slingshot. I threw them on the garbage dump. Crows and animals like possums came there to feast. If the wind was blowing from the wrong direction, it was so bad I lost my appetite."

"Sometimes we don't see the cat all day and then at night he'll show up. Natalie brushes him and talks to him like he's a baby. It makes me want to puke."

"Doesn't she feed him?" Kara asked.

Jade gave her an _are-you-kidding-me_ look. "From her own plate. If he's not here when we eat, she saves food for him. Yuck. His name is Daniel. Big surprise, huh?"

"Like the…artist who lives here in the valley?"

"You don't have to pretend with me. He told me you figured out he was a Cylon the first time you saw him, but you kept his secret. He likes you. He showed me the picture he painted of you. I thought if I ever met you, you'd have flowers in your hair and be wearing a flowing gown instead of a flight suit."

"Does anybody else in the valley know about Daniel?"

"I don't think so."

"My father knows and Lee and Hunter know, too."

"Huh," Jade said. "I hope Hunter and Lee know how to keep their mouths shut. I know your father does."

"Why is it a big deal now? Hunter's people have accepted you and Natalie living here."

"It's not my place to tell. Daniel should tell everybody when he's ready."

"Did Natalie tell you about Daniel and Lucy being in love?" Kara asked.

"The Sixes aren't as good at hiding their emotions as she thinks they are. I noticed the dopey look she gets when she's around him. She's in love with him. I think it's stupid to feel that way about a man."

"I don't."

"So you're in love with Lee?"

"Yes."

"Do you have sex with him?"

Kara snorted. "Do I look like a temple virgin?"

"Does it feel good?"

"You don't know?" Kara asked incredulously. "I thought most of you take breeders."

"Not me," Jade said scornfully. "That's for those wimpy brothers and sisters in the city. They want to frak and try to make babies instead of fight."

"So you don't like men. Do you like women instead?"

Jade glanced away. "I don't like either one. One night when I was in the forest, some human men caught me. They tied a blindfold over my eyes and they raped me…five of them. Then they killed me, but I downloaded. I remember it very well but I didn't see their faces…maybe they still live here in the valley and maybe they're all dead now. Natalie said some things are better not to remember and that I should move on with my life."

Kara said. "When I lived in the refugee camp, I used to go into the woods. One afternoon two big guys grabbed me. I know that's what they were planning to do, but another guy stopped them. He had a gun and they didn't."

"Were you hunting those men in the forest?"

"No. I'd found an old stone altar that the first people who came to Caprica had carved. I used to go there to get away from the camp."

"And worship your many gods?" Jade asked.

"Mostly I thought about my parents and everybody else the Cylons had killed. I didn't know my father was still alive."

"I went back to the forest after I downloaded. I was angry. I wanted to kill all the men I could find. After I killed a few more, your friend Hunter killed me. He cut my throat. I would have gone back and kept killing, but that's when Natalie stopped me from going into the forest. She cut my hair short and told me that I had a new look so I could be a new person. Natalie doesn't like killing. Neither does Yoshimo. I became a _project_ for them to tame my warrior ways."

"Did they succeed?"

Jade shrugged. "Did your father ever tell you how we met?"

"No."

"Ask him sometime. That should answer your question."

"You don't need to kill any more humans," Kara said. "If you want to stay here on this planet, you're going to have to get along with them."

"Huh. You sound just like Natalie."

"That's the way it is. Are you going to fight with us or with the Cylons?"

"I follow Natalie. Her enemies are my enemies. After Daniel told me what Cavil had done, I realized I'd been killing the wrong ones. I'll fight now with the humans if it gives me a chance to get to Cavil. I want to personally cut him into tiny pieces."

"I'd hate to have you on the other side." Kara stood up and stretched. "I need to take a shower."

"We only have one bathroom and one hot water heater so we have rules about taking showers. Markham says turn on the water, get wet, then turn off the water, soap up, turn on the water and rinse off. It's more important now that we have so many needing to take showers."

"So you're saying if someone takes a decent shower, they'll use up all the hot water?"

"That's right."

"Bummer. Maybe I'll go to Emmalyn's and take a hot bath tonight. Their water comes from a hot spring. It never runs out."

Jade grinned. "Or you could shower with someone."

Kara smiled back. "Been there. Done that."

"With Lee?"

"Lee's the only guy I've ever been with."

"What about Lee's brother, Zak? Has he been with a lot of girls?"

"A lot. Look, just take my advice and stay away from Zak. He and his girlfriend broke up not too long ago. He's not ready for another girlfriend."

"Why do you think I want him for a boyfriend?"

"Because you've asked about him twice and last night you sat beside him. In humans that means you're interested."

"I'm not a human."

"Look, Zak might…shower with you, and you'd probably enjoy it a lot, but I don't think…I just don't want to see you get hurt."

"Huh. I know how to take care of myself."

"I don't doubt that, but…just be careful."

"Why are you so concerned about me?"

Kara wondered how much to tell Jade and then said, "When I was at our military academy, I roomed with an Eight named Sharon. She's married to my best friend now. They have a little girl named Hera, four months old. You don't look like her too much with your short hair, and you sure don't act like her, but…" she shrugged. "Sharon is a friend. That's all."

Kara unzipped her bag, found clean underwear and sweats and a towel.

She had realized the night before that they were all sharing one bathroom. Markham told them that the others had been stripped of the sinks and commodes to furnish the bathrooms of the village dwellings. Markham lived on the first level of the ship and he still had his own bathroom, but the other levels had been gutted to furnish the dwellings. Markham's parents had kept some of the scientific areas intact, areas that their son now tended, but the rest of the ship was a ghost ship buried in the earth under tons of rock and dirt instead of sailing through the heavens as she had at her finest.

Walking down the corridor toward the bathroom, Kara felt a pang of sadness as she realized that she was actually in the grave of a once state-of-the-art vessel. Her only consolation was that the story of the second _Hyperion_ mission could be completed, the question mark about the expedition's fate erased from history.

When she reached the bathroom, Zak and two of his buddies were clad in towels and were standing at a long mirror above the four remaining sinks. They were shaving.

"Morning," Kara said as she walked behind them toward the showers.

"We don't have much hot water…" Zak started.

"I've already heard," she called back over her shoulder. "Where's Lee?"

"I don't know. He was gone when we got up. I guess he wanted to make sure he got a hot shower. The guys and me are getting ready to go get the rest of the supplies and equipment from the Heavy Raider."

"Need any help?"

"We've got it covered."

"I need to talk to you about something later…in private."

Her remark got Zak some ribbing from the other Marines. Kara just rolled her eyes and kept going. She wanted to tell Zak not to take advantage of Jade. The young Cylon could probably easily defeat Zak or any of the rest of them in combat, but her naïve heart was another matter.

Kara took a quick shower, dutifully turning off the water and shivering while she used the soap. Warmth from the outdoors did not penetrate two levels deep underground and Markham obviously didn't run the heat during the summer. She guessed it was maybe sixty-eight degrees. Even after she was dry and in her sweats, it took several minutes for the goose bumps to go away.

She walked down the hall to her father's door and knocked. He called for her to come in. She found him on the floor doing push-ups. He was wearing sweatpants but had taken off his sweatshirt. As he stood and pulled it on, she again saw the scars on his chest from the surgery that had removed a bullet. She wondered about any scars the Cylons might have inflicted but she knew better than to ask him. He'd made it clear that he wasn't going to talk to her about what had been done to him at the prison.

"How'd you sleep?" He asked.

"Better than I thought." She glanced at the table and saw a mug. "I see you found something to drink from."

"Natalie brought me a cup of tea before she left this morning. She took Natasi to visit Daniel."

"So are you and Natalie…?"

"No."

Kara shrugged. "Just checking. Jade said Natalie is in love with Daniel."

"That's right. You want to tell me why you were disrespectful to Laura the day before we left?"

"I figured she would rat me out." Kara said sullenly.

"She mentioned it because she was hurt. She was trying to apologize to me because she feels like all our problems are her fault."

"Most of them are."

"You know better than that. I won't exactly take a prize for _husband of the year_ in anybody's book."

Kara couldn't meet her father's eyes. "I knew I should have kept my mouth shut but once I got started, I couldn't stop. I think she should have treated you better."

"Kara, she loves you. She's not trying to be your mother and tell you what to do, but she does want a decent relationship with you. She deserves something more from you than your smart mouth. If you have something to say, you say it to _me_. Don't take it out on Laura."

Not willing to concede completely, Kara said, "She still didn't treat you right. You'll never make me believe she did. You don't turn your back on somebody you love…not like she did to you."

"Listen, baby, my situation with Laura is nowhere near as simple as you're making it out to be."

"Do you not _love each other_ anymore?"

"I'll always love her, but sometimes it takes more than just love to overcome…the kind of problems we've got right now." He took a deep breath. "Kara, I brought a Cylon back to Caprica who is pregnant with my child. I had a relationship with another Cylon while I was here. Put yourself in Laura's place. What if Lee had done that? Would it be as simple as you two still loving each other?"

Kara was staring at her feet. "Probably not," she muttered thinking about the problems she and Lee had dealt with just because she'd stolen the Raider. She tried to imagine how Lee would have reacted if she and Hunter had slept together. She began to see that Laura's dilemma was more complicated than she'd thought.

Her father continued. "Now add to the situation the fact that Laura is the President of the Colonies. Her private life is fodder for every tabloid and magazine and blogger out there who considers it his or her business. Hell, everybody on Caprica feels like they have a right to weigh in on her every action whether it has to do with politics or not. The very last thing she needs is to have to defend me to anybody."

He was right and Kara knew it. "Brae still needs you."

"I know he does." John took another deep breath. "I'm going to have to bring D'Anna and our son back here when the fighting is over and he's strong enough. I'm probably going to wind up splitting my life between here and Caprica. I don't see any other way."

"You won't be living on either planet if you go through with the insane rescue you've got in mind. We'll get to have a _real_ memorial service for you…and everybody who goes with you, too."

"I was tired last night…and I was really upset when Natalie told me what had happened to Petra and Yoshimo and Sonja. I jumped the gun talking about a mission to rescue them right now. Our primary task is to find out the situation on Nereid. We'll do that first."

"What do you mean _first_?"

"After we accomplish our main objective and you've jumped back to the G_alactica_ with the data, I'll carry out the rescue mission. I'm not going to let Cavil have them killed."

"So you'd rather die trying to rescue them," she said angrily.

"If it comes to that. Now go put on your valley clothes and let's get some breakfast. I'm going to grab a shower." He glanced at his watch. "Emmalyn is expecting us in about twenty minutes."

"I thought I'd lost you…twice," Kara almost choked on the words. "Please…"

He walked over and put his arms around her like he had done the night before. "Everything will be all right, baby. I've got faith. You need to have it, too."

"Our faith or theirs?"

He squeezed her in a hug. "Mine."

...

Laura, Edgar and Bianca were alone in the physician's lounge on the maternity floor of King's Bay Medical Center. Twenty very long minutes had ticked by since another agent had gone to find a monotheist priest. Bianca finally stood and announced that she was going down the hall to see if she could gather some news about D'Anna and the baby.

"I know you want me to go back to Marble House," Laura said to Edgar after Bianca left.

"That would be my first choice," he answered.

"If John were here, he would stay, but he's not here."

"Can't Dr. Cardenas handle it?"

"I'm sure she can, but she's done so much for us already. She stayed here all night with D'Anna. I can tell that she's exhausted."

The door opened and an agent walked in with a silver-haired priest clad in the black tunic and pearl gray collar favored by many monotheists. Laura and Edgar both stood. She could see the confusion in the priest's eyes.

"I see that you've recognized me." Laura said.

"Aye."

Laura looked at the name badge that indentified him as Father Jordan, a medical center employee.

She extended her hand and introduced herself and Edgar. "You're a staff chaplain here?"

The priest took first her hand and then Edgar's in quick shakes. "One of several. How may I be of service to you?"

"First I'd like to thank you for coming. Would you sit here beside me and let me explain why we need your services?"

They sat and as briefly as she could, she told him of the situation. She ended by saying, "The child needs to be named and blessed as is your custom."

"Even though the child is given a name for the birth certificate, we normally wait to perform the naming ritual until the twelfth day. We only do it at birth if the baby is stillborn or expected to die. Is that the case?"

Suddenly Laura found her eyes filling with tears again. "His mother is barely into her twenty-fourth week. It could go either way. I thought it best not to take a chance."

"The baby's father…"

"Who is also my husband," Laura said.

"Is he not available?" The priest asked hesitantly.

"No. He would be here if he could, but he's…somewhere that we can't contact him."

Laura was aware that while only a high-ranking few knew of John's mission, the absence of eight battlestars and the deployment of twenty thousand Marines had not gone unnoticed. A military spokesperson had made the announcement yesterday afternoon and it had been played repeatedly on the news and the internet. She was sure Father Jordan understood.

He nodded. "Is this the child you spoke of in your interview with Mr. McManus, the peacemaker who has been promised in both of our scriptures?"

"Yes."

"Will the child's mother be able to participate in the ceremony?"

Fresh tears flowed as Laura thought once again of D'Anna's sacrifice. Edgar found a box of tissues and handed it to her. She thanked him, plucked several and mopped her eyes.

"D'Anna is very ill right now and has placed her son under my protection. She said John should choose his name, but he's not here and there's no way to get in touch with him. My husband is very traditional in some regards. We named our son after his father and mine. I've given this a great deal of thought and tried to come up with something that would be agreeable to him. John had an older brother whom he loved and idolized. I've chosen his name…and that of my own dearly loved brother. The child will be named Sean Andrew Gallagher."

The door opened and Bianca came in. Laura could tell from her face that the news was not good.

She walked over and sat on the other side of Laura who grasped Bianca's hand.

"Dr. Delos delivered the child by c-section," Bianca said. "He's alive, but he's very tiny and very fragile. He's only thirteen inches long and weighs just one pound six ounces, but he's perfectly formed. Dr. Milo Junius and his team took him immediately to the neonatal intensive care nursery. That will be his home for a very long time."

Relief flooded Laura. She squeezed Bianca's hand. "D'Anna?"

Bianca shook her head and tears formed in her eyes. Laura held out the box of tissues.

"D'Anna stopped breathing during the surgery and was put on life support. Dr. Delos is almost certain she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. She's called in a neurologist to do some tests, but she's not hopeful. I'm so very sorry."

Laura introduced Bianca to the priest and they sat quietly while he read several comforting verses from the monotheist book of scriptures and offered a prayer for the baby and for D'Anna. Then he turned to the back of the book and read the naming and blessing ceremony. When he finished, little Sean Andrew was officially named and had received his first blessing.

Laura thanked Father Jordan and asked him if there was a special ceremony that he might perform for D'Anna. He assured her that he would do it as soon as he was allowed to see her.

"I need to go," Laura said glancing at Edgar who looked profoundly relieved. "Are you going to stay?" She asked Bianca.

"For a little while. I'd like to talk to Dr. Delos again and to Dr. Junius if he has time. Then I need to see about Rachel. I called Brad Parker early this morning and he said Kim would be happy to look after Rachel today since the school where Kim teaches hasn't resumed classes yet. They were going to let Leah stay home from day care as well. It seems she's quite adamant about playing big sister to Rachel, but I can't ask them to continue to care for her."

"I'd like for you and Rachel to move into Marble House with us," Laura said impulsively. "I can't bear the thought of you two being out at the airbase all alone and we've got plenty of room. There are three guest bedrooms just down the hall that aren't being used. I'll have someone get Rachel's crib and your belongings and bring them to us today."

"Are you sure?" Bianca asked.

"Yes. Maya and Mrs. Blythe can help with Rachel. You'll be free to visit little Sean if the doctors will allow it. You'll also be as safe with us as you are at the base."

"That would be very nice. Thank you."

"Our dinner table is almost empty now that Kara and Lee and Hunter are gone. I would love to have you and Rachel join us for meals."

On the way back to Marble House, Laura sat quietly and pensively in the back seat of her limo. She felt sad and drained and at the same time elated that the baby was alive, but she knew better than to think there was any guarantee that he would survive. When Dr. Delos had put D'Anna on complete bed rest, Bianca had explained to Laura the tremendous uphill battle the child would have to fight if he were born this early. She had no illusions that the tiny boy was out of danger just because he had been born alive.

"Bianca and her husband saved John's life, you know," she said to Edgar.

"Yes, ma'am."

"You don't approve of what I did today."

"My concern is your safety. I think that in putting the baby under your protection, you've done a noble and courageous thing, but if it gets out, it will only stir up the same people who threatened you before."

Laura sighed and looked out of the dark tinted windows and knew that by accepting the responsibility for tiny Sean, her world had again changed inexorably and there was no going back. But to have done anything less would have been to surrender a part of herself that she couldn't compromise.

...

The entire mission team had each been given one outfit of handmade clothes that were as nearly like the clothes made in Hunter's valley as could be fashioned on Caprica. It was Kara's idea since the team would stand out in their camouflage BDUs if Cavil made a surprise visit to the valley. But in outfits like Targa and Beck wore, the mission team would be able to move around freely. Even John would have some degree of freedom because even though he had met the Cavil in Settlement Alpha, he had never personally met the city Cavil.

One afternoon nearly a month earlier, Kara and Hunter had sat down with a designer and had told her what the valley clothes looked like. Kara had been surprised at the amount of detail she'd remembered. A week later, they had approved three different basic outfits for the men and one for her. Kara knew that if she needed more clothes, Dessa would let her borrow something.

She now sat on the low stool at Emmalyn's while Dessa's nimble fingers worked their magic turning her loose hair into a tight braid. John and Emmalyn sat with Hunter and Lee at the table. Breakfast was over and the dishes washed. Kara sneaked another look at Lee. She'd seen him in uniforms and in a flight suit and dressed up in a suit and dressed down in jeans or shorts. She'd seen him wrapped in a towel. She'd seen him naked, but she'd never seen him dressed like he was now in simple homespun clothes. He was just as handsome posing as a valley farmer as he was as Hunter's best man.

Lee glanced in her direction and smiled. She knew he'd never seen her in a long homespun skirt and blouse.

Zak appeared in the doorway and addressed John. "We've finished unloading the supplies from the ships, sir. Everything is stowed in the _Hyperion_. The guys are wondering what we should do next."

"Take it easy for a while. Enjoy the rest of the morning."

"Aren't we going to meet and talk about rescuing your friends?"

"Not yet. I've decided to postpone the rescue until after we learn more about the situation. Natalie thinks her centurion might return today. We'll wait."

"Would it be all right if we helped some of the people with their chores? Hunter told us last night that harvest will begin soon. There are tools to sharpen, things like that."

"That would be fine," John said. "Just don't get in their way and don't get hurt."

Zak grinned. "No, sir. We might go fishing later this afternoon. Jade knows the way to the lake."

Dessa had finished Kara's hair. She glanced at Lee again. Then she followed Zak outside and walked partway up the path with him.

She didn't waste any words. "Lay off Jade. She's no match for your charm."

Zak smiled. "I wondered how long it would take for you to stick your nose in."

"I wasn't a bit surprised at how quick you made a move on her."

"Lighten up, Kara. All I did was talk to her. In case you didn't notice, she came and sat down beside me last night."

"She's never been with a man before."

Zak got a funny look on his face. "You're kidding."

"No…unless you count something that happened to her in one of her former lives."

"What?"

"She can tell you details if she wants, but she used to fight in the forest. Let's just say she got caught one night by five men. Enough said?"

The smile disappeared from Zak's face. "They raped her?"

"And then they killed her so this copy of her is still innocent. Don't make the mistake of thinking she's coming on to you. She doesn't know how. And for the gods sakes, don't let any of your buddies try to take advantage of her. I know how they feel about Cylons, but Jade has already told me she plans to fight with us."

"Give us a little credit. We figure anybody living is this valley is one of the good guys."

"Treat her nice, Zak. I know you can."

He grinned. "As a favor to you. You're going to be my sister one day."

"How about as a favor to yourself? My dad told us at breakfast how he met Jade. Ask him if you don't believe me. I would not want to get on her bad side."

Zak gave her a little salute. "Yes, sir." Then he turned and walked up the path toward his buddies waiting at the road.

When she got back inside the dwelling, Hunter said, "The apples have started to ripen. If we've got the morning free, I'd like to take a wagon up to the orchard and get as many as we can." He addressed John. "Is that all right with you?"

"Sure, why not," John said. "I'll stay here with Emmalyn. She mentioned something about a lot of ripe tomatoes in her garden that need picking."

Emmalyn smiled. "If you're still free tomorrow, I'll put you to work peeling apples. We always make apple butter and apple jam with the first wagonload. Sometimes we make a little apple cider."

That earned a huge grin from Kara. She took her mobile phone from the pocket of her skirt and put it on the table. "I want pictures of my dad picking tomatoes."

"Let's go," Hunter said. "We don't want to waste the morning."

"Go get the wagon ready," Emmalyn told him. "I'll pack some bread and cheese and mead for you to take. Lee and Kara can bring it."

"Me, too," Dessa added.

In twenty minutes they were on their way. Hunter drove a small wagon that was pulled by a mule. The wagon was filled with sturdy baskets woven of the long flat-bladed grass that grew in one of the meadows. Lee, Kara and Dessa walked behind the wagon.

"Where did you go this morning?" Kara asked him. "Zak said you were gone when he got up."

"I wanted to see a little bit of the valley so I sat on the wooden platform with Markham and watched the sun rise. Then I went for a walk. I followed a path up a hill. It led to their cemetery."

"What do you think?"

"I can see why you like it here. It probably reminds you of camping out with Karl and his family back on Picon."

She smiled. "Mostly it reminds me of when Karl and I lived in the little stone house."

Dessa caught up with them and put her arm around Kara's waist. "I'm so glad you're back. Did you and Lee get married like Hunter did?"

"No…not yet."

"Are you going to?"

"Someday," Lee said. "Whenever Kara is ready."

"Did he give you that gold ring?"

"He did."

Dessa giggled. "Did Hunter give his wife a gold ring?"

"Just like his," Lee answered. "I was with him when he bought it."

"Are you Hunter's friend?"

"Yes, I am."

Kara said, "While we were gone, Lee and Hunter lived together in a…dwelling in Caprica City."

"Like ours?"

"Sort of."

Dessa lowered her voice. "Someday I want to get married like Hunter did. I want to wear that pretty white dress."

Kara said, "Before you get married, you have to have a boyfriend."

"I have a boyfriend, but you can't tell anybody."

"Narcho?" Kara whispered.

"Who told you?" Dessa asked suspiciously.

"I guessed."

"He holds my hand sometimes. One night he kissed me."

"On the mouth?" Kara asked in surprise.

Dessa giggled again. "Don't tell Aunt Emmalyn. She'll get mad. She told me I shouldn't let a boy kiss me or touch me."

"Did he touch you?" Kara asked.

"No. He just kissed me." She smiled bashfully. "Maybe I kissed him first."

Kara glanced at Lee and asked, "So where is Narcho this morning?"

Lee answered. "Helping Targa and Beck. They're sharpening scythes…getting ready for the wheat harvest. They're going to join us picking apples if they get through in time. How far is the orchard?"

Kara pointed in the distance on the side of a hill. "See all those trees? That's the orchard."

"That's probably two miles away."

She chuckled. "Yeah. Two miles on this road and then we start climbing a smaller one for at least another mile. Aren't you glad you've been working out?"

"Lords of Kobol. No wonder you lost weight while you were living here."

"Surviving here has been hard work, but these people have managed it."

Suddenly Lee understood why Kara shared a bond with Hunter, why she admired him. She and Karl had survived on their own for six months in a little stone cottage on Caprica. They'd had to fish and hunt for some of their food, but they'd had electricity and running water and a well-stocked pantry of home-canned vegetables. Then they'd lost the electricity in an ice storm that had severed the power lines and they'd struggled just to keep enough firewood cut to keep the woodstove going. Karl had told him that if the soldiers hadn't found them, he felt like they would have starved to death. Hunter's people had none of the modern amenities and they'd survived in this valley for over sixty years. They'd done it by hard work and pulling together.

He looked at Kara. "How many people do you think will leave here and go to Caprica?"

"I don't know."

"Can I go?" Dessa asked.

"You mean to live or just to visit?" Kara asked her.

"I want to go visit Esmari. Then I'll come back here. This is my home."

Kara smiled at Lee. She didn't think Dessa was the only one who would always think of this valley as home.

…

"You have something you'd like to tell me?" Emmalyn asked John when they were alone and sipping another cup of tea.

"I'm not sure where to start."

"Hunter told me you want to rescue Yoshimo and Sonja and another young woman you met in the city. He said the Cylons have put them in prison."

"After we get the data we came here for. Natalie thinks one of her centurions might be back today."

"I'll have to tell you that even though we welcomed Natalie and Jade, we're all a bit uneasy about the centurions."

"Even Buddy?"

"No, not so much him, especially after Markham gave him a voice. Maybe if the other ones could talk they wouldn't seem so…big and intimidating."

"I can understand why you feel that way. In the past centurions have always been on the other side. They've been the enemy. But once Buddy removes that round piece of metal from them, they gain the ability to think for themselves. They realize that Cavil and his bunch have enslaved them. Buddy makes sure they understand that we're the good guys."

"Have you talked to Markham yet?"

"Last night. I shared a drink with him after everybody went to bed. We sat up talking until past midnight."

"I know he was anxious to find out if his device to neutralize the centurions was any help to you."

"A couple of scientists on Caprica were able to duplicate it. We brought some prototypes along with us. One of our battlestars is bringing some more. The only problem is that it can't be used around any of our electronics…like our communication equipment or weapons that have laser guides because it takes them out just like it neutralizes the centurions. Of course it's definitely an option if we're about to lose troops. Better to lose the wireless than a group of Marines. So…we'll see."

"I'm sure Markham understood."

"He did. He's a genius. I'd like to introduce him to a couple of guys on Caprica who would love to work with him."

"I don't know if you could ever get him to leave his beloved _Hyperion _much less travel to another world."

"He said Lucy is trying to draft him to help her make a humanoid body for her to download her avatar into. He wants to help her, but he doesn't even want to travel as far as their lab on this planet. It doesn't take a psychiatrist to see that Markham has some…issues. He told me that he and Buddy have been playing chess at night after Natalie and Jade go to bed. Markham wasn't happy with me when I told him I'd asked Buddy to guard Natasi and make sure she didn't try to sneak out. He really looks forward to their nightly chess matches. I told him I couldn't help him out there. Laura plays chess but I don't."

Emmalyn smiled. "Did he say who won most of their games?"

"He did at first because whoever programmed the centurions didn't put in a chess subroutine, so he had to teach the game to Buddy. Now I think Buddy wins most of the time."

"So the centurions can learn."

"At the end of the First War a group of the old centurions, the U-87s and the 0005s abruptly left the Colonies. We were all told they went to find and settle a world of their own. We had no idea that a group of humans went with them or that Nereid was their destination. Now we know the creators promised the old centurions they'd create not only humanoid versions, but a new centurion as well. Of course the old centurions didn't know that their new brothers would be slaves not only to their creators, but to the humanoid Cylons as well."

"I guess you thought that you were rid of them forever."

"Not at first. The pilots I served with on the _Solaria_ couldn't believe it. We all thought it was a trick. The war had been going on for over ten years by then. I'd been flying a Viper off a battlestar for almost two years. It was just too good to be true. We stayed on alert status and kept flying CAPs for months. Then we heard that a group of diplomats had written something called the Cimtar Accords declaring peace. Basically the Accords said '_you leave us alone and we'll leave you alone._' We never heard a word from the Cylons after they signed the document. We built an Armistice Station and declared a neutral zone. For the next twenty-five years an ambassador went to the Armistice Station on the anniversary of the signing. The Cylons never showed up until they jumped into space and destroyed the station in a surprise attack and went on to destroy eleven of the twelve Colonies. They came close to destroying some of Caprica's major cities. They just didn't do it with nukes. There was no way to get an accurate count of the dead in those attacks, but estimates run from five to six million if you count those who later died of disease and starvation."

"Natalie has told me how one group went to the Colonies and the other group stayed here. Based on the way we've been treated by Cavil, I can't tell much difference in the two groups."

"I can see why."

"Natalie is nice, as is Jade, but you know Sonja wasn't too friendly. She obviously felt she was better than us. I can't understand why you're so anxious to save her."

John shrugged. "I know she wasn't too nice to all of you here, but she saved my life in the city and she gave me a lot of freedom. More important to me, though, she let me get Kara back to her ship so she could escape. I owe her. It's just that simple to me."

"You don't want to resume your affair with her?"

"That was over long before I left Nereid."

"Then you must do what you feel is right."

"As soon as we get our report ready for Admiral Adama and Kara leaves with it, I'll start working on a plan to save my friends."

"I look forward to seeing Yoshimo again. Even though he's a monotheist, he's a good and holy man."

"I just hope he's survived the prison. It's not a very nice place and he's not young."

"You know we'll welcome him as we will the young woman whose child was taken. We'll even welcome Sonja. It seems our valley has once again become a refuge."

John smiled. "You're a good woman, Emmalyn. When the fighting's over, there's someone I'd like to introduce you to…the doctor on the _Galactica_. His name is Sherman Cottle. He likes beautiful women so I think you two would get along just fine."

A blush crept into Emmalyn's cheeks. Then she said, "Oh, get on with you and hush such talk. We've sat around far too long. I think it's time I showed you my garden and put you to work."

…

The group arrived at the orchard an hour after they started. Kara opened the food basket, took out the big jug of water and poured a tin cup full of the cool drink. She passed the cup to Dessa who finished it and gave it back to Kara. She filled it again and passed it to Lee. He was beginning to get his breath.

"Fun, huh?" She asked.

Hunter tied the mule's harness to the trunk of an old apple tree. "Okay, here's how we do it. Take a basket. Check the apples on the ground first. If they look ripe and don't have any major wormholes or chunks missing or big rotten spots, put them in your basket. Throw the bad ones in a pile. And watch out for yellow jackets and wasps. They love the soft, rotten spots. Once we get all the good ones from the ground, we'll pick the low hanging fruit."

Kara and Lee each took a basket. There weren't a huge number of apples scattered on the ground which made their job easier, but there were hundreds of trees. They moved slowly up the hill. By noon the four of them had covered three-fourths of the ground under the trees. As they got farther from the wagon, it took longer to carry the full baskets back, empty them and return.

Finally Hunter whistled and they stopped to eat. Kara stood up straight, stretched her aching back and watched Lee do the same.

"Let's hope Dad doesn't change his mind and decide to go ahead with his rescue tonight. I'd be worthless."

"He's going to get the data for the invasion first. Then we'll talk about the rescue again."

Dessa came over with the lunch basket and they shared the bread and cheese and cups of mead. They all ate without much talking. Kara tried not to act like she was famished. Then she stretched out on her back and looked at the sky through the branches of a tree.

"I feel a nap coming on."

Dessa giggled. "We used to put Esmari in her cradle for a nap after she drank her milk."

The day was hot, but a breeze ruffled through the trees. The air was full of the sweet smell of apples and grass and the earth. Lying in the shade Kara could hear the faint buzz of the wasps and yellow jackets. She began to zone out. Lee leaned back beside her and propped on his elbows.

"I hope nothing happens to this valley when we start fighting," he said. "It's the most beautiful place I've ever seen."

Words of agreement formed in her mind but were never spoken. Just before sleep claimed her, she decided that she and Lee would get married twice…once in Elosha's little temple and once in this valley.

...

Laura knew that for several days she had all but ignored the many problems facing the citizens of Caprica. On her return to Marble House from the medical center, Billy followed her into her office.

"I've got the delegation from Sovana cooling their heels in the big conference room."

Laura glanced at her watch. She was over two hours late for a meeting with them.

"Did you have refreshments brought in?"

"Yes. They've gotten very impatient, though, and are demanding to know where you are."

"Before I forget, I've asked Edgar to take care of getting Bianca and Rachel's things from the airbase. They're moving in with us. I told him to put them in the room just beyond Kara's. Call the cleaning staff and make sure the room has fresh linens and towels. Get another crib delivered."

Billy nodded and made a note on the e-pad he carried around with him all the time.

"Give me a minute to get presentable," she said before she went into her private bathroom, quickly redid her makeup and brushed her hair. When she emerged, Billy had just gotten off the phone with the cleaning staff supervisor.

"All right. I'm ready. Let's get to the meeting. Remind me again. What does this group want to discuss?"

Billy didn't need to consult his notes or her appointment book. "They blame the Sons of Ares for the temple bombings and want them declared an outlaw organization. Basically they want our military to treat them like enemy combatants and wipe them out starting with the compound they've built in the mountains outside Sovana."

"Dear gods," Laura said. "We've absolutely no proof that they've engaged in any hostile activity. Agent Darren's investigation shows the temple bombings are probably the work of the Soldiers of the One or the Right Hand of God or some other terrorist group."

Billy looked disgusted. "I know. I've got Darren's report in case we need to refer to it. Another thing. Tom Zarek joined the Sovana delegation about twenty minutes ago. One of them must have called him."

Laura straightened her shoulders. "Let's go. The sooner I get this over with, the better."

She walked into the conference room with a welcoming smile she did not feel pasted on her face. Tom Zarek had a cup of coffee in one hand and a sweet bun in the other. Life in Caprica City was certainly agreeing with him. His long-ago prison pallor was completely gone, replaced by a tan. He'd probably gained twenty pounds since Adar had appointed him to the Quorum. The fact that she hadn't seen Zarek in several weeks made his weight gain look more pronounced. If he kept on, he'd give new meaning to the term _fat cat politician_.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Laura said, "I do apologize for the delay. Something very unexpected came up that I had to handle personally. Please have a seat and we'll begin."

The meeting went about like she'd expected. She listened to their arguments and disparaging remarks for nearly thirty minutes. She gave Zarek credit. He let the delegates talk instead of butting in like he usually did. It was clear to her which one of them had called him since the man kept glancing at Zarek for his reaction.

Finally Laura said, "I appreciate all the information you've brought me and I'll certainly take it up with our domestic terrorist team, but you must understand that while the Sons of Ares may not be a group any of you would join, we've got absolutely no proof that they've committed any crimes or that they are behind the destruction of your temples. I think you're looking in the wrong direction. Traditionally the Sons of Ares have been ardent protectors of our faith and our places of worship…perhaps a little too ardent for some. You know the Cylons banned them as a group here in Caprica City and shut down the temple dedicated to Ares."

Zarek finally spoke. "I know you think the Soldiers of the One are responsible…"

"Our investigation seems to bear that out."

The lead delegate almost shouted, "Then why haven't we seen any arrests? Why are our temples still being destroyed?"

"Some suspects have been detained. Our interrogators question people every day. The problem is that those who belong to these shadow terrorist groups look just like you and me and our neighbors. And finding solid proof that they perpetrated these acts of violence is not easy. But I can assure you we will never stop trying." Laura stood. "Thank you all for coming. I _will_ pass along your concerns about the Sons of Ares."

Zarek followed her out of the room. "A word, please, Madame President."

Laura continued walking toward her office. "You never stop trying to garner favor with various groups of malcontents, do you? Or do you actually believe the Sons of Ares are blowing up our own temples?"

"I think everyone deserves the right to be heard," he said loftily, "even me."

"Make it quick then. I've got a lot of work to catch up on."

"Is it true the Cylon is in the hospital?"

"Medical information is confidential, Mr. Zarek."

"Not hers. She has no rights. She's a machine."

Laura struggled to control her temper. "I'm too busy for this nonsense."

"Do you know what your current approval rating is?"

"No, but I'm sure you do."

"Fifty-two percent, Madame President, down from ninety-three percent last November following your election. Why do you think that is?"

Laura turned. "I'm certain you're dying to give me your opinion."

"You've become a Cylon lover, pure and simple. On top of that, you're married to a _real_ Cylon lover. You went on record defending him, trying to get the people of Caprica to believe in some mythical peacemaker in order to get the religious element on your side and make your husband's acts seem less like treason."

"Not everyone shares your opinion." she said coldly. "Do not follow me any further or I will have my security guards escort you out."

She turned and walked into the outer office. She was aware that the eyes of her entire staff were on her.

"I'm right and you know it," Zarek said as he took a step into the room. "If you keep on, what do you think your chances of reelection are in three years?"

"Mr. Zarek is leaving," she said to the security guards who sat outside her office. They both stood. Laura knew that they would relish the chance to throw Tom Zarek out on his expanding rear end if he chose to try to follow her. Wisely Zarek stopped and retreated.

She went inside and closed the door and leaned back against it momentarily. Zarek was right and she knew it just like Edgar had been right. Taking responsibility for John's tiny son would not endear her to many of her constituents. Even though medical records were confidential, she wasn't foolish enough to think the news of Sean's birth wouldn't get out sooner or later. D'Anna had been in the hospital less than twenty-four hours and someone had already leaked it to Tom Zarek. People talked, even those who worked in health care. It was just human nature.

All she had ever wanted was what was best for the Colonies, especially for the children, and that included all of them, even ones like Rachel and Sean who were only half human. The welfare of the Colonies' children had been why she'd accepted Richard Adar's appointment as Secretary of Education nearly ten years earlier. It was why she had worked so hard to get schools started in the refugee camps. The children were the future. They deserved the best chance that could be given to them…all of them…no matter what their race or religion.

As she walked toward her desk, Laura found that she could almost laugh at Zarek's information. She wondered if in the coming days, an approval rating of fifty-two percent would sound good to her.

...

Kara woke up to Lee's kiss. She stretched. "Mmmmm."

"Wake up sleepy head," he said. "Time to pick some apples."

She moaned. "Do we have to?"

He took her hand and pulled her into a sitting position. "Targa and Beck and Narcho are on the road just below us. They'll be here in a few minutes. You've got a reputation to maintain."

She got to her feet. "Where are Hunter and Dessa?"

"Picking apples. Let's go."

"You go ahead. I want to talk to Narch for a minute. Even if she kissed him, he's playing with fire if he's putting himself in situations being alone with her."

"You know she doesn't seem _that_ mentally challenged to me. Maybe you're sticking your nose into somewhere it doesn't belong."

"Like I did with Zak about Jade?"

"Zak isn't stupid. He first slept with a girl when he was fifteen. He's had a little experience."

"It's not Zak I'm worried about. And he and I are cool now. If Jade castrates him, he can't say I didn't warn him."

"So go get yourself involved in Narcho and Dessa's romance. It doesn't matter what I say. You'll do it anyway."

Kara watched him stalk off up the hill. She opened a jar of mead, took a swallow and waited for the three men to get there.

"I need to talk to my wingman a minute," she said.

Narcho stopped and reached for the jug of mead. Kara handed it to him and waited until Targa and Beck had moved off up the hill.

"What's up?" Narcho asked.

"Tell me about Dessa?"

"Tell you what? We hang out at Emmalyn's. We go fishing sometimes. I help her in the garden."

"How often do you kiss her?"

"She told you?"

"Who else knows?"

"Kara, I swear, it was just one kiss. Nothing else happened."

"First she said you kissed her. Then she admitted she kissed you."

"We'd been to one of those things in the community center with dancing and fiddle playing and…mead. I was walking her back to Emmalyn's. She took my hand. When we got partway down the path to the door, she stopped and…" he shrugged.

"Did you kiss her back?"

"I really don't think that's any of your business."

"Okay. Just don't ask me for help if Targa and Beck find out."

"I am _not_ taking advantage of her."

"You like her, don't you?"

Nacho shrugged again. "Just leave it alone. It doesn't matter how I feel about her. I don't want to get shot with a crossbow."

Kara looked him in the eyes and saw sadness. "I'm sorry. You're right. It's none of my business."

"You don't trust me, do you? Even after I told you I wouldn't take advantage of her."

"I'm sorry I said anything, Narch. I can't seem to stop putting my foot in my mouth. First with Laura and then with Zak and now you. I'm sorry. Okay?"

"Dess is really sweet…and pretty…and there's nothing fake about her. I know she's got some learning problems because of what happened when she was born, but here in this valley you just don't notice it like we would back on Caprica."

"Come on. Let's go pick apples."

He took another drink of mead before he put it back in the picnic basket.

"Dessa is up there. You can walk back with her."

"I will never figure you out. You jump my case about her and now you tell me I can walk back with her."

Kara grinned. "You know I'm crazy."

"Beyond crazy. I hear you fly a Mark VII now."

"Who told you that?"

"Hunter. Are you going to take down some Cylon Raiders when Admiral Adama shows up?"

"If I have to. You sure you don't want to join us? The _G_ still has Mark IIs on board."

"I don't want to be arrested and thrown in _Galactica's_ brig. Besides, it's been too long since I've flown. I've lost my qualification. I'll fight beside Hunter and his uncles down here on the ground."

"I guess I'll have to settle for Lee as my wingman."

Narcho smiled. "I don't think that will be a problem for either of you. Now let's go pick apples before Lee comes looking for us."

"Or Dessa."

...

Laura sat on the couch in the sitting room outside the children's bedroom. Rachel slept in the child carrier near them. Laura was so tired she felt like she could fall asleep where she sat.

Maya walked out of the children's bedroom and pulled the door almost closed.

"Esmari is finally asleep," she said. "Where's Bianca?"

"She went to her bedroom to call Dr. Delos. I made the decision to keep D'Anna on life support even though a neurologist said she had a flat EEG."

"Which means?" Maya asked.

"No brain activity. According to the expert there's no chance she will improve."

"Then what's the point of keeping her body alive?"

"Because we can't think of her the way we would think of a human in the same condition. If the doctors are able to keep her body alive until we can get her back to Nereid, then she will do something the Cylons call _download_. Her consciousness will transfer into a new body. But if we take her off life support here, her death will be permanent."

"You'd do that for her…even knowing that she made John…?" Maya shuddered and couldn't finish the sentence.

"Yes," Laura said.

The door opened and Bianca came in. Laura indicated the drink she had poured for her.

"Thank you," Bianca said as she wearily sat in the chair. "This is much needed and much appreciated."

Laura waited until Bianca had taken a sip. "What did Dr. Delos say?"

"She'll do as you ask. They'll keep D'Anna on the ventilator and start a feeding tube and perform dialysis. There's always a chance her kidneys will resume functioning to some degree now that the child has been delivered and her blood pressure has begun dropping. If they're able to stabilize her, then she'll be transferred to a long term care facility."

Laura nodded. "Good."

"I hate to be indelicate, but Dr. Delos asked how the cost of D'Anna's care will be handled. She said that since D'Anna's condition is irreversible, she's sure to meet with resistance from the medical center committee that governs such cases…especially considering what D'Anna is. Her care will be quite costly."

"I'll personally take care of it. I inherited some money from my parents. There was also quite a large settlement from the government of Tauron after they died as an act of terrorists."

Maya gasped. "You told me that money was earmarked for Braedon's education."

Laura smiled tiredly. "John has some money. Before he left, he told me that he'd put his cottage on the island up for sale. He also sold his ship. He found a buyer a week ago. We won't be reduced to begging."

"That's not fair," Maya said.

"What should I do? Have her taken off life support and let her die?"

"In my opinion she's already dead."

Bianca said, "Your heart's in the right place, Laura, but please make sure you understand your reasons. Is this for you or for John?"

"It's for Sean. He should know his mother if that's possible. How is he?"

"He's on a ventilator as well. The lungs are one of the last organs to develop. That's one reason we lose so many infants born this early. Fortunately Dr. Delos knew from the beginning that D'Anna's chances of carrying full term were almost zero. She administered a course of glucocorticoids starting several weeks ago. The drug crosses the placental barrier and stimulates lung development in the fetus. If little Sean survives, it will be thanks in part to the excellent treatment his mother received from Dr. Delos."

"Did you see Sean before you left the medical center this morning?"

"No. Dr. Junius and his team were still working on him. I was told if I come back tomorrow, I'll be allowed to see him for a few minutes. I have John's phone. I'll get a picture if they let me."

"I'll keep Rachel," Maya said. "I've never seen Braedon happier than to have _two_ little girls as playmates."

Laura managed a smile. "He's like his father. He loves women."

"I can't thank you enough for sharing your home with me," Bianca said. "Quite honestly I was dreading going back to the apartment at the airbase. It's nice enough, but it would be so lonely now with everyone gone. I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but I miss John the most. He reminds me so much of the son I lost during the holocaust."

"I know John misses you, too. And the pleasure of having you here is ours," Laura said and stood. "My home is now your home."

"You look almost as tired as I feel," Bianca said.

"I'm going to bed. I didn't sleep well last night."

Maya said, "I think we should all call it a night."

In her room Laura took a bath and put on her gown. As she sat on the side of her bed, though, she realized there was someone she needed to tell about D'Anna. She picked up her phone and called Leoben's personal number.

"I hope I'm not calling too late," she said when he answered.

"No. I stay up and watch the late night talk shows."

"I'm calling about D'Anna."

"She's been on my mind all day. Your news is bad, isn't it?"

"Mixed. Due to medical circumstances the doctor had to deliver her child. The good news is that he's alive. The bad news is that D'Anna suffered a massive stroke. She was put on life support. I've asked her doctor to keep her on it until we can return her to Nereid where she'll download."

"When you say she suffered a massive stroke, what do you mean?"

"She's brain dead. The tests done by a neurologist show no activity at all. My question for you is this…what, if anything, will that mean when she downloads?"

Leoben was silent for a few moments. "I'm not absolutely certain since I have no reliable memories of my former life or lives."

"Then give me your best guess, please."

"If she's completely brain dead, then she'll have no memories of this life."

"Nothing?"

"I don't think so. She'll revert to her memories at the last time she downloaded. Since I don't know when that was, I couldn't say."

"Natasi mentioned something about each model having collective memories."

"I'm not sure exactly what she's talking about, but again I would guess that since D'Anna's out of range of any resurrection technology, the memories she had when her brain died didn't go anywhere."

"So basically, the downloaded copy wouldn't have any memory of John or their son."

"I can't say absolutely. My guess is no. You might ask Sharon. Maybe she knows more about the process."

"Thank you. Perhaps I'll call her tomorrow."

"You're willing to keep D'Anna's body alive even…"

"Yes. I've already made that commitment. Before she…before the baby was born, D'Anna placed her son under my protection. I named him and had a monotheist priest perform the appropriate ritual."

"What did you name him?"

"Sean Andrew, for John's oldest brother…and my only brother. I asked D'Anna, but she wouldn't give me a name for him."

"It's a good name. Sean Andrew… sounds like a peacemaker. Are you going to raise him…you and John?"

"I don't know. Sean has a long way to go before he'll be able to leave the hospital…many months according to a pediatrician. He'll have a number of medical hurdles to overcome."

"I'll pray for him…and for D'Anna."

"Please do."

"Would it be possible for me to see her?"

"I'll try to arrange it after she's transferred to a long term care facility."

"Caprica will miss you one day, Madame President."

"What do you mean?" Laura asked with trepidation in her voice.

"Read our scriptures. I think you'll figure it out. I wouldn't want to taint your interpretation by giving you mine."

...

John was picking tomatoes in Emmalyn's garden when a boy of about eight or nine came running up the path.

"Robot's come back," he called out. "The blond Cylon sent me to fetch you. She says '_come now_'."

John stood and stretched. He was torn between finishing the job and hurrying to the _Hyperion_. Emmalyn made the decision for him.

"Go. I'll finish this. I can't start canning this batch until tomorrow anyway."

John blotted the sweat from his face with the bottom of his t-shirt and got a dipper of water from the wooden bucket before he headed for the path. Natalie and Jade were waiting for him at the top of the steps.

"Where's Hunter?" Natalie asked.

"He hasn't come back from picking apples. We should wait since he's the other leader of this mission. We should hear this together."

"I told the centurion to start transmitting his information to Buddy. I'm anxious to hear what he has to say."

"It's late afternoon. They should be back in an hour. We'll wait until after dinner to let Buddy tell us. You've waited this long. You can wait another few hours."

Natalie and Jade walked down the steps.

"I like your daughter," Jade said. "She's okay…for a human."

John smiled. "That was quick. It took you a couple of weeks before you told me I was okay…for a human."

She shrugged and suddenly John saw her eyes light up. "Natalie said I'll get to fight with the humans against Cavil and his forces."

"We need to hear what the centurion has to say first," Natalie said.

"What will you do then?" Jade asked John.

"I'll write a report for my commanding officer. Hunter will help. We'll record as much detail as we can about the situation on the planet, and then we'll give him our recommendations for how he should proceed."

"And after you write your report, what then?"

"Kara will take it and jump to where our battlestars are waiting. She'll give the report to the admiral."

"Natalie says she'll give her report to Lee's father."

"That's right. Lee's father is the admiral."

"And then we can fight?"

"Then I go rescue my friends."

"I'll go, too. I can get Sonja for you."

John smiled. "All by yourself?"

"Yes."

He glanced at Natalie and she said, "Jade has decided that this is something she must do."

"That makes two of us."

"So you wait here and talk to Buddy," Jade said. "I'm going fishing."

Natalie watched her hurry off up the path before she looked at John. "Which one of them is she interested in?"

"My guess is Lee's brother Zak. Back on Caprica he's what might be called a _babe magnet_."

"Does that mean what I think it does?"

"Probably."

"Does he have a wife or a girlfriend?"

"Not at the moment. You want me to talk to him?"

Natalie gave it some thought and finally said, "No. It might be good for Jade to experience feelings of attraction to a man. She hasn't said anything to me, but I know she's scornful of my feelings for Daniel. She even makes fun of the care I give to the cat."

"So you think her problem is with feelings in general?"

"Yes."

"She seems to have made a lot of progress from the person who threatened to cut my throat in the woods. I've actually seen her smile a couple of times. She seems to have lost a little bit of her confrontational attitude, too. You know, I watched my daughter go through some of the same changes. Kara still has a lot of in-your-face attitude, though. I don't know if she'll ever lose it."

Natalie sighed. "I hate that we're soon going to start fighting. It will probably set Jade back in the progress she's made."

"I know. Where's Natasi?"

"Down in the ship with Buddy and the centurion from the city." She smiled. "Buddy won't let her out of his sight. He's very loyal to you, John. You told him to watch her and that's what he's doing."

"Should we go join them?"

"I suppose we should."

John took a long last look at the beautiful late summer day. He wanted to stay outside and enjoy it, but he turned and followed Natalie up the wooden steps and into the ship. _Duty before pleasure_, he reminded himself and tried not to think of where they were headed. There would be time enough for that very soon.

TBC…


	57. The Eve of War

Chapter 57

The Eve of War

_The Planet_

_Day 94: Two things of note happened today. My young friend Irina Galatova managed to get herself posted to the surface as a tech assistant to a group of scientists. Naturally Joshua Hoshi, the young man who has caught her eye, just happens to be one of those scientists. Before I left for the surface, Irina asked me how I could bring myself to leave my husband for an entire year. I told her that I couldn't bring myself to pass up the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a part of such a history-making expedition. Oren and I have been married for almost five years so I am not exactly a newlywed, but the decision did give me pause. There are many nights when sleep does not come easily and I think about him and wonder if he is missing me as much as I miss him._

_The other thing that happened is that I examined a woman who is the pilot of one of the shuttles that travel between the surface of the planet and the _Hyperion_. She is nearly thirty, unmarried and has been engaging in a sexual relationship with one of the mercenaries who accompanied us. My diagnosis of the reason for her nausea and fatigue should have come as no surprise. She's pregnant. She did not take the news well and argued with me despite the fact that she finally admitted neither she nor her lover have taken any steps to prevent a pregnancy. She immediately asked me to perform an abortion. I asked her to discuss the situation with the child's father and come back because I feel he has a right to know that he has participated in the creation of a life. I offered to help her tell him if she finds that she cannot. Although I did not say it to her, I find it sad that she could share the most intimate part of herself with a man with whom she apparently cannot talk freely about the consequences. If she decides to have the child, the baby will be born shortly before we leave this beautiful place to return to Libran. _

_I told her that her baby would be the first child born on this planet in a thousand years and would be a citizen of two worlds. She promised only that she would think about it. _

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

The group gathered in the _Hyperion's_ ready room as they had the night before. Buddy and John stood at the front along with the centurion that had returned late in the afternoon from the city. Natalie and Natasi sat on the front row. The rest of them were scattered on the rows behind.

Buddy had written a series of numbers on the whiteboard in his neat and precise handwriting.

"Okay," John said, "we got news from the city thanks to this liberated centurion. His name is LG4987624, but we'll refer to him as LG49 since that's easier to remember. LG49 has transmitted information to Buddy and Buddy has told me and Natalie. What we're going to do tonight is give you some pertinent facts and then get any recommendations for Admiral Adama and the rest of the fleet. Any questions so far?"

One of the Marines asked, "Do we have independent verification for this information, sir?"

"No."

"Then how do we know it's telling the truth?"

Buddy said, "LG49 transmitted his information and the accompanying images to me. We are incapable of lying or fabricating."

"So you say."

Natalie stood and faced the small group. "While my brothers and sisters have the ability to lie, our centurion brothers do not. They report exactly what they see and hear."

"Anything else?" John asked the group. When no one said anything, he pointed to the numbers on the board that Buddy had written in his computer-perfect handwriting. "We've heard previously that there are a hundred thousand centurions on this planet. Here's how they break down. Remember these are approximations that might be off by a hundred or so in either direction. LG49 was not able to access the central computers in the city since Cavil's loyal centurions are the exclusive guardians of those machines, so LG49 compiled this from data he got from various other of his brothers. Remember also that this does not include the three baseships which have approximately ten thousand centurions and seven hundred ninety-two Raiders on board each."

Lee said, "So basically we're talking about an additional thirty thousand centurions and two thousand three hundred seventy-six Raiders."

"That is correct," Buddy said.

"How many Vipers are our battlestars bringing to the fight, sir?" One of the Marines asked.

John pointed to Lee. "He's my numbers man."

Lee said, "It varies by the class of the battlestar. We currently have three classes, Valkyrie class, which is the smallest, Galactica class which is midrange and Mercury class which is the largest and newest. Valkyrie class and Galactica class were being built at the same time so we can't say which of those is the oldest, but if a battlestar is Mercury class, it's newer than the others. Examples of each would be the _Valkyrie_, the _Galactica_ and the _Pegasus_."

Zak said, "Thanks for the battlestar history lesson, but you didn't answer the question. How many Vipers?"

Lee's face reddened. "It would average about two hundred per ship so sixteen hundred total."

Zak continued. "So we'll have sixteen hundred going against over twenty-three hundred of them?"

John said, "We doubt that the three basestars will have a chance to launch every single Raider. They'll be more than busy with our eight battlestars."

Kara said, "Besides, one of our Viper pilots is worth a dozen of them."

It was a boastful statement and she knew it, but Zak and his buddies weren't immune from boasting either. Self-confidence was necessary to do what all of them did. Several of them smiled at her. They understood.

"Okay," John said, "Let's get back to the business at hand."

He took the marker and went down the lists of numbers inserting commas.

"Did I make a mistake?" Buddy asked.

"No, Bud. You don't need the commas to read these numbers. We don't _have to have_ them either, but large numbers are a lot easier for humans to read if they have commas."

"I will remember that."

John smiled. "I'm sure everybody can read your numbers without commas better than they can mine with the commas."

Using a laser pointer he highlighted each line on the board.

========**Humans===Humanoids===Centurions====Half-Breeds**

**Valley** =======**842** =========**3** =========**6** =========**0**

**City** =========**38** ======**2,000** ======**12,400**========**18**

**Prison**=======**14**=========**60**========**1,500**=========**0**

**Dam**=========**0**=========**25**=========**100**=========**0**

**Shipyard**======**0**=========**300**======**12,000**=========**0**

**Alpha**=====**18,995**=======**1,998**======**25,994**=========**0**

**Beta**=======**6,407**=======**2,000**======**8,600**==========**0**

**Gamma**=====**4,129**=======**2,000**======**7,500**=========**0**

**Delta**=======**5,066**=======**2,000**======**8,400**=========**0**

**Epsilon**=====**3,992**=======**2,000**======**7,500**=========-**0**

**Zeta**=======**1,214**=======**2,000** ======**7,500** =========**0**

**Eta**========**1,639**=======**2,000**======**7,000**=========-**0**

**Theta**======**3,506**=======**2,000**=======**7,500**=========**0**

**Totals**=====**45,942======18,386 ======106,000=======18**

John tapped the board. "If you've looked at the total number for the centurions on the planet, you'll notice that it's more than 100,000. There are approximately 6,000 U-87 centurions on Nereid.

"What's the situation in the city?" The question came from Jade, who was again seated beside Zak.

Buddy said, "My brother did not notice anything different in the city. There is no civil war in progress there."

John indicated the board once again and continued. "The numbers clearly tell us that the prison is guarded by the least number of centurions. It makes perfectly good sense from the Cylon point of view since the prison poses the least threat. I…can assure you that any human prisoners aren't able to cause problems. According to LG49, there are only two prisoners there now. The other twelve humans are guards."

"Why would they have more centurions in the city than in the settlements, sir?" Zak asked. "Those figures indicates there are fewer humans in the city than anywhere else."

"Good question. I'll let Natalie answer."

"Most of the humans in the city are there because they choose to be, but the main reason is that there is also a lot of demolition and new construction going on in the city which is the job of the centurions."

Lee addressed Buddy. "What about the little girl Natalie mentioned who was taken from her mother? Any word on her?"

Buddy answered. "LG49 knows only that there are now 18 hybrid children in the city."

"What about a child being cared for by an Eight?"

"LG49 did not observe a child with an Eight, but he was not able to cover the entire city. He tried to avoid areas where there were large numbers of humanoid brothers and sisters. Centurions do not wander around aimlessly. He had to appear to be engaged in some sort of work while he was there. He also had to be very careful getting in and out of the city since no centurions are in the forest now. He had to use the maintenance tunnel and exit it before he reached the hydroelectric plant at the dam."

"Thank you, Bud," John said. "That's it in a nutshell. One more thing, something our Marines are unfortunately very used to but our Viper pilots are not. The good guys here are mixed with the Cylons. The last thing we want is collateral damage. We came here to free the humans, not kill half of them in the process. We want to remember that if we're ever in a firefight."

The Marine sergeant said, "What are we going to do if the Cylons take humans as hostages?"

John asked Natalie, "What do you think the Cylons would do in a similar situation?"

"I'm afraid it would be difficult to guess."

"Let's hope we don't have to deal with something like that," John said. "I'm going to write up the information that LG49 brought us and everything we've talked about tonight for Admiral Adama. Does anyone have suggestions you'd like for me to include?"

"What is your admiral going to do?" Jade asked.

"That will be up to him," John answered.

"So after your daughter is gone tomorrow, are we going to go get your friends at the prison?"

"We're going to talk about it again. Any more questions or comments?" There were none so he continued. "Okay, everybody. Thank you for your time tonight. I've got to get a report ready. We'll talk again tomorrow night about the other mission. Captain Adama and Lieutenant Thrace, stay behind. Hunter, stay also, please."

"Should we leave?" Buddy asked.

"No. I need you and LG49. Natalie and Natasi stay, too."

Lee and Kara sat while the others exited the room.

"I guess that means I'll be leaving tomorrow," Kara said. "I thought I'd have more time."

Lee took her hand and squeezed it. He thought they'd have more time, too.

John said. "Let's go up one level. There's a nice room near Markham's quarters where we can all sit around a table. The lighting is better, too…and it's warmer."

Kara glanced at Lee. The purpose of their mission had suddenly become very real to her. Even though she was still wearing her long skirt and cotton blouse, she was shifting gears again because she knew that in twelve hours she would be a light year away. She would either be in a bunk room with some of the other pilots or meeting with the admiral as he debriefed her about Nereid.

Buddy led the way and they climbed the stairs to the next level. Markham was waiting for them in a room about half the size of the one they'd just come from. It had a long dark wood table instead of rows of chairs. Buddy explained to them that the room was where the captain of the _Hyperion_ and his senior officers and the senior scientists had eaten their meals.

Please note the rug," Buddy said. "It is an antique from the planet of Scorpia. The sideboards are made of ebony wood from the forests of Virgon."

Markham said. "I've been educating Buddy about the ship while we play chess."

"Hi," Kara greeted Markham. "It's been a while."

Markham gave her a brief smile and said, "The girl with the fancy little computer." Then he shifted his attention to Lee. John made the introduction.

He had already warned Lee that Markham didn't shake hands so Lee just nodded. It had nothing to do with manners and everything to do with Markham's fear of germs and apparent dislike of physical contact.

John said to Hunter, "You might be bored with some of this, but since you're co-leader of the mission, I want to include you in all the meetings."

Markham had already chosen the captain's chair. "Sit," he said to them.

"The chairs downstairs are more comfortable," Kara commented.

Markham said, "We used to watch movies in that room. Does it remind you of a movie theater back on Caprica?"

"A really small one," Kara answered.

"When I was child, the projection equipment still worked. Years ago, maybe thirty, some parts broke and there were no replacements."

"Maybe we'll get Markham a DVD player for all his help," John said. He removed the laptop from its carry bag and placed it on the table before booting it in preparation to start entering his report.

While John was working with the laptop, Lee asked, "Is the airstrip at the prison big enough to accommodate a troop transport ship?"

"I'm not sure," John answered. "I only saw it once from the air and that was at night. It's not well lighted since the centurions have infrared capability."

Buddy said, "If you can give me the dimensions of your troop transport ships and tell me the runway length they require to land, I can tell you if the airstrip will accommodate them."

Lee rattled off the dimensions and runway requirement of the largest troop transport that could be carried by a battlestar. He was glad he had spent time memorizing the information about the various ships while he was at the Academy. For the first time since he'd graduated, the data had proved useful for something other than getting an _A_ on one of Colonel Burgher's tests.

Kara gave him a little nudge and whispered, "Showoff."

"Is it a dropship?" Buddy asked.

"Technically yes, but we don't drop them from battlestars. They launch from the largest landing bay. They do have limited vertical takeoff and landing capability, though. We call it VTOL. It's similar to a Heavy Raider but much larger. It will carry two hundred fifty troops and all their equipment and it's armed and armored."

"Is it FTL capable?"

"Yes, but that's limited as well. Less than a light year."

"The airstrip at the prison will accommodate your ships. My suggestion would be for them to jump into planetary space several hundred miles east of the prison. There are no monitoring stations in that area because it is mostly swamp."

"That's good information to have," John said to Buddy and then asked Lee. "Where are you going with this?"

"I was wondering if we shouldn't try to secure the prison and the prison airfield first. There are fewer centurions there and once the basestars are taken out, we won't have to worry about an attack from the air. It's remote enough that it can't be hit by ground fire from the city or the settlements and we don't have many humans to worry about becoming collateral damage. Because it's on a high plateau, we can see a ground assault coming. There's plenty of room on that plateau to unload troops and equipment and set up camp. With the airstrip, we could deploy troops anywhere on the planet. We could set up a base of operations there and keep the war away from this valley. Hunter and those who want to fight with him could come with us. The rest of them could stay here and get in the harvest."

Kara said. "You've really thought about this a lot haven't you?"

"All day while we were picking apples, I kept thinking what a shame it would be if we used this valley as a base and it got overrun and destroyed. It would be worse than a shame. It would be a disaster, not to mention we've got nowhere to land large ships here."

Markham said, "You've got my vote for creating your base at the prison."

"Mine, too," Hunter said.

Lee said, "I think we could defend the plateau better. With one dradis setup we could monitor anything coming our way…and visibility up there is great compared to the city or the valley or any of the settlements. We could put anti-aircraft weapons at strategic places. We could base some Vipers there and keep a team of pilots on standby."

John smiled. "I'm glad you went to War College."

"We'll need a battle strategy room," Lee said. "Is there anywhere at the prison that we could set one up?"

Natalie answered him. "The building that houses the res facility could be used as your headquarters. There are several basement levels that were completed but never furnished."

"You can't put all the troops at the prison and leave the valley undefended," Kara said. "We're only a hundred miles from the city which has over twelve thousand centurions. They could get here in less than a day. Settlement Beta is about a hundred miles to the south, too. Even if the basestars have been taken out, the valley is still vulnerable to the centurions. The people who live here wouldn't stand a chance."

"I agree with both of you," John said. "You've made very valid points, but we won't be the ones making the decisions. That will be up to Admiral Adama and General Vargas and his staff. All of this is going in my report."

Hunter said, "We were always afraid of an attack from the city. We've already got some defenses set up, bunkers and trenches. Give me some Marines and a lot of RPGs and other explosives and I think we could hold off a centurion attack."

"Got it," John said. "Now, can LG49 tell me anything about the mood in the city?"

"I do not understand what you mean?"

"Has the boss Cavil in the city talked about what he'd do to the valley? Has he made _any_ new laws or changes in the way things are done?"

Buddy and LG49 conferred wirelessly. Then Buddy said, "Cavil does not currently feel like the valley is a threat to him. The council has told all brothers and sisters to keep a close eye on their human breeders…and on each other. They're to listen for any talk of discontent, especially anything that sounds like a rebellion is in the making. This same message was sent to the settlements as well. Any talk of an uprising is to be crushed immediately."

"I take it that the brothers and sisters aren't accustomed to spying on each other."

"Certainly not," Natalie said, "however we were encouraged to listen to all gossip from the humans and report anything that made us suspicious. I found it a deplorable practice."

"On Caprica, our leader wasn't nearly so trusting," Natasi said. "He encouraged all of us to keep an eye on each other as well as the humans."

"Did you comply?" Natalie asked.

"I told him little things of no consequence that kept him happy. He thought I was cooperating."

"Did you make up stuff or tell him the truth?" Kara asked. "Did you get anybody killed while you were keeping him happy?"

"That's enough, Kara," John said. "We're not here to engage in personal bickering."

"Thank you Major Gallagher," Natasi purred.

She sounded so much like Sonja that John felt an unpleasant sensation in his gut.

Buddy said, "You were asking questions about the city."

Lee asked, "When the time comes and we're fighting in the city or the settlements, how are we going to be able to tell the difference between the centurions who have been freed and who are on our side and those who aren't?"

John smiled. "Any ideas anybody?"

"Lucy gave me a chestplate with a bullet scar so she could recognize me," Buddy said.

"That's good, but not good enough. We need something that can be recognized instantly and at a reasonable distance."

"LG49 and I will ponder the problem," Buddy said.

When the meeting was finally over, John said, "Kara and Lee, stay behind. The rest of you go get some sleep."

She could tell that her father was tired and he still had hours of work ahead of him that night.

After the others were gone, she said, "I'm sorry. I can't help it. When I'm around Natasi, I just want to…I don't know…punch her out or something."

John rubbed his face. "I seem to remember you doing that a couple of years ago. All it got you was a bruised fist."

"Have you forgotten that she nearly got Laura killed at the University that day?"

"It was Cavil that nearly got Laura killed. Natasi just wanted to teach a class on their religion. Say what you will about her otherwise, but she's sincere in her belief in the Cylon God."

"Is that why you defend her all the time?"

"I'm not defending what she did on Caprica, but she's a member of this mission team. There's no point in antagonizing her."

"I'm sure the others feel like I do."

"That may be true, but it won't be an issue for you after tomorrow. You'll be on the _Galactica_. Remember that Buddy is with her everywhere she goes."

"What do you think Buddy would do if she tried to run? Shoot her?"

"No. He'd just catch her and bring her back. He wouldn't chance killing her and having her download because she'd be out of our control. Plus she knows she'd be locked up somewhere, probably down here in the _Hyperion_. Natasi's loyalty might be divided, but I don't think she's stupid enough to try to escape. I think she got her fill of being locked up below ground on Caprica. And just in case you're worried about me taking Natasi's word as gospel, I'd never listen to anything she told me without getting a second opinion."

"It sounds like you've got all the answers."

He managed a smile. "I wish. Since you're going to be leaving tomorrow, why don't you and Lee take my room tonight? I'm going to be working on this report for Bill most of the night. If I get sleepy, there's another small bunkroom down the corridor from Markham's room. I'll nap there."

Kara stared at her father. "Seriously?"

John said, "You've been sleeping with Lee for what…three years now?"

Kara walked over to her father and put her arms around him.

"I love you," she said.

He smoothed her hair back and kissed her forehead. "I know you don't believe it, but I was your age once. Now go spend some time with Lee while you've got the chance. If there's one thing I learned while we were fighting the First War, it's that you don't let a good opportunity go to waste. It might be a long time until you get another one. Now get going and let me go to work on Bill's report. I've got a long night still ahead of me."

…

In her father's room with the hatch closed, Kara said, "I don't want to go tomorrow. I want to stay here."

Lee put his arms around her and held her. "It could be worse. You could be back on Caprica right now. Dad chose you because he knows you can fly the Raider. The whole fleet is depending on you to get back there with the information from Nereid. All the humans on this planet are depending on you, too. They just don't know it yet."

She grudgingly acknowledged his statement. "I know I've got a job to do and I'll do it. I'd just rather be here with you. That's all."

Lee reached back and pulled the elastic band off the end of her braid. He gently and carefully undid her hair until it was loose. The braid and the day's humidity had left it wavy all the way down. In the dim light of the small room, she looked like Persephone. All she needed was a wreath of flowers in her hair. Sometimes her beauty took his breath.

"You want to tell me what's going on with you and your dad? There's a tension between you two that wasn't there before."

Kara shook her head. "I'm not sure. Things haven't been quite the same since he escaped."

Lee gently stroked her hair. "A lot changed for both of you while he was gone. Have you tried talking to him about your feelings?"

She shook her head. "I don't know what to say."

"Maybe he's having the same problem. When this is all over, you should sit down and talk. It's probably not going to get any better until you do."

"I just want everything to be like it was when he and Laura were together with Brae and…and…he wasn't praying to the frakking Cylon God."

"Is that what's wrong?"

"Probably. I don't understand how he can just…change his faith like that…like flipping a switch."

Lee took her chin and lifted her face. Her eyes were full of tears. "Kara, I want you to remember that whatever you're feeling right now, John loves you more than anything. Have you thought about what it'll do to him to watch you get in that Raider tomorrow, knowing you'll be back here in a Viper? He flew one against the Cylons for almost two years. He knows exactly what you'll be facing. I'm sure he'd rather keep you here, too, but he's going to let you go."

"I know."

"Sometimes I think about what I'd do if our kid was getting ready to do the same thing. I'd be crazy so don't blame him if he's a little on edge."

"You could go with me tomorrow. We'd both be in Vipers."

"I could, but I think John needs me down here more than my dad needs me on the _Galactica_. The _G_ is running over with good Viper pilots." He made an attempt and managed a smile. "Up there I'd be lost in a crowd. Down here I'm one of a kind."

"And down here you can keep an eye on Zak like your father asked you to do."

"And your dad, too. I know he's changed, Kara. I've seen it. He's under a lot of pressure right now and finding out that his escape was taken out on his friends has made it worse. If he goes to the prison to rescue them, I want to be with him. I saw firsthand what putting him in a cell back on Caprica did to him. I can't imagine what walking into that prison might do, but nothing any of us can say is going to stop him from trying to rescue his friends."

Kara could hardly get her breath for her feelings. "Don't let my dad do anything stupid."

"I don't know if I can stop him, but I can be there with him. In the six years I've known him, he's been more of a father to me than my own was the whole time I was growing up."

They stood holding each other until Kara said, "I need to take a shower."

"Let's go take one together. The bathroom should have cleared out by now."

"It's too cold in there to…do anything besides a quick shower."

"Then we'll have to come back here to get warm."

Kara smiled and tried to put everything out of her mind except the present moment. She wasn't as much of a planner as Lee was. She'd let him worry about the future.

The barely warm water ran out as they were starting to wash off the soap. They had no choice but to continue rinsing in the cold water. A few minutes later they were wrapped in towels and shivering as they ran down the corridor from the showers to John's room. Kara threw her clothes on the small table and her towel over the chair before she dived under the sheet and blanket on the bunk.

Her teeth chattered. "Hur-r-r-ry up-p. I'm fre-e-e-zing"

Lee dumped his clothes on the table and followed her into the bunk. They clung to each other. Gradually they warmed and the shivering stopped.

"When this is over…" he managed to say.

Kara leaned over him and kissed him. "When _this_ is over, I'll expect an encore. Who knows how long I might be gone."

...

John yawned and rubbed his face. He had shaved that morning, but the stubble was now readily apparent. Over six hours had passed since the meeting had ended and he was nearly through with the report. Markham had chosen to keep him company, but spoke only if John spoke to him or asked him a question. Markham could provide nothing except technical help on the laptop. He didn't even get out in his own valley so he knew nothing of the world outside the _Hyperion_. Finally John stood and stretched.

"Bathroom break."

When he got back, there was a bottle of clear liquid and two glasses sitting on the table. Markham said, "I think you should call it a night…or rather an early morning. You're past the point that anything is making sense to you anyway. Have a drink with me and then get a few hours of sleep. I'll wake you. You know I stay up all night and sleep during the day."

John yawned. "You talked me into it. Just a small drink."

Markham poured an inch of the liquid in each glass. "Home brew. Made from corn instead of honey."

"Once when I was on the _Solaria_, somebody forgot to put the booze on our supply ship. We ran out a week before the next ship was due. Some enterprising crew members down on the hangar deck made a still that was one of the most complicated things I'd ever seen. The product was clear like this, but it got the job done." John took a sip. "Damn, this is strong."

"But oh, so pure. More?"

John shook his head. "No, thanks. I made a vow to myself about how much I'll drink every day. I haven't broken it since I left the planet. Some self-denial is good." He chuckled. "Of course lately I've been denying myself just about everything."

Markham slowly nodded his head. "After what you've been through, it would be easy to overindulge, especially if you like alcohol."

"I do…probably way more than is good for me."

"You're trying to set a good example for your daughter."

John heard a sound and looked around. Natalie stood in the doorway. She was wearing a heavy bathrobe.

John smiled. "We aren't making that much noise, are we?"

"I can't sleep."

"You can't sleep and I'm having trouble staying awake. What's on your mind?"

"The future of my brothers and sisters and the centurions. Which ones of them will consent to accept a coalition government? How many humans will choose to remain here and how many will want to go to Caprica? What will happen to the harvest in the settlements? Little things like that. I worry that our intentions are good, but when your military gets here, I'm afraid they'll visit on us what the Angel of Death did to your Colonies."

"That's not the plan. Laura wants this planet to become a shining example of how we can live together. I'm sure it would upset her if Admiral Adama shows up and blows everything up, including me." His voice took on a teasing tone. "Or maybe not. Maybe the two of them planned this together and it's just a huge, incredibly expensive plan to get rid of me since it didn't happen the first time."

"Are you drunk, John?"

"No. I've had my one and only drink for the night…a small one. Markham can testify. I've just been awake for nearly twenty-four hours."

"John is stressed and tired," Markham said. "I told him that he should get a few hours of sleep."

"That's a good idea," Natalie said. "You go sleep and I'll sit here and talk to Markham. I have some plans I need to discuss with him."

John grinned and then stood. "I'm not sure I want to hear this."

Natalie gave him an eye roll that reminded him of Kara. "It concerns his future and Lucy's. If we can give her a new body, then I think the two of them could work well together. We could possibly create some new brothers and sisters."

Markham said, "If you create an entirely new body for Lucy, would she become a new model Cylon? Or would she still be considered a human?"

"That's way too deep for my tired brain right now," John said.

"Zoe Graystone was considered human even though she had a body much like mine," Natalie said. "The only difference is that the Graystones hadn't perfected resurrection technology when they downloaded Zoe's avatar into her new body. That came much later. Daniel told me something that Lucy hasn't yet mentioned to me. At the same time Lucy created her avatar and loaded it into Buddy, Zoe created one of herself. Unlike Lucy, Zoe refused to load hers into a centurion because she'd spent years in a U-87 before her parents created a humanoid body for her. She saved her avatar in one of the computers that Cavil took to the lab at the prison. Daniel told me that Zoe never believed she'd have to use it. She was far more trusting of her parent's creations than Lucy was. The problem is that there are hundreds of computers and servers and other magnetic storage media stacked in a room at the prison lab now. We'd have to find her. That's what I want Markham to help us with."

"When were you going to mention this to me?" John asked.

"Daniel only told me today."

"So basically we're going to have to protect that lab at the prison from being destroyed by either side?"

"I thought that was always the plan. In some ways our future as a viable race depends on it. Not only are the computers there, all the creation equipment is there also."

John sat back down at the table. "Suddenly I'm not sleepy anymore. I need to get this into the report."

"Can you do it without being specific about the creator's equipment? I'm afraid some of your military might not want to preserve it the way we do."

"I'll just say that it's come to our attention that some very valuable equipment and documents are being stored at the prison and that neither of those building should be targeted. How's that?"

"I knew I could count on you," Natalie said. "And I know I can count on Markham, too."

Markham got up and left the room without a word.

"Maybe not," John said as he saw the disappointment on Natalie's face.

But Markham came back very shortly with another glass. Without a word he poured Natalie a drink and poured another swallow into his and John's glasses.

John understood. He raised his glass. "To the mission."

Natalie's toast was better. "To a brighter future for all of us."

...

As Kara waited near the small clearing the next morning, she was aware again of how much she wanted to stay on Nereid. She stood with her father and Lee in the shade of some trees while the Marines removed the camouflage netting from the Raider. She had only a few minutes before she had to go. They didn't want the Raider sitting exposed for any longer than necessary.

"We'll expect the fleet in three days," John said. "Bill wants that much time to read the report and plan his attack."

Kara nodded.

"Follow the same route we took here. Jump as soon as you reach the river."

"I know, Dad."

He pulled her close and kissed the side of her head. "Be safe, baby. I love you."

"I love you, too."

John let go of her and looked at Lee. "Next."

Kara threw her arms around him.

"I love you, Kara."

She kissed him hard on the mouth. "I'll see you soon."

Then she turned, picked up her bag and the laptop bag before she hurried toward the Raider.

"I don't think I'd survive something happening to her," John said to Lee.

"She's going to be fine. Have you slept?"

"Not yet. Soon."

The Marines carried the camouflage netting to the Heavy Raider and stowed it inside. The Raider made no sound as Kara started it. The first indication they had that she was taking off was Kara engaging the Raider's vertical thrusters. They waited until she had disappeared over the treetops.

Jade was waiting for them on the path. "So Kara is gone?"

"She's gone," Lee said. "But she'll be back."

"Natalie's cat looked for her last night but her bunk was empty. _Meow, meow, meow._ He woke Natasi up, too. Natalie was gone. I let the cat out before Natasi wrung his neck. She might be Natalie's sister, but Natalie would wring her neck if she hurt that cat. He's her _baby_."

"Natalie was talking to me and Markham," John said.

"Kara stayed with me," Lee added.

"Huh. I thought so. When do we rescue your friends from the prison?"

"Not tonight," John answered her.

"I hope Yoshimo is all right," Jade said softly. "I like him."

"Let's hope the Cylons won't torture a monotheist priest," John said. "Especially one who is eighty years old. Just thinking about that makes me sick."

"So will we talk about the rescue tonight?" Jade asked eagerly.

John smiled. "If I'm awake by then. I'm going to hit the sack for a while."

"Good. You go sleep. Lee can help Dessa peel apples. Emmalyn is canning tomatoes."

"What are you going to do?" Lee asked.

"Pick corn."

"I think I'd rather do that."

"Aren't you taking a chance spending so much time outdoors?" John asked. "What if Cavil shows up?"

"Huh. He's too lazy to look very far. He's not going to walk miles looking for me. He'll send the centurions he left here. When they don't find anything, he'll leave."

John said, "You've got it all figured out, haven't you?"

"He only thinks he's smart. I doubt anyone has missed me in Settlement Alpha. I spent most of my time out in the woods or with Natalie or Yoshimo. I didn't spend time with the others. Besides, he didn't come here looking for me. He's trying to find Natalie. I'm sure this valley isn't the only place he's looking for her."

Lee asked, "What do you think he'll do if he searches all the settlements and still can't find her?"

"Since she's not causing any trouble, he might give up. Sonja told me his attention span is about as short as his…a certain part of him."

"Frak," John said and started laughing. "I do not want that picture in my mind while I'm trying to go to sleep. I'm going to tell you like I told Sonja. There's such a thing as _too much_ information."

"It's the truth," Jade said defiantly.

"I'm not doubting your word. I just don't want to know anything that personal about Cavil. And I'm not so sure he has a short attention span. He was obsessed with finding two pilots he thought were still on the planet. Who's to say he won't get just as obsessed with finding Natalie?"

Jade smiled. "So what will it matter if he does? In three days he'll have his hands full."

At the top of the path Jade turned toward the road, walked a short distance and waited. John and Lee let the Marines catch up with them.

"Going to pick corn?" John asked the sergeant.

"Yes, sir, now that Lieutenant Thrace is gone. Unless you have something else you need us to do."

"No. Picking corn is fine." He turned to Lee. "What about you?"

"I think I'll join the crowd and go pick corn." Lee glanced at Zak. "I guess I should keep an eye on the lovebirds."

"Thanks, big bro," Zak retorted. "I'm getting enough grief from these guys. Now I've got you on my case, too."

John said to Lee, "If I'm not up by the time you come in from the fields this afternoon, come wake me."

"Okay." Lee started down the road after the Marines and then turned back. "John, she'll be all right. She's your daughter."

John turned around also and Lee saw the naked love on his face. "She's not just my daughter. She's my heart, just like Brae."

...

Billy followed Laura into her office the next morning. "Want to see something interesting?"

She smiled. "Always."

"Log onto your computer and open the email I just sent you."

Laura complied and clicked on the attachment. The photograph that filled her screen was of medium quality. It had obviously been taken with a mobile phone, probably by someone who was trying to remain unnoticed. The lighting was low, the image not the best quality. Laura saw a table in a restaurant that used real tablecloths and silver flatware. There was a low cut glass candleholder on the table and a sterling silver wine bucket.

"Is that where I think it is?" She asked.

"The private dining room at Bonnie Patrice."

"How did you get this picture?"

"Dee sent it to me. She has a cousin who works as a waiter at Bonnie Patrice. He took it."

Laura studied the picture. A couple was sitting at a table near the fireplace. In a corner behind them stood two large men dressed in dark suits who had _security guard_ written all over them. But the couple gazing so adoringly at each other was the real focus of her attention. The man was Tom Zarek. The beautiful, dark-haired young woman with him was one that Laura had met on several occasions, a Raptor pilot who had graduated in the same class as Kara, a former roommate of hers and Karl's.

"That's Maggie Edmondson," Billy said.

"I recognize her. When was this taken?"

"A couple of nights before half the fleet left for Nereid. Dee checked the battlestar rosters. Maggie is on the _Galactica_ now. This must have been hers and Zarek's farewell dinner."

"Dear gods," Laura said. "He's twice her age."

"More than twice. I did some research. In the political biography he released to the press, the birth date he gives makes him forty-two now, but birth records in central registry show him to be six years older. He's really forty-eight. Maggie just turned twenty-one."

"Is Dee pro-Zarek?"

"No. She was born on Sagittaron like Zarek was, but she doesn't believe in the kind of violence he advocated in order to achieve their goals."

"Blowing up government buildings and killing innocent civilians is never the right approach."

"I think Dee's cousin sent her that picture because he thinks it shows that Zarek is making inroads in recruiting our military to his political views."

"He doesn't need to do much recruiting. Many in the military agree with him completely, but I don't think this has anything to do with winning over the military. I think it's simply an example of a man on the other side of middle age enjoying the company of a beautiful young woman who obviously has a big crush on him."

"Arm candy?"

"A big ego trip for a man with an even bigger ego. Does Dee's cousin follow Zarek around taking pictures of him all the time?"

Billy smiled. "No. Just when he's dining at Bonnie Patrice. Zarek dines there a lot. Since it's both expensive and attracts influential people, it has a lot of appeal for him. I checked spending records for the Quorum. He's putting all these personal dinners on his expense account. His wine tab alone would feed a family of four for a year."

"Dear gods. So our taxpayers are footing the bill for his romantic dinners."

"It looks that way. Should I tip off the Accounting Oversight Office?"

"If you can do it so that it doesn't look like the tip came from this office. If Zarek thinks I'm behind it, he will accuse me of engaging in a witch hunt."

Billy said, "I still can't believe that Maggie would prefer Zarek over Zak Adama."

"To be fair to Maggie, Zak did break up with her first. Kara tried to get them back together, but Maggie told Zak she'd started dating someone else. I guess we now know who."

"Dee's cousin sent her another picture if you're interested. He took it at Bonnie Patrice about two months ago."

"Anyone I know?"

Billy smiled again. "Ellen Tigh."

"Please, spare me. I can do without seeing her."

Billy said. "I don't blame you for not wanting to look at Zarek and Mrs. Tigh. She doesn't look too sober. Dee's cousin said she was all over Zarek. It was embarrassing for the staff. He might still be seeing her, but he hasn't brought her back to the restaurant."

"Poor Saul," Laura sighed. "That man is a saint to put up with her…indiscretions."

Billy snorted. "I don't think he's a saint. I think he's a fool. He should have divorced her years ago."

"I wonder what Zarek wants with Ellen? She's a very attractive woman, but she's not much younger than he is."

"My guess is information," Billy said. "After all she is married to Admiral Adama's XO."

"You'r absolutely right," Laura said. "I hadn't thought about that angle. Let's just hope Colonel Tigh isn't one for a lot of pillow talk. I don't doubt for a minute that an inebriated Ellen would pass along anything her husband told her."

For several minutes after Billy left, Laura continued to gaze at the picture of Maggie and the politician who was old enough to be her father. She had always thought of Zarek as a man of few, if any, morals. She sincerely hoped Maggie understood what she was doing. Laura didn't think for a minute that Maggie was anything but a momentary diversion for Zarek.

The rumor had reached her from several sources that Zarek was gearing up to run for President during the next election in three years. He was already making speeches to any group that would invite him. She also knew that if Zarek had his way, he would exterminate every humanoid Cylon in the universe no matter what the cost. Because of his hard-line anti-Cylon stance, Zarek had a strong following among the military and many others. The only use he had for the centurions was as slave workers in the tylium mines of Tauron. He had said many times that he would never allow centurions back on Caprica. Laura suddenly wondered how safe Nereid would be if Tom Zarek were ever elected President.

But she had too much to do to spend the morning pondering Zarek's schemes and plans. With a sigh Laura brought up her calendar and began to prepare for her first meeting of the day.

...

Four hours later she joined Maya and Bianca upstairs for lunch. Bianca had been to the hospital and produced John's mobile phone.

"Dr. Junius allowed me to take several pictures. Before you look at the first one, please be aware that if you've never seen one of these tiny preterm infants, it's absolutely heart-wrenching. You'll think the child is more apt to die from the efforts to save him than anything else."

Bianca handed the phone to Laura who barely suppressed a gasp. The tube for the ventilator looked hardly bigger than a soda straw. The tape securing it covered much of the lower part of Sean's face. Tiny tubes and wires were everywhere. There was part of someone's hand in the first picture. The person's index finger was larger than Sean's arm. But Bianca had been right. As Laura looked at the second and third pictures, she saw that little Sean was perfectly formed. One small hand was turned so that she could see five tiny perfect fingernails. The close-up of his face showed pale but distinct eyebrows and eyelashes. There was a covering of pale blond fuzz on his head. Her own son had looked so different at birth.

She wondered if Sean had made a sound yet. Brae had cried almost immediately. It was the most wonderful sound she had ever heard. Laura wiped away a tear.

"What did Dr. Junius say?" She asked Bianca.

"Sean has made it through the first crucial twenty-four hours, but quite honestly, with infants this small and premature, it's almost minute to minute. I don't want to paint an unrealistically optimistic picture. So many things can still go wrong."

"Do you think John did the right thing in bringing D'Anna to Caprica?" Laura asked.

Bianca didn't hesitate. "Without a doubt. He gave his son a chance at life. On Nereid both D'Anna and the child would have died. Of course D'Anna would have downloaded."

"I hope that will still be possible," Laura said. "May I borrow the phone for a few minutes after lunch?"

"Of course."

"I want Billy to copy the pictures for me. Within ten days a ship should be back here with word on what is happening over Nereid. I'm going to write John a letter and update it each day until Bill sends that ship back. Then I'll send the letter and pictures to John."

"Would it be possible to send D'Anna back with the ship?" Bianca asked. "Her kidneys haven't resumed functioning so she'll have to undergo dialysis several times a week. The longer she languishes here, the greater the chance her heart will fail. If that happens, there will be no downloading for her. She's been moved to the long term care wing of the hospital. I was allowed to see her. I sat and talked to her for almost twenty minutes and told her about Sean and the naming ceremony, but of course she didn't respond. I'll be glad to accompany her if that's an option."

"You want to go back to your husband, don't you?" Laura said gently.

Tears came to Bianca's eyes. "Yes. We've never been apart this long in our entire marriage."

Maya said, "I'll be glad to keep Rachel until she can be safely returned to Nereid."

Before anyone could say anything else, the fighter song played on John's phone. At least Bianca had turned down the volume. They all smiled. Laura answered.

A child's voice said, "This is Leah Parker. Is this Dr. Cardenas?"

"No, this is Laura Roslin."

"Could I speak to Dr. Cardenas, please?"

Laura handed the phone to Bianca and mouthed, "Leah Parker."

Bianca smiled. "Hello, Leah. How are you today?"

Laura and Maya couldn't hear the other side of the conversation, but both were smiling when Bianca ended the call.

"Leah is very precocious, you know."

"Yes," Laura said. "I could tell that even with the brief time I was around her at Maya's wedding reception."

"When I went by yesterday afternoon to pick up Rachel, Leah begged me to let them keep her. The bond the two of them have formed in barely more than a day is amazing."

Maya said, "John mentioned that Leah is a name in the Cylon scripture of one of the six protectors of the peacemaker. Rachel is also. It doesn't surprise me that there's a bond between the two children."

Bianca said, "Leah is at an age where having a younger sister is very appealing. She called to invite Rachel and me to dinner tomorrow night. You heard me verify her invitation with Kim. Leah wants us to come early so she can spend time with Rachel. I told her I'd bring Rachel out as soon as she woke up from her afternoon nap."

Laura said, "I will certainly miss you if you take D'Anna back to Nereid."

"Me, too," Maya added.

"I just want to know my husband is all right," Bianca said.

Laura glanced at Maya. "I think that makes three of us."

...

The Raider materialized at the coordinates near where the eight battlestars were supposed to be waiting. Kara looked at the dark dradis screen and felt a moment of panic before she realized that she hadn't yet turned on any of her communication equipment.

"Duh," she said to herself. "Come on Kara, get with it."

She flipped several switches and almost immediately the long-range dradis sweep indicated the eight battlestars and a number of smaller blips...Vipers flying CAP. She adjusted the frequency on her wireless to the one Kevin had written on the cheat sheet for her.

"Big G, this is Sadie. Over."

She breathed easier when the acknowledgement came back. "Sadie, this is Big G. We have you on dradis. Go ahead."

"Request permission to land. Over."

"Set IFF."

Kara switched the transponder setting on the IFF from the Cylon signal to a Colonial one. Kevin had installed the _identification, friend or foe_ system in the Raider. Admiral Adama had wisely insisted the ship be identified as a friendly before being allowed to land on the _Galactica_. It was their second level of security after voice recognition.

The controller's voice came back. "IFF is confirmed, Sadie. Approach is port landing bay. Turning you over to the LSO."

Kara watched her dradis and honed in on the _Galactica's_ signal. She navigated past the _Pegasus_ to the _G_. As soon as she saw the port landing bay, she said, "Sadie is on approach."

"Deck is green," the LSO replied. "Call the ball."

"Sadie has the ball," Kara replied to let the LSO know that the two converging rows of landing lights had now appeared on her screen. They beckoned her onward and inward.

It wasn't until she had shut down power and Sadie was on an elevator being lowered to the hangar deck that Kara realized she'd never put the Raider down on a battlestar before. She hoped Kevin had sent instructions to the deck crew about where to attach the tow. Sadie wasn't a Raptor that could be slung around the way she'd seen some ships done.

She felt a thump as the elevator reached the bottom and then what seemed like an interminable amount of time passed before there was a jerk and the ship began to inch forward. When it stopped, she spun the little wheel on the hatch and shoved it open.

Galen Tyrol greeted her and helped her unfasten her helmet.

"Hey, Chief," she grinned.

"Welcome aboard, Starbuck. The Old Man is waiting for you in his quarters. We'll take care of getting your gear to a bunkroom."

"Which one?"

"Same one you were in the last time, sir."

"Oh, great. That means I get to put up with Kat's mouth."

Tyrol smiled. "What's it like being inside a Cylon Raider?"

"Not for the claustrophobic. I'd rather be in a Viper."

"I think we've got a Mark VII on board with your call sign on it."

Cally Henderson walked up and said to Kara. "Could I help you get your gear, sir?"

"I've got two bags. I need the laptop," Kara said before she crawled back into the Raider. "Admiral Adama is waiting on it. The other one is yours."

"It's good to see you again, sir," Tyrol said. "I think we're going to kick some Cylon ass."

Kara grinned. "Is everybody as eager as you?"

"Ask your pilot friends. I hear some of them are so pumped at the thought of fighting Raiders that they can't sleep."

Several decks above the hangar deck, a Marine opened the hatch door to Admiral Adama's quarters. Kara found him with Saul Tigh. She hoped she kept her expression neutral. The admiral would naturally want Tigh to hear anything she had to say.

She came to attention. "Lieutenant Kara Thrace reporting as ordered, sir."

"At ease," Adama said. "Let's not stand on formality. How are you, Kara?"

"Fine, sir."

"Everybody else?"

"All fine, sir."

"Any problems?"

"No, sir. Everything was textbook. Exactly like we planned. We did have to change our landing field in the valley because the meadow was full of sheep, but the clearing is a much better place. I got some pictures on my mobile phone and Dad got them into the report. It's all on the laptop."

"Full of sheep," Tigh mused. "I don't think I've ever heard that one."

"It's a whole different world, sir."

Tigh chuckled. "Obviously."

"What about the rebellion your father thought might be going on among the Cylons?" Adama asked.

Kara shook her head. "Things didn't go so good for them after Dad escaped. Their leader, Natalie, had to sneak out of the settlement. She and an Eight named Jade are in the valley now with Buddy and a couple of freed centurions. Cavil's come looking for them a couple of times, but they're hiding in the _Hyperion_ which he doesn't know about. Everything is in the report."

Adama nodded. "Go get settled. I'll expect you back here at 19:00 tonight. I'll have finished reading the report by then and we'll talk."

"Yes, sir." She looked at Tigh. "I'd like to thank you for saving my dad's life."

Tigh looked vaguely embarrassed. "It was the right thing to do. He shouldn't have attacked Cain, but she was way out of line with trying to airlock him and the Cylon."

"I think she understands that now," Bill said. "Oh, and Kara, I'd appreciate it if you kept your thoughts about the situation on Nereid to yourself. I'm sure there will be a lot of questions. You let me answer them."

"Yes, sir."

As Kara made her way through the levels and corridors to the pilots' bunkrooms, she knew what she was going to do first. She was going to take a long, hot shower.

...

Lee sat down near the end of a row of corn and wiped his forehead with the bottom of his shirt.

"Quitting so soon," Jade snickered from the next row. "Humans don't have much stamina."

"I'm just taking a short rest," Lee retorted. "We've been at this for hours and it doesn't even look like we've made a dent."

Jade said. "It takes a lot of corn to make cornmeal and all the other things these humans make from it. Emmalyn explained it to me. This harvest has to last them for a year."

She pushed her full wheelbarrow to the wagon at the end of the row and helped two of the men lift it and dump the contents. The big wagon had made many trips to one of the barns already. She came back and sat by Lee.

"Natasi showed me a dress she brought with her. It's red and tight and very sexy. She said she would wear it to the prison to get John's friends. Huh. The human's eyes will pop out. She's very beautiful and very sexy. Sonja is like her." She snickered again. "They might fight over that red dress. Sonja will want to wear it for Kara's father. She doesn't like Natalie's clothes. She says they're too plain."

"I'll agree Natasi is beautiful and sexy. I'm sure Sonja is, too, since you say they look like twins."

"Huh. Would it make Kara mad if she heard you say that?"

"I doubt it."

"She doesn't like Natasi."

"I know, but Kara knows how men look at the Sixes. I don't want to have a relationship with one, but Kara would know I was lying if I say they aren't beautiful."

"How do human men look at the Eights?"

"Kara's best friend is married to one. Natasi's boyfriend hasn't married her yet. That should answer your question."

"So you're saying that while humans will frak Sixes, they want to marry Eights."

Lee said seriously. "I know one Eight and I just met you. I'm barely acquainted with one Six. I'd hardly say that's enough to make a generalization."

Jade began to laugh. "Does your brother feel like you do?"

"I don't know. It's not something we've discussed."

Zak appeared at the end of the row and walked toward them pulling off his gloves. "I'm working my butt off and I find my brother goofing off and talking to the best-looking girl on Nereid."

Lee shot Zak a look, but he didn't appear to notice.

"Huh," Jade said to Zak. "Why aren't you chasing after Natasi? She's the beautiful one. Just ask your brother."

"I've had my fill of that kind of woman. Besides, I don't see her out here getting blisters on her hands picking corn."

"You won't, either," Jade said. "Natasi and Sonja keep their hands soft so their men will like what they do with them."

"Is that why you wear gloves?" Zak asked Jade in a teasing tone. "To keep your hands soft for your boyfriend?"

"I don't have a boyfriend," Jade snapped.

"Then that's your choice," Zak said.

Lee stood and put his gloves back on. "I'm going to leave you two to debate the finer points of Jade's boyfriend situation. There's corn to be picked."

He gave Zak another pointed look that caused his brother to smile.

"Don't worry big bro. Kara's already laid a warning on me. I'm not going to take advantage, but I am going to try to do my part to further human-Cylon relations. Major Gallagher told all of us to treat them nice. I can be nice with the best of them."

As Lee pushed his wheelbarrow toward the end of the row, he called back over his shoulder, "She carries a knife and according to John, she knows how to use it."

He didn't catch Zak's reply, but it made Jade laugh. Lee asked himself why he even bothered.

...

Kara was alone in the bunkroom when the hatch opened and Kat and Hot Dog came in. Both were wearing flight suits.

"Hey, Starbuck," Hot Dog said. "We heard you might show up one day this week."

Kat glanced her way but didn't speak before she opened her locker door and stowed her helmet.

Kara stood and stretched. She should have known better than to think she'd get a much of a nap before dinner.

"I'm hitting the showers," Kat said to Hot Dog as she stripped off her flight suit. "You coming or not?"

"In a minute," Hot Dog said.

When Kat was gone, Kara said, "I see she's still all warm and fuzzy for me."

Hot Dog shrugged. "It's not just you."

"Not _just_ me, but _especially_ me."

"Anybody who threatens her spot as _Galactica's_ Top Gun. So how're you doing?"

"Good. You?"

"Hanging in there. We heard a rumor that three days from when you show up, we're going to jump to the Cylon homeworld and take out those motherfrakkers."

"I gave Admiral Adama the report when I got here. I'm meeting with him at 19:00 tonight to answer any questions."

"So what's this place like?"

Kara shook her head. "I was ordered to keep my mouth shut. All I'll say is most of it is beautiful. It'd be a shame if we destroyed any of it."

"Is that why you're hanging out in here by yourself instead of in the rec room? Don't want people bugging you with questions?"

"I was trying to take a nap. I didn't get much sleep last night."

"Wait for me to take a shower and we'll go together."

Hot Dog quickly peeled off his flight suit and grabbed his shower gear. Kat made it back first. She came in wrapped in a towel and pulled on her underwear before she threw the towel over her locker door.

"So are we speaking or not?" Kara asked. "I'll play it either way. Your call."

Kat pulled a gray, sleeveless t-shirt over her sports bra and turned around. "We heard the famous Star-buck was going to be dropping by to give the admiral a report. Staying long?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On what I'm ordered to do next."

"I hear you fly a Mark VII now. What do you think of it?"

"It's a bitchin' ride. More to remember. Less pilot control. You qualified on one yet?"

"Not yet. We were set to rotate planetside to start training when this came up. I'm still in a Mark II."

Kara shrugged. "They both shoot Raiders. That's what counts."

"So are we going to get to shoot Raiders?"

"Probably. I'm not supposed to talk about anything."

"Everybody's psyched. We've been waiting for this for a long time. Every pilot on this ship lost somebody during the holocaust. Everybody wants another little piece of Cylon to chew on."

"I'll bet."

The door opened and Hot Dog came through with a towel wrapped around his hips. He had gotten his call sign because he was well known for his lack of modesty. Before he reached his locker, Kara averted her eyes.

Kat didn't. "Did you even use water?" She asked him. "That's the fastest shower I think you ever took."

"What the frak?" Hot Dog said. "Are you timing my showers now?" He tossed his towel at her. "See? It's wet. You want to feel my hair, too?"

"I'm going to the rec room," Kara said not wanting to get in the middle of one of Kat and Hot Dog's arguments. She'd always thought they had a thing for each other but were afraid to get involved because they flew together. Instead of frakking, they fought a lot. If the intensity of their bickering was any sign, the attraction was strong.

A hush fell over the room when Kara walked in.

"Hey, don't stop the party on account of me," she said.

Karl and Saunders were sitting together at a table near one wall. They beckoned her over.

"I wondered when you'd get here," Saunders said.

"Who won the bet?"

Karl smiled. "We both lost. Nobody thought you'd make it in two days. We were thinking end of the week."

"Before you ask, I can't talk about the mission. Is Kendra on board?"

"Nope. Her transfer request was turned down. Guess why."

"Mommy dearest?"

He shrugged. "The official reason was no open positions in her area of expertise on the _G_."

Karl smiled. "So hacking is now an official area of expertise?"

Saunders looked at Kara. "My ECO is a real comedian. I think it had something to do with her nearly getting killed when we were with Lee on Tauron. Twice. I think her mother made a few phone calls and that was the end of her transfer request."

Karl said. "I told him if I could leave my wife and daughter behind, he could live without Kendra for a while."

"How are Sharon and Hera?" Kara asked.

"Fine when I left."

"I'm sorry I didn't get by to see them for the last couple of weeks, but with Maya's wedding and then planning the mission and…time just got away from me."

"It's okay. We understand how busy you've been. Sharon and Hera spent a couple of afternoons a week with D'Anna out at the airbase. Dr. Cardenas let Natasi take care of Rachel some of the time. It worked out good. Hera needs to be around somebody besides just me and Sharon. I think she finally let Natasi hold her without squalling."

Saunders grinned, "Depending on what happens next, it might be a long, dry spell for both of us. I'm staying faithful to Kendra."

Kara grinned. "Sounds serious. Will we be getting an invitation soon?"

"I'm not ready to go there yet, but I wouldn't rule it out in the future. I'm afraid at some point Mamma Shaw will insist on a wedding…a big one so she can invite all her political friends…kind of like you and Lee will have."

Kara snorted. "Yeah. Right. You just keep believing we'll have a big one."

"Your dad and Laura invited most of who's who in Caprica City to their wedding."

"Not to the wedding. It was just me and Lee at the wedding. They had a big reception."

"It was nice," Karl said. "A lot different from what Sharon and I did after our wedding. We went home so she could continue throwing up."

"How is everybody on the ship treating you?" Kara asked him.

"The same way they treat me at the base. They talk to me if they have to, otherwise…" He shrugged. "Everybody except Flat Top, but we both know he doesn't have good sense. I think he was in a Raptor that crashed last spring and he got all the sense knocked out of him."

Saunders made mock kissing sounds. "I love you, too, Helo."

"Can you understand why Kendra likes this nut?" Karl asked.

"'Cause I'm so good in bed," Saunders shot back.

Kara groaned. "Too much info. Time to change the subject."

"Maggie's on board," Saunders said. "You'll never believe who she's dating now."

"The suspense is killing me," Kara said mockingly.

"Tom Zarek."

"Holy mother of the gods," Kara breathed. "Are you serious?"

"Yep. She told Showboat and Showboat spread the word. If Maggs wanted to keep it to herself, she shouldn't have told anybody. You know how it is on a battlestar. Tell one person and you might as well announce it over the PA system. The pilot grapevine is faster than an FTL drive."

Kara was still trying to wrap her head around the idea of Maggie and Zarek and not doing a very good job of it. How could Maggie prefer a creep like Zarek to Zak Adama?

"Zarek's like…older than my father," she finally said. "On top of that he's a murdering scumbag."

"Hey, tell us something we don't already know," Karl said. "Not that I exactly care what Maggie does. I just hate to see her get her life messed up with somebody like him."

The door opened. Hot Dog and Kat walked in and after glancing in her direction, made their way to a table on the other side of the room. Hot Dog got two beers.

"What's the story on them?" Kara asked.

"Nobody's ever caught them," Saunders said, "but some of us think they've got something going on…kind of a love-hate thing."

"Is Kat still using stims?"

She got a non-committal look from both men. Finally Saunders said, "A lot of pilots use stims from time to time to keep their edge. CAG hands them out."

"Do you?"

"No, but…"

"But nothing," Kara said angrily. "Karl doesn't use them. Lee doesn't use them. I don't…"

"Okay, we get the picture," Karl said.

Saunders asked. "Have you ever stopped to think that Kat isn't quite as naturally gifted a pilot as you are and that she knows it? Maybe that's why she's got such a chip on her shoulder with you. She hasn't got a famous father and stepmother. She didn't even go to the Academy. She went to OCS and then Flight School. She's had to struggle for everything she's gotten."

"Look, Dwight, all I know is that when I was a nugget pilot on the _G_ last year, she went out of her way to bust my chops every chance she got. She tried to make me look bad every damned day that I was out training with her. If something went wrong, it was always my fault. She was so whacked out on stims half the time that she couldn't even run a simple training exercise."

"I know," Saunders said softly. "We were on the G then. too. Remember?"

Kara sat sullenly for moment then shrugged. "Forget it. She's not worth us getting into it. You guys are my friends."

"Back on Caprica, her former boyfriend was a drug dealer," Saunders said. "So was her father. Her boyfriend got stabbed by another inmate and died in prison last winter. Her father has some kind of cancer. She may or may not ever see him again."

"How do you know so much about her?"

He shrugged. "I'm a good listener."

They sat in silence for a while until Karl asked. "How's Dreilide doing?"

"About the same. I went to see him last week. His bronchitis has flared up again which makes the emphysema that much harder to manage, but Paulla is taking good care of him. She's making him take his medicine and use his inhaler."

"Ms. Soup and Sermons?"

"That's her. All along I've thought she wanted something from him. Now…I don't know. I mean it's not like he's getting rich off his CDs. He barely makes enough to pay the rent and buy groceries."

"Maybe she cares about him," Saunders said.

"I guess I should be glad he's not alone."

"What say we go to the officer's mess and eat some dinner?" Karl said. "Then we can come back here and have a couple of beers. Maybe play a little triad."

"I'm all for the dinner," Kara said, "but afterward I've got a date with Admiral Adama and Colonel Tigh. They want to pick my brain about my father's report. It shouldn't take too long. There's not much in there to pick."

TBC…


	58. Rescue

Chapter 58

Rescue

_The Planet_

_Day 96: Today I sat with the shuttle pilot and her mercenary lover and helped her tell him that she is expecting his child. His reaction was not unlike I had expected. Disbelief followed by anger. He said he had assumed that she was 'taking care of that sort of thing', meaning of course, birth control. _

_He is in his late thirties, a handsome man in a rugged sort of way, fit and masculine. It is easy to see why the woman was attracted to him. He has one serious drawback, however. He is obviously unwilling to become a husband or a father. When I asked him if he had any problems with his lover's decision to abort the child, I thought I saw a brief flicker of something in his blue eyes, regret or shame, perhaps, and then it was gone. He said he had no problem with it and left._

_I comforted the woman as best I could through a lengthy bout of tears since their relationship is clearly over, but just as I had resigned myself to scheduling her to come back for the procedure, she suddenly dried her eyes and said she is going to have the child and give it up for adoption. Her reasoning is not the best. She said her former lover would go through the rest of his life knowing he had a son or daughter somewhere in the universe, but would never know where. She actually left the medical tent in much better spirits than when she arrived. I'll have to admit my spirits were raised as well that she had decided not to go through with the abortion. _

_For the first time late that night I thought of offering to take the child. Oren and I have discussed having a family, but we could take this unwanted child and still have our own. _

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

Kara, Karl and Saunders sat alone at a table for four in the officer's dining hall or officer's mess as it was called on the _Galactica_. All were spooning ice cream from small plastic cups.

"Bet you didn't eat ice cream on Nereid," Karl said.

"Didn't have ice in my drinks, either, but Emmalyn's cooking more than made up for it."

"I thought you weren't supposed to talk about Nereid," Saunders said with a smile.

"I hardly think a comment about somebody's cooking could get me in trouble."

Kara finished her ice cream. The only sound at the table was that of spoons scraping plastic.

Finally she said, "What the hell. It's not like you're going to tell anybody. Right?"

"All your secrets are safe with us," Karl said.

"How is Narcho?" Saunders asked.

"He's such a valley man now that you wouldn't recognize him. Got a beard and long hair and everything."

"What do you think he'll do when this war is over?"

Kara shrugged.

"Oh, come on," Saunders said. "I know you've got an opinion. You've always got an opinion."

"I think he'll stay on the planet. I think he's got feelings for a girl who lives there. She's a little bit slow because there were problems when she was born, but in the valley you barely notice it."

"Is she pretty?"

"Very. She's also Hunter's sister. She has his same dark hair and blue eyes. The only problem is their uncles."

"Why are they a problem?"

"Duh. Things are just different in the valley. She and Narch can't spend much time alone."

"Does she like him?" Saunders asked.

"She told me he was her boyfriend."

Karl said, "If it's meant to be, they'll get together. I mean how many Cylons were there on Caprica two years ago, and I not only met one, I fell in love with her."

Kara smiled. "Getting married and having a kid has changed you."

"Becoming a husband and father does that to some guys…if they take it seriously."

"There's an Eight on Nereid hiding out in the valley with their First Six. Her name is Jade. Her face looks exactly like Sharon and she's the same size as Sharon, but those are the only ways they're alike."

"What do you mean?"

"Remember how we cut my hair short after Tom Zarek hijacked Dad's ship. I was creeped out because he'd kissed my ponytail. I thought if I cut my hair short like a boy, nobody could do that to me again."

Karl looked at Saunders. "You should have seen us cutting her hair in the men's bathroom at that little airport. Gods, what a mess. She looked like someone had used hedge clippers on it."

"Well that's how Jade's hair is cut except it looks like whoever cut it knew what they were doing…like when Jared's mother cut my hair that time in the refugee camp…short and layered."

"I heard from Jared not too long ago," Karl said. "He's getting married to some girl he met at work."

"Good for him," Kara said.

"Back to Jade," Saunders said. "Tell us more."

"Why are you so interested?" Kara asked. "I thought you and Kendra were close to setting a date."

He gave her a look. "I'm just curious. How is Jade so different from Sharon except for having short hair? I'm sure Karl would like to know, too."

"She's a fighter. Dad said she's skilled at hand-to-hand combat and she carries a wicked-looking knife. I can't stand Natasi, but I liked Natalie their First Six right away. I can't explain it."

"So do you like Jade?" Karl asked.

"We shared a bunkroom on Nereid. She's cool."

Kara decided to keep it to herself about Jade and Zak. Their relationship may not go anywhere although it might be good for Maggie to hear that Zak wasn't eating his heart out over her. For now, though, she kept silent.

Saunders reached into his jacket pocket. "I almost forgot. Kendra gave me this list…the eight battlestars that are with the _Galactica_ and their commanders."

"Why would I need that?"

"I don't know. Impress the Old Man, maybe?"

Kara unfolded the list and looked at it. It was printed from a computer. Nine battlestars. The _Galactica_ and eight others along with the names of their commanders and their class designation.

_Ajax,_ galactica class, Commander Nestor Thorean

_Charybdis,_ galactica class, Admiral Myron Taylor

_Columbia, _mercury class, Commander Jordan Pike

_Galactica, _galactica class, Admiral William Adama

_Minoan, _valkyrie class, Commander James Jonasson

_Orion, _valkyrie class, Commander Juan Tocarra

_Pegasus, _mercury class, Commander Helena Cain

_Sylla,_ galactica class_, _Commander Marian Riley

_Valkyrie, _valkyrie class, Commander Royan Herschel

Three females and six males since she knew Jordan Pike was a woman. Three valkyrie class vessels, four galactica class and two mercury. There was one other admiral on the list. Myron Taylor of the _Charybdis_.

Cole _Stinger_ Taylor was still the CAG of the _G_. Saunders must have read her mind because he said, "Cole is some distant relation to Admiral Taylor. Kendra dug up that little bit of info. The admiral's grandfather and Stinger's great grandfather were brothers or something like that. The whole Taylor family has been military for umpteen generations. Stinger has a sister flying a Viper off the _Orion _and a brother at the airbase on Caprica."

"It figures," Kara said. "Stinger never much cared for me. Kat's his pet."

"I didn't know he had one," Karl commented. "He seems too arrogant for pets."

Always a fountain of information, Saunders said, "Cain brought him with her and promoted him to CAG when she came to the _G_ as commander six years ago. He was a Viper squadron leader while she was XO on the _Columbia_. Then after the fighting six years ago, Jackson Spencer got promoted to Colonel and rotated to flight commander at the base on Caprica so it left the position of CAG open on the _G_. Admiral Adama went to Caprica as President Adar's chief military advisor and Cain was posted to the _Galactica_ as commander. Cain wasted no time in offering the position of CAG to Stinger. There were some ruffled feathers because she didn't promote somebody already serving on the _G_."

"So Stinger went from squadron leader of a brand spanking new mercury class battlestar to CAG of an old galactica class ship," Karl said. "No wonder he always walks around the _G_ like he's got something smelly on the bottom of his boot. Wonder why he made the move. I _know_ he doesn't have something going on with Cain. He's not her type."

Saunders smiled. "Because he'd rather serve as CAG on a slightly smaller and older battlestar under a commander he knows and respects than take his chances with staying on the _Columbia_ and serving under Jordan Pike. I hear she's tougher than Cain."

"Not possible," Karl grinned.

They sat in silence until Kara said, "I need to go. I've got ten minutes to get to Admiral Adama's quarters. I don't want to be late." She folded the list and stuck it in an inside pocket of her uniform tunic. "Thanks for the info. You want it back?"

"No. Kendra printed a couple of them for me."

Kara stood. "I guess I'll see you guys at breakfast…unless I get through tonight in time to join you for a beer."

She arrived at the admiral's quarters five minutes later and found an ensign standing outside the door.

"The meeting has been moved to the Situation Room, sir," he told her. "If you'll come with me."

Kara knew where the Situation Room, often called the War Room, was. It was near the CIC, but unlike the CIC which she had seen on several occasions, she'd never been in the Situation Room.

"Why the change?" She asked as they began walking.

"Too many people to fit in the admiral's quarters. He wanted access to the maps, too."

As soon as the ensign opened the hatch door for her, she understood why they needed more room and why she was glad Saunders had given her the list. Besides Admiral Adama and Colonel Tigh, the commanders of every battlestar had gathered. She hadn't seen that much brass in one room since her Academy graduation. All eyes turned to her. Her first reaction was a gut-clenching _oh, frak_. She entered and came to attention.

"At ease, Lieutenant Thrace," Adama said. He then introduced the eight senior officers, many of whom had mugs of coffee in their hands.

"Don't tell me that this young woman flies that Cylon Raider," Admiral Taylor said. "She's hardly more than a girl."

That got a rare smile from Bill. "How old were you when you started flying a Viper?"

Taylor chuckled. "Point taken."

Adama continued. "Starbuck is one of the best pilots we've got. She's just as good in a Viper as she is in the Raider."

Kara felt her cheeks grow hot. A part of her knew that Admiral Adama was right. She had plenty of self-confidence when she was in a ship or around other pilots, but she wasn't used to hearing that kind of praise in a room full of senior officers.

"Thank you, sir," she murmured. Commander Cain caught her eye and Kara glanced away. She still hadn't forgiven Cain for trying to kill her father.

"I'm going to let Mr. Gaeta explain to you what we're going to do tonight," Adama said to her. "We'll start the meeting in about ten minutes." He indicated a table that held a big silver coffee server and plates of cookies and small squares of cake. "Get yourself a cup of coffee and some desert if you'd like."

Kara declined coffee. She was wired enough as it was, but she picked up a cookie.

"Starbuck," Felix Gaeta said. "Welcome aboard."

"Thanks, Felix. Keeping them straight in the CIC?"

"Trying."

They walked to the end of the room that held the huge electronic map table. She knew from Colonel Burgher's class at the Academy that the big table was in reality a huge computer screen laid flat instead of standing up. The walls around them also held a number of large screens. Several technicians were at a control desk in one corner waiting to project any image that the admiral asked for. At the opposite end of the room was a long, slender table that seated at least twenty people. It was elevated several steps above the rest of the room which made it easier to look down on the map table. The senior officers seemed to be gradually making their way in that direction.

"I've never been in this room before," Kara said. "I hadn't expected anything quite this…complex."

"You think this is complex, you should see the one back at the base on Caprica. They've got a dozen of these tables in one huge room. When war games are going on, it's controlled chaos."

"So what's the plan for tonight?" Kara asked. "I thought I would be answering questions for Admiral Adama and Colonel Tigh, not the commanders of the whole fleet."

"The admiral sent each of them a copy of your father's report as soon as you gave it to him this morning. I think he wants you nearby in case he needs clarification about anything. Admiral Adama wants the input of his senior officers, but in the end, the battle plans will be his."

The electronic table flickered to life. Kara immediately recognized the map of Nereid.

"That's some map," Kara said.

"Admiral Adama has had some of the military's best cartographers working on it since your father escaped. They used the recon photos you and Lee took and Major Gallagher's drawings and information from him and Hunter. Using your father's report, the guys behind me were able to add the coordinates of the major locations on the planet including all eight settlements."

"They did a good job. I'm really impressed. So what am I supposed to do?"

"Just answer any questions the commanders have."

Kara felt the pang in her gut again. She wasn't the least bit sure she had the answers.

"Let's gather at the table for a short meeting," Adama said. "Join us, Lieutenant Thrace."

As she left the map table, Gaeta began getting small model battlestars and several basestars from a cabinet.

Bill sat at the head of the long table and indicated the chair to his right for Kara. She sat stiffly, uncomfortable with the scrutiny she was getting from the commanders and from Tigh who sat directly across from her.

Bill opened the discussion with making sure everyone had read his or her copy of the report. They all indicated they had.

"Questions?"

"What happened to the Cylon rebellion Major Gallagher said might start?" Commander Pike asked. "He said it hadn't come about but didn't really say why."

Bill glanced at Kara and she answered. "After my father escaped, their First Six, a Cylon named Natalie, never got a chance to spread the word about what happened to their creators and the Sevens. She was lucky to get away from Settlement Alpha with her life. She's been hiding in the valley ever since."

"In some ways that makes our job easier," Commander Thorean said.

Admiral Taylor said, "I disagree."

"Right now _all_ the Cylons on the planet are the enemy," Thorean said.

"If they were fighting each other, we'd have a better chance of rescuing the humans."

"You must not have read the same report I did," Thorean said. The humans and the Cylons live cheek by jowl in the settlements and in the city. There's no way you could get the humans out without engaging in heavy conflict with the Cylons. We're talking massive collateral damage."

Adama said, "Since a Cylon rebellion isn't an issue for us, let's get on with planning the attack. Mr. Gaeta, show us the placement of the basestars."

Felix pressed several keys and an image appeared on the wall screen at the other end of the table. All eyes shifted. The view was of Nereid from space. There were three realistic-looking basestars in orbit. Using a laser pointer, Adama highlighted the one nearest the planet and then the next one.

"We've basically got two baseships in orbit around the planet and a third that's sits farther out in space and lets the planet rotate below it. The lowest orbit is a geostationary one that keeps ship A over the city. Ship B is in a slightly higher orbit, also geostationary, but at a position that indicates it's over the shipyard for the basestar under construction. Basestar C sits out in space beyond Nereid's moon. According to Natalie, the ship in orbit over the city contains their large resurrection facility."

"But we've got to go through the other two to get to it," Commander Tocarra said.

Adama said, "Not necessarily. We have the coordinates of its orbit and could jump in below the other two. The problem is that we don't want to destroy the ship. We only want to cripple its weapons and FTL capability. If we take it out, we've lost the only bargaining chip we've got. We need something to offset the huge bargaining chip the Cylons have…the lives of forty-six thousand human slaves."

"So what you're saying is that we take out the other two and cripple the third…and then what?"

"We try to get their leaders to listen to reason and surrender. I would think the thought of permanent death hanging over their heads would be a powerful incentive."

"What do you really think the odds are that they'll just roll over and surrender?" Commander Cain asked.

"Not much," Bill answered. "But right now it's our initial strategy as has been mandated by the President. If that fails, we'll have to do it the hard way in the air and on the ground. Let's go over to the map table."

They all stood and made their way to the other end of the room. Kara stood back and let the senior officers go in front of her.

As Cain passed her, she said, "How are you Lieutenant Thrace?"

"Fine, sir," Kara answered. Cain looked like she wanted to say something else, but Kara glanced toward the map table. Cain took the hint and moved on.

Gaeta changed the map to show Nereid with the three base ships orbiting. She didn't envy Admiral Adama his dilemma one bit. But he obviously had a plan. She couldn't wait to hear it.

When they had all found a place around the four edges of the big table, Bill Adama said, "I've thought about this a great deal because we've got a major concern with destroying those basestars too close to Nereid. The two orbiting ships are definitely a problem because any large debris will _not_ burn up in the atmosphere and will impact the planet's surface. I know all of you saw the photographs taken by the unmanned drones over Picon. You saw the central hub of the ship on the ground and the destruction it caused. It was almost intact. We can't let that happen on this planet since we have no way of controlling where the debris will fall."

"How do you propose we take out two of them and still prevent that from happening?" Thoreon asked.

"I'm hoping we can lure them away from the planet."

"How?" Pike asked.

"This is my plan," Bill said. "After I explain it, I'm going to ask for volunteers."

...

"Here's what I've come up with," John said to the assembled group. "Feel free to shoot down all or part of it."

Buddy had drawn another map on the whiteboard. John used the laser pointer. "The airfield, the prison, and the lab where the res facility is located."

"Distances?" The Marine sergeant asked.

"Roughly eight miles from the airfield to the complex of buildings. The lab is next door to the prison…maybe a hundred yards between the two entrances. Natalie said the res facility is on the second floor."

"Will we have transportation or be on foot?"

"According to LG49 there are always trucks at the airfield. We'll do our best to appropriate one of those."

"Guards?"

"Buddy says that three-fourths of the centurions are at or in the vicinity of the prison. That means about eleven hundred at that location and three seventy-five at the airfield. Those guard the eight hangars so that averages about fifty centurions per hangar. Some have a few more, some a few less. What we hope is that with the help of Natasi, Jade and LG49, we can land at the airfield without raising any alarms. They'll know we landed, but we hope they don't think anything out of the ordinary is happening. Once down, our centurions can start liberating theirs."

"Going in under their dradis?" Zak asked.

"In a manner of speaking."

Lee said, "Do you think it will be a problem that the Heavy Raider we'll take to the prison is the one you stole?"

John smiled. "I prefer to say _borrowed_. LG49 said the centurions don't know the ship was stolen so they won't do anything when it comes back. Apparently Cavil never thought I'd bring the ship back to Nereid, much less to the prison so he never bothered to put out any kind of alert."

"What about the humanoid Cylons who are there?"

"They don't hang out at the airfield at night. Maybe I should go through my plan and answer questions afterward. And I'd just like to remind everybody again that this is strictly a voluntary mission. We have three teams. My team consists of me, Natasi, Targa and Beck. We'll pose as prisoners that Natasi is bringing in guarded by her two centurions. The second team consists of Lee, Hunter, Jade and the other two centurions. Their goal is to get to the res facility and unbox Sonja while my team rescues Yoshimo and Petra. Then we'll meet back at the truck and drive back to the airfield. Our Marines compose the third team. They'll stay at the airfield and guard the Heavy Raider. LG49 will stay with the Marines since he's a pilot. In case the mission is really blown, he'll get you back to the valley."

"What do you plan to do with the Cylons and humans at the prison to stop them from alerting anyone?" Lee asked.

"If we have to, we'll lock them in cells. There's every probability that some or all of them have information we'll need in the future. We'll kill only if we have to."

There were nods all around.

"When do we do this?" Hunter asked.

"Tomorrow night after midnight. Around two in the morning. It's got to be tomorrow night because the next night we can expect the fleet to arrive. Questions?"

Lee said, "I think we should rehearse."

That got a snicker from Zak. "We're not putting on a play, big bro."

"Practice makes perfect," Lee shot back. "How many times do you think I flew that bombing range on Caprica? How often did you practice on the rifle range on Caprica?"

"Actually I think that's a good idea," John said. "Tomorrow morning after breakfast we'll meet back here. Now everybody go get some sleep or have some fun…whichever you'd rather do."

Lee stayed seated as did Natalie while everyone else slowly left the room. Zak had mentioned that they were getting a triad game going after the meeting and asked him to join them. Now Lee told Zak to start without him. He glanced at Natalie. It was obvious that she shared his concern.

"What's up?" John asked.

"Are you certain you want to do this?" Lee asked.

"I want to rescue my friends, but no, I don't really want to take a team there to do it. I wish I could go by myself."

"Are you sure you don't want to wait until your fleet gets here?" Natalie asked.

"Can you guarantee that Yoshimo and Petra won't be killed?"

"No," Natalie answered. "The One in charge of the prison is a cruel and arrogant man, more so than the One in the city. He's vengeful. I can't say what he might do. Yoshimo and Petra might be used as hostages or shields or he might just kill them out of spite."

"What about Sonja?" Lee asked.

Natalie said, "She wouldn't be seen as a threat. She's boxed. She should be safe."

"Unless Cavil decides to blow up the lab rather than let us have it," John said. "It wouldn't be the first time in a conflict that one side destroyed their own strategic holdings rather than let them fall to an enemy. We did it on Picon during the Second War."

"He's right," Lee said. "We'll get Sonja. I know she's important to you."

John said. "She saved my life and D'Anna's and Rachel's at the cost of her own. I pay my debts. I'd rescue Leoben and Simon if I could, but they're on a baseship and are out of my reach. All hope might not be lost for them, though, because I told Bill he should try to take that ship intact. Cavil might not be so ready to start killing humans if he knows we have the power to destroy his ability to download."

"Are you okay with going back to the prison?" Lee asked.

"I'll have to be. There's no other choice."

"We could swap places. You go with Jade and Hunter to get Sonja and let me go to the prison."

John shook his head. "No, this is something I've got to do. Confront the demons and all that. Brad and I talked about it a couple of times although I don't think he envisioned something quite like this."

"Did you mention this rescue plan in the report to your admiral?" Natalie asked.

"It'll be over before he gets here. We'll all be safely back here in the valley."

"Or splattered all over the high plateau," Lee said somberly.

"That's not going to happen." He looked at Natalie. "We've got to have faith."

She smiled. "What are you going to do right now...sleep or fun?"

"I'm going up and have a drink with Markham. You're both welcome to come?"

Lee said, "I'm going to play a little triad with Zak and the guys. Keep him out of trouble."

"Jade has mentioned your brother several times," Natalie said. "Do you think there's an attraction between them?"

"I'm sure there is on his part," Lee answered. "But don't worry. Kara and I have both told him to play nice. Zak understands this is not like meeting a girl at a party on Caprica and taking her back to his place for a night of fun. He won't take advantage of her."

"I doubt Jade would let him," Natalie said.

"I think Lee means emotional advantage," John added. "Zak has a lot of charm when it comes to women. Add his good looks and you've got a killer combination...just like his older brother."

"Then maybe you should keep an eye on them," Natalie said to Lee. "Jade is very wary and very skilled in combat, but I'm afraid her heart is like a child's…open and trusting. She may be feeling things now that she's never felt before."

Lee remembered how quickly Sharon Valerii had fallen for Karl. The Eights didn't seem to have nearly the sophistication in that regard as the Sixes. He walked down the corridor to the bunkroom. The triad game was already underway and Zak was missing.

"Where's my brother?"

The sergeant looked up from his hand. "He went for a walk with Jade."

"In the moonlight," one of the others added.

"Damn," Lee said under his breath.

"Don't worry, sir. He won't do one thing to her that she doesn't want him to do. We were practicing a little hand-to-hand combat this afternoon. She took him down twice without really trying. Of course he was tired from picking corn or that's the excuse he gave us. Have a seat."

Reluctantly Lee sat and picked up the cards he'd just been dealt. The first hand showed him what was in store for him that evening. Between thinking about Kara and wondering what Zak was up to with Jade, he couldn't keep his mind on the game. He didn't think the others minded a bit as his stack of cubits quickly shrank.

…

"You want to ask Natasi and the others to join us?" John asked Natalie.

"You don't mind?"

"The more the merrier."

Before he left the room, Natalie put her hand on his arm. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"I haven't known you very long, but I sense…a change in you."

"Let it go, Natalie."

"You don't have to do this. Yoshimo is a man of God. He would never blame you no matter what his fate."

"That's not the point. _I'd_ blame me. _I'm_ the one who's got to live with what happened to him and Petra and the others because of my escape. Now drop this, please. There's nothing more to talk about."

John continued down the corridor and up the stairs. Markham was waiting on him with the bottle of home brew. He poured.

"I've got sixteen centurion zappers ready to go," Markham said. "I'll have another one ready before tomorrow night."

"Good. With the one we brought that makes eighteen. If all goes well, we won't have to use them. I really appreciate what you've done for us."

"I've got a stake in this war, too. Besides, while you're gone tomorrow night, I'll be able to play chess with Buddy. Natalie might want to keep us company."

"If…something happens and we don't come back…"

"We'll have a nice service for you," Markham said.

"Make sure Admiral Adama knows it was all my idea. The rest of them were just following orders."

John took a small drink of the alcohol and closed his eyes. While he'd slept that morning, he'd dreamed of Laura, of her soft, slim body and the love they shared. He'd awakened wanting her, believing for a few brief moments that she was beside him in his bunk. But she wasn't. They'd been on Caprica for months and other than one kiss which had gone nowhere, they'd barely touched. He knew why and he'd been depressed for the rest of the day. He didn't want his mood to rub off on the others. He forced himself to smile as Natalie entered the room followed by Natasi and Buddy. Maybe after tomorrow night he could smile and mean it.

...

The Presidential limousine moved through the night minus the blinking lights or fender flags. Without these signs of her office, Laura's car looked like any other limo with dark tinted windows favored by the rich and the elite of Caprica. She had no doubt that Tom Zarek now rode in one very similar as he wined and dined his rich and influential supporters and also a bevy of beautiful, naïve young women like Maggie Edmondson.

Again her driver took a circuitous route to the Kings Bay Medical Center and entered the physician parking lot. An agent let them in the door. The night was misty with rain threatening which worked in Laura's favor. She wore a raincoat and a scarf over her hair.

Dr. Junius met her and Edgar in the physician's lounge on the maternity floor. Bianca had described him so well that Laura recognized him immediately. A few inches taller than her with features similar to Sharon, he was slim and handsome. Bianca had told her that the brilliant neonatologist was forty-nine. He looked ten or more years younger. At nearly nine o'clock at night, he looked as fresh as he had no doubt looked at nine o'clock that morning.

Laura extended her hand and he shook it.

"I'll admit I was surprised this morning when Dr. Cardenas told me to expect a visitor tonight."

Laura smiled. "I can't thank you enough for remaining here to meet with me."

"You'd like to see Sean?"

"Oh, yes…if I could. Did he have a good day?"

"If by a good day you mean did he live through it, then yes, he had a good day."

"Tell me honestly, please, what do you think his chances are?"

"Every day he beats the odds, his chances get better. After our initial tests we've disturbed him as little as possible. When they're as small and premature as Sean, too much handling can be detrimental since his nervous system is still developing. We don't want to over-stimulate him. We try to simulate the warm, quiet peaceful environment of the womb as much as possible."

"Has there been any change with his mother?"

"Not that I'm aware of."

"You know of the Cylon ability to download?"

"Dr. Cardenas educated me."

"I know you're not D'Anna's physician, but would there be any way to keep her alive on a ship that would return her to her homeworld?"

"There are portable ventilators. If she had just undergone dialysis…" he shrugged. "I suppose it would be possible. Are you thinking of sending her home?"

"Yes. What kind of medical attendants would she need? A physician?"

"A respiratory therapist and someone with the training of an EMT."

"Thank you, Dr. Junius. I don't want to take anymore of your time. Can I see Sean now?"

After she put a disposable paper gown over her dress and a paper mask over her mouth and nose, she followed the doctor through a set of double doors into the neonatal intensive care nursery. There were a dozen high-tech incubators around the room. All but three of them held infants. Sean was in one against the far wall. A nurse was standing beside him charting the numbers that displayed on all the monitors. They waited until she had moved to the next incubator.

Even though Laura tried to prepare herself, she still found her eyes filling with tears as she looked at the tiny boy. Dr. Junius patiently explained all the tubes and wires to her and answered her questions. He told her that Sean was being fed through a tube because he was to premature to be able to coordinate breathing, sucking and swallowing.

"May I touch him?" She asked.

"Cup his head and feet very gently and talk softly to him."

She reached through the round openings in the side of the incubator and touched John's son for the first time.

"I've written your father a letter about you," she said softly. "I've told him how strong you are. I've told him…I've told him how much he'll love you."

Sean's tiny hand opened. It might have been nothing more than a muscle spasm, but Laura took it as a sign. She put her little finger against his palm and his fingers closed around the edge of her finger. In that moment Laura felt love well in her for this child who was fighting to live. They had formed a bond.

"One day I hope to stand here with your father," she whispered. "So let's agree right now that you're going to be waiting for him when he comes home."

Dr. Junius smiled. "I'll remind him every day that he's been given a Presidential order."

Laura gently stroked the blond fuzz on Sean's head. "Thank you for allowing me to see him."

"Come back anytime you like."

Laura smiled. "I'll do what I can. I'm afraid these visits are giving my head of security ulcers. I want to give you my personal phone number. If there are any changes in Sean's condition, I'd like for you to call me."

"And I'll give you mine," Dr. Junius replied. "Please call me anytime."

…

The next morning Laura's secretary put through a call from Colonel Jackson Spencer at the airbase.

"Good morning, Madame President."

"Good morning, Colonel Spencer. You have news for me?"

"Yes, ma'am. Early this morning our ship jumped into space with word from Admiral Adama. Before he left, he told me to notify you as soon as the ship arrived."

"I didn't expect that ship until later in the week."

"Neither did we, but it's here. What time would be convenient for me to bring you the report?"

"Does _now_ suit you, Colonel Spencer?"

"I'll be there in an hour."

_..._

Everyone on the mission team wore black except Natasi. She wore a tight red halter dress with tiny straps and red shoes with stiletto heels. Natalie gave her a black raincoat to wear over the dress until they reached the prison. Natasi had taken pains with her makeup and hair. Even though the Overseer Sixes at the prison were her sisters and had the same features, John knew that none of them had ever gotten the reaction from the human guards that Natasi would.

They gathered silently on the top level of the _Hyperion._ John's watch showed 01:25 in the morning. Zak and the other Marines checked and rechecked their weapons. Each wore a backpack that contained two of the special centurion-zapping canisters as well as a number of explosive devices. Lee and Hunter also carried backpacks containing two canisters. Jade carried her knife and nothing else.

Markham said, "Do not use those canisters within fifty meters of the Heavy Raider or you'll be walking home."

"Understood," the Marine sergeant said.

John looked around at the team. "Any questions?"

"We know what we're supposed to do," Hunter said.

"Okay then. Let's do it."

"Good luck," Natalie said. "Buddy and I will be waiting."

They exited in single file and gathered at the bottom of the steps. Two centurions took the lead and disappeared down the path under the trees. They needed nothing to find their way except their ability to see in the infrared spectrum of light. The others used flashlights and lanterns. The waxing moon was between a quarter and half-full. The clearing was light enough that the Marines quickly removed the camouflage netting from the Heavy Raider. The centurions stowed all the netting under the trees at the edge. Everyone boarded silently. John got into the copilot's seat and let LG49 take the pilot's seat.

This time they flew north toward another river. Fifty miles downstream it powered the hydroelectric plant that provided power for the city. John put all his faith in the centurion to stay low enough that the dradis of the basestars wouldn't pick them up. He missed being able to have a conversation like he and Buddy had, but he knew that LG49 understood him and that's what mattered. He had brought the translation device but didn't think they would have an opportunity to use it.

The treetops below them opened up and John saw moonlight reflect on a river much wider than the one at the waterfall. LG49 put the coordinates for an area ten miles east of the plateau into the FTL drive, skimmed low over the water, and jumped.

They came out of the jump and saw the prison as a small sea of light above them in the distance. Natalie had told him that the electricity for the prison and lab complex came from huge underground generators powered by tylium. Keeping the tylium supplies going would be crucial if they wanted to use the plateau as a base of operations. John had put all of that into his report to Bill along with the fact the Lee had come up with the idea.

LG49 made a wide circle and approached the facility from the west like their approach would have been if they'd come from the city. As before the airfield was minimally lighted. The centurion sat the ship down on the runway near the first hangar. It was also nearest the fuel tanks. John had burned through a lot of fuel getting the fully-loaded Heavy Raider off Caprica. He had already told LG49 to have the centurions who worked at the airfield to fuel the ship.

Natasi went down the ramp first. The rest of them stayed on board. Buddy had told him that the centurions recognized the hierarchy of the humanoid forms, but that at 02:30 in the morning there shouldn't be any others around the airfield to countermand Natasi's authority.

She called the centurions from the first hangar to her and told them to kneel. John breathed a sigh of relief when they obeyed. LG49 and the four centurions exited the ship and began removing the telencephalic inhibitors and snapping them in half. It took only a short while until the sixty plus centurions in the first hangar were liberated. LG49 transmitted wirelessly to them as their higher cognitive functions began coming on line one by one. They gathered around their liberator, eager for whatever he had to tell them.

Slowly Natasi backed away and joined the team.

"Let's do it," John said.

The Marines scouted the immediate area and reported. "No truck."

John made his way through the newly liberated centurions to LG49. In anticipation of needing to identify his main helper, John had tied a strip of white cloth around the waist of the big robot.

When he got to LG49, he said, "We need transportation to the prison. Could you get one of these guys to find us a truck?"

By the time he had finished speaking, two centurions detached themselves from the edge of the group and exited the hangar. John walked back to the Heavy Raider and they waited. Everyone was so keyed up that it was hard to stand still…everyone except Natasi. If she felt nervous or apprehensive, she was hiding it well.

Eight long minutes ticked by before they saw headlights. A transport truck with a canvas covered cargo area pulled up. It was exactly like the one that had taken John from the prison to the airfield half a year earlier. LG49 was gesturing to the two centurions who drove the truck and then back to him. To make sure he understood, John got the translation device from the Heavy Raider. LG49 was telling him that the two centurions would drive them. He also told John that they would obey him or Natasi over anyone at the prison.

"Stay here and free as many of your brothers as you can while we're gone," John said.

Then he and the men got into the back of the truck. He reached down and took Natasi's hand and helped her up. Silently they sat on the bench seats on either side of the cargo area. LG49 stepped back from the truck's door and they were on their way.

The truck's suspension was nearly gone and they bounced over the rutted road. John doubted the centurions felt the bumps the way their human cargo did. He tried to calm himself by taking deep breaths, but tonight it didn't seem to help.

The truck stopped. With it shielding them from the prison gate, John jumped down and helped Natasi. She took off the coat that had been covering her red dress. In the bright lights that surrounded the prison, she glowed like an exotic bird. Their eyes met and he thought of Sonja.

"Thank you," she said.

"Thank you for helping us," he echoed.

Targa and Beck were having a hard time taking their eyes off her. Lee and Hunter seemed to be doing a little better.

"Let's do it," John said. He, Targa and Beck put plastic restraints on their wrists that were loose enough they could easily get out of them. Each had a pistol tucked into the back of his waistband under his shirt.

His team went first while Lee, Hunter and Jade hung back with their two centurions.

One of John's centurions led the way followed by the three _prisoners_, then Natasi and finally the second centurion.

Their centurions communicated wirelessly to the centurions guarding the gate that they had incoming prisoners. The heavy metal gate topped with razor wire began sliding back in its track. It was all John could do to make himself walk forward.

Two more centurions opened the outer door to the prison and they walked inside. The smell of the place threatened to suffocate him.

Natasi leaned over and whispered, "Trust me."

That's all he could do now. Several times on this planet a Six had saved his life but his heart wouldn't stop hammering and the saliva wouldn't return to his dry mouth.

The team was met by another centurion and a human guard who was clothed in a mismatched uniform and looked half-asleep.

"I bring three prizes," Natasi said.

"We weren't expecting anyone tonight," the man said grumpily but without taking his eyes off her. "Nobody tells me a damned thing anymore."

"What a shame," she purred. "I'm sure you're one of their most loyal employees. They should treat you better."

"I'm going to have to wake up the commandant. He's going to be royally pissed off. Couldn't this have waited until the morning?"

"Oh, I think he'll forgive you. Look who I've caught."

She grasped John's arm and propelled him forward.

"Remember me?" John asked. "Because I sure as hell remember you."

The guard's eyes widened, the last bit of sleep leaving them in a rush.

"I'll be damned. I'll just be damned. Where did you find him?"

"Hiding outside the city with these two," Natasi said and pushed Targa and Beck forward. "Now please, take us to your leader." She turned to the centurions who had accompanied them. "Please stay here and talk to your brothers at the gate. I'm sure they're anxious to catch up on all the gossip from the city."

Then she turned to the guard and winked as she slipped her arm through his. Little did he know that the minute they disappeared down the hall, his two centurion guards would be liberated and well on their way to joining the rebellion.

The three prisoners were escorted to a bare room and locked inside. Natasi grasped the guard's arm again and left with him. She had started calling him _Roger_.

John's eyes searched the room for hidden cameras or other monitoring devices. The only place he saw where such a device might be hidden was a small air vent near the floor on the opposite wall. He walked over to it before he removed his restraints. Targa and Beck did the same. Carefully he took the pistol from the back of his waistband.

"I'd rather have my crossbow," Beck said.

"It wouldn't fit down your pants, you fool," Targa said. There was a roughness to Targa's voice that told John they were just as nervous as he was.

Fifteen minutes passed before the door opened and Natasi walked in accompanied by Roger and the One who was the commandant of the prison. She let the two men get inside before she closed the door. At first they didn't seem to comprehend that their prisoners were no longer restrained and now had weapons.

"Oh, my," Natasi said with mock concern. "I guess I didn't search them well enough. I suppose it goes without saying that if you make any noise, they'll hurt you very badly."

Targa and Beck quickly relieved Roger of his weapon, shoved him to the floor and used the plastic restraints on his wrists and ankles. Targa pulled a rag from his pocket and stuffed it into Roger's mouth and tied it in place with a short length of rope.

The One was not armed and made no move to do anything. Finally he looked at John. "I saw you carried out of here on a stretcher. The doctor said he didn't think you'd live."

"You asked the wrong doctor," John replied.

"I knew it was a mistake to humor that idiotic Three and give you to her. She's been nothing but trouble from the day she came out of the soup. So now you've come back to extract your revenge on us."

"While that's a real pleasant thought, tonight we've come for the two humans that were brought here a few months ago. If we do this quietly, no one will get hurt, including you."

Cavil seemed to ponder John's request. "And if we don't give them to you?"

"Then I guess we'll do this the hard way and people will get hurt…starting with you."

John glanced at his watch. With Natalie's help they'd estimated that it should take twenty minutes for Lee and his team to unbox Sonja. They were coming up on that mark now.

"Why are you helping these humans?" The commandant One asked Natasi.

"Do you not recognize me, brother?" She replied.

"You come from the city, obviously," he said. "You won't find a dress like that here at the prison. Our Sixes prefer more practical clothing and shoes."

She smiled. "The question is _which city_?"

"There's only one on the planet," he said as if talking to a child.

"That depends on the planet," John said.

The commandant's eyes widened briefly but he maintained his composure. "It's not possible."

Natasi was still smiling. "Could I interest you in a chance at redeeming yourself or does boxing have a real appeal for you?"

Targa took a knife out of his pocket and opened it. "Let's see how he likes some of his own treatment. I think I know just where to start."

"We're in a hurry," John said to the One. "But we're willing to be generous. We'll give you fifteen whole seconds to make up your mind…starting right now."

…

At the same time John's team entered the prison, Lee's team walked through the gate with their other two centurions to the lab next door. There was one centurion outside. It was quickly liberated by one of theirs who stayed with him as his higher cognitive functions began to start up one by one.

The inside of the lab was dark with only the dimmest of lights over the stairwell doors.

"Second floor," Jade said and took the lead.

The stairwell was equally dim, the steps leading down vanishing into the darkness long before the landing. They went up.

Natalie had given them instructions. They were to go in the fourth door on the right. Lee, Hunter and Jade moved without noise. It was impossible for the centurion to move quietly, but they hoped the sound of a centurion in the hallway was not enough to spook the three resurrection nurses.

Jade grasped the handle and opened the door slowly. The interior was lit a dim green by a series of ceiling fixtures. The width of the room was about twenty-five feet. Lee could only guess at the length, perhaps four times that. There was row after row of tanks, all of them dark. Natalie had told them that when a download was triggered by the death of a brother or sister, the tank was lit from within.

They stood and waited for their eyes to adjust. Natalie couldn't tell them which tank Sonja would be in. They were going to have to look in each one. She also couldn't tell them where the resurrection nurses might be…whether they would be sleeping in a different room or would be in the main room.

Lee made a signal for the centurion to wait outside. Lee signaled to Hunter and then to Jade to take a row and begin looking. He took the third row. Each had a penlight.

They found her near the back. Their penlights barely penetrated the thick, opaque goo that covered her. Lee reacted like he would to someone drowning in a bathtub and had to fight the urge to reach in and pull her head to the surface.

"_Think of it as being in amniotic fluid in a mother's womb," _Natalie had said. "_She'll emerge and breathe on her own as soon as the control box is reattached and consciousness is restored to her."_

As Natalie had said, the control box on Sonja's tank had been removed. Jade immediately went to the side of the room and searched cabinet after cabinet. Hunter helped. Lee went to the other side. The cabinets were filled with boxes and jars of chemicals with handwritten names, some he'd never heard of. There were crystals resembling salt and others that were liquid. He wondered if these containers held the ingredients that were added to water to make the goo in the tanks. He was so fascinated that he never heard the door at the back of the room open.

"What are you doing?"

The voice a few feet behind him startled him so badly that he dropped his penlight. Miraculously it continued to burn. He retrieved it, stood and turned just as the fluorescent lights flickered on. When his eyes adjusted to the bright light, he saw a Three dressed in white with a similarly clad Six and Eight behind her.

Nurse Three asked again. "What are you doing?"

Natalie had told them that the nurses as a rule were docile. They were caregivers and not fighters. Lee answered her question truthfully.

"Looking for something…a control box for one of the tanks. Maybe you can help me find it."

Jade walked across the room. "If you won't help him, sister, then maybe you'll help me."

"What are you doing here?" Nurse Six asked. "No one is supposed to be in here except us."

"We want the control box to Sonja's tank."

"We don't have it," Nurse Three said. "The commandant of the prison took it."

"Can we take a control box off another tank?" Lee asked Jade.

"No. Think of that box as storage for Sonja's avatar. These control boxes are empty until someone starts to download. Sonja's memories downloaded into that box and then it was removed."

"Damn," Lee said. "What are we going to do?"

"I'll go to the prison," Jade said.

"No. We'll send the centurion," Lee said. "Go tell him to find out where the control box to Sonja's res tank is."

Jade ran to the door, opened it and spoke to the centurion who turned and clanked off toward the stairwell.

Lee called to Hunter. "You might as well quit looking. These ladies say it's not here."

"Why do you want to unbox Sonja?" Nurse Eight asked.

"Because she didn't deserve what was done to her," Lee answered.

Jade was more emphatic. "She helped her human lover and for that Cavil boxed her."

"We heard she helped him escape the planet," Nurse Eight said. "That makes her a traitor. She deserves her fate."

Jade looked at Nurse Three. "He took the mother of our peacemaker with him in order to save her life and her baby's life. She's a Three just like you. The human that Sonja helped escape wasn't just _her_ lover. He's also the father of our peacemaker."

"Is that true?" Nurse Six asked skeptically.

"It's true," Lee answered. "Help us unbox her and she can tell you herself."

Jade said, "You should treat Sonja like the hero she is."

The three nurses huddled together and whispered among themselves. Finally Nurse Three said, "We lied. We have the control box."

"Give it to us," Jade said.

"Please," Lee added. "We'll remember this favorably."

"Come with us," Nurse Six said.

They followed her to the third row of empty tanks and watched her remove the control box from the tank beside Sonja. It had been right under their noses. _Hiding in plain sight_, Lee thought.

"This is Sonja," she said. "Now let us do our job."

Lee, Hunter and Jade stood at one end of the tank while the Six reattached the box. Immediately the tank was lit from within and they could see Sonja's body in the opaque liquid. It took a few moments, but her head broke the surface and she took a shuddering breath followed by another. Then the nurses gathered around her, holding her arms and comforting her as she looked wildly around.

"You were boxed and now you're back with us," Nurse Three said. "Breathe slowly and deeply."

"My head," Sonja moaned and coughed up some of the fluid.

"The pain will pass," Nurse Six said as she gently stroked Sonja's head. "Relax."

Sonja shuddered and coughed again finally clearing her airways of the fluid. Lee tried to imagine what she was going through. It was the closest thing to birth that he'd ever witnessed…only instead of a baby, he was watching the birth of an adult.

"How long is this going to take?" Hunter asked.

Jade turned on him. "As long as it takes. She didn't just download. She was boxed for two months. She's still very confused. We can't rush her."

Sonja's eyes darted to them, took them in and returned to Lee. "Who are you?"

"John sent us. We've come to rescue you."

"John?"

"You don't remember him?"

Sonja shook her head. "I was boxed for _two months_?"

"Yes," Nurse Six said.

"I don't remember…anything."

"Your memories are intact. They will return as your headache eases."

Jade asked, "Where is your datastream?"

"In a part of the lab we're not allowed to access," Nurse Eight said.

"Explain _not allowed to access,_" Lee said.

"There is a lengthy number that must be entered into a keypad. Only the One who is our prison commandant knows it. The creators live and work in that part of the lab."

"Huh," Jade said. "The creators don't live and work anywhere. They've been dead now for almost seven years. Natalie, the First Six saw them after they were killed."

"They can't be dead," Nurse Three said serenely. "We still hear their voices in the datastream."

"Would that be the datastream you can't access?" Hunter asked.

"Stop lying to us," Jade said, an edge of anger coming into her voice.

"We're not lying," Nurse Six said. "Sometimes brothers or sisters are brought here and taken into the lab. Cavil opens the door and we're allowed to go to the datastream and participate in their rehabilitation. We soothe them while he adjusts their programming. Sometimes it causes them pain."

"You've never seen the creators, have you?" Jade asked.

"No, but we've heard their voices…" Nurse Three began.

"Frak their voices," Jade said angrily. "Cavil has years of their voices in the data library. He can make them say anything he wants them to say. They're dead. Not only that, the death of our brother Sevens was no accident. Cavil poisoned their tanks on purpose and had the living copies killed along with the creators."

"She's telling you the truth," Lee said. "I've talked to the only Seven who escaped."

Suddenly Sonja stood up in the tank, the gelatinous fluid cascading down her naked body. Lee had caught momentary glimpses of Gaius and Natasi while he'd listened to the surveillance tapes back on Caprica, but the sight of this woman rising from her tank immediately made him think of a painting in the Caprica Museum of Art. It was called _The Birth of Aphrodite _and depicted the goddess of love rising from the ocean in an open sea shell attended by the West Wind Zephyrus whose gentle breath dried her hair. On the other side was Persephone who carried a regal robe to cover Aphrodite's nakedness.

"Don't you have something to…cover her?" Lee asked. "We can't take her with us like that."

While Nurse Eight went to get a robe, Lee and Hunter both tried to avert their eyes. Jade stared openly at her lovely sister. Sonja didn't seem the least bit embarrassed and made no attempt to cover herself.

"Come with us," Nurse Three said to Sonja.

She and the Six helped Sonja out of the tank and led her to a shower in the back of the room where they began washing the goo from her.

Lee glanced at Hunter. The look they shared would have been immediately understood by any male and needed no words. It had nothing to do with Kara or Maya, but a universal appreciation of perfection in a woman's face and form.

"Huh," Jade said. "It's a good thing I'm along to tell you to put your tongues back in your mouths."

Lee started to comment that Zak would have looked, too, but he let it go. They were there to get Sonja safely to the valley, not to engage in debates about her beauty. For the first time Lee understood what John must have gone through trying to resist this woman.

"What will happen to the nurses?" Hunter asked Jade.

"Nothing if we don't get caught. No one will know Sonja is gone. After tomorrow it won't matter anyway."

The nurses brought Sonja back to them clad in a thick white robe. Sonja still appeared to be dazed.

"You take care of her," Hunter said to Jade. "Lee and I will get us out of here and back to the truck." He turned to the three nurses. "Is there anyone else in the building?"

"No," Nurse Three answered.

"You did the right thing tonight," Lee said. "Just forget that you saw us."

They left the three nurses in the lab and hurried toward the stairwell. Lee hoped that John's team was having as good luck as they had.

...

Laura took the thick report that Jackson Spencer gave her. "Have you read it?"

"Not all of it, ma'am. Admiral Adama asked specifically that a message be conveyed from Major Gallagher to Dr. Cardenas. Her husband is all right and is still treating patients in Settlement Alpha although the centurion guard at the clinic has been increased."

Laura immediately picked up the phone and called upstairs. It gave her a great deal of pleasure to tell Bianca that her husband was all right.

Then Laura turned her attention back to Colonel Spencer and the report. "Give me the bottom line."

"The attack will begin tomorrow night. The details are in there, both Major Gallagher's report and Admiral Adama's plan."

"When did Kara get to the _Galactica_?"

"Yesterday in the early afternoon."

"Everyone on the mission is all right?"

"Yes, ma'am or they were when Lieutenant Thrace left the planet."

"Has the ship that brought you the report gone back yet?"

"No, ma'am. They'll leave in the morning."

"Is it a large ship?"

"It's a CF-450. It's a transport, about a third the size of _Colonial One_."

Laura took a deep breath and told Spencer about the situation with D'Anna. "I'd like to send her back with that ship. I've been told that if we get her near their homeworld and pull the plug on the ventilator, she'll download. The longer we keep her here, the greater the chance that her heart will fail."

Spencer was silent for a few moments. Then he said, "She'll have to be attended by military personnel. Because of the situation, I can't let civilians on that ship. If I did, Admiral Adama would court martial me."

"Military personnel are fine. As long as the ventilator keeps her breathing until she gets to Nereid. Will you handle the military end of it for me, please? I'll call D'Anna's physician and tell her to expect a call from you. You two can work it out. I'll also take full responsibility with Bill."

She wrote Dr. Delos' name and number on a piece of paper and handed it to him.

Spencer stood. "Yes, ma'am. We'll have her on that transport in the morning."

"One more thing," Laura opened her drawer and took out an 8½ by 11 sealed envelope and handed it to him. _Major John Gallagher_ was written on the front in her neat handwriting. "Could you see to it that this is put in the pouch going back to Admiral Adama and ask that he give it to my husband at the earliest possible opportunity?"

"Yes, ma'am. I'll take care of that, too."

When he was gone, Laura sat at her desk and thought of John and tried to imagine his feelings when he read her letter and looked at the pictures of his son who clung so tenaciously to life, defying the odds, strong, as D'Anna had said, like his father.

...

"Your fifteen seconds are up," John told the commandant One. He turned to Targa. "Let's get the centurion in here to undress him. Then we'll get to settle once and for all if what Jade and Sonja say about him is the truth. Of course it might not give you much to work with."

Targa and Beck laughed. "That won't make it hurt any less."

"I don't like the sight of blood," Natasi said. "Isn't there something we else we can do to him?"

"The way I do it," Targa said, "he won't bleed much…at first."

The commandant said, "The prisoners are on the second level down. The first and fifth cells."

"See, I knew we could reason with him," John said. He turned to Cavil. "Who's monitoring the cameras?"

Cavil nodded toward Roger. "That idiot."

"Just one guard on duty tonight?"

"We're not overrun with prisoners right now," Cavil said sarcastically. "Or visitors who come calling in the middle of the night."

Quickly Targa and Beck put the plastic restraints on the One, looping them through the restraints that held the guard at both the wrists and the ankles so that the men faced away from each other. Then Targa pulled out another rag and stuffed it in the commandant's mouth and tied it with another piece of string.

"That ought to hold them for a while," he said.

As John shut the door on the two men, he smiled at Cavil. "You made a wise choice."

He could have sworn that behind his gag, the One was laughing at him.

They hurried to the elevator, but before Natasi pushed the button for _down_, John stopped her. "Let's take the stairs. I'm afraid someone might hear the elevator."

Their centurion began moving his head from side to side.

"What's he saying?" Beck asked.

"I don't know. I left the translator in the truck."

The centurion unfurled a talon and carved a word into the wall. _Alarm_.

Natasi understood immediately. "He's telling us that the doors to the stairwell are alarmed. We'll have to use the elevator unless we want to alert the sleeping guards and the un-liberated centurions…all eleven hundred of them."

She pressed the button. The doors opened immediately and they all got on. The centurion didn't try to follow them.

Natasi said, "They've been programmed not to use passenger elevators because of the weight limits."

John pressed the button for the next level down. Even in the elevator shaft, the smell of the prison was overwhelming. The sooner they got out of there the better.

The hallway outside the cells was brightly lit but quiet.

"Which end?" Targa asked.

"You and Beck check that end. Natasi and I will check the other."

"We're on camera," Natasi said and indicated the devices at ceiling level.

"Let's hope Cavil was telling the truth and Roger was the only guard on duty tonight watching the monitors or we're in a lot of trouble."

Natasi said, "I don't hear an alarm yet."

They reached the fifth cell from the end. It was empty as was the last cell. They turned to see Targa and Beck hurrying their way.

"Son of a bitch," John said. "He lied to us. They're not on this floor. That means he might have lied about the guards."

They piled into the elevator and rode back up to the ground floor. "Where's the control room?" Natasi asked the centurion. They followed him to the far end of the hall. A man sat dozing in front of a triple bank of monitors, his chin down on his chest. They watched the top row of monitors switch from hallway to hallway and the other two from cell to cell. They stood there for several minutes without seeing either Petra or Yoshimo. Every cell was empty.

Finally John pointed to Targa and then to the sleeping guard. Targa walked over to him and quickly pulled his head back and put the knife against his throat. The man nearly fell out of the chair, but Targa held him and spun both him and the chair to face the others.

John said, "All we want are the two prisoners who were brought here two months ago. Tell us where they are and you won't be killed."

The man shook his head. Targa slid the knife an inch sideways and a thin trickle of blood began to run down the man's neck."

"Last chance," John said. "Next cut goes through your artery."

"They're upstairs," the guard croaked hoarsely.

"Where upstairs?"

"A Four has got the woman with him. Third room to the left off the elevator. The old man is across the hall."

They left the guard trussed and gagged like the other two. Natasi stepped over to the console and took a plastic card.

"Master key."

John looked at his watch. They were ten minutes past the time they had allotted for their mission.

In the elevator he said, "He won't bleed to death, will he?"

"Barely nicked him," Targa said.

The hallway on the second floor was not as brightly lit as the one on the prison level. They counted three doors. John pointed to the one across the hall and whispered, "We get Yoshimo first."

Natasi used the master key card and opened the door. The room was dark. Light from the hall showed a sink and toilet and a bunk bed. Yoshimo was asleep under a blanket. John knelt on one knee and whispered Yoshimo's name. The old man opened his eyes and John immediately said, "Shhhhh. It's John. We've come to rescue you."

Yoshimo sat up slowly, blinking away sleep.

"Are you all right?" John whispered.

"As well as I can be under the circumstances."

"Can you walk?"

"With your help. I need my trousers and shirt."

"I'm going to let Beck help you. We're going across the hall to get Petra."

John and Natasi left Beck helping Yoshimo and walked across the hall. Natasi used the card on the door. It opened onto a small sitting room with another door on one side. John took the pistol from his waistband. Natasi stopped him.

"Let me." She opened the bedroom door and turned on the light. "Hello, brother. I'm so sorry to awaken you, but we've come for the woman."

John walked to the door. Petra was sitting up in the bed with the sheet pulled up to cover her breasts. One hand shielded her eyes from the light. The minute she saw him, she began to cry. John walked over and knelt beside the bed. "We've come to get you. Get dressed as fast as you can."

"What?" The Four asked. Then he looked at John. "You!"

"Me. I look a little better than I did the last time you saw me."

"What is this?" He demanded of Natasi. "You're not one of the Overseer Sixes."

"No, thank God," Natasi said.

John pulled the blanket off the bed and held it in front of Petra while she got up and pulled on her skirt and blouse. "They took my shoes," she said tearfully.

"We'll carry you. It's not far to the truck."

As Targa and Beck bound and gagged the Four, he said, "You'll pay for this."

"I already did," John said. "Many times over. I'd shoot you right now if I could, but I don't want you downloading and raising the alarm."

They shut the bedroom door behind them and rode the elevator to the first floor. Yoshimo was leaning heavily on Beck. John put his arm around Petra who was trembling.

She managed to say only one word. "Cassie?"

"She's in the city somewhere. We'll find her. I promise you."

Petra began to cry then, deep sobs shaking her.

John kissed the side of her head the way he often did Kara. "Hang in there. We'll be out of here soon."

As they exited the prison, he glanced at his watch. They'd been inside nearly thirty-five minutes. Their centurions plus the ones they had liberated were waiting.

"We made it," Beck said. "We pulled it off."

"We'll celebrate back in the valley," John said.

Three seconds later, the prison's alarm went off.

Lee and Hunter came running from the lab next door followed closely by Jade and a white-robed Sonja.

"Go. Go," John shouted. He scooped Petra into his arms and they all began running for the truck. Beck and Yoshimo were moving very slowly and Targa dropped back to cover them. Centurions poured from the prison and in seconds the liberated centurions were engaged in a firefight with their brothers.

John had just put Petra into the back of the truck and told her to lie flat when he saw Targa go down. He shouted at Hunter who was firing his assault rifle at the centurions and running toward his uncle. They were so seriously outnumbered, they didn't stand a chance.

Lee stopped and ripped the small pack off his back. He pulled out one of the canisters, twisted the bottom to arm it and lobbed it toward the prison as hard as he could. He followed it immediately with the other one.

John and Hunter reached Targa at the same time. There was a dark wet area on the back of his shirt. He was moaning. Just as John and Hunter began dragging him toward the truck, the first canister Lee had thrown went off. The volume of firing from the centurions decreased sharply. It decreased again as the second one went off seconds later.

At the back of the truck, Beck helped them get Targa inside. John crawled forward and pounded on the back of the cab. "Go," he shouted to the centurion driver. Nothing happened and he realized that the canisters had zapped it, too. Lee was the first one off the back of the truck. He raced around to the driver's door and tried to pull the robot from the seat. John got there seconds later and together they managed to pull the now inert metal body out, taking care not to let it fall on them.

John climbed into the driver's seat. As Lee ran to the back, he felt something sting his side, but it wasn't until they were bumping down the rutted road that he realized he'd been grazed by a bullet. More centurions had come from the prison and were firing at them.

Petra ripped cloth from the bottom of her skirt and pressed it over the wound on Targa's back. She was bent over and Lee couldn't see her face in the dim light, but he didn't have to. He knew the wound was bad. He put his hand against his side just below his ribs. It came away dark with blood. Sonja slid down the bench seat until she was beside him.

"You're hurt."

"Not bad," he said and realized that his mouth was dry. "I think the bullet went through."

She lifted his shirt. "You need a bandage. You're bleeding."

"When we get to the ship." He leaned his head back and concentrated on breathing. The adrenalin was wearing off and his side was beginning to hurt.

Sonja placed one hand behind him and the other on the front of the wound and pressed. Lee grimaced in pain.

John had the old truck pegged at its top speed. They were going almost sixty when the airfield came into sight. He wondered what a centurion's top speed was and if the ones from the prison were chasing them. Then he wondered if they could communicate with the ones at the airfield. He skidded to a halt beside the Heavy Raider, jumped out and shouted. "We've got wounded."

LG49 and the Marines helped them get everybody aboard. He looked at Petra and she shook her head. It was clear to him that without emergency intervention, Targa wouldn't make it. Then he saw Zak helping Lee. Sonja was holding Lee's side with bloody hands.

"Get strapped in and ready to jump," he shouted to everybody.

LG49 got into the cockpit but John was already in the pilot's seat. He turned to the robot. "I got no choice, big guy. We can't go back to the valley. I got to get these men some help."

He gave LG49 a series of coordinates for the FTL drive even as he was applying vertical thrusters and lifting off. There was only one place he could get to fast enough to save Targa's life and possibly Lee's as well. He had to get them to the fleet and Doc Cottle.

They were climbing into the night sky when he engaged the drive and said goodbye to Nereid for a second frantic time. Once again his fate rested with Bill Adama. If Bill threw him in the brig because of the unauthorized mission he'd just led, he wouldn't be coming back.

TBC…


	59. Not Today

Chapter 59

Not Today

_The Planet_

_Day 112: An expedition returned from the city this afternoon having spent the better part of a week there. On this expedition Joshua Hoshi went armed with a digital camera and I am thrilled that he and Irina shared numerous photographs of the ancient temple including the altar of which I earlier wrote._

_Another scientist who is also an amateur linguist told us that the inscriptions on the altar are clearly in the language of ancient Kobol. He was able to translate two of them. The first is, '_Life here began out there' (presumably meaning on another planet). _The second is, _'The road to the future is also the road to the past.' _This second sentence is the last line in the monotheist book of scripture. Joshua claims this is just another way of saying, '_History repeats itself' _which has proved to be universally true. Was it on the altar as a warning or a comment?_

_The four of us sat up long after most of the others had retired to their tents. We talked about what might have happened to the people who had journeyed across the stars to find this world. We are in total agreement that this planet was once called Eden and was home to the Thirteenth Tribe, but their ultimate fate is still a mystery. The ruined city and the temple are proof that they were once a thriving society. Did they leave here and go somewhere else and if so, why and where? Or did their numbers decrease until they eventually died out? To me that is the penultimate mystery._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

Years spent in the cockpit helped John to function after the nearly disastrous ending to their rescue mission. Seconds after their jump was complete, he had switched on their communications and turned the IFF transponder from the Cylon signal to a Colonial one. He did both things right after he saw the fleet in the distance.

He grabbed the headset. "Big G, this is Papa Bear. I'm declaring a medical emergency. Request immediate clearance to land. Over."

There were five seconds of static on the open channel and then the acknowledgement came back. "Papa Bear, this is Big G. IFF received and confirmed. State nature of medical emergency. Over."

"We have two men with gunshot wounds. Serious wounds. Over."

"Papa Bear, proceed to port landing bay. Over."

"Proceeding to port landing bay."

"The LSO has you. Over."

He was cleared for landing immediately by the LSO. By the time the elevator had lowered the ship to the hangar deck, a medical team was waiting for them. Targa and Lee were placed on gurneys and rushed onto the freight elevator for the ride up to the Sick Bay deck. The others followed except John who stayed behind to see about the ship.

"I'll catch up," he called to them. "After Lee and Targa are taken care of, make sure everybody gets checked…starting with Petra and Yoshimo."

He turned to the waiting crew chief.

"Galen Tyrol, sir," the man said. "What should we do about the centurion in the cockpit?"

"Nothing. He's a friendly. I've got a translation device so I can talk to him. I've asked him to wait in the ship for now. Just work around him. He won't cause any trouble. Could you tell me what time it is?"

John knew that even though they had left Nereid at 03:42 in the morning, the time on the battlestar would be different.

"It's almost 07:00, sir," Tyrol said. "First shift is just coming on. Is there anything we need to know about your ship?"

"There's blood in the passenger compartment that needs to be cleaned up."

"Yes, sir. I'll see that it's done. And…welcome aboard, sir."

John nodded his thanks. He knew that Tyrol's welcome might be the only one he got as he hurried to the elevator and made his way to Sick Bay. He didn't know how much time he'd have before the admiral either showed up or sent for him. He wanted to spend it finding out about his team.

…

A Viper pilot with curly red hair that was pulled into a tight bun came into the room just as Kara was getting out of her bunk. The redhead was in a flight suit and had probably been flying a rotation on CAP…night CAP it was called even though in space there was no day or night. They lived their lives based on the 24-hour clock and that clock was now set to CST…Caprica Standard Time. When she had left Nereid the day before, it had been mid-morning. When she had landed on the _Galactica_ minutes later, it had been after lunch. The only difference had been the time on the clock.

"Are you Starbuck?" The redhead asked her.

"That's the infamous Star-buck," Kat said.

"Cool it, Kat," Hot Dog said. "Nobody asked you." He turned to Kara. "Meet Cherry," he said to her.

"Is that your call sign or your name?" Kara asked.

"It's _Cheryl_, Cheryl Clark, not Cherry like the Big Dog calls me. My call sign is _Redbird_."

"Kara Thrace."

"I've got a message for you from Chief Tyrol. He said to tell you that your father landed a Heavy Raider in the port landing bay about twenty minutes ago. He had wounded aboard."

"Who?"

"I don't know. They had just started cleaning up the blood in the passenger compartment."

Kara began putting on her uniform. She didn't bother to braid her hair, just brushed it back. She was pulling the elastic on her ponytail as she ran down the corridor toward Sick Bay. She couldn't shake the feeling that Lee was one of the wounded.

She found her father in the waiting room with Hunter and Beck sitting on one side of him. No one was talking. Everyone looked somber. Beck looked dazed.

Jade and Natasi sat together nearby with another Six in a white bathrobe. Kara immediately noticed her bloody hands. She had to be Sonja. There was a young woman beside her father who was very pale and who also had bloody hands. Her face was streaked with tears and she was visibly shivering even though the room wasn't cold. John had pulled her close and had his arm around her. Zak and the other four Marines were standing around the walls. All seemed okay.

A medical technician with a wheelchair came out of Sick Bay and called, "Next."

"Take Yoshimo," the woman said, indicating the old man on the other side of her.

He looked to Kara like he was barely able to sit up. She waited until the med tech had wheeled him through the Sick Bay doors.

Kara looked at her father. "Where's Lee?"

"He and Targa got hit," John said.

"Bad?"

"Lee got hit in the side. He was conscious and talking when the medical team took him off the ship."

Before she could say anything else, an ensign escorted a slim woman through the waiting room. She wore the collar pins of a major and carried a small duffel bag. They were obviously in a hurry.

Another med tech met them at the door and said, "Right this way, Dr. Sharif. Dr. Cottle is already in surgery. I'll show you where to change and scrub."

"Who is that?" John asked the ensign.

"Ship's doctor from the _Charybdis_," the ensign replied. "Cottle sent for her. She's a neurosurgeon."

Without a word Kara turned and entered Sick Bay. A med tech tried to stop her from going into the treatment area. "Please wait your turn. We're triaging everybody as fast as we can."

"I'm not hurt," Kara said. "Lee Adama is my fiancé."

The woman's look softened. "He's in x-ray."

"Why?"

"He has a through and through wound on his lower left side. He was lucky. It missed his ribs and anything vital. We've bandaged him. The bleeding has stopped, but we want to make sure there's nothing still in there before we put him in a bed and give him something for pain so he can rest. If you'll return to the waiting room, I'll come get you as soon as they're done."

Kara went back out and sat down across from her father. His eyes begged her forgiveness, but she wouldn't give it to him. She leaned over and put her elbows on her knees and looked at the floor.

Jade came over and sat down beside her. "Everything went good last night."

"Everything _did not_ go good," Kara said angrily. "Lee and Targa got shot. And for what…getting a frakking Cylon out of a tub?" She looked up at Sonja. She and Natasi were two peas in a pod only Sonja's hair was slicked back and she wasn't wearing makeup.

John said tiredly, "Kara, I know you're upset, but please just stop there."

"No, I will not stop," she said, her voice rising in anger. "This is all your fault. You could have gotten Lee killed so don't you dare tell me to stop."

Zak caught her eye and shook his head slightly. _Not here, _he was telling her. _Don't do this here in front of everyone._

She wasn't sure what she would have said if the med tech hadn't come to the door and beckoned to her. She jumped to her feet and followed.

They had put Lee in a bed near the end of a long row of beds. His eyes were closed and he was very pale. He was shirtless, a heavy bandage on his lower left side. There was a bag with blood hanging above one side of the bed. She went to the other.

She leaned over and kissed him gently on the mouth. "Hi."

He opened his eyes. It took several moments for them to focus. He'd already been sedated.

She forced herself to smile. "I leave you alone for two days and you get yourself into all kinds of trouble."

"It's not so bad," he slurred. "Went right through. Nothing damaged. Just lost a little blood."

She could tell he was already drifting off.

She squeezed his hand. "Get some sleep. I'll be back later this morning."

As she was walking back to the waiting room, a med tech passed her pushing a wheelchair with the young woman who was sitting beside her father. For the first time Kara noticed that she was barefoot, the bottom of her skirt torn. Her hair was a mess; her eyes hollow and dark-circled. She was still shivering.

The young woman reached out. "I'm Petra," she said. "Please don't be angry at your father." Fresh tears came into Petra's eyes. "Please. He loves you so much."

"That doesn't mean he didn't do something really stupid."

"He saved me and Yoshimo. You don't understand…"

The med tech resumed pushing the wheelchair. "Let's get you checked now. You can talk to the lieutenant later."

"He loves you so much," Petra called over her shoulder.

Kara walked back into the waiting room. Her father had his head back against the wall and his eyes closed. She sat down beside Jade.

"He's only slept a couple of hours in the last two days," Jade said.

"It was a good plan," Natasi added.

John said. "We should have locked up that control room guard. He's the one who managed to trigger the alarm. One frakking mistake and I nearly got everybody killed."

"Lee saved our lives," Sonja said.

"She right," Jade added. "If Lee hadn't thrown those zappers when he did, we'd all be dead."

Bill Adama strode into the waiting room and stopped at the sight of them.

"Admiral on deck," the Marine sergeant called and his men immediately snapped to attention including Zak.

"At ease," Adama said. "Who wants to tell me what's going on?"

John had struggled to his feet. "That'd be me, sir."

"Lee's okay," Kara said. "He's asleep."

Bill looked at John. "My quarters. Right now. I'll be along after I see Lee."

John left the waiting room without a word.

Zak and Kara followed the admiral through the double doors into Sick Bay.

"This way," Kara said.

They stood by the bedside as Lee slept. Kara was glad to see that some of the color had returned to his face.

"What did Doc Cottle say?" Adama asked.

"I haven't seen him," Kara said. "He's still in surgery with Targa. I talked to one of the med techs."

"What happened to my son?"

"A bullet went through his side but didn't hit anything vital. He'll be fine after he gets some blood and some rest."

"I thought I'd lost him one time before," Adama said softly. "I stood by his hospital bed like this when he had that accident in the deep space simulator."

"Dad didn't leave the hospital for almost two days," Zak said. "I remember it well since I had to deal with Mom's hysterics."

Kara nodded. Somehow she knew that her father was in for much worse from the admiral than if Lee hadn't been wounded. She glanced at Zak. He knew it, too.

"How did he get shot?" Bill asked.

Zak spared her from having to reply. He said, "A prisoner rescue. It was a good plan. Things don't always go perfect. I learned that up in Sovana. I was on a couple of missions where things went to hell and men died. You can't always plan for everything."

They had no idea how Zak's words affected the admiral because he took another long look at Lee then turned and left them standing there.

When he was gone, Kara asked, "What happened on Nereid?"

"I wasn't there. Your father left us guarding the ship. Jade told me that things were going great until the prison alarm went off. Then it was chaos. Natasi's centurions had freed some prison centurions. She didn't know how many. She thinks between fifty and a hundred. The free ones got into a firefight with the other ones. Mostly the centurions were killing each other, but bullets were still getting through. Targa got hit first. Lee saved everybody's life by throwing the two centurion zappers he was carrying. It gave them the couple of extra minutes they needed to get away."

"Is that how he got shot?"

"Jade said he and John had to pull their centurion driver out of the truck. It was incapacitated, too, but there were others still coming from the prison shooting at us. That's when Lee got hit."

"He could have been killed," Kara said. "He could have been…"

"Don't," Zak said. "Don't dwell on it. Lee's here. He's alive. He's going to be all right. It's what we do, Kara." Suddenly he smiled. "Look at the bright side. It'll keep him out of a Viper for a couple of weeks at least and probably get him a medal."

"Lee's never cared about medals any more than my father has. Besides, the military doesn't give medals for unauthorized missions that end in real FUBARs. They usually dish out court martials which is exactly what my father deserves for doing something that _stupid_."

"You don't mean that and you know it. You're being way too rough on your dad. I've talked to the guys and I've talked to Jade. We all agree he did the right thing. He caught a lousy break. That's all. If that alarm hadn't gone off we'd be back in the valley right now and nobody would have been the wiser. Look at that woman and the old man they rescued. Before we left the valley, Natalie said they would have been killed the minute we started the invasion…or they'd have been used as hostages. If it had been two people I care about in that prison…if it had been you and Lee…I'd have done exactly what your father did."

Kara felt her anger beginning to evaporate. She looked at the man who would be her brother one day. "So have you kissed Jade yet?"

He grinned but said nothing.

"Don't tell me you're losing your touch."

"We went for a walk night before last. I kissed her once. I could have done it again, but I'm taking it slow with her just like you and Lee told me to do. It's a first for me."

"How long has it been since you kissed a girl who'd never been kissed before?"

"Probably never."

"That's what I thought."

"Nothing's going to happen for a while now. That's for sure. We'll have to join the rest of the Marines in the invasion force. I'm sure Dad will keep Jade and the Sixes here on the _G_. He can't return them to the valley right now."

"I heard something about Maggie on the pilot's grapevine…if you want to know."

He shrugged again and then said, "Go ahead and tell me. I'd rather hear it from you than from one of the guys."

"The politician she's dating is Tom Zarek."

Zak started laughing. "And I'm the Summer Solstice Bunny."

"Don't say I didn't warn you."

"Are you serious?"

"I'm just telling you what I heard."

"Has she lost her frakking mind?"

"You know how she's always felt about the Cylons. Zarek feels the same way. _The only good one is a dead one_. Laura told me she thinks he's going to run for President in three years. Part of his platform will be the total destruction of all the Cylons…especially the humanoid ones like Jade. I heard one of his speeches. He calls them the _ultimate evil_ _in the universe_."

"I used to feel the same way Maggie does," Zak said softly.

"I know. So did I. So did Karl. Then I met Leoben the bookseller and started rooming with Sharon at the Academy. I realized that they're just like humans. Some are good and some are bad."

"You remember who introduced Sharon to Karl, don't you?"

"I'd forgotten you brought her into Zeno's one night and she dumped you for him."

"It didn't happen exactly like that."

"Where'd you meet her? I don't think you ever told me."

"She came into Bull's Eye where I was working at the time. I thought she was hot so I asked her out."

"Is that why you're interested in Jade? You want an Eight of your own?"

He grinned. "That's one of the nice things about Cylons. If another guy gets a girl you're interested in, there's always another one who looks just like her so you get another chance."

"I don't think Jade and Sharon look that much alike."

"It's the short hair," Zak said. "And Jade is kick-ass, take no prisoners. I don't remember Sharon being like that."

"She's not. And now that she's a mom…" Kara shrugged. "I think the only thing she'd kill you for is if you threatened her baby…or her man."

They started walking back toward the waiting room. Zak said, "Thanks for telling me about Maggie."

"If I were you, I'd keep Jade away from her. I doubt your old man would appreciate the fireworks."

"You're not implying they'd fight over me, are you?"

"Duh, Zak. Use your brain. Jade is a Cylon. Maggie hates Cylons. I don't know if you remember, but at the winter dance while I was at the Academy, Maggs and Sharon almost got into it in the bathroom because Sharon thought Maggie was making eyes at Karl."

"I'd forgotten about that."

"Besides, Jade would mop the floor with her and we need all our Raptor pilots in working condition. Say what you will about Maggs and her beliefs, but she a top-notch pilot."

…

The Marine outside Adama's quarters let John in. He wanted to sit down, but he knew he shouldn't. He was halfway between mind-numbing exhaustion and another adrenaline rush. Then he realized that the worst the admiral could do to him right now was throw him in the brig. It would almost be a relief. It might give him a chance to sleep.

He was looking at a picture on Bill's desk of a young Lee and Zak when Adama walked in.

John came to attention. He owed the admiral that much.

Apparently Bill hadn't expected that sign of respect from him.

He mumbled, "At ease," before he walked around behind his desk.

Bill was very obviously struggling with his emotions. The cool military leader was at war with the father. He needed to put something heavy and solid between them at the moment and his desk served the purpose.

Finally Bill said, "Prisoner rescue? What in the _hell_ were you thinking? You could have gotten both my sons killed on your _personal_ quest for justice, not to mention your _entire team,_ including _those prisoners and you. _I had to tell Laura you'd died once. Do you think I want to do it again?"

"Three people were suffering because of my escape. They…"

Bill's voice rose. "I don't want to hear your _excuses_. I'd be perfectly justified in stripping you of your rank and convening a court martial right now." His fury was barely controlled and it gave his eyes a fire that John had never seen.

He didn't say anything other than, "Yes, sir."

He shifted his gaze to a spot on the wall over Bill's shoulder. A long time ago on the _Solaria,_ his CAG had taught him that when a senior officer is chewing you out for something, he doesn't want to hear your side of it. He wants to get his feelings off his chest. He might listen to you later or he might not. Until Bill decided which it would be, John knew he should stand still and keep his mouth shut and take whatever Bill dished out.

"I trusted you with Lee and Zak and the rest of the mission team and what do you do? You put _all of them_ in harm's way. I trusted you to lead the mission and you abused that trust six ways from Sunday. You abused the trust of all of us…including that of the President of the Colonies who is our _mutual_ commander in chief."

"Yes, sir."

"Is that all you've got to say for yourself?"

"What do you want me to say, sir? Everything you just said is true. I'd hand you my collar pins right now, but I don't have them on me."

Bill ignored his remark and went on, the anger still controlling his voice. "Do you remember the oath you took went you were commissioned as an officer?"

"Not word for word, sir."

"Well part of it goes…_I will support and defend the Twelve Colonies of Kobol against all enemies, foreign and domestic and _**_obey_**_ the orders of the officers appointed over me. _That's the same oath that every officer in the Colonial fleet has taken since the Articles of Colonization were ratified fifty years ago. It's the same oath I took. It's the same oath my son took and it's the same oath your daughter took. Both you and Kara seem to have a problem with the _obeying orders_ part of it."

"Yes, sir."

"Your mission was to assess the situation on Nereid, write a report and send it back to me. That is _all_ your mission was supposed to do. You did not have the authority or the permission to take your team and launch a rescue of prisoners or hostages."

"No, sir."

"We're getting ready to lay the lives of our pilots and Marines on the line to try to free forty-six thousand human slaves. Every one of our men and women will obey orders. I don't care if you think you've got a personal obligation to do something or not. There will be _no_ exceptions. _None_. Not even for the husband of the President. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did you compromise our mission?"

"I don't think so, sir."

"You…don't…think…so?" The anger ratcheted up a notch.

"I can't know for sure. I tried to slant it so the prison commandant would think it was a personal mission to save my friends. Natasi told him she'd found us outside the city. The only men he or anyone in the prison saw besides me were Targa and Beck. We dressed in clothing like the valley men wear. He never saw the Marines so he's got no reason to think there was military involvement."

Bill pondered John's answer for a few moments before he asked, "Anything else I should know?"

"I brought a centurion back with us…a liberated one. He's waiting in the ship."

"What good does that do us?"

"I've got a device that lets me talk to him…I mean I talk to him and the device translates his answers into readable text. He can pilot a Heavy Raider."

"I still don't see what good that does us?"

"He knows how to liberate other centurions."

"I thought you told Major Parker that could be done by removing the telencephalic inhibitors."

"That's right, but the centurions aren't going to kneel down and let a human do it. Also the newly liberated centurions adjust much faster to their freedom if there's another one who can communicate wirelessly with them while their higher cognitive functions come online. I call the centurion LG49. He tells them what happened to the creators and the Sevens and that we're their friends."

Bill shook his head. John knew he'd failed to impress the admiral with the potential of liberated centurions so he continued.

"Once we jump into space over Nereid, LG49 can probably intercept some of their communications. He looks just like the rest of them so he's perfect as an infiltrator. He's the one who brought Natalie information about what was happening in the city."

That finally got Bill's attention. He stopped to ponder the potential, although John knew it still didn't erase what he'd done.

"If I did what I wanted to do," Bill said, "I'd throw you in the brig and then send you back to Caprica on the transport as soon as it arrives today. But the truth is I need your input and your help. Nobody in the fleet knows the city or Settlement Alpha like you do. You're the only one I trust who has contacts in those places."

"Meaning you don't trust the Cylons, sir."

"That's right."

"Did you read Lee's ideas for setting up our base of operations on the plateau?"

"I read it."

"It's a good idea, sir."

"Yes, it is, but before we can establish a base on the planet, we've got to take out those basestars."

"Lee saved our lives last night…all of us. He deserves a medal for his quick thinking and his heroic action. I hope you'll allow me to recommend him for one."

Bill didn't speak for a long time. That was probably the last thing he'd expected John to say. John saw him glance at the bottle of whiskey that sat on a small credenza near the desk. Barely 08:00 in the morning and Bill Adama wanted a drink. Their eyes met briefly before John looked back at the spot on the wall. They both had their weaknesses. Bill obviously hated for John to see one of his, but it must have given him a moment of pause and made him realize that they were both human. It must have reminded him that part of what he was taking out on John was personal and was embodied in their mutual love for two people…Lee and Laura. It might even have reminded him that there was a time when he had valued John's friendship. Some of the fiery anger left Bill's eyes.

"When was the last time you slept?"

"I got a couple of hours yesterday. I think it was yesterday?"

"Go get some sleep," Bill said. The anger had mostly leached from his voice. "And get cleaned up. When was the last time you shaved? You look like hell."

"Should I report to the brig, sir?"

"No. Use the same guest quarters you used the last time you were aboard my ship. Consider yourself confined until sent for."

"I'd like to go back to Sick Bay and check on everyone."

"They'll be taken care of. Go get cleaned up and get some sleep. That's an order. I'll have clean clothes and breakfast sent to your quarters. The attack is still on for tonight. I'll need you on your feet and functioning by then. You'll join Tigh and me in the CIC."

"Yes, sir."

John knew that wasn't because Bill wanted his input on the attack. It was because Bill wanted to keep an eye on him. John didn't argue. It could have gone worse. A lot worse. As he walked down the corridor toward the guest quarters, the only thing on his mind now was how he was going to make things right with his daughter.

...

The call Laura was expecting came much later than she had expected. She was walking through the outer office on her way upstairs for a late lunch when her secretary said, "Colonel Spencer is on line two."

Laura walked back into her office and picked up the phone. "Yes, Colonel Spencer."

"The transport left about fifteen minutes ago."

"Were there problems?"

"A couple of small glitches. The Cylon had to be transported by ambulance to the base. There was a bad wreck on the I-6 that snarled traffic. They were stuck for over an hour before they were routed on a detour. Then we had to wait for the portable ventilator to charge, but we got everything worked out. We tracked the ship until it jumped. It should be with the fleet now."

"I can't thank you enough for your help."

"My pleasure, Madame President. If I might express my opinion, D'Anna is back where she belongs…with her own kind."

"In a way, Colonel, I agree with you. Sadly there is no place for her here on Caprica…no place that she would be safe, that is. Please call me as soon as the transport returns with news."

"Yes, ma'am."

Laura went upstairs and joined Maya and Bianca in the small dining room.

"I hope you didn't wait for me."

"We went ahead and fed the children," Bianca said. "Then we ate."

Rachel was still sitting in her high chair. Braedon and Esmari were on the floor.

Maya said, "Esmari has a surprise for you. Brae, show your mother what you and Esmari can do now."

"Mamma, look," Brae said. He crawled across the rug and Esmari followed him, a bit clumsily, but she was crawling.

Her son looked up at her and smiled like Esmari's accomplishment was all his doing. Laura smiled in return. "There'll be no stopping them now."

"I wish Hunter could have been here," Maya said. "I took some pictures. I'm going to send them to him."

"Brae started walking while I was campaigning. John was the one with him. I've always been sorry I missed his first steps."

"But you've seen quite a few steps since then," Bianca said. "Believe me. Your son will not remember who was there. He won't even remember taking his first steps. I always told the parents of my youngest patients not to stress over the small things."

"The ship taking D'Anna back to Nereid left a short while ago. I know you wanted to be on it, but Colonel Spencer wouldn't allow anyone but military personnel."

Bianca sighed. "As long as Laszlo is all right, I'm content to stay here and take care of Rachel and visit Sean. Laszlo and I will see each other as soon as the fighting is over."

Braedon got up and walked over to Bianca. "Put Wachel down." He pointed to the floor.

"Put Rachel down _what_?" Maya said to him.

"_Pwease_."

"He wants Rachel on the floor with him and Esmari," Maya said. "I've told him she's too little to be able to crawl. She can't even sit on her own yet."

"It's time for Rachel's nap," Bianca said. "See how sleepy she is?"

"Give my binky," Brae said.

Laura smiled. A week earlier Rachel had been crying and Brae had insisted that Maya give his pacifier to her. He seemed to have accepted now that he couldn't take it back.

Maya said, "Yes, we're going to give her your binky and Bianca is going to put her in her crib. We'll all get on the floor and play after she wakes up from her nap."

"Mawi nap, too."

"Yes, it'll soon be time for Esmari's nap. You can take one with her."

"No," Brae answered seriously. "Not today."

The three women smiled. Somewhere he had learned the phrase _not today _and employed it often, usually when Maya asked him if he needed to go potty.

Bianca came back from putting Rachel down for her nap just as Laura was finishing her lunch.

"I look at Rachel and I see what Sean will look like when he's her age. I think they're going to have the same coloring…the fair skin and blond hair and blue eyes."

"Did you talk to Dr. Junius today?" Laura asked her.

"This morning. Sean's temperature is slightly elevated, but Dr. Junius is not overly concerned right now. They've put him on a broad-spectrum antibiotic. I'll go see him tomorrow."

"I want to go see Sean again soon if I can talk Edgar into it. I can understand his concerns, but…I don't think he understands how important it is to me."

"He's worried about your safety," Maya said.

"I know, and I'm grateful…but there are times I wish I didn't have to deal with all the security. I wish I could just go to the medical center like anybody else and visit the NICU."

"Don't forget who works for whom," Bianca said. "I believe you're the boss."

Braedon went over to Maya. "Mawi sleep."

They glanced around. Esmari had fallen asleep on the floor. Maya picked her up and sat down with her, rocking her gently in her arms. Esmari sleepily stuck her thumb in her mouth.

"Mawi suck thumb," Brae said.

Laura picked her son up and put him on her lap. "When Esmari was just a little baby, she lived somewhere they didn't have binkies so all she had to suck was her thumb."

Braedon sucked on his own thumb for a few moments and made a face.

"It doesn't taste good, does it?"

"No."

"Have you shown him a picture of Sean yet?" Bianca asked.

"Not yet," Laura said.

"What Sean?" Brae asked.

"Sean is your little brother," Laura answered.

It was obvious that her words meant little, if anything, to her son, but he must have made the connection between _brother_ and another person.

"Where Sean?" Brae asked. "Show me."

Laura struggled to find an explanation. Braedon knew nothing of hospitals. She tried to find something he could relate to and finally said, "Sean is in a big building like the doctor's office because he's very tiny. He's the same size as Esmari's baby doll. A doctor is taking care of him right now until he gets bigger."

"Stick Sean with needle?"

Laura knew he was talking about getting vaccinations. That was what Brae remembered most about the doctor's office…getting shots.

Before she could reply, Brae said, "Go see Sean."

"Not today," Laura answered and suddenly realized where her son had gotten the phrase.

"You could show him a picture," Bianca said.

"See picture…pwease."

"Wait here." Laura went next door to her sitting room and got one of the pictures Billy had printed. She carried it back into the dining room and put it on the table before she lifted her son.

"That's Sean," Laura said.

Braedon propped on his arms and studied the picture. "Him wobot."

Laura looked at her son in shock. "Why do you call him a _robot_?"

"It's probably all the tubes and wires," Bianca said.

"Tubes and wires," Braedon giggled and slid off Laura's lap and crawled under the table.

"He's too young to understand," Laura said. "Sean probably looks like a doll to him."

"I think you underestimate your son," Bianca said. "Braedon is very smart. Based on his vocabulary alone, I'd estimate that developmentally he's three to four months ahead of his peer group."

Yolanda Brenn's words about Brae mapping the stars on the way to Earth came back to her, but all she said was, "Maya has worked with him, and John and I have always read to him at night. I think it's made a difference."

"What are you going to do if D'Anna downloads on Nereid and learns she has a son and wants him back?" Maya asked.

Laura looked at Sean's picture and thought of the touch of his tiny hand. D'Anna had given him to her and told her to love him. Already Laura thought of him as hers…hers and John's. What would she do? What was morally right?

"I'll cross that bridge if I come to it," Laura said.

But even as she prayed that she would never be faced with the decision, she knew that one day she would. She had all but insured that it would eventually happen when she'd agreed to leave D'Anna on life support and send her back to her home planet to download into a new body. But Laura's decision to do so hadn't been completely altruistic. She believed that one day it would help her win the hearts of many of the Cylons to her plans for a blended society where everyone was treated equally. There was too much of the politician or perhaps the diplomat in Laura Roslin to pass up this golden opportunity at détente.

As for D'Anna wanting to reclaim Sean, Laura knew that even if D'Anna had no memories of John or her son, she would most certainly eventually find out. One day Laura would have to make that morally and emotionally charged decision…but not today.

...

Kara went back to Sick Bay after lunch. She had an hour before she and the rest of the Viper pilots were supposed to meet with the CAG for a briefing on the night's mission. At lunch Karl had told her to go take a nap, that she would need it. She had chosen to check on Lee instead.

The waiting room was empty as she went through it. She wanted to talk to Jade again, but had no idea where the Cylons had been taken.

Lee was still sleeping soundly, but she stood by his bedside anyway. The same med tech who had helped her that morning walked by.

"His vitals are good," the woman said after glancing at all the monitors. "He's young and in excellent condition. I'm sure he'll recover quickly."

"Thanks," Kara said.

"So when are you two getting married?"

"We haven't set the date yet because…" her voice trailed off. She didn't have to say why. Anybody on the battlestar would understand why.

"I got married two years ago. My husband and I have talked about starting a family, but we've put it off. Same reason."

"How are the others?" Kara asked. "Petra and the old man?"

"I really can't talk about their medical condition."

"The admiral is probably going to court martial my father for rescuing them."

"I hope not." The med tech looked around and then back at Kara before she lowered her voice. "Yoshimo is a real sweetheart. They didn't beat him or torture him, but he's been starved and he was very dehydrated. I doubt he'd have lived another week. I hope none of the Cylons your father brought here had anything to do with what was done to that sweet old man."

"No. They helped rescue him. What about Petra?"

"She's in slightly better shape physically, but…she was forced to choose between living with a sadistic Cylon doctor and being given to all the guards as their plaything. She chose the doctor."

"She was married to the same model Cylon before she was sent to the prison. He was killed and their little girl was taken away and given to a Cylon in the city."

"Oh, my gods. How horrible. She didn't mention a husband or a child."

"It's probably too hard for her to talk about them. Any news about Targa?"

"He's out of surgery."

"And?"

"Maybe you'd better ask his brother and his nephew."

"Where are they?"

"They were in the waiting room until about twenty minutes ago. Dr. Cottle went out and talked to them. He probably told them to get something to eat. Mr. Targa is still in recovery."

"Just so you'll know. Targa is his first name. His last name is Franklin."

Kara had just turned to leave when Hunter walked up. "How's Lee?"

"Still sleeping," Kara said. "He'll recover. Targa?"

Hunter shook his head. "The bullet hit his spine at an angle between L1 and L2 if that means anything to you. It took the doctors a long time to pick the bone fragments out of his spinal cord. Dr. Cottle is optimistic that he'll recover, but he'll probably never walk again."

Kara put her hand on his arm. "Gods, Hunter. I'm so sorry."

"He's alive. If it had happened while we were fighting in the forest, he'd be dead by now."

"How is Beck doing?"

"Like a lost puppy without Targa to give him grief. I'm sure Emmalyn and all the rest think we're dead."

"Give the admiral a couple of days. Let us get these basestars taken care of and maybe he'll put Beck in a Raptor and let him go back to the valley."

Hunter nodded. "Look, I just want you to know that none of us blame your father for what happened. We all volunteered. We all understood the risks."

"Even me," Lee said hoarsely.

Kara whirled. "You're awake."

He managed a smile. "It's hard to sleep with you two yakking."

"I'll come back later," Hunter said. "The doc is letting me and Beck stay outside Targa's room for a while. He said Targa probably won't know where he is or what had happened when he wakes up. We want to be there for him."

"Tell him I'll say a prayer for him," Kara said before Hunter left.

She turned to Lee. "I'm sorry we woke you."

"I'm not," Lee said. "Now that I'm awake, could you get me some water? I'm really thirsty."

Kara found the med tech who got a plastic glass of ice water. Kara held the straw for him to drink. When he'd had all he wanted, he said, "I heard everything that Hunter said about Targa."

"Yeah," Kara said glumly.

"Is everybody else okay?"

"More or less."

"Have you talked to Natasi or Jade or Sonja?"

"I talked to Jade."

"Sonja saved my life. She put pressure on my wound. It was bleeding bad at first."

"So that was your blood on her hands."

"I guess so. Petra was helping Targa."

"Does it still hurt?"

Lee shifted slightly and grimaced. "Let's just say I'm aware of it. So is the attack still on for tonight?"

"Yep."

"You'll be in a Viper?"

"Where else would I be?"

"I can do without the sarcasm, Kara. Think you could get someone to find me some food? I'm hungry."

"I'm sure I can. Then I got to go to a meeting with the CAG and the rest of the pilots. We'll get our marching orders about tonight."

"You'll be careful?"

"Always."

"Come see me when you can."

She leaned down and kissed him. "You know I will. I'll see you later."

He reached up and took her hand. "Is John okay?"

"I don't know. Last I saw him he was on his way to your father's quarters. That was early this morning. I haven't seen him since. I'm not sure I want to." The anger came back in a rush. "He nearly got you and Targa killed."

Lee picked up the anger in her voice, but he let it go. She and John were going to have to work out their issues. He'd learned long ago not to get between Kara and her father.

"Nobody held a gun to my head," he said softly. "I went on that mission because I believed it was right. I'd do it again. I don't blame John for what happened to me."

"I'll go find you something to eat," Kara said.

She knew that eventually she would forgive her father. She loved him too much not to, but it probably wouldn't be today.

…

Kara looked around the ready room. Every seat in the back half of the room was occupied.

"There are seats down front, Starbuck," Cole Taylor said.

Kara quickly walked down to the front row and sat. Only after she was in a seat did she notice it was beside Kat.

"Star-buck," Kat said. "We're honored you left your Cylon friends to come meet with us."

"You might be wishing you had some Cylon friends when you're getting your ass kicked all over the sky tonight."

Taylor said, "Starbuck, Kat, is there anything you'd like to share with the rest of us?"

"Just don't put her on my wing," Kat said. "I don't want a Cylon-lover flying my wing."

"Request permission to move to another seat, sir," Kara said to Taylor. "It might prevent bloodshed."

"Permission denied. Both of you shut up and listen."

Keeping her face expressionless, Kara inwardly smirked. Taylor had included his little pet in his reprimand. She turned her attention to the state-of-the-art electronic screen at the front that had just lit up.

Taylor controlled it with a small handheld device. He showed them the same long-distance view of the planet with the three basestars that Kara had seen in the Situation Room.

"Here's Admiral Adama's plan. At 20:00 tonight the fleet will move to a position closer to the Prolmar Sector but still outside of the Cylon's long-range scanners. The commander of the_ Valkyrie _has volunteered to jump his ship into space near the outermost planet. He will begin broadcasting a distress signal on multiple frequencies about his damaged ship. It is our hope that the basestar will respond to that distress call with the intention of destroying the _Valkyrie_. We want to lure it far enough away from Nereid that we can be destroy it without endangering the surface from debris entering the atmosphere and falling to the planet."

Taylor paused while the scenario he had just mentioned was played out on the monitor.

"I see hands up," Taylor continued. "I know your first question is going to be…what if it doesn't happen that way? What if the basestar won't be lured out?"

Hands went down.

"If that happens, the _Pegasus_ is going to jump into space near the _Valkyrie _on the pretense of helping the _stricken_ ship. Our element of surprise will be blown, but it's almost impossible that the Cylons will ignore two battlestars in their backyard." He paused a moment. "Yes, Flat Top?"

"What if they take the bait while it's just the _Valkyrie_ limping around out there? Can she take on a basestar by herself?"

"We actually want the Cylons to take the bait. The fleet will be in touch. The minute the basestar heads toward the ship, the _Pegasus_ will jump in to help out. We predict that the two ships will be able to take out the basestar."

Kat asked, "Do you think the basestar will launch its Raiders?"

"Probably. Based on evidence from past confrontations, we think the Raiders launch themselves if they perceive a threat to the basestar."

Natalie had told them that the Hybrid who controlled all the functions on each basestar actually gave the command to launch Raiders, but Kara didn't want to invite any more of Kat's sarcastic comments about her Cylon friends. It didn't affect the outcome. Raiders would either be launched or they wouldn't.

"You mean the Vipers from the _Valkyrie_ and the _Pegasus_ will get all the action?" The peeved question came from someone behind her whose voice Kara couldn't identify.

"I think there'll be plenty of Raiders to go around," Taylor said. "Don't forget about the other basestars. Admiral Adama is hoping the second ship comes to the aid of the first after the _Pegasus_ jumps in. That leaves the third basestar in orbit over the city. That ship is going to be ours…ours and the _Columbia's_. But, and it's a big one, we are to do everything possible to avoid destroying it. According to our intelligence, that's where the Cylon resurrection facility is located. Admiral Adama wants that ship intact to use as a bargaining chip which means they'll get a chance to launch _all_ their Raiders. That's seven hundred ninety-two ships, gentlemen. I think that should be enough to satisfy all of you even if the other basestars don't launch a single Raider. The _Ajax_ and the _Charybdis_ will take on the second basestar whether it stays put or goes to the aid of the third one. Any question so far?"

The same voice from the back said, "So you're telling us we're going to target only two of their basestars and leave one of them alone to launch all its Raiders?"

"Not exactly. Our battlestars will try to take out that ship's FTL capability. You're to target any Raiders that are launched. _That is all you are to target_. Leave the basestars to our battlestars. Any more questions?" There were none so Taylor said, "Be back here tonight at 19:00 suited up and ready to go. My suggestion in the meantime would be for you to get some rest. We want you all sharp tonight. Dismissed."

Kara almost bolted out of her seat. If she'd lingered, she had no doubt that she and Kat would have had words at the very least. The last thing she wanted was to spend tonight's mission in the brig.

Saul Tigh was waiting for her out in the corridor. "Come with me, Lieutenant Thrace." They began walking as she searched her recent memory for anything that she had done.

"Ready for tonight?" Tigh asked.

"Yes, sir." It took only a short while before Kara realized they were heading toward Sick Bay. She felt her breath catch. "Is something wrong with Lee?"

"You mean besides his bullet wound? Not that I'm aware. Bill wants to see you. I volunteered to fetch you."

"Is something wrong with my father, sir?"

"No. I'd rather Bill talked to you."

They walked through the waiting room. Instead of turning toward the long room with the rows of beds, Tigh continued walking until they came to several private rooms near the back of Sick Bay. Adama and Doc Cottle were standing outside of one. The privacy blinds had been drawn so she couldn't see who was inside.

Cottle was smoking. "Call me if you need me," he said to the admiral and walked off.

Bill opened the door to the room and beckoned Kara to follow him inside. A Three was lying on the bed, a sheet up to her shoulders, a ventilator tube attached at her trachea. The hiss and hum of the machine filled the small room. The sound reminded Kara of finding her father in the hospital in Sovana after he'd been shot saving Laura's life.

Bill gave her a wry smile. "This is D'Anna. Apparently Laura didn't think we had enough to deal with. She sent her to us on the return trip of the transport ship. They arrived an hour ago."

"What happened to her?" Kara asked.

He handed her a letter addressed to him from Laura and let her read for herself. When Kara finished, she looked at the admiral. "What are you going to do, sir?"

"Laura also included something for your father. I need him in the CIC tonight. If he sees D'Anna now, how do you think it will affect him?"

Kara took a deep breath and blew it out. "I'm not sure it's her condition that will upset him since D'Anna will download like Laura says. I think it's the baby."

Bill stood for a long time. Kara could tell he was agonizing over what to do. Finally he said, "I was rough on your father this morning. Right now he's confined to his quarters. If I decide to withhold the information about D'Anna and his son from him until this attack is over, I don't want it to look like it was in retaliation for what happened to Lee."

"Are you asking _me_ to make that decision, sir?"

"No, I'll make it. I just want your opinion. You know him better than anybody except Laura and she's not here."

"What does Doc Cottle say about D'Anna?"

"He read the medical report that was sent with her. Her condition is irreversible. Laura's intention was to get her to Nereid where we could pull the plug and she'd download."

"D'Anna _is_ the mother of their peacemaker. The religious ones believe the prophecy. The fact that we have her might be worth something."

"Your father deserves to know," Bill said. "I can't betray his trust the way he did mine."

"Let me tell him, sir," Kara said. "I think he'll take it better coming from me."

Bill handed her an envelope with her father's name on the front. She recognized Laura's neat handwriting.

"He's going to want to see her," Kara said.

Bill nodded. "I'll expect him in the CIC at 19:00 tonight. He can stay here in Sick Bay with her until then if he wants to."

"Thank you, sir," Kara said.

"John is in the guest quarters just down from mine. I ordered him to get some sleep."

She left Adama talking to Tigh. On the way to her father's quarters she realized that Admiral Adama didn't want to be the bearer of bad tidings after whatever he had said to her father that morning.

She didn't have to figure out which guest quarters her father was occupying. A Marine stood outside the door. He allowed her to enter. If her father had been asleep, she had planned to leave and come back later. He glanced toward the door as she entered. He was wearing olive fatigue pants and an olive t-shirt and was lying on his back in a bunk.

"Hi, Dad," she said softly.

He sat up. "Hey, baby. You don't know how sorry I am that Lee got shot…"

She held up her hand. "That's not why I'm here. Maybe you'd better read this first. Then I'll tell you the rest."

She handed him the envelope and wandered around the room. It had two bunks and despite being called _guest quarters,_ it was no fancier than the pilots' bunkrooms.

John tore the envelope and then sat at the small table in the center of the room. He slid several pages out. Two were handwritten. Then he saw the pictures. He spread them out on the table and read the letter that began, _My Dearest Husband._

When he finished, he looked at the pictures again. He was so overwhelmed by emotion that he couldn't speak. Kara walked up beside him. He slipped one arm around her waist.

"Laura named him Sean," John said, his voice cracking. "Sean Andrew for my oldest brother and her only brother." He handed her one of the pictures. "He only weighed a little over a pound when he was born. As of yesterday he'd gained an ounce."

Kara wrapped her arms around her father and held him.

Finally John said, "Sean's life is in God's hands now. Where's D'Anna?"

"In Sick Bay. Admiral Adama said you could spend time with her as long as you're in the CIC by 19:00 tonight. She's brain dead. She doesn't know anything."

"Do you think he'd mind if I said hello to Lee and Targa?"

"You'll have to ask him."

"How do you feel about it?"

"I don't care. Lee doesn't blame you. Hunter says Targa won't either."

"I'd like for Natasi to see D'Anna."

"You'll have to take that up with Admiral Adama. I don't know where he put them."

"Is the attack still on for tonight?"

"Yep."

"You'll be careful?"

"I'll do my job, Dad."

"Good hunting, baby."

"Thanks." She put Sean's picture back on the table. Looking at the tiny baby connected to so many tubes and wires was painful for her.

John picked up the fatigue jacket that had been delivered with the rest of the uniform while he had slept. Someone in the ship's uniform supply had even gotten the collar pins right.

"Did you get some sleep?" Kara asked.

"Five or six hours. I've had breakfast and lunch. I feel a lot better."

John picked up the pictures of his newborn son and put them in his pocket.

They left the quarters and began walking toward Sick Bay. Neither seemed to know what to say, so they walked together silently through the corridors of a battlestar getting ready for war.

…

Lee had fought taking another painkiller, but after he had eaten lunch, he had given in. When next he opened his eyes, Natasi was standing by his bed…or was it Sonja? He couldn't tell. She was wearing an olive t-shirt and light gray sweatpants. She was very obviously braless.

He reached for the water on the rolling tray by his bed but couldn't quite reach it.

The Six handed it to him. She smelled faintly of some spice that he couldn't identify, something exotic that reminded him of faraway places and a warm beach under a canopy of stars.

"How are you feeling?" She asked.

"Like I was shot," he answered. "Natasi…or Sonja?" Yet even as he asked the question, he knew the answer.

Her smile was warm. "You don't recognize me? You saw quite a bit of me during my rescue."

Despite the lingering effect of the painkiller, Lee very clearly remembered the image of Sonja rising from the tank.

"You…made me think of a painting, _The_ _Birth of Aphrodite_. It's in the Caprica Museum of Art."

"Natasi said you're very smart. You're very handsome, too, every bit as handsome as John…and young."

He didn't say anything.

Sonja's smile broadened. "You're blushing, Lee Adama. In all the times John and I were together, despite all the compliments I paid him, I never saw him blush."

Lee didn't know what to say. He had an uncomfortable feeling and tried to change the subject.

"Thank you for helping me."

"Does it surprise you that a Cylon helped save your life?"

"You saved John's life, didn't you?"

"Perhaps not quite so literally. I never had his blood on my hands."

"How are Natasi and Jade?"

"Natasi is writing a letter to her lover. Jade is bored and wants to see your brother. I told her I'd try to find out where he is. Do you know?"

"He and the others probably joined the Marines on board. Where did my father put you?"

"Down the hall from his quarters. I think we're next door to John."

"I can't believe Dad is letting you wander the corridors of the ship."

She smiled a bit slyly. "I told the Marine guarding our doors that I had to go to the bathroom. It was very easy to slip out while he wasn't looking."

"I think you'd better go back. If you're caught, you might be sent to the brig."

"Are you sure I can't get you something?"

"I'm fine, Sonja."

"Then I guess this is goodbye…for now."

Without warning and without asking, she leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. Lee was so shocked that it took a moment for him to push her away. The taste of her stayed on his lips, bittersweet, like the aftertaste of honey.

"My reward for saving your life."

"Don't do that again," he said with an acute awareness of how helpless he was in the hospital bed. "John's daughter and I are going to get married."

Still smiling Sonja backed away. "But you're not married yet," she called over her shoulder as she sauntered down the long row of beds toward the exit.

Lee shut his eyes. The smell and taste of her lingered and he was once again reminded of what John must have gone through as he'd tried and then failed to resist her. The Cylon's creators had made the perfect seductress, a woman who was programmed to get her way no matter what she had to do.

He should tell Kara what Sonja had done. He knew he should, but tonight she would be in a Viper and he didn't want anything that would distract her. He was also aware that Kara might try to confront Sonja and that would be an utter disaster. One or both of them would wind up in Sick Bay or the brig…or the morgue. He'd seen Jade practicing hand-to-hand combat with the Marines. He had no doubt whatsoever about the humanoids' strength. Even if Sonja didn't have Jade's fighting skills, she would no doubt be a formidable foe.

One day soon he would tell Kara and they'd deal with it…but not today.

…

Once inside Sick Bay, John and Kara separated. Kara pointed John toward where D'Anna was before she went to see Lee. Just inside the door to the room containing the beds, she saw a Six coming toward her and knew instinctively that it was Sonja.

They both stopped.

Sonja smiled. "We meet again. You looked very different in the valley when you were posing as Hunter's wife. I suppose I should call you Kara instead of Juliana."

"What are you doing here?" Kara asked although she knew the answer.

"Checking on Lee."

"He's fine."

Sonja smiled. "Yes, we had a nice chat. How is John?"

"He's fine, too. Stay away from him. He's got enough to deal with without you slinking around. And stay away from Lee."

"Are you worried about your men, little girl?" Sonja subtly licked her lips. "You should be."

Kara felt the anger bubble up in her. She was already on edge because of everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours and what she would be facing that night. She felt her hands start to curl into fists and then forced herself to relax. She didn't want to spend tonight in the brig. She wanted to be in her Viper shooting down Raiders so she could come back and tell Sonja how many of her pets she'd killed.

Without a word she pushed past the Six. _Cylon bitch _was on the tip of her tongue, but she managed not to mutter it until she was nearly to Lee's bed. When she looked back, Sonja was gone.

Her tone was accusing. "What did _she_ want?"

"To see how I was doing," Lee answered. "I didn't think I'd see you again today."

"The transport from Caprica brought a passenger. My dad's on the way to see her now."

For a crazy moment Lee thought it might be Laura. Then Kara pulled up a chair and told him what had happened. It was enough to wipe out all thoughts of Sonja and the unwanted kiss.

"Laura sent Dad a letter and some pictures of the baby. She named him Sean. Gods, he's so tiny. I didn't tell my dad, but he looks like a little skinned rabbit. He weighed just over a pound when he was born."

"John doesn't need something else on him," Lee said sympathetically. "He's dealing with enough as it is." He reached for her hand and a wave of guilt washed over him.

"What's wrong?" Kara asked.

"Think you can find me some sweatpants and a t-shirt?"

"Why? I like you mostly naked."

"Because tonight I want to join everybody in the CIC. I'll swipe a wheelchair from the doc."

"Have you lost your frakking mind? You'll start the wound bleeding again. When I got shot Jack Fisk told me to take it easy and lay around for a couple of days. My wound wasn't nearly as bad as yours."

"Calm down."

"Promise me you'll stay in bed?"

"Yes, Nurse Kara."

"I'd better go. Karl and Saunders are waiting for me to eat dinner with them. I'll come back if I can."

"Kara, you need to be with your team and keep your mind on your mission."

"Right now I'm trying not to think about it."

He pulled her down to him and kissed her. "Good hunting."

She smiled. "Good healing. I'll see you tomorrow."

…

Doc Cottle was waiting for John outside D'Anna's room. He lit a cigarette from the stub of the one he had just finished.

"You look better than you did the last time I saw you," Cottle said.

"I feel better, too. You know about D'Anna?"

"I read the medical report that was sent along with her. She's not aware of anything. Hasn't been since she had the cerebral hemorrhage. The ventilator is all that's keeping her alive…if you can call it that."

"I wish Natalie was here. I'd like to talk to her about what to do. In the letter that Laura sent, she said it was Leoben's opinion that when D'Anna downloads, she won't remember anything since her last download over a year ago. She won't remember me or the baby or anything."

"What about talking to one of the Cylons you brought with you?"

"Sonja knew D'Anna. I'd hoped to avoid her if possible. We, uh, have some history, but I guess I could talk to her."

"Would you like for me to make a call and get her here?"

"If you don't mind. I don't want to make this decision on my own. D'Anna is their sister." John slipped the pictures out of his pocket and handed them to the doctor. "My son. D'Anna's son."

Cottle looked at the pictures for a long time before handing them back. His usually gruff voice softened slightly. "Would you like to go sit with D'Anna while I make that call?"

"Yes."

John went through the door and closed it behind him. D'Anna was very pale, the only movement was the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest as the ventilator forced air in and out of her lungs. She had been taken care of though. Her hair was clean and brushed. He smelled the faint scent of lotion on her skin. He found her cool hand under the sheet and held it.

"I know you tried," he said and his voice cracked again. It was a minute before he could speak. "You got our little boy this far. Now it's up to him and God. Laura says he's strong so maybe he'll make it. I promise you that if he does, I'll raise him and love him."

Tears filled his eyes and the image in front of him blurred. He stood beside the bed unaware of the passage of time until the door opened. Sonja walked up beside him.

"The doctor told me what had happened."

"She'll die…her body will die as soon as we turn off that machine."

"I know, but she'll download."

"Was Leoben right when he said she wouldn't remember anything since her last download?"

"I'm not sure. We've never faced anything like this before. She may revert to the basic memories that are programmed into all the Threes."

"What should I do?"

"How far are we from Nereid?"

"A little over a light year."

"That's too far away. We're out of range of both the resurrection facilities."

"We'll be closer soon. Natalie said only the first twelve copies of each model can download at the lab on the planet. All the rest go to the basestar."

"She's right."

John took a deep breath. "On the basestar…will they know who she is? I mean will they recognize her as the mother of the peacemaker?"

"No. Since D'Anna won't know it, the memories that download at the time of her death won't contain that information."

"If we…if I pull the plug while the fighting is going on and there are a lot of copies downloading, how will we ever find her?"

Sonja looked at him in surprise. "Do you _want_ to find her?"

"My wife went to a lot of trouble to get her here. She thinks it's the morally right thing to do."

"I'm not asking you how your wife feels, John. I'm asking how _you_ feel."

"I want my son to live. I want him to grow up and learn one day about his mother's courage and determination and sacrifice…and her faith. If we can find her after she downloads and she wants to have a part in raising him, I'll make that happen. But as long as Laura will have me, I'm her husband and she's my wife. I know you'll probably find that amusing, but it's true. I'll gladly share custody of our son with D'Anna, but that's it. There won't be any group marriage or anything like that."

"What a shame," Sonja purred in her most seductive voice. "You have so much to offer a woman. I've no doubt you could keep several of us happy."

"I can tell you've never raised an infant," John said. "It doesn't leave you with a lot of energy for...whatever. I'll leave you to Josh. He's more your speed."

"How nice to have your blessing," Sonja said.

"Maybe you'd better see Doc Cottle before you indulge, though, or you might be learning how to sing lullabies. You've got a new body now."

"Hmmm," Sonja said thoughtfully. "Maybe I should ask the doctor about those birth control patches that I've heard about."

"You do that. Now I'd like to spend a little time with D'Anna…alone."

"Let me know if I can do anything for you."

He closed the door behind Sonja and sat with D'Anna until Cottle came for him.

"I got dinner for both of us sent up. It's in my office. You need to eat before you go to the CIC. You might be there all night."

They ate mostly in silence until Cottle pulled out a cigarette and lit it. John pushed his empty plate aside.

"How's Dr. Cardenas?" Cottle asked.

John smiled. "According to Laura's letter, Bianca is living in Marble House and helping Maya take care of the kids."

Cottle turned his head and blew out a stream of smoke. "That's very kind of your wife."

"She comes across to a lot of people as opinionated and determined, hard-line even, but there's another side of her. If you'd see her with our son…" John took a deep breath. His emotions were getting the better of him again, but he went on. "D'Anna knew she was dying. She gave Sean to Laura and told her to love him. It's all in Laura's letter."

"You're tired of the fighting, aren't you?"

John nodded. "I almost resigned my commission this morning. If I'd had my collar pins, I'd have given them to Bill and been done with it. I'm glad now I didn't have them. It's not over yet. God willing, though, it will be soon. Then I can go back to my wife and we can raise our sons."

Cottle smiled, a half smile. "You think being the husband of the President is going to be any easier?"

"Probably not. Do you ever think about retiring? Just hanging it all up?"

"More and more lately. I imagine a cabin on a small lake with a pier and a rowboat for fishing."

"I know just the place for you. Just the woman, too."

Cottle blew out another stream of smoke. "Hang on to that thought. I might ask you for directions one day."

John stood. "Will you keep an eye on D'Anna for me?"

Cottle nodded.

"It's time to find my way to the CIC. I don't want to be late for the war."

As he made his way through the passageways of the battlestar, John passed pilots in their flight suits on their way to the ready room. He felt a sense of déjà vu, a journey back in time to his days on the _Solaria_ when he was a young lieutenant full of fire who wanted nothing more than to kill Cylons. He was older now and he yearned for a different future for his daughter and his sons.

If the people who had a different vision, people like Laura and Natalie, got their way, peace would eventually come to their two embattled races…but it wouldn't be today.

TBC…


	60. The Blink of an Eye

Chapter 60

The Blink of an Eye

_The Planet_

_Day 152: Joshua Hoshi and his team were allowed to revisit the ruined city and were gone this time for eight days. The only difference is that the chief of security for the entire expedition accompanied them. Joshua told me tonight that the man, Chester Pollard, had insisted on going everywhere with them and scrutinizing every artifact that they uncovered. Joshua said it was almost like he expected them to find something mind-boggling._

_The day before the expedition returned to our base camp, it happened. Joshua was taking bone samples from some graves in a large cemetery outside the city. Mr. Pollard had insisted that they could not open graves and must content themselves with the above-ground crypts that were already open due probably to an earthquake that had struck the city many years ago._

_The shocking discovery came when a grave collapsed under one of Joshua's assistants and revealed the contents of a crumbling wooden casket. When they returned, I treated the assistant for some bad scratches and removed a deeply embedded sprinter from his lower leg. The assistant told me that Pollard pulled him out of the grave, but before he was hustled away, he saw a human skeleton that had been buried with a number of books. He managed to snatch one and conceal it before he was pulled from the grave. He did not tell anyone of his discovery. The grave was marked by a stone but the writing was so weathered that it could not be read. The young man is certain, though, that at the top of the stone was carved a symbol that indicated the buried man was of the priesthood._

_I spoke with the assistant when he returned to get his bandages changed and found that he has apparently been so intimidated by Pollard that he begged me not to reveal what he had told me. Joshua can neither confirm nor deny what the young man found because he never saw the grave. He is sorry now that he missed it and hopes they return to the city soon._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

In the CIC Bill Adama gave his XO Saul Tigh the task of bringing John up to speed on the battle plan. John realized that Tigh would probably rather give up booze for the rest of his life than deal with him right now, but he did as Bill asked.

Anyone who spent much time around Tigh knew that he had a serious drinking problem. _Functioning alcoholic_ was the term a counselor would apply. John was more likely to leave off the word _functioning_ in describing him and Tigh knew it. But Tigh had saved his life when Cain wanted to airlock him and D'Anna so he paid serious and respectful attention to Tigh's words.

Adama and Tigh went back a long way, and for whatever reason, Bill had steadfastly stood by his XO. John was sure that only Adama's protection had allowed Tigh to keep his position and his rank while Helena Cain had been the commander of the _Galactica_. Cain had little tolerance for such obvious problems. She was about as by-the-book as a commander could be.

"What do you think of the plan?" Tigh asked.

"It's a good one. Bill could always see the big picture. He always covers every angle. Just one question. How does he plan to keep the basestar over the city from jumping away? We can't use it to bargain with the Cylons on the planet if it's not there."

"You think they'll cut and run…leave their comrades down on the surface?"

"To save their entire race…sure. It's exactly what we'd do in the same situation especially if we had their kind of resurrection technology. They'll jump far enough away that they're past our long-range scanners and then they'll keep moving, but always staying within what they call _resurrection range _which is less than a light year but farther away than we can track them. They'll stick around long enough to save all the humanoids and Raiders that we kill in the attack on their basestars and the planet and then…then I don't know what they'll do. I'm sure somewhere the Cylon high council has a backup plan for dealing with an attack. It was probably in place before the group went to the Colonies. Maybe they'll abandon Nereid and move on. Remember how the Cavil on Caprica boasted to his interrogators that their homeworld wasn't the only outpost they had. There's always the possibility they've found Kobol. The star map was supposed to be hidden somewhere on Nereid."

"Have you talked to Bill about this?"

"No, because I didn't know he planned to hold the resurrection ship hostage until now. I told everything else to Major Parker during my debriefing. I'm sure he reported it to Bill."

"I guess that's why we're going to target that basestar's FTL drive without destroying the ship."

"That'll be a good trick if it can be done. That drive is in the most protected part of the ship. I'd have thought the only sure way to destroy it without destroying the basestar would be to have someone walk a bomb up to it."

Tigh smirked. "Are you volunteering?"

John smiled. "I'll pass. Been there. Done that. It was no fun."

"We've got a couple of special penetrating missiles with a low explosive capacity. As soon as we jump into space near the ship, we're going to put those missiles into the heart of the basestar. The _Galactica's_ gunners practiced on a derelict freighter near the ice planet for weeks. It was damned impressive how accurate they were."

"A derelict freighter is not a basestar that will be firing back or moving."

"We know that," Tigh said gruffly. "The gunners were going for accuracy. All they've got to do is damage part of the drive or the computers that control it to render it useless."

"Even if we manage to take out that drive, the ship will launch all her Raiders."

"That's why we'll be fielding over three hundred Vipers between us and the _Columbia_."

John nodded. He didn't want to think about his daughter being one of the three hundred who would be going up against almost eight hundred Raiders. During the First War the largest single battle he had participated in involved about seventy Mark II Vipers and about a hundred old-style Raiders, the kind that were piloted by the 0005 centurions. The battle had lasted for hours and when it was over, the Raiders had been destroyed, but more than a third of their pilots were dead. It was in that battle that he'd lost one of his best friends. John took a deep breath and then another. Tonight's battle held no promise of having a different outcome. The Colonials would probably emerge victorious, but they would pay a steep price.

Then John realized that they couldn't have it both ways. They could have nuked everything in sight like Bill's original plan or they could try to minimize the damage to the planet and save what they could of the human slaves and the Cylons who sided with them. But that option would not come cheaply or easily.

Tigh said, "As soon as we take out the ship's FTL drive, we're going to pull back and make their Raiders come after us before we launch our Vipers. We hope our ship's gunners can take out a lot of the Raiders before our Vipers have to engage."

"Let's just hope the basestar doesn't have nukes," John said.

"I thought one of the Cylons told you they didn't."

"That's Natalie's understanding. She said Cavil, or the Angel of Death as she calls him, took all of their nukes to the Colonies seven years ago, nukes they'd taken from us during the First War. She said they never found the material to make them on this planet. Natalie told me the truth, but the Cavil who runs the show here is every bit as cunning as the one who wiped out eleven of our Colonies. He could easily have lied to her and to the rest of them."

"Let's hope not," Tigh said, "or it's a whole different ball game."

"I guess we've got nukes."

"Oh, yeah. We've got nukes."

"Does Bill plan to use them?"

"Only if we have to."

…

Kara walked with Karl and Saunders to the ready room. All were wearing flight suits and carrying their helmets inverted like buckets with their gloves inside.

"You'll come get me if I get my Viper shot out from under me," Kara joked.

"That's not funny," Karl said.

Saunders punched his arm. "You know we will. We're going to launch twenty SAR Raptors as soon as all you guys are out of the tubes."

Karl added. "Let's hope we do a lot more rescuing than we do searching."

They walked the rest of the way in silence. All knew that unless a pilot was able to eject, his chances of surviving a hit by a Raider were almost zero. Even ejecting was no guarantee of survival. One tiny tear in a flight suit could prove fatal very quickly. And there was always the chance that a Raider would come after the pilot with guns blazing.

They joined the other pilots filing into the ready room. After they sat down Kara glanced at the pilot who sat on the other side of her. She recognized him immediately…Troy Minos, who earlier in the summer had married Shelley Sydell.

"Starbuck," he said. "Ready for tonight?"

"As ready as I'll ever be, Captain Minos."

"Use my call sign, _Sever_. I'm leader of the Vigilantes so you're in my squadron. Stinger will announce them at the end of the briefing. He's going to take one, too."

Kara nodded. It didn't surprise her that Cole Taylor wanted a piece of the action.

Gradually the room filled. There were more pilots than there were seats and the side and back walls were jammed. Kara glanced at the big clock in the front…19:15. Forty-five minutes until they would jump into space much closer to Nereid.

"Heads up, gentlemen," Taylor said. "We've got ten Viper squadrons. Most have eighteen ships. A few have sixteen. We have one Raptor squadron with twenty-two ships. I'll post the list at the end of the briefing just in case anyone has forgotten which squadron he belongs to. I'm taking Squadron 9, the Headhunters. Squadrons 1 through 5 will launch from the port tubes; 6 through 10 will take the starboard tubes. As soon as we jump, we'll go down to the hangar deck and get ready to launch. Remember you are to engage _only_ their Raiders and only after the _G_ has a shot at them. You will be given the order when to engage and remember to stay out of _Galactica's_ firing solution. I repeat. Do not target the basestar in any way. Leave it to the _G_. They're going to try to knock out the ship's FTL. We know from experience that those Raiders will target our landing bays with everything they've got. Don't let them reach those pods or you'll be floating around out there with nowhere to land and refuel and that makes you a sitting duck. Remember what happened to the _Erasmus_."

They all knew the sad story of the _Erasmus, _a valkyrie class battlestar. Kara had learned it in Colonel Burgher's class at the Academy.

During the final days of the fighting six years earlier, the _Erasmus_ had run out of ammunition and her remaining Vipers had not been able to keep the overwhelming number of Raiders from penetrating their perimeter. Both the port and starboard landing bays had been destroyed. The Raiders had then picked off the Vipers one by one as they had also run out of ammo and fuel. Then the Raiders had started on the battlestar itself and finally hit a main fuel cell. Like the _Solaria_ and the _Atlantia_ and many of the other proud ships of the fleet, the _Erasmus_ and her brave crew of over two thousand men and women had been a total loss.

Many considered it to have been the final straw in the Colonial's resistance, the event that had caused then President Richard Adar to agree first to a truce and then to a complete surrender to the Cylons.

Kara fought the urge to squirm in her seat. Taylor's mention of the _Erasmus_ had heightened their already high determination to defeat the Cylons on Nereid and free the human slaves. She had no doubt that he had referenced the ship on purpose. It was a lesson _and_ an inspiration. The atmosphere in the room now felt like an electrical current enveloping them. The tension was so high that she could taste it. Most of the pilots around her had assumed positions meant to show they were cool with everything they would soon face…bravado in the face of possible death. They were for the most part a cocky bunch. It went with the job. And they were all as wired as she was, especially the nuggets, and yet each was soberly calculating the odds of coming back.

"Admiral Adama is going to speak to the whole battlestar before we jump," Taylor said. "In fact his speech will go out to the entire fleet. It'll start in about five minutes. Try to hold it down until then."

Kara let out the breath she'd been holding. "How's Shelley?" She asked Minos.

"She's had a hard time with morning sickness."

"Shelley's pregnant?"

"Didn't Lee tell you? I thought she said she'd mentioned it to him."

"I guess he forgot to pass along the good news. Boy or girl?"

"We don't know yet. I heard Lee got shot rescuing some prisoners. How is he?"

"He won't fly a Viper for a couple of weeks, but he'll be fine."

"The other guy who got shot is worse?"

"A lot worse. He took one in the spine. I haven't seen him yet. I talked to his nephew."

"How's your father?"

Kara shrugged. "In the CIC right now. He'd probably be happier down here, but Admiral Adama wants him underfoot for some reason."

"Do you think he'll return to teaching at the Academy when this is over?"

"I don't know."

Kara doubted it would happen, but she didn't want to speak for her father. He'd already told her that he would probably have to divide his time between the two planets.

The PA system came alive with a whine and then static that lasted for half a minute before they heard Admiral Adama's voice.

"Men and women of the fleet, there are forty-six thousand human slaves on the surface of the planet that we call Nereid and that the Cylons call their homeworld. Three basestars stand between us and getting our Marines to the surface to begin winning the freedom of those slaves. The ship we're going after is the one we want to take in one piece so remember that our objective is to cripple and not destroy. I know that many of you have never seen combat before. We have a lot of nugget pilots but you've all trained for this day so do your duties as I know you can do them. You're the best men and women the Colonies have to offer so stand to your stations and we _will_ achieve victory tonight. So say we all."

His words reverberated through the ready room.

Cole Taylor echoed the phrase. "So say we all."

And the pilots picked it up.

"So say we all."

…

In the CIC Adama said, "Mr. Gaeta, ready the ship to jump."

"FTL drives are spooled up," Gaeta replied. He was standing at the FTL station, a small area behind the Tactical Station that was rarely manned on the battlestar. Only when they were preparing to jump was anyone there. Gaeta inserted the key with its chrome handle and twin glowing blue crystals into the jump slot. He had already programmed the coordinates into the computer and had them double-checked by another technician.

"Drives are ready. Awaiting your command."

John and Tigh had both walked close enough to the command console that they could place a hand on it. John preferred to be sitting when he was in a ship that jumped, but as long as he could hold onto something solid, he was okay. Jumping had never made him dizzy like it did a lot of people.

All eyes in the CIC were now on the clock as the second hand ticked toward 20:00. All over the battlestar eyes were also on clocks.

When the second hand was straight up, Bill Adama took a composed breath and said, "Jump."

Gaeta turned the key and began the ten-second countdown. Space bent. There was the momentary sensation of being stretched in a tunnel and then the ship emerged at a new set of coordinates. Over six trillion miles and it happened in the blink of an eye. John looked at the screen that showed where they were in relation to nearby planets and stars. The configuration winked out briefly and then changed as the long-range sensors picked up their new surroundings.

They were clearly on the edge of a star system. Even though the yellow sun was just a speck and they couldn't see any of the planets, he knew that Nereid was the fourth planet from the star. He felt a sense of excitement grip him as one by one the small blips of the other battlestars appeared on the screen.

"Jump complete," Gaeta said as he removed the key and placed it back in the holding slot.

For a moment they all relaxed and waited while incoming chatter confirmed the jumps of the other battlestars.

When the First War had started, John had been a young boy and had no memory of the day or week or even the month because it had started on Tauron when U-87 combat units were brought in to help quell a civil uprising against the government by a group that was referred to as _Dirteaters _or _Dirt Eaters,_ a racial slur that was still used by many people to describe anyone from Tauron.

But something interesting had happened as the robots had fought a group of humans that were rebelling against their own near-enslavement. The sentient U-87s had learned that there were those for whom freedom was worth dying. It had apparently been a watershed moment in the evolution of machines. Eventually those machines had also rebelled and had turned their guns on their masters. The First War had begun.

John's home planet of Virgon had been little affected by that war. There were small inconveniences since imported supplies were sometimes not available. He could remember several times that his mother complained about being unable to buy sugar. Once his father had waited for several weeks for a part for his trawler, grumbling all the while about what _that damned war _was costing them_._ Prices had gone up on many things, especially tylium fuel since so much of it was being diverted for military use, but by and large their lives had continued without major interruptions.

During the fourth year their capitol city of Boskirk had seen some fighting, but his home town of Port Ithaca was far to the north and had seen none since it held no strategic value for either side. It had never occurred to John that there were children just like him on other planets who had been thrust into the heart of some vicious battles. The main thing he remembered was hearing his parents talk about a few of their town's young people who had enlisted and subsequently lost their lives fighting on distant planets or in space.

Fighting Cylons had not been in his parents' plans for him or his brothers. He was expected to follow them onto the sea like generations of Gallagher men had done before him. Then a storm had taken their lives and changed his life forever.

During a discussion several years earlier, Bill had told John that he clearly remembered the first day of the war. His family had relatives on Tauron and adolescent Bill had heard his father's anguish as he and his mother had discussed the beginning of the war. Bill had told him that it was on that day he had decided to train to become a Viper pilot.

He and John had come to that cockpit in different ways and for different reasons and had served on different battlestars, but it was something they shared. Despite their sometimes contentious relationship, it bound them in a very small band of brothers and sisters and always would. He'd deserved the chewing out that Bill had given him that morning, but his presence here in the CIC also told him that Bill would pursue it no further.

"Sir, we are unable to establish contact with the _Orion_," one of the communication technicians said. "We don't have their IFF signal either."

Bill said, "Get a Raptor out there and get me a visual confirmation that ship isn't with us."

John counted the blips on the big dradis screen and confirmed what the tech had just said. Besides the _G _there were only seven blips being revealed with each sweep. A battlestar was missing.

Bill was following protocol in sending out a Raptor, but John also knew what they would find. The _Orion_ wasn't there.

…

The pilots in the ready room were aware of the jump. After it was completed, they began preparing to leave and head for their ships on the hangar deck. The next jump would put them close to the resurrection basestar and into the fight. They would be in their Vipers waiting to launch when it happened.

Taylor answered the phone on the wall and barked an order for quiet. A hush fell over the room. No one moved.

"Flat Top, Tailgate, Helo," he said after he hung up. "Report to the port launch bay ASAP. We're missing a battlestar. Before we proceed to the target, Admiral Adama wants a visual of all ships…on the double."

The two Raptor pilots and their ECO left the ready room at a run.

"Which ship?" Someone in the front asked.

"The _Orion_."

Kara knew the ship was an older one, a valkyrie class ship. It was probably the oldest ship of the eight that had accompanied the _G_. The fact that it hadn't completed the jump was not good news, but Kara also knew that the admiral had brought more than enough ships to complete their mission.

"What do you think happened to the ship?" She asked Minos.

He shook his head. "I'm guessing something failed while the FTL drives were spooling up. There's so many error checks built into the process computers that a failure at any point will shut them down. That's why it takes nearly twenty minutes to initiate a jump."

"The drive on the Raider I flew took less than a minute from initiation to ready. The FTL on the Heavy Raider is the same."

"I guess that's the difference between our computer technology and theirs."

"The two guys who worked on the Raider told me their computers are so much faster and more accurate. An FTL drive is a mechanical thing but it's controlled by computers."

Taylor's voice rose above the din of everyone speculating on the fate of the _Orion_. "The rest of you get to your ships. I doubt the missing _Orion_ will change Admiral Adama's battle plans."

Silently they filed out of the ready room, each taking time to touch the two pictures that hung by the door. After talking to Lucas Agathon on Neried, John had confirmed what Kara had always known. Her mother had died during the Cylon assault on Picon.

_This one's for you, Mom, _Kara thought as she reverently touched the fallen soldier. _Tonight they're all for you._

…

Sick Bay was quiet. There was only one other person in the long row of beds…a crewman who had broken his arm as he'd helped load ammo for one of _Galactica's_ huge twenty-four primary duel Kinetic Energy Weapons. His arm had been set and he'd been given a pain-killer. Lee could hear him snoring from a dozen beds away.

He waited until a med tech walked by.

"Do you think you could find some sweatpants and a t-shirt for me? I'd like to visit the other man who was wounded."

"He's heavily sedated," the med tech replied. "He won't know you're there."

"I'd still like to talk to his nephew and his brother. Hunter and I were roommates for the last five months."

He could see her relenting. "We're going to jump soon. Stay put until then and I'll see what I can do. I'll have to push you in a wheelchair. I'm not about to let you wander off somewhere and pass out. We don't want to add a concussion to your injuries."

Lee gave her his best smile. "I'll be waiting."

Thirty minutes passed before Dr. Cottle walked down the row and stopped at his bed. He dropped some folded clothes on the foot with one hand and raised a cigarette to his lips with the other.

"I guess this means you're feeling better," he said through the smoke.

"I can't lay here while everybody else is doing something."

Cottle started to say something and apparently thought better of it. "I'll be back in ten minutes with a wheelchair. Don't sit up too quickly. You might pass out. Do you want one of the techs to help you get dressed?"

"I think I can do it myself."

"Hit the call button if you need somebody," Cottle said as he walked toward the exit.

Using his right arm and the bed rail, Lee slowly pulled himself into an upright position. It hurt, but the pain was manageable. Cottle had wisely brought him a pajama shirt that he could slip into one arm at a time. Lee realized that he would never have gotten a t-shirt over his head because raising his left arm more than a few inches sent lightning bolts of pain radiating up and down his side and made him feel like he was going to throw up. After a dozen tries he gave up on the sweatpants. He could only bend over slightly, not nearly far enough to get the pants on. When Cottle got back, Lee was sweating, in pain and ready to admit defeat.

"You should have pressed the call button," Cottle said.

"How can such a little wound hurt so much when I move?"

"I don't know where you got the idea that it's a _little_ wound. That bullet or whatever it was that hit you entered near your belly button, tore through the muscle layer and exited your side. You're damned lucky it missed your intestines and your ribs."

"So your advice would be for me to stay in bed."

"It would. The young woman John rescued would like to visit you. Would that cheer you up?"

"Why not," Lee said. He was very disappointed and it came through in his voice.

"You pilots are all alike," Cottle said as he inhaled a lungful of smoke and then blew it out. "You all think you're supermen. Should I leave the sweatpants?"

Lee nodded in a dispirited way. "I'm sure I'll need them eventually. And I don't think I'm a superman," he added grumpily. "I got that knocked out of me when I had to eject over the ocean last November."

"Then consider yourself damned lucky," Cottle said. "Maybe there's a good reason you're down here in a bed instead of getting ready to turn yourself into cannon fodder for a bunch of Cylon Raiders. I hear your father chewed Major Gallagher out over what happened to you. He probably should have thanked him instead."

_..._

"Raptor has launched, sir," the communication tech said to Admiral Adama.

Tigh and John had exchanged glances at the announcement that they were short a battlestar, but neither had voiced an opinion as to what might have happened. With a Raptor in the air, it shouldn't take long for a visual confirmation.

Bill walked over to them. "Work was done on the _Orion's_ FTL drive just before we left Caprica."

Beyond that he wasn't willing to speculate.

The tech said, "Raptor has a visual, sir. The _Orion_ is not with us."

Bill said, "Mr. Gaeta, get our last coordinates to that Raptor. They're to jump back and see if she's still there. If she's not, tell them to wait twenty minutes before returning."

"Yes, sir."

The communication was made and three minutes later, the tech said, "Raptor has jumped."

John knew that meant at least twenty-five minutes before they'd know anything. Either way the news was not good for the old ship. If the FTL drives had failed to spool up or had died before the jump had been initiated, the _Orion_ was relegated to sublight engines. She was in a dark corner of space with nowhere to go, now separated from the fleet by over a light year, more than six trillion miles and almost thirty times that distance from Caprica. Unless something could be done to repair the FTL system, her crew would have to be rescued by another ship. And right now Bill didn't have another ship to send.

The other alternatives were better…or worse. If the coordinates had been entered incorrectly, they could simply jump back to the previous ones and try again. That's why Bill was sending the Raptor to check their previous location and had told them to wait twenty minutes since it took that long for a battlestar's drives to spool up after a jump. If the drives had failed during the jump itself, there was no telling what had happened to the _Orion_. They were probably somewhere between here and there, but with their FTL capability gone, they would be lost.

Everyone in the CIC knew the possibilities. Every face was somber as they waited for the Raptor to return.

"Have you thought about bringing LG49 up here?" John asked the admiral.

"What is LG49?" Tigh asked.

"John's centurion," Adama replied.

That got an incredulous look from Tigh and a sarcastic comment. "A Cylon centurion in the CIC? Why not just turn over the ship to him?"

"John thinks he can intercept their transmissions once we jump."

"You think?" Tigh's voice went up and attracted the attention of the crew. "If that robot can hear them, it means he can talk to them. Are you insane?"

"Forget it," John said to Bill. "You planned this op without him. I'm sure you've got all the bases covered."

Bill said, "Go down to the hangar deck and bring me back one credible bit of information that only your centurion could have heard. Then I'll reconsider. If one thing happens that makes me believe he's betraying us, I'll have him airlocked and used as target practice."

"Fair enough," John said, "and just to set the record straight, LG49 isn't _my_ centurion. He's one that was freed and is working _with_ us to right some very glaring wrongs. In fact he's more sympathetic toward the human slaves since he's been there himself and now understands how wrong it is."

Bill had turned away and was studying one of the many screens in the CIC. He didn't react, but the ruddiness of Saul Tigh's cheeks deepened a shade. If Tigh had his way, he would probably already have ordered LG49 put out an airlock.

"I need to use the head," Tigh mumbled before he hurried out of the room.

Bill glanced around and for a brief moment his and John's eyes met. It was a tacit acknowledgement of what Tigh was going to do. The outline of the ever-present flask was too obvious when he carried it in his tunic pocket. He had switched it now to a holder on his ankle…less obvious unless you knew where to look. Whether Bill would have said something about it they would never know because at that moment a small blip reappeared on the dradis screen just over their heads.

"Raptor has returned," the comm tech said. They waited. "The _Orion_ wasn't there."

All eyes once again focused on Bill.

"Bring that Raptor on board, retract the flight pods and notify the fleet that the _Valkyrie_ will be jumping in twenty minutes. Have all ships keep their FTL drives spooled up and ready. Attack commences as planned."

"Yes, sir."

"Mr. Gaeta, input our next jump coordinates and make ready to jump. Switch comm channel A to long-range."

"Yes, sir."

John knew that long-range communications would be tuned to a pre-arranged frequency that the _Valkyrie_ would be using to communicate with the _Galactica_. He also knew the acid test for the usefulness of the centurion depended on what he could glean once they made their second jump.

…

Kara sat in her Viper with the canopy pushed back. Troy Minos' ship was already in the launch tube. They were launching the Mark VIIs first. She was third in line behind Minos. Second was River _Hiccup _Brigden who had been in her Mark VII class out at the airbase. He had been a year ahead of Lee at the Academy and was also a captain like Troy. She and Brigden would be flying Minos' wing.

Not for the first time that night she missed Narcho. Maybe because they'd gone through the Academy and Flight School together, he was always her first pick for a wingman. He was a good pilot and they had a similar style of flying. He'd come in third in the Top Gun competition behind her and Eammon Pike but she knew that was only because Pike had outscored Narcho in the classroom. Kara had always maintained that Narcho was the better pilot. Pike was gone now, dead in the fighting the previous November and Narcho was on the surface of Nereid.

Lee would have been her other choice as a wingman even though their flying styles were different. He was a good pilot, the Top Gun in his Flight School class, but he was more cautious than she was. Some of her moves had more than once rated the term _insane_ from him. Yet she'd still rather have him on her wing than a pilot she barely knew.

The ladder was still beside her ship since she hadn't yet completed her preflight check. The crew bustled around below her. She knew that everyone was waiting to hear about the fate of the _Orion_.

"Raptor coming in," she heard someone call over the din of the hangar.

She knew Karl and Saunders' Raptor would have to be checked since it had made an FTL jump. They waited. It seemed like all she had done today was wait. She went over the lessons her father and her instructor Jessups had tried so hard to drill into her head. Watch your instruments. Stay with your wingman. Go in fast and go for the kill…never hesitate…never look back to admire your work…go on to the next Raider and take it out and then the next. And most of all…stay aware of everything around you. Air battles are fought in three dimensions, not two. It sounded like a mind boggling task and sometimes it was, but she had practiced over and over in the simulator. Her father had seen to that. In fact Kara had started practicing when she was barely more than a child at the video arcade when she had played the game called _Dogfight_.

A crewman climbed the ladder and finished fastening her to her seat and attaching the back of her boots to the snap-back cables. He pulled the pins that armed the ejection seat and took it out of safety mode.

"Your seat's hot, sir," he said.

"Any word on the _Orion_?" Kara asked.

"It wasn't back there," the man said.

"That's bad news."

"Yes, sir."

Kara shook her head. "I hope they just jumped to the wrong coordinates."

"Let's hope, sir. And they find their way back soon. I have friends on that ship."

Kara put on her gloves and her helmet. The crewman helped her fasten it to her flight suit. As the ladder was pulled back, Kara slid the canopy shut and flipped the electromagnetic lock. She took a deep breath of the oxygen in her helmet. She was ready to kill Raiders.

…

Petra walked slowly down the row at the end of the beds and carefully maneuvered the wheelchair she was pushing between Lee's bed and the empty one beside him. Yoshimo was in a hospital gown with a blanket over his lap that also covered his legs. Petra wore a baggy t-shirt, scrub pants and a pair of rubber clogs. Her short brown hair was clean and fluffy but her eyes were still dark-circled. Lee realized that she was extremely attractive although too thin.

_Damned Cylons_, he thought.

"I'm Petra," she said. "This is Yoshimo. We came to thank you for rescuing us."

"Yes," Yoshimo said. "We owe you much."

"I was on the other team," Lee said modestly. "I went with Hunter and Jade to unbox Sonja. John's team is the one who rescued you."

"We don't differentiate," Yoshimo said. "You are all responsible. Your Dr. Cottle told me that I was in very bad shape. I am still hooked to this bag of fluid and I have eaten some soup. I feel much better now. The nurses have been very good to me."

"I heard one of them calling you her sweetheart," Petra said affectionately.

"She was being kind to an old man."

"I'm sorry for what you both suffered," Lee said. "I know John is, too."

"I bear no grudge," Yoshimo said. "I was ready to meet God and see my wife again."

"Now you can put it off for a while," Petra said. "We'd like for you to stay with us and live on Nereid as a free man."

Yoshimo said, "Dr. Cottle told us that the transport had brought D'Anna back with them. Her child has been born."

Lee nodded and told them everything Kara had told him. He finished by saying, "I think John is waiting until we're closer to Nereid to pull the plug so she'll download into a new body."

"I would like to sit with her for a while," Yoshimo said. "We had many long and interesting talks about our faith while she lived in the settlement. She is a true believer. I would like to pray for her."

Lee told them where to find D'Anna. Petra left saying that she would be back shortly. When she returned, the wheelchair was empty. She parked it at the end of the bed.

"How are _you_ feeling?"

"I couldn't even put on a pair of sweatpants."

"Would you like for me to help you. I'm a nurse."

"Let's give it a try. I'm going nuts just lying here."

Petra told Lee to swing his legs over the side of the bed. She smiled. "I won't peek."

Lee grunted in pain as he tried to twist his body around.

Petra grasped his ankles and gently assisted him. "Take your time," she said.

"You know Dr. Cottle told me to stay in bed."

"But you're stubborn just like John and don't want to listen." When Lee finally got turned, Petra slid his feet into the legs of the sweatpants. "Can you stand up?"

Using his right hand Lee pushed on the bed rail. He experienced a moment of dizziness but he was on his feet. Petra steadied him and quickly pulled the sweatpants up, stopping short of the heavy bandage that encircled his waist.

"There now," she said. "I think they'll stay up even on those slim hips of yours."

Lee sat on the edge of the bed. "Have you talked to Hunter or his uncle?"

"Dr. Cottle was talking to them when we went by. Would you like to visit?"

"I can't walk that far."

"Why do you think I brought the wheelchair back with me? One of the med techs told me you were getting restless. Yoshimo is settled in a comfortable recliner in D'Ann's room. He'll be fine for a while."

After the struggle to get into the shirt and sweatpants, getting into the wheelchair was both easier and less painful. Gingerly Lee touched the bandage and hoped he hadn't torn anything internally.

As Petra was rolling him past the row of beds, Petra said, "John's daughter is very angry at him for what happened to you."

"She'll get over it. That's just the way Kara is. She might be angry now, but it won't last. She loves her father so much that she stole the Raider late last winter and jumped to Nereid to look for him even though the rest of us thought he was dead."

"He told me what she'd done. They sound very much alike. I hear that his mission to rescue us wasn't authorized."

"No."

"And that your father chewed him out."

Lee nodded. "I'm sure Dad would have had a go at me while he was here if I hadn't been asleep."

"All of you will have mine and Yoshimo's gratitude forever."

Lee understood why John was willing to risk their lives including his own to rescue his friends. Sometimes a choice had to be made between right and duty because they weren't always the same thing.

…

John left the CIC and made his way down to the hangar deck. It currently reminded him of a bee hive with crewmen getting pilots into ships and ships into the launch tubes. He had hoped he might catch a glimpse of Kara but he didn't even know which side of the ship she would be launching from. He made his way to the Heavy Raider and got on board.

The centurion was right where he'd left him that morning although it seemed like it had been days since he'd headed up to Sick Bay to see about his team.

The centurion was holding the communicator. John sat down in the pilot's seat.

"Hey, big guy. Did you have an interesting day?"

The centurion handed him the communicator and John read. _I have observed a day on your hangar deck._

"Interesting or boring?"

_Informative. It is much like a day in a hangar on our homeworld. My brothers perform the same tasks that your human friends perform on this ship._

"We're getting ready to make a second jump. When we do we'll be over Nereid…your homeworld."

_I am aware that we made a jump fifty-four minutes ago. One of your battlestars is missing._

"How do you know that?"

_I listened to the communications between your Hybrid and others of the crew._

For a moment John didn't understand and then he realized that the centurion had no frame of reference for what he was hearing. LG49 had mistaken Bill Adama for the _Galactica's_ Hybrid. He smiled.

"The voice you heard is not a Hybrid. He's a human just like me. He's the commander of this battlestar. Actually he's the commander of the whole fleet. How much do you know about the basestars?"

_I can access a copy of their design._

"Do any of them carry nukes?"

_They have the capacity for both conventional and nuclear weapons._

"I saw their capacity for both kinds of weapons when they visited the Colonies six years ago. What I want to know is whether any of them are carrying nukes right now?"

_I am not aware of a current reference to nuclear devices on any of the baseships. My database indicates that all nuclear weapons were taken to the colonies._

"I'm glad to hear they didn't leave any here. Bill will be, too."

_Are you and I going to take the Heavy Raider and engage in the fighting after we jump to the homeworld? If so we will require ordnances. This ship currently carries no ammunition._

"No. Our Vipers are going to do the fighting. What the admiral wants to know is whether you can intercept communications between your basestars and the city once we make the next jump?"

_I can._

"That's the right answer. Now we wait for the jump."

They sat in silence for almost five minutes watching the activity in the hangar before more words scrolled across the screen.

_Your ship the _Valkyrie_ has just jumped into Cylon controlled space near the seventh planet which is not habitable for human life. It is a gas giant with a methane atmosphere and a number of orbiting…_

"Can you follow the action involving the _Valkyrie_?" John asked before LG49 could continue with his astronomy lesson.

_I will relay to you what I hear. The _Valkyrie_ is broadcasting a distress signal._

"A false one," John said. "The ship's purpose is to lure one or more of your basestars away from Nereid. It's the bait. Do you understand the concept of _bait_?"

_A substance, usually food, used in catching fish…_

Keep looking. I'm sure you'll find another definition that fits the situation better.

_A lure, enticement or a temptation._

John smiled. "Keep hanging around me and I'll have you thinking like a human."

_I am not sure Natalie would approve._

"I won't tell her if you don't."

_The Hybrid of the nearest baseship has heard the distress call from the _Valkyrie_ and is summoning the humanoids to the control room. The Hybrid has sensed a threat and is launching the baseship's Raiders. The _Valkyrie_ has communicated to your commander that Raiders have been launched and that they have begun launching Vipers. _

"What's the basestar doing? Is it on the way to intercept the battlestar?" John asked.

_The humanoids have ordered their baseship to destroy your battlestar so that means they have taken the bait as you phrased it. They are on the way. _

"What about the other two basestars?"

_They are holding their positions awaiting the outcome of the battle._

"What will they do if the third basestar is destroyed?"

_I cannot say. If the Hybrid of either ship senses that destruction is imminent, she will jump the ship away. Their primary directive is the preservation of the ship and our race. It is the primary directive of all of us…unless we have been enlightened to the truth of our betrayal by the Ones._

"Who has the final say in whether or not the basestar jumps…the Hybrid or the humanoids?"

_The Hybrid. She has complete control of the ship. Usually they agree, but if they don't, the Hybrid will do what she thinks is best. Humans would probably regard this as a flaw in our control of the basestar._

"So there is no suicidal valor in a Hybrid?"

_I do not understand your question._

"Never mind. Stay here, big guy. I've got to go talk to the commander."

John left the hangar deck and hurried back to the CIC. Bill glanced at John as they heard Commander Royan Herschel's voice, static-filled due to the distance, but clear enough to understand.

"Their Raiders are engaging our Vipers. The basestar is standing just out of the range of our guns. Do we engage?"

Adama said. "Wait for the arrival of the _Pegasus_ and then engage and destroy that basestar."

"Understood," Herschel replied.

Adama picked up the heavy black phone on the command console. "Patch me through to Commander Cain on the _Pegasus_." When the connection was made, he said, "Time for you to join the fight. The third basestar has taken the bait."

They didn't hear Cain's reply, but everyone knew what it was. Gaeta's counterpart on the _Pegasus_ must have been standing by with his hand on the jump key. In barely ten seconds Gaeta said, "The _Pegasus_ has jumped."

Tigh looked at John. "Any nuggets of wisdom from your metal friend?"

"The outermost basestar took the bait like we've heard. The first and second basestars haven't moved. They're waiting to see the outcome of the battle with the third. The humanoids on all ships have been alerted. LG49 says if their Hybrids feel threatened, they'll jump the ships away. The Hybrids control all functions of the ship and their primary goal is its preservation and that of the humanoids on board. They can override the orders of the humanoids if they sense they're in a hopeless situation."

A tech said, "Long range scans confirm that the outermost ship is moving toward the _Valkyrie_. The other two ships are holding position, sir."

Bill didn't hesitate. "We can't wait for them to decide that jumping away is the best option. Mr. Gaeta, prepare to jump. Send the command to the _Columbia_, the _Ajax_ and the _Charybdis_ to prepare to jump in exactly two minutes. Go to action stations, set condition one and launch Vipers as soon as the jump is complete. Notify gunners to be ready to commence firing on my signal."

Once more Gaeta inserted the jump key into the slot and they watched the clock as two minutes ticked by. He turned the key. Ten seconds later they were in space over Nereid.

They had lost the element of surprise, but Adama was betting that the attention of both basestars near the planet would be focused on the battle going on farther out in space.

Tigh said, "Helm come about one quarter. Weapons grid to full power. Gunners get ready to fire."

The Galactica's starboard side began a slow swing into a position broadside to the basestar.

"Basestar is launching Raiders," Gaeta said.

"Launch Vipers, port side only until gunners have a shot at that ship. Range to target?"

"Twenty-eight miles, sir."

John knew that they were outside the range of the basestar's guns, but that was what Bill wanted. He didn't want to destroy the basestar, only the Raiders they were launching.

Bill took another deep breath. "Gunners launch missiles when target is acquired."

…

Kara heard the klaxons and realized they had gone to condition one at the same time she heard the voice of the Launch Officer saying, _Prepare to launch all Vipers, port side only_. Troy Minos' Viper was launched immediately and the magnetic catapult drawn back as the outer doors closed and the inner doors opened. The next ship was moved into the tube. The launch supervisor completed the required checks in record time and Brigden was out.

She took slow, deep breaths as the rear tube door opened and her Viper was pushed into it until her front skid was in position to engage the catapult. She heard _bird in the tube _and then the confirmation that her ship was secured to the catapult. Kara gave a salute and a thumbs-up to the Launch Officer visible through the window in the side of the tube.

She pressed her head back against the seat. A few moments later she was rocketing down the triangular tube and out into space. The entire ride took less than three seconds. She joined Sever and Hiccup just in time to see the big starboard guns swing up into position. Raiders were pouring out of slots in the central portion of the basestar like sparrows rising from a nest, hundreds of them. They didn't have to wait to be launched. They just fired their engines and they were airborne.

_Frak_, Kara said to herself. She looked around as best she could. Somewhere behind her the _Columbia_ should be launching her Vipers as well.

At that moment a missile was fired from the _Galactica_. She watched its bright and fiery tail as it sped toward the basestar…and exploded before it got there thanks to several Raiders that had sacrificed themselves to protect the ship.

A second missile was launched with the same results. She was certain that Admiral Adama hadn't counted on that happening. Sacrifical Raiders.

More Vipers were launching from the port side and joining them.

She heard Tigh's voice over the wireless in her helmet. "All batteries suppression barrage. Target enemy fighters. Commence firing."

Before the first shells had reached the incoming Raiders, there was a bright flash and the basestar disappeared. A few Raiders exploded in the barrage of fire now pouring from the _Galactica_, but more got through arcing up and over or down and under the hail of bullets. Kara didn't have time to think about the implications of the resurrection ship escaping because Troy Minos' voice was in her ear saying to his squadron.

_Engage. Engage. Engage._

Kara wheeled her Viper in a tight arc just in time to see a bright flash on the side of the _Columbia_. The second basestar or one of its Raiders had scored a direct hit on their sister battlestar.

_Frak_, she thought again as she joined Brigden on Minos' wing. They didn't have to look far to pick their first targets. The sky was full of them, silver scythes reflecting Nereid's sun like a thousand deadly fireflies on a dark summer night.

…

"Basestar has jumped away," Gaeta said. "Vipers are engaging Raiders."

John couldn't decide if what he saw on Bill Adama's face was disappointment or anger, but it was a strong emotion that the admiral fought to control and quickly conquered.

"Notify the _Scylla_ and the _Minoan_ to jump in and launch all their Vipers. Status report on the other ships."

"_Columbia_ reports heavy damage to her port landing bay. Attempting to retract the pod."

A pod that wouldn't retract was a huge liability to a battlestar. While she could still jump with an unretracted pod, it destabilized the entire ship. It may or may not come through the jump in one piece. If it did make it, it would have structural damage that would need to be repaired. That level of damage was usually impossible to fix outside of a dry dock on a planet.

The Cylons had learned during the fighting six years earlier that an extended landing pod was the weakest part of a battlestar. Not only would damaging one keep a ship from jumping away, if they could damage both pods badly enough, the battlestar's Vipers and Raptors would have nowhere to land.

John looked up at the big dradis screen. The second and third basestars were still showing although there was an empty spot where the first ship had been only minutes before. The large number of Vipers and Raiders formed such a mass that they showed on the screen like swarms of insects instead of individual ships.

"The _Ajax_ took a missile hit on her starboard side," Gaeta said. "Explosive decompression on several decks. Commander Thorean and his XO have ordered all fire-fighting crews to the damaged compartments."

Tigh said, "If the fire reaches the D deck they're in danger of it getting to the fuel lines. They should seal off all those compartments and vent them."

"Thorean knows that. We have to trust the commander to handle his own ship," Bill said. "He knows the situation better than we do."

"He's wet behind the ears," Tigh said so softly that only John and the admiral could hear him. "Seven years ago he was CAG on the _Columbia_. He's basically a pilot for the gods' sakes."

"Don't forget that's how we got our starts," Bill said.

"He's not going to roll the hard six," Tigh said. "He'll lose the whole damned ship before he'll deliberately condemn men and women to death."

John was reminded again of why he would never want the burden of that much responsibility. Commander Nestor Thorean was in a no-win situation.

"_Ajax_ is venting forward compartments on D deck," Gaeta said.

Bill Adama sadly acknowledged Thorean's decision with a slight nod. It was understood by everyone in the CIC that there would be casualties that weren't directly caused by the Cylons.

"Give me a report on our other ships, Mr. Gaeta."

"The _Pegasus_ and the _Valkyrie_ have disabled the third basestar. There are fires burning in two of the arms."

Again Bill nodded. "Have the _Pegasus_ come to the aid of the _Ajax_. How is the fight going with our Vipers and all the Raiders that the basestar left behind?"

"Forward observers report intense fighting."

Bill glanced over at John again. His eyes said it all. The admiral had sent his Vipers into the fray as he had to do, but the father in him wished there'd been another way.

…

"What's that?" Petra said as a series of muffled booms reverberated through the ship and continued like the heavy bass accompaniment to a long snare drum roll.

"_Galactica's_ big guns," Lee answered.

"Have we already gone to war?" She asked in surprise.

"I thought one of the techs would have mentioned it to you," Lee said.

"No." He heard a wobble of fear in her voice. "So you've rescued us only so we can die in space."

"We've got nine battlestars. They've got three basestars. We'll win. My father wouldn't have undertaken this mission if he'd thought we'd lose."

Petra stopped pushing the wheelchair. "You didn't want to come visit your friend. You really want to go to wherever the action is."

"Caught me." Lee said. "But if I show up in the CIC in a wheelchair, my father will go so ballistic, it'd be worse than a nuke hitting the ship."

"What is the CIC?"

"Combat Information Center. It's where my father and his XO, that's Executive Officer, will be as long as there's any fighting going on. John's there, too."

"And he wouldn't want you there as well?"

"I'm a junior officer not to mention I'm supposed to be in a bed in Sick Bay. If I hadn't gotten shot, I'd be in a Viper right now."

"He sounds like a bit of a hard ass that father of yours."

"It's the military. Dad's responsible for the lives of everyone in the fleet. Right now I'd just be a distraction for him."

"You're his _son_."

"Look, I don't expect you to understand. It's just…there are protocols to observe."

She sighed and resumed pushing the wheelchair and very shortly they reached Targa's private room. The door was open. Beck was lying on a pallet on the floor on the far side. Hunter was sitting in a chair by the bed. All three men appeared to be asleep, but as Lee and Petra talked softly, Hunter opened his eyes. He got up and walked out of the room.

"I see Petra managed to get you out of bed. I'm surprised you didn't insist on flying your Viper."

"Funny," Lee retorted. He looked at Petra. "I had to put up with this comedian as a roommate for a few months."

Petra smiled. "How is your uncle?"

"He came out of the anesthesia. He knew us but he didn't remember getting shot. Dr. Cottle had to give him something for the pain so he's out again. I owe you for helping him while we were in the truck and the Heavy Raider."

She smiled modestly. "Once a nurse, always a nurse. And I owe you my freedom so we'll call it even. Your uncle looks very different with his hair cut short and his beard shaved. He's quite a nice looking man. I can see the family resemblance."

"One of the nurses did the barbering. She said they could keep him clean so much easier without the bushy hair and beard. He hasn't realized it yet. He'll probably _freak out_ as they say on Caprica."

"Is it a cultural or a religious thing for him?"

Hunter chuckled. "Neither. He and Beck got in the habit when we started fighting Cylons in the forest years ago. It was more for convenience, but they have a little thing going about whose beard is the longest and thickest. You'd have to know them to understand. My paternal grandfather had two families. My father and Emmalyn are from the first. Then his wife died. Targa and Beck are from the second family. Targa's the baby if thirty-five can be called a baby."

"I'll be glad to sit with him if you'd like to push Lee somewhere so he can find out how the battle is going. He's not going to be happy until he knows."

"I heard the guns start up," Hunter said. "They must have some kind of firepower."

"I know where we can go," Lee said. "We'll go down to the hangar deck and find a corner out of the way. The deck crew always knows what's going on."

"I'm game," Hunter said. "I guess I could get in a lot of trouble for taking you down there."

"We could both get in a lot of trouble. Let's just hope Dr. Cottle doesn't feel honor bound to call my father."

Petra said, "Then you should get out of here before he comes to check on Targa."

Lee directed Hunter to the corridor that led to the elevator that took them to the hangar deck. Only a few people noticed them. Nobody challenged their right to be there. Lee saw the Heavy Raider parked at the far end.

"Let's go wait over there," he told Hunter. "We'll be out of the way but can still see what's going on."

Hunter pushed the wheelchair beside the ramp to the Heavy Raider and then sat on the ramp's edge. They'd been there about ten minutes when John walked up.

"I thought you'd be in the CIC," Lee said.

"I was for a while. Your dad and Tigh have everything under control. I thought you were in Sick Bay."

"I probably should be," Lee said. "Can you tell us what's happened?"

John sat down on the ramp beside Hunter. "The good news is that the third basestar is out of the fight. The bad news…there's a couple of things. The second basestar did some major damage to the _Ajax_ before it jumped away and a Raider launched a missile into the _Columbia's_ port landing bay. They can't retract the pod on that side...or land ships. The first basestar, the one your dad wanted to hold hostage, jumped away without firing a shot, but not before it launched all its Raiders. In fact two basestars launched all or most of their Raiders."

"Can't LG49 do anything?" Lee asked. "Tell the Raiders to back off or something?"

"Natalie told me that Raiders are self-aware to a point. They're similar to trained attack dogs. They have some degree of choice, but once they're launched and revved up to kill, there's not much that will stop them. They have two main objectives. Protect their basestars and kill us…in that order. Since two of their basestars have jumped away, they'll now be concentrating on killing us."

"Then Kara is out there with…"

"She's out there with a sixteen hundred rabid Raiders."

There wasn't anything left to say.

…

The fighting Kara was in was the closest thing to hell that a pilot could imagine. Raiders came slicing through the Viper squadrons like scythes through a wheat field. In an instant and instinctively she realized that the Vipers were too close together. They were almost like bowling pins in an alley.

She dove sharply and came around on the tail of a Raider that had just cut a swath through a number of their Vipers. It exploded under a burst of fire from her KEW weapons.

"Spread out. Spread out," she called to the rest of her squadron that had moved too close together. She couldn't risk shooting at the Raiders in their midst without worrying she'd hit one of her fellow pilots.

Minos realized it, too and echoed her words. They headed for the edge of the pack. It was easier when she was fighting just two or three Raiders and not thirty. Vipers were exploding as well as Raiders. Later she would mourn their dead…if she wasn't one of them, but now her total concentration was on staying alive and taking out the enemy.

She quickly lost count of the ships she blew away or of their own ships that she saw explode.

"I'm hit. I'm hit."

She recognized the voice of River Brigden and spun her Viper through a one-eighty turn just in time to see him eject. There wasn't a thing she could do to help him as he tumbled, still in his seat in the vacuum of space. Before he was very far from his ship, it exploded. The concussive wave slammed into him and left him floating like a broken doll.

Although she knew he was probably already dead, she saw three Raiders coming toward him to make sure. With anger so strong that she literally saw red for a few seconds, she opened fire on them, taking out two immediately. The third one kept coming but had now focused its fire on her instead of Brigden.

"Come on, you motherfrakker, pick on somebody who can fight back."

The bullets passed so closely over her canopy that she imagined she felt the heat from them. She was not yet in a good position to fire when the Raider exploded.

She heard Minos' voice. "That was close."

"Thanks. I owe you."

"Get back into the fight. I'll stay here with Hiccup and see if I can get a Raptor to pick him up."

"I think he's dead, sir. He was too close to his Viper when it exploded."

"I don't want those Raiders using him for target practice."

She spun her Viper around knowing that Raiders didn't care about their own dead or wounded. In that regard they had a tactical advantage. In the distance she saw two more battlestars wink into space. In only seconds they were launching Vipers. A dozen Raiders flashed past her a hundred feet overhead. They saw fresh prey in the recently jumped battlestars and were on the way to kill more of their enemy. A hundred of the _Sylla's_ Vipers could take on those Raiders. She headed back toward the heart of the fight.

_The next one's for you, Hiccup_, she said to herself. _The next one's for you._

...

Thirty light years away Laura knelt in Elosha's temple and prayed for a tiny baby whose touch she had again felt against the side of her little finger…and in her heart.

Elosha knelt beside her and Laura squeezed her hand. "Thank you for letting me in this late."

"You know you're welcome here any time of the day or night."

"Sean is better today. His temperature is back to normal."

"That is good news…and yet I sense that you are very troubled."

"The war for Nereid has begun," Laura said softly. "The future of our two races hangs in the balance…the very thing that little Sean is a symbol of."

"This war is very personal for you."

"Almost everyone I love is involved in the fight."

"Then we should pray for them."

"It's all I can do from trillions of miles away."

Elosha patted her hand. "It's but the blink of an eye to the gods."

TBC…


	61. Cat and Mouse

Chapter 61

Cat and Mouse

_The Planet_

_Day 180: Our year is nearly half over. I saw the pregnant pilot today whom I shall call 'Nadine' because of the song she often hums while she waits for her checkup. Her pregnancy is progressing normally so I have no reason to ground her yet. As of late she is always cheerful with me so today I asked her if she had thought further about giving up her child for adoption. She smiled and said, "Why? Do you want him?" (She has decided that the child is a boy despite not one whit of proof.) I do not have ultrasound equipment here on the surface and she does not want one of the shipboard physicians examining her._

_I admitted to Nadine that I had thought of making the offer for quite some time, almost since the beginning. She said she would consider it on one condition, that I not say anything to the child's father. I made her that promise and she said the child was mine. Oren will be more than a little surprised when I return with a baby. _

_On a different note the men in charge of the expedition have decided that they will allow no more expeditions to the city, much to the disappointment of Joshua Hoshi's team. In fact they have asked for all research material and have confiscated all photographs and other documents pertaining to the temple and the incident at the cemetery._

_Of course rumors have now spread that what they confiscated was somehow related to buried treasure. That may be correct, but I do not think it is treasure of the gold or silver variety. I think it is much more valuable. I think it is a key to our past._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

John left Hunter and Lee outside the Heavy Raider and once more went inside.

"I guess you noticed that two of your basestars jumped away," he said to LG49.

_Yes. The other one is partially destroyed. Many humanoids were killed._

"Can you tell where the other two ships went?"

_They are out of range for me. The only place to track them would be in the city where the main computers are located._

"Do you think the resurrection ship is still within range so the humanoids who died can continue to download?"

_Yes. Your commander can rejoice in his victory. Is that not what you humans do?_

"I don't think he'll do that. We both lost today," John said sadly. "The only difference is that our people won't download. Somewhere out in space, the Cylons will be back up to speed sooner or later."

_We have lost a baseship._

"Not totally."

_You do not understand. A missile from the _Pegasus_ penetrated the heart of the ship. The Control Room was destroyed. The Hybrid is dead. The air has ceased being cleaned and circulated. The temperature is no longer controlled. Three arms of the ship are burning. The rest are in darkness. The humanoids still alive will eventually die. The ship will become a lifeless derelict._

"How long do they have?"

_I would have to know the number of survivors and the amount of breathable air left on the ship before I could…_

"You've got a really fast computer for a brain. Ballpark it," John said impatiently.

_I do not understand._

"Give me your best guess. Figure half of them survived and they've got half a ship of air."

_Ten hours at the most. The fires are sealed off now, but if more of the ship starts to burn, it will shorten the amount of time for all of them._

"Okay, let's say six hours to be on the safe side. I'll tell Bill that's how long we've got to rescue them."

_Rescuing survivors is a human practice._

"Are you telling me that the humanoids would rather die?"

_They might rather die and download than surrender and become your prisoners._

"Couldn't someone talk some sense into them?"

_I do not think they will listen to a human who has just destroyed their home._

"What about Natasi or Sonja or even Jade? Would they listen to one of their own?"

_I do not have enough information about the humanoids to answer your question. It is too bad that you do not have the unit you call Buddy. Since he has a U-87 processor as well as the avatar of one of the creators, he has much more insight into the humanoid mind._

"I need to go talk to Bill."

_You had better hurry. The commander of the _Pegasus_ has just asked your commander for permission to__ '__finish off'__ the baseship. I think that is a human term that means '__to eliminate or dispose of'__._

"Frakking hell," John said. He scrambled out of the cockpit and down the ramp. "Where's the nearest phone? I need to call the CIC right now."

"What's the rush?" Lee asked.

"Cain wants to finish destroying the third basestar."

"Isn't that what we came here to do?" Hunter asked.

John ignored him and looked frantically around.

"Ask one of the crew," Lee said.

There was a sick feeling in the pit of Lee's stomach. He hoped his father refused Cain's request. It would be a repeat of the _Erasmus_. There was something about the destruction of a helpless ship and crew that was wrong…no matter who did it.

John saw a black phone on the wall behind them. He got through to one of the comm techs in the CIC.

"This is Major John Gallagher. I need to talk to Admiral Adama immediately."

"He's speaking with Commander Cain, sir."

"That's what I need to talk to him about…ASAP…before he gives Cain his decision."

He waited impatiently as the seconds ticked by. Finally he heard Bill's voice.

"Where the hell are you?"

"Down on the hangar deck. I've been talking to LG49."

"What's so urgent?"

"Don't let Cain destroy that ship, sir, please."

There was a lengthy silence. "How did you know what she asked to do?"

"LG49. He's monitoring all short-range communications."

"So you're asking us to spare that ship for your centurion?"

"No, sir. I'm asking for all of us. How can we hope to win any of them over to our side if we massacre the surviving humanoids on that ship?"

"_Massacre_? That's an odd way of putting it. Would you be using that word in the same context as what they did to billions of innocent humans…humans who _died_ instead of downloaded?"

"Please, sir. Think about the implications. It's time to put certain things behind us. There's a lot more at stake here than whether they'll download. That's not the point at all. In the long run what's more important? Letting Cain get her rocks off by destroying a helpless ship and killing the survivors…or giving us a big trump card in future negotiations. The Hybrid who controls all the functions of that basestar is dead. The humanoids left on the ship will die sooner or later if we don't rescue them because the ship's air circulation has stopped working and they've got no heat. You've lost the resurrection ship as a bargaining tool. I can't help but think that Laura would say to help the survivors of that baseship. The Cimtar Peace Accords are very specific about taking prisoners instead of killing battle survivors."

"Damn it, John, don't you dare quote that document to me. I know what it says. Who broke it in the first place when they nuked eleven of our Colonies?"

"Does that give us the right to kill the helpless?"

"They're enemy combatants."

"That's all the more reason we should show them mercy."

"For all we know their leaders will interpret mercy on our part as a sign of weakness. I'm not sure they understand the meaning of the word. What kind of mercy did they show the _Erasmus_ or the _Atlantia_ or your old ship the _Solaria _or a dozen other battlestars? What mercy did they show billions of our fellow humans?"

"I agree with you completely, sir, but at this point mercy is the only thing that separates us from them. Our long-range mission is to create a way for us to live together on Nereid. Now is your chance to show them our intentions aren't just their wholesale destruction."

Bill said, "I'll take your suggestion under consideration. I want to talk it over with Saul." The line went dead.

John realized that he had reached the end of his rope with the admiral. "Thank you, sir," he said to the dead phone before he hung up. He wondered which way Tigh would lean. If he sided with Cain, the basestar's survivors probably had only minutes before they would be on their way to downloading…and having one more reason to distrust humans. But there was nothing more he could do right now. He'd spoken his mind to Bill. Now it was up to the admiral.

John had just turned from the phone when one of the deck crew came running up.

"Are you Major Gallagher, sir?"

"I am."

"Dr. Cottle is trying to find you, sir. He wants you to come to Sick Bay ASAP. He also said if you know where Lee Adama is, to get him up there, too."

John suddenly felt sick. Kara. Dear God, please don't let it be Kara.

The crewman eyed the wheelchair but didn't say anything else.

"I think I can find Lee," John said. "Tell the doc we're on our way."

"Yes, sir."

"You heard the man," John said to Lee after the crewman had hurried away. "We're wanted in Sick Bay."

"It's not Kara," Lee said, willing it to be true. He looked at Hunter. "Coming?"

"I need to get back in case Targa wakes up."

When they reached Sick Bay, they found Marine guards outside the door. A med tech saw them and told the guards to let them pass.

"Dr. Cottle sent for me," John said.

"A Raptor just brought in a wounded pilot. Dr. Cottle is busy with him right now."

"Do you have names of the wounded yet?" John asked.

"Not yet, sir. I'm going to get Captain Adama back to bed. You need to go to the room at the back. That's why Dr. Cottle called you."

They parted company. Hunter went toward Targa's room and John continued to D'Anna's room. He found Yoshimo sitting in a chair by the bed. It took several seconds before he realized that the ventilator was off.

Yoshimo said, "I called for Dr. Cottle because the monitor began beeping. Her blood pressure had started to drop. He turned off the machine after her heart stopped. He said her brain had probably begun leaking blood."

"How long ago?" John asked. "The res ship jumped away almost an hour ago."

"Not more than twenty minutes. The doctor went right out and made a call trying to find you. He would have stayed, but a wounded pilot was brought in. D'Anna has downloaded by now has she not?"

"As long as that res basestar is within range. I can't believe it went completely out of range since the third basestar was still under fire."

"But you don't know?"

"Not for sure."

John realized that the situation with D'Anna couldn't be any worse. He wasn't even sure she'd downloaded. If she had, it would have been while other Threes from the third basestar were downloading. Even if that resurrection ship came back, he wasn't sure how he'd go about finding her because she would have no memories of him or the baby. She would be just one Three among many.

"Would you like to be alone with her?" Yoshimo asked.

"No. I'm okay. I spent over an hour with her this afternoon. You look tired. Would you like to go back to your bed?"

"Yes. Petra said she would come back for me, but she hasn't. She might be helping care for the wounded."

"I'll get a wheelchair. We'll have you back to bed in no time."

John walked down to Lee's bed and retrieved the wheelchair.

"Kara is all right," Lee said.

"I know," John said, not because he was sure, but because they both needed to hear him say it. "D'Anna's dead. I mean really dead. Her heart stopped and Dr. Cottle turned off the ventilator."

"I'm sorry," Lee said since he didn't know how John felt right now.

"I made my peace with it. We'll have to see what the future brings. You're looking pale again. You need to get some rest. Take one of those pain pills."

Lee nodded. "You talked me into it."

John went back and got Yoshimo and took him to his room. After he had helped him into bed, John sat down for a minute in the chair.

"I asked Bill…that's Admiral Adama…I asked him not to let Commander Cain finish destroying the third basestar. I also asked him to rescue any surviving Cylons. I don't know if he'll do it or not."

"Is your admiral a religious man?"

"Not in the least. I just hope he'll honor the Cimtar Peace Accords that we signed with the Cylons after the First War. Among other things, it spells out how surviving combatants should be treated."

Dr. Cottle came to the door. He was wearing surgical scrubs, a cap and mask that he had pulled down so he could light a cigarette.

"You know you really need to ease up on the smokes," John said.

Cottle nodded but didn't comment. "Have you seen D'Anna?"

"Yoshimo explained what happened."

"I turned off the machine after her heart failed."

"It's okay, Doc. The D'Anna I knew died back on Caprica. How are the wounded pilots?"

"Three of them have made it…so far."

"Out of…?"

"Seven that were brought to me. Most of the ones recovered by rescue Raptors were taken straight to the morgue."

"How many dead?"

Cottle shook his head. "I didn't ask. My concern is those that are still breathing when they're brought on board this ship. What would you like for us to do with D'Anna?"

"I don't know. Before I met her she…she'd killed herself several times in an effort to _see the face of God_. I never asked her what was done with her body afterward."

"I'll send her to the morgue until you decide. We're going to need the bed. We might need the ventilator, too. I told the admiral to let the _Ajax_ know we'd help with their wounded. They have a lot of burn victims. Their Sick Bay is overwhelmed. We'll have to think about getting the dead back to Caprica soon. We aren't set up to keep hundreds of them."

"You think it'll be that many?" John asked in shock.

Cottle's eyes were bloodshot and he looked tired. "The gods only know, Major. We're fighting a war. During the planning Bill said something about sending the dead back to Caprica on the transport for burial in the military section of the Thanatos Cemetery. You can ask him what he plans to do."

Two med techs wheeled a gurney past the door to Yoshimo's room. "Got another pilot," one of them called. "Head wound."

John caught a glimpse of curly dark hair underneath a temporary bandage that covered most of the pilot's face and then felt guilty for breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn't Kara.

Cottle followed the gurney without a word.

"I will pray for the pilot," Yoshimo said. "I will pray for all of them. And you, John, I will pray for you. The right path is often the most difficult one to follow…but you know that already…and so, I think, does your admiral."

…

How much longer could she keep it up? The thought had already crossed Kara's mind several times. They had been out there for hours now and she had survived by staying at the edge of the pack, making the Raiders come to where she had room to maneuver. And come they did, like cats to mice. She and Troy Minos and several other Vigilantes were holding their own now that the total number of Raiders had been reduced.

She'd seen first the resurrection ship and then the second basestar jump away. How angry was that going to make the admiral? He might not have cared so much about the second ship, but that res ship was the prize he'd wanted.

How many had they lost? Impossible to tell since their Vipers had gotten mixed up with those of the _Columbia_.

"Incoming," Minos shouted at the same moment that Kara heard her missile alarm blare.

"Breaking left," she called back to him so that she and Minos wouldn't turn into each other and collide. The last thing Kara wanted as her epitaph was _Here lies Kara Thrace who made a Stupid, Nugget Mistake and collided with her squadron leader._

She was gradually getting used to Minos' flying style, somewhere in between Narcho and Lee, cautious and gutsy at the same time. Suddenly it was very important to her that he survive this battle to return to Shelley. Shelley might not deserve him, but their kid needed a father.

She deliberately let the missile acquire her before she dove toward the planet.

Minos did exactly what she knew he would do, follow and take out the missile in a hail of bullets a second after he told her to break left again. The moment it exploded, she pulled up and turned. The Raider that had launched the missile was behind Minos and coming fast.

"Bogey on your six," she called as they rapidly drew near each other. "Passing on your right."

It worked beautifully. The second that Minos zipped by her, she opened up on the Raider. Another one down.

"How many missiles do those motherfrakkers carry?" She wondered aloud.

"I think they're laying them like eggs," Minos joked.

They again turned toward the pack just in time to see the remaining Raiders start jumping away. It took less than fifteen seconds and a thousand bright blips for the battle zone to be cleared of everything except Vipers and rescue Raptors…and the debris of a vicious battle.

"Holy frakking Hera," Kara breathed as she looked at the devastation. There were parts of ships everywhere, both Vipers and Raiders, from large chunks like wings and engines and fuselages to pieces that would fit in her palm. There were bodies, too, and parts of bodies.

"Let's look for survivors so we can help direct those SAR Raptors," Minos told his squadron. "Watch out for debris small enough to be sucked into your intakes or you and your ship will be drifting and we'll be rescuing you."

_Wouldn't that be a bitch, _Kara thought. Survive the Raiders only to have a five-cubit bolt get sucked into an engine and trash it. Of course this was the military. Maybe she should make that a fifty-cubit bolt.

…

John walked into the CIC just in time to hear Tigh say, "Would you look at that?"

He followed the XO's gaze to the big dradis screen that showed the location of all the ships, both theirs and the Cylons'. The insect swarm was rapidly disappearing.

"What's going on?" He asked.

"Their Raiders are jumping away. It's almost like they got some kind of signal that told them it was time to go."

Bill was on the black phone again. John glanced at Tigh. Apparently the colonel wasn't going to say anything. They waited in silence for Bill. When he hung up he joined them.

Bill addressed Tigh first. "When all those Raiders are gone, start bringing our Vipers in. We need to reorganize with regard to the pilots we lost and we need to get a CAP out there as soon as possible."

"You think the Raiders are playing a game of cat and mouse with us?" Tigh asked.

"I don't know what they're doing. Maybe we should ask John?"

"I'd only be guessing, sir," John said.

"You guess is better than ours," Bill snapped. "You lived with them."

"I never lived on a baseship, sir."

"Give us your opinion, then."

"Those two basestars won't jump back here considering that we now outnumber them four to one. I doubt they'll send their Raiders back either since we were holding our own against them. I'll be glad to ask one of the Cylons for her opinion, though."

"That's good enough for now. I tend to agree with your assessment. We'll still have a CAP flying within the hour."

John risked Bill's anger and asked, "Did Cain get her wish?"

"I'm still thinking about it."

_Well don't think too long or it will be a non-issue, _John thought. Out loud he said, "I'll be glad to take one or all of the Cylons and LG49 and go over there in the Heavy Raider."

"And do what?" Tigh asked sarcastically. "Ask them over for tea?"

"Cut the sarcasm," Bill said to Tigh. "John has made a valid point about the Cimtar Accords." He turned to John and said, "I'm beginning to think we should call you Ambassador Gallagher instead of Major Gallagher. Living with Laura has rubbed off on you."

Bill's comment was better than having Tigh make another snide remark about how the Cylons had influenced him. John started to mention that he hadn't lived with Laura for the better part of a year, but he let it go.

He shrugged. "Okay, how about you let me take the Heavy Raider down to the surface of the planet and get Natalie and Buddy? Natalie is known to all of them as a leader. She's their First Six. The good thing is that she's on our side. Beck might want to go back to the valley. Maybe Hunter, too."

"I'd like Hunter to stay on board for any strategy sessions since he's the closest thing to a leader that the humans on Nereid have. His people were here even before the Cylons."

"If he goes, I'll make sure he comes back."

Bill turned to Tigh. "Find Cole Taylor and start getting the word to our pilots. You need to meet with them. See how everybody's holding up. Start getting a casualty list together. Work out something so we can get a CAP in the air ASAP. Order the rest of the pilots to get some sleep. I'll get word to the other battlestars to do the same thing. I don't want to chance those basestars jumping back on top of us and catching us with our pants down."

"Yes, sir," Tigh said.

Bill turned to Gaeta. "Have all decks submit damage reports. And then have someone analyze the image of the dradis scan just before those Raiders started jumping away. I want to know what kind of numbers we might be dealing with. And get the camera footage from those Vipers."

"The Raiders download, too," John said. "If you'll look at the image of their baseship after she'd launched all her Raiders, I think you'll see ships still in their sockets. Those function like the goo tubs for the humanoids. Somewhere out there, those destroyed Raiders have downloaded. I don't know about all of them, but some of them at least."

"So they could be back up to full speed by now."

"They're still outnumbered and they know it," John replied.

"They've got to run out of Raiders eventually," Gaeta said, "unless they can build them on the basestars."

"What are your thoughts on that?" Bill asked John.

"I don't have any idea what they can and can't do on their basestars. Let me go to the planet and get Natalie and Buddy so we can involve them in a strategy session. I'm sure between them they can answer all your questions. I can jump down there, get them and be back in about an hour. We've got roughly six hours to rescue the survivors."

"Do it," Bill said. "When you get back, bring them to my quarters and call me. We'll meet there."

"Thank you, sir," John said respectfully and meant it.

He realized how much Bill Adama had just given and how much it had personally cost him, but John also believed that he was doing the right thing and in the long run Bill would come to see it, too.

…

Kara was the one who found a piece of fuselage from Cole Taylor's ship with enough of his name and call sign on it for her to identify. She wasn't sure who would take over now as CAG. It would be one of the captains, maybe even Minos. Admiral Adama would have to make that decision or maybe Colonel Tigh. The ship's CAG reported directly to him.

She and the other Viper pilots stayed out until the Raptors had retrieved most of the bodies even though many of them were near bingo fuel levels. One by one they began coming in. There were so many Vipers in the landing bay that Kara had to wait a long time before an elevator was available to take her ship down to the hangar deck.

The adrenalin had worn off by then and Kara was numb. She felt like she could sleep for a week, just put her head back on the headrest and sleep, but she knew it would be a long time before she could close her eyes without seeing the carnage she had witnessed that night.

As a crewman was helping her out of the cockpit and down the ladder, she wondered how her father and Admiral Adama had taken their ships out during the First War and faced the enemy day after day, week after week for several years. How had they survived it? How had they stayed sane watching friends and fellow pilots die? Yet somehow they had.

She took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. She was the daughter of a Marine and a Viper pilot who had both fought a war in their own ways. She was tough. She would make it.

"I'm okay," she said to the crewman who probably doubted her words as he took in her sweat-soaked hair and glassy eyes. "I'm okay," she repeated and actually began to believe it.

He let go of her arm. Her legs held her up.

Minos found her and clasped her shoulder. "Damned good flying, Starbuck. I'm glad you're on my team."

"Thank you, sir. What next?"

"See to any injuries, get an energy drink and meet in the ready room in thirty minutes. Colonel Tigh is going to make a speech."

"I think we're going to need a new CAG," Kara said softly, but Minos had walked on and didn't hear her. She didn't bother to call him back and repeat it. He'd find out soon enough.

There were several huge coolers at the back of the hangar containing energy drinks. Some of the pilots were milling around near there. Others were sitting on the floor and leaning against the bulkheads. Some of them had found a quiet spot and stretched out. All of them were sweaty. A lot were dazed looking. She saw Hot Dog sitting with his knees drawn up and his arms crossed over them. His head was down. His helmet lay on the floor beside him. He hadn't even unzipped his flight suit.

She walked over to him and squatted. "Could I get you something to drink?"

"Got one," he said and looked up at her. She wasn't surprised to see his face was tear-streaked as well as sweat-stained.

"Who?" Kara asked, suddenly feeling cold.

"Cherry…Cheryl. I saw her get hit. Her ship exploded. And Kat…but not dead…I don't think. She managed to eject. Me and another pilot kept those motherfrakkers off her until a Raptor got to her. She didn't look conscious by then. Her helmet…cracked maybe. Those guys risked their lives coming in to get her. I think it was Racetrack and Skulls and their ECO."

Kara had started to shiver. Maybe it was the cold drink that she had just drunk.

He continued. "They won't let us in Sick Bay unless we're injured. Doc Cottle had to post Marines outside the door. It's a frakking zoo up there. Pilots all over the hall waiting for word about one or another of their friends, talking about who died and who was still hanging on. I couldn't take it."

"When do you think we'll know…about all of them?"

Hot Dog shook his head and laid it back down on his arms.

When they had fought the Cylons over Caprica, it had taken days for the list of dead and wounded to be officially compiled. But they'd all known before then…long before then.

"I'm going up to Sick Bay to see Lee," she said. "I doubt I'll get in, but I'll try to find out about Kat."

He didn't even raise his head, just said, "Good luck."

…

Kara was almost to the Sick Bay level when she remembered something. As a nugget pilot posted to the _Galactica_ over a year earlier, one of the assignments given to all the incoming newbies, pilots and crew alike, was to learn the layout of the battlestar deck by deck. It came back to her now and she remembered something that she hoped would get her into Sick Bay without trying to get past the Marine guards.

She turned and went back down three decks and walked halfway to the stern of the battlestar before she turned down a little-used corridor. Her memory had served her well. The door to the morgue was guarded by two Marines. They stopped her.

"I need…" she started. "Someone I know is in there. I just want a couple of minutes. Please."

"How many Raiders did you kill, sir?" One of the guards asked.

She told him the truth because that's what he wanted to hear. "So many I lost count."

"I guess we showed those toasters, sir. I heard they all jumped away. Turned tail and ran."

"Yeah," she said tiredly. "We showed them all right."

"We're going to look the other way for a minute, sir" he said. "Take your time."

It was her signal to lift the door handle and disappear inside. She knew that at the back of the morgue was an elevator that connected it directly to Sick Bay. It had been put there for a reason. Looking neither right nor left, Kara walked straight to the back of the morgue and pressed the button. It was a freight elevator so it was slow, but it brought her up to Sick Bay at the end of a corridor.

There was a gurney sitting just outside the doors with a sheet-covered body on it. Kara didn't remember a pilot who had long blond hair like that so she gave in to her curiosity and lifted the edge of the sheet just enough to see who was under it. D'Anna. Quickly she dropped the sheet into place and wondered when her father had pulled the plug. Several more stretchers were set end to end down one side of the hall. All held bodies under sheets. She walked past them with her eyes straight ahead. She'd lost her stomach for looking at the dead.

She continued down the hall and passed the operating room doors. Through the small round window she saw a masked Dr. Cottle bent over someone on the table. He was being helped by two assistants who were also masked. The rest of the treatment rooms were engulfed in what looked to her like controlled chaos.

She managed to get to Lee's bed without anybody stopping her. Most of the medical personnel didn't even look up at her as they treated the wounded some of whom looked burned. She heard groans and cries. It was much worse than the near-silence of the exhausted pilots on the hangar deck.

At least a dozen of the beds that had been empty when she'd been there earlier were now occupied. Lee looked like he was asleep, but when she touched his cheek, he opened his eyes.

She managed to smile. "I know I look like crap."

Tears of relief and joy flooded his eyes. "You look beautiful. You look alive."

She stood for a long time with Lee clasping and unclasping her hand, assuring himself that she wasn't a dream.

Finally he said, "Cottle has Marines guarding the door. How did you get through?"

"I came up the morgue elevator. I saw D'Anna's body. I guess my dad pulled the plug."

"He didn't have to. Her heart stopped while the fighting was going on."

"You think she somehow knew what was happening?" Kara asked.

"It's doubtful. Doc Cottle told John her brain had started to bleed again. I wonder if she downloaded. The first basestar had jumped away before she died."

"Did you talk to my dad?"

"He and LG49 are taking Beck back to the valley and bringing Natalie and Buddy back here to meet with my father. They're talking about rescuing the humanoids left on the crippled basestar."

"Rescuing them? You've got to be frakking kidding me."

"No. I agree with John. The Cimtar Accords spell out how prisoners are to be treated."

"Yeah. Like they treated my father."

"We should at least give them a chance to surrender. I'm glad my father stopped Cain from destroying the remains of their basestar."

"You might not feel that way if you'd been out there with us fighting them tonight?"

"Let's not argue about this," Lee said tiredly. "If rescuing those Cylons on the basestar saves even one human life on the planet it will be worth it."

Kara closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Because of the losses they'd suffered that night, she wasn't sure how she felt about what Lee had just told her. She couldn't see them going to a lot of trouble and risking Colonial lives to help Cylons. But Lee had a point that she couldn't argue with. They'd lost too many already. Anything that saved lives on the planet was worth a try as long as it didn't cost any more of theirs.

She changed the subject. "Kat got hit and had to eject. Hot Dog told me. You haven't seen her, have you?"

"No. I took half a morpha pill."

Kara managed to smile for the first time in hours. "You should have taken the whole thing."

"And missed seeing you? Not a chance."

The med tech Kara had met earlier that day came down the row of beds and whispered, "You're not supposed to be here."

"I know," Kara said. "I just wanted Lee to know…that I made it. I'm going. I've got to get to the ready room. Colonel Tigh is going to talk to us. I think we'll be getting a new CAG. I saw a piece of Cole Taylor's Viper."

She didn't have to say anything else. Lee understood.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"I am, too. He wasn't my favorite person, but he was a damned good CAG." She leaned over and kissed Lee. "I'll be back."

"You'd better."

As the med tech walked with her down the row of beds, Kara asked, "Have you seen a pilot named Louanne Katraine?"

"I think she's the one Dr. Cottle is operating on right now. There was a woman pilot brought in about forty-five minutes ago. Petite with dark hair. Her face was bandaged. I didn't triage her so I don't know how bad she's hurt."

As Kara went down the hall to the back elevator, she noticed more sheet-covered gurneys against the wall. Before she had a chance to push the down button, the doors opened and an orderly got off pushing an empty gurney. He looked at her strangely but didn't say anything. She didn't wait for him to get another body and follow her on. He didn't ask her to hold the door, either.

There were more sheet covered bodies in the morgue, too. A man and a woman were checking dog tags and writing on clipboards. The woman glanced up at her.

"I got lost," Kara said and kept walking.

She knew that when this battle was written up for the Colonial history books, it would be called a victory for them, but walking past the bodies of the men and women she'd flown with and shared a bathroom and a bunkroom with, trained with and drank beer with and played triad with, it sure didn't feel that way.

By the time she got to the door of the morgue, she was shivering again.

…

Nearly two hours had passed before John and LG49 were out of the port launch bay and on their way to Nereid.

"Considering that we're under a time constraint, I think we'd better jump to the surface," John said.

He looked at his watch. It was 05:16 on the _G_ which meant it was a couple of hours earlier in the valley. Everyone would be asleep. Or maybe not. If they'd been watching the sky, they should know that something was happening.

They were still descending. Finally he looked at the comm device.

_Where shall we jump?_

"Over the larger river. It's a straighter shot from there to the clearing."

After the jump it took less than ten minutes to reach their destination. LG49 set the ship down perfectly in the dark. Beck and Hunter got off first. Hunter had insisted on accompanying them to the valley and had promised to return to the ship with them.

"Targa is my uncle," Hunter had said. "It's my responsibility to tell Emmalyn what happened to him."

"I'd like to be with you when you do. I'm responsible."

Using flashlights they quickly ascended the trail. They were met at the top by Narcho and several of the men. As they stood talking quietly, Buddy, Natalie and Markham came out of the rock entrance to the _Hyperion_.

Hunter led them to Emmalyn's house. She was already up preparing tea. Dessa threw herself into her brother's arms. When Hunter told them about Targa, John could tell that Dessa didn't understand the extent of the injury. All she cared about was that he was alive. Emmalyn took the news more calmly than he had thought she would.

"Considering that we thought you were all dead, it's a relief to hear." She looked at John. Before he could speak, she said, "And I don't want to hear you taking blame on yourself for what happened to my brother. Now drink your tea. Something tells me that you're not here just to bring us the good news that you're all alive."

"I've come for Natalie and Buddy. We've got a small window of time to save the humanoids on a basestar that's partially destroyed. I think we'll have more credibility with them if Natalie and Buddy are with us, although LG49 doesn't think it will matter. He thinks the survivors would rather die than surrender to us." John looked at Natalie. "What do you think?"

"I think he's right about some of them…but others might be willing to listen to reason."

"Is it the resurrection ship?" Buddy asked.

"No. It and another one jumped away. This is the one in the outermost orbit. LG49 calculated we've got ten hours to save them. I told Admiral Adama we had six. It's already been almost three. I'd love to stay and chat, but we need to get going."

Natalie said, "I'll go pack my things."

Markham rose to go with her. "I'll take care of your cat." At the door he turned. "I'm going to miss my chess partner."

"I will miss our games, too," Buddy said. "You have taught me a great deal."

"I think you've taught me something, too," Markham said and then he was gone.

Emmalyn said, "I never thought I'd hear Leonard Markham admit to having learned anything from a Cylon."

While they were waiting for Natalie to return, Buddy's voice switched and became Lucy's. "I think he's in love with Natalie. When you didn't return from your mission, Natalie wanted to visit the cemetery. She asked Markham to walk with her. He left the _Hyperion_ for the first time in many years. He accompanied us tonight, too."

"Poor Markham," Emmalyn said.

"Is my sister on board your ship?" Lucy asked John.

"No, she's commanding the _Pegasus._"

"She's the one who crippled the basestar," Hunter said. "She asked Admiral Adama if she could finish it off. John talked him out of it."

"Why?" Narcho asked in surprise. "They're the enemy."

"I'm trying to look at the big picture," John said. "I know they're in communication with the planet. If rescuing them saves lives down here, then it will be worth it."

"He's right," Beck said, surprising all of them. "Don't forget how many humans they could kill right now if they wanted to…even without those basestars."

"Then the Colonial military would wipe them out on this planet," Hunter said.

"And would that bring back our dead?" Beck asked. "They've got enough centurions in the city to destroy this valley and kill everyone a hundred times over. I know what happened to Targa, but on this I agree with John."

John was surprised and a little bit amazed by Beck's declaration. He didn't think he'd heard him say that many words at one time since he'd known him.

"Beck and John are right," Emmalyn said. "Avoiding more bloodshed should be our goal. It that means rescuing a few of them, then so be it."

"Do you think that I might get to meet my sister?" Lucy said.

"I don't know," John answered. "That will be up to her and to Admiral Adama. I'd suggest you let us get a few of these other issues settled before you ask."

Natalie came to the door. "I'm ready." She looked at John, "I packed your bag, too."

Emmalyn and Dessa hugged Hunter.

"We'll keep in touch," Hunter said. "Beck has got a wireless device. Narcho knows how to use it."

As they walked outside, Emmalyn grasped John's arm. "Kara?"

"She survived the fight. I haven't seen her yet, but the crew chief on the _Galactica_ saw her land."

"What about Lee?"

"He had to sit this one out. He got shot at the prison, not as bad as Targa, but he's out of the cockpit for a few weeks."

"Narcho said earlier that the battle was going on. Did you lose many?"

"We lost a lot of good men and women. I don't know the numbers yet, but this victory cost us and there will be more battles to come."

He realized that he was preaching to the chorus. Emmalyn understood loss as well as he did.

"Are you going with Natalie to negotiate with the surviving Cylons on that basestar?" Emmalyn asked.

"They need a human representative."

"Please be very careful. I know you trust Natalie and Buddy, but how do you know she'll be able to negotiate with the survivors? Will they trust her if they view her as a collaborator?"

"I don't know, Emmalyn. I guess we'll find out."

"Is Targa being cared for?"

"He's getting the best care possible. Dr. Cottle saved his life. He even sent for a neurosurgeon to help him operate. I'd like for you to meet the doc someday. I think you'd like him. I know he'd like you."

She ignored his last remarks. "Do you think Targa will ever be able to come home?"

"I don't know that either. I'm sorry."

"I know you need to go."

"I'll see you and everyone here again. I just can't say when."

"We'll be here. Where else would we go? This is our home."

_…_

Laura had managed to doze for several hours before she jerked awake and lay in the dark with her heart pounding. Something had awakened her but she didn't know what.

She held her breath and listened. She and Maya both had monitors for the children's room, but she heard no sound except that of a distant helicopter as it plied the night sky. She rolled over and looked at the clock. Nearly five o'clock, too early to get up and yet…not really too early considering the work piled on her desk.

She sat up in the bed and rubbed the back of her aching neck. John used to do that for her, his hands strong and sure and yet gentle as he massaged the knots of tension from the muscles of her shoulders and back, often finishing by kissing the sides of her neck and sending warm shivers of desire through her. Just thinking about him like that made her yearn for him. In that moment she would have given almost anything to have him with her, to curl herself into the protection of his arms and let him shut out the rest of her world as only he could do.

She believed without a doubt that he was alive because the gods had protected him and then had returned him to her. And what had she done with their generosity? Let jealousy and spite get in the way of accepting their gift. Penelope had forgiven Odysseus for his dalliances with Circe and welcomed him home. Even knowing what her husband had suffered in the Cylon prison, Laura had fallen far short of Penelope's ideal in the treatment of _her_ husband.

"Please bring him home to me," she whispered in prayer to any of the gods who might be listening. "Bring him back to me and our sons. I won't make a mess of our love this time."

After she got out of the shower and dressed, she checked her phone. She had a text message from the Marble House switchboard and a phone number. The call had come in at 5:34 and the caller had identified himself as Colonel Charles Winters.

_Please call as soon as message is received._

Feeling a sense of dread, she selected the number. He would not be calling this early in the morning with good news.

"Hello, Chuck," she said when he answered. "I hope I'm not calling too early."

"I've been awake for over an hour. You're up awfully early, though."

"It goes with the job."

There was a long pause before he said, "I think you probably know why I'm calling."

"Is it Stacey?"

"Hugh called about an hour ago. Stacey passed away at three this morning. He asked me to call you."

"I'm so sorry. Do you know anything about the arrangements?"

"Not yet, but I'll let you know."

"How is Hugh holding up?"

"About like you'd expect. Stacey was moved to a hospice facility near Lake Theia about a month ago, a very nice place. I visited her several times. Hugh took an extended leave over the summer so he could be with her."

"How is Elaina?"

"I don't think she understands. She's not quite four years old."

"No, I'm sure she doesn't. Can you give me Hugh's number? I'd like to call him later today."

Winters read off Hugh's mobile and home numbers and Laura wrote them down.

"Hugh has mentioned something to me several times. I know this is probably not the time to bring it up, but I don't know when I'll talk to you again. I'll tell you so you can keep his offer in mind. As much as it bothers me to think of seeing him leave the Academy, he said if a civilian mission eventually goes to Nereid to set up schools, he'd like to take Elaina and go. He said there was nothing to keep him on Caprica now. At first I thought it was just the grief speaking. We all say things we don't mean when life deals us a heavy blow, but I think Hugh is serious."

"I haven't started making those kind of plans yet, but I'll certainly keep him in mind. Right now I'm waiting on word from Bill about the outcome of the battle for control of airspace over the planet. They haven't landed the first Marine on the surface yet. We have no idea what will happen when we try to free the human slaves. It may be over quickly or it may drag on for quite some time."

"Is there any chance that John will come back to the Academy when his part in the Nereid situation is over? Conrad Burgher has asked me several times."

"I don't know how to answer that question. John enjoyed teaching the simulator classes very much, but…neither one of us felt confident enough to discuss the future before he left to go with Bill. There are just too many unknowns."

"I understand. I'll let you go now. Take care of yourself, Laura, and spend as much time as you can with your son. They grow up way too fast."

"Thank you for calling me, Chuck."

She ended the call and thought about Winters' last comment. In many ways he reminded her of Bill Adama. He'd sacrificed spending time with his family in order to pursue a military career. He and his wife had only one child, a son who had died when the _Atlantia_ was destroyed over Picon. His marriage had not survived much longer.

Then Laura turned her thoughts to Hugh Connelly. Stacey's death had not been unexpected, but it still caused a deep ripple of sadness in her. And made her think once again about how they would proceed on Nereid after the conflict was over. They would need to set up an interim government, make sure food and medicine and other supplies reached everyone. They would need to start working on a plan for resettlement of those humans who wanted to return to Caprica and begin taking applications for anyone who wanted to move to Nereid. There would be trade agreements to forge. The list of tasks was almost endless and would involve a great many people…both humans and Cylons in order to create the blended society that she envisioned.

But one thing they would have to do was see to the education of the children and teens who remained with their parents on the planet and also the children who had been born to human mothers and Cylon fathers in the city. She had called on Hugh Connelly once before to help her start a school in the largest refugee camp and he had done an excellent job. She was heartened to know that he would accept her offer if she called on him again.

_…_

Kara looked around the ready room for Hot Dog and finally found him slouched in a seat about halfway to the front. She gestured for him to move over one seat so she could sit beside him without crawling over him. There were plenty of empty seats and no one was standing around the walls. Either there were a lot of pilots who hadn't yet come in or they'd lost more than she'd thought. Colonel Tigh still hadn't arrived either.

"Kat's in surgery," Kara said. "I couldn't find out anything else about her except that one of the med techs thinks it was a head injury."

"How the hell did you get past the guards?"

"Crawled through the air vent."

"You're frakking lying," he said tiredly.

"How I got in will have to remain my secret."

"Kat's helmet might have hit her canopy. Her ship was damaged. I don't think her ejection mechanism fired properly. It all happened so fast. Maybe it was some debris that hit her."

"Holy frak, Hot Dog! If her helmet hit the canopy, she's lucky to be alive. She's lucky it didn't break her neck."

"She's probably going to wind up a vegetable."

"What is the matter with you?" Kara asked in exasperation even though she knew exactly what the matter was. She'd done the same thing as she'd imagined Lee's injury…made it a lot worse in her mind than it really was. "Why do you always assume the worst? Where's your faith?"

Hot Dog didn't say anything.

She tried another approach. "Look at the bright side. If she's a vegetable, you can tell her you love her and she can't tell you to go frak yourself."

"Damn, Starbuck," he said, and she finally heard a hint of life in his voice.

"You think I haven't figured out you like her, Big Dog? Always running around naked in front of her showing her your pride and joy."

"Keep your voice down for frak's sake!"

"Admit it. Man up and admit you like her. You face Cylon Raiders that can blow you out of the sky and you don't have the guts to tell Kat how you feel about her?"

Before he could reply, Colonel Tigh walked to the front of the room. The silence was immediate. Kara straightened in her seat.

Tigh cleared his throat. "Before I get to the bad news, I'd like to say everybody did a good job tonight. Good job. Now for the bad news. Our CAG Cole Taylor has been listed as a casualty, killed in action."

He waited as the shock washed over the room before he continued.

"I know a lot of you thought he was a tough leader and that he was inflexible. I've listened to enough complaints to know he didn't bend the rules for anybody, maybe even when he should have, but he was a good CAG, one of the best CAGs I've served with. Commander Cain had the utmost confidence in him and his abilities while she was on this ship. I hope that's how he'll be remembered."

"How many casualties, sir?" Someone in the front asked.

"We're still in the process of determining that. As of a few minutes ago we had eighteen injured pilots in Sick Bay, one of them still in surgery. But we picked up some of the _Columbia's_ injured pilots and she picked up some of ours so sorting everything out is going to take a while."

"Just look around the room if you want to know how many we're down," somebody else said.

Kara didn't look. She didn't have to. At least half their number was missing. And then she realized one of the reasons. She didn't see a single Raptor pilot. They were all still out searching for bodies. Tigh went on.

"Until we determine who will take over as CAG, I'll be assuming that function. We need to get a CAP into the air ASAP per Admiral Adama's orders. Any volunteers?"

Every hand in the room went up. Kara saw the hint of a proud smile from Tigh.

"Starting first row left, count off twenty. That's our first CAP. I'll have another one posted shortly. The _Ajax_ was hit by a Cylon missile and damaged. She had a lot of dead and injured so she'll be jumping back to Caprica for repairs. Her pilots and Marines will be divided between us and the _Columbia _so we'll have reinforcements soon. They're going to need bunk space. As soon as we've got a complete casualty list, I'll need a few volunteers from each bunkroom to clean out lockers. You all know the rules. No reading journals or diaries or letters. No keeping anything as a souvenir. Everything gets boxed to be delivered to next of kin." He waited a moment for his words to sink in. "Any question? If not, you're dismissed. Go get some sleep. Captain Minos, stay behind."

Kara and Hot Dog sat still for several minutes and let the pilots on CAP exit first, then silently trailed them out of the room. She was glad Tigh hadn't mentioned the crippled basestar or that Admiral Adama was considering rescuing the remaining Cylons. After they'd just seen how many pilots had been lost, she could imagine how that kind of news would have been greeted.

…

Six Marines were waiting for the Heavy Raider when the elevator lowered it into the hangar bay. John wasn't surprised.

He told LG49 to remain on board as he had before. He and Hunter got out first.

"I guess you're our escort," he said to the Marine sergeant.

"Yes, sir."

"I've got a centurion with me that I need to take to Admiral Adama's quarters. He's expecting us."

"Yes, sir."

"The centurion doesn't pose any danger to anyone."

"Yes, sir."

"Come on," Hunter said. "They're still going to guard us every step of the way. They're just following orders."

John walked back up the ramp and motioned to Buddy and Natalie. "We've got a walk ahead of us. We'll be escorted."

"Our bags," Natalie said.

"Leave them. I'll get them later."

John felt like the walk from the hangar deck to Admiral Adama's quarters was made under a microscope, a well-guarded, and in most cases, hostile microscope. He was never so glad to see a door in his life. They all entered. The Marines stayed in the hall with the two who were already outside the door.

John picked up the phone on the wall and was put through to the CIC. "We're here," he told Adama.

"I'll be there shortly."

For the first time since he'd met her, Natalie seemed ill at ease, although she had never looked better. She was wearing simple charcoal gray slacks and a sleeveless black top with silver buttons down the side.

"Relax. Everything will be fine," John told her.

Buddy had found a corner and stood as unobtrusively as possible yet John knew he was carefully observing everything in the room.

The door opened and Bill Adama stepped inside. The Marines started to follow him, but Bill stopped them.

"I'll be fine, sergeant."

"Sir, that is a Cylon centurion and a skinjob. They're the enemy."

"I'm aware of what they are," Adama said. "If John and Hunter trust them, I think I can, too."

"Sir…"

"That will be all, sergeant. Wait outside," Adama said and closed the door.

John made the introductions, Natalie first and then Buddy. Both greeted him. Bill carefully studied both of them.

Finally he said to Natalie, "You don't look like the other Sixes."

"Not the others you've met, I'm sure."

"She doesn't act like them either," John said.

"How did you get the centurion to speak?"

"Markham gave him the voice." When he saw Bill's puzzled look, he added, "The guy who created the zappers. Buddy's been playing chess with him at night."

Bill nodded.

Buddy said, "Markham is a very smart man. He is going to care for Natalie's cat until she returns."

"Now that we've got that out of the way," Bill said, "what do you propose for that basestar?"

"Let me go over there," Natalie said. "I don't know who survived. Without seeing and talking to them, I can't judge what our next step should be."

"You don't know your own people?" Bill asked skeptically.

"If the survivors are more Sixes, Eights and Twos, their reaction will be quite different than if there are more Ones, Fours and Fives. The Threes could go either way depending on how they interpret this with regard to our religion."

"I'll take her over in the Heavy Raider," John said.

"No," Bill said. "You won't take her anywhere. If this operation goes south, I won't have you on a Cylon ship…or worse. The centurion takes her over. She carries a radio and communicates with us through it. I won't do this any other way."

"I won't risk Buddy," Natalie said. "He's too valuable."

"But you'll risk your own life," John said.

"I'll download if something _goes south_ as Admiral Adama puts it. Buddy won't."

"How long do you think you'll last if you download at the prison?" John asked angrily.

She smiled. "Until you come to rescue me."

Buddy said to Natalie, "If you will not let me accompany you, then perhaps you should take Natasi or Jade."

"Not Jade. Her skills will be needed elsewhere. If something happens to her she would download on the basestar. She'd be lost to us. Natasi and Sonja would both download at the prison."

"Then take both of them," Bill said.

"Yes," Natalie said. "The more of our number I can present to the survivors, the better."

"Won't it look funny that it's all Sixes?" Hunter asked.

"One of each model would be the optimum, but we don't have one of each model so three of us will have to do."

Buddy said to Natalie, "Can I stay with John while you are gone?"

John said, "I might ask you to stay in my quarters while I join Admiral Adama in the CIC so we can listen to Natalie's progress. Then maybe later you can teach me to play chess."

Buddy's voice changed to Lucy's. "Could I talk to Helena?"

"Not right now," John said. "Remember what I told you. Maybe later after this crisis is resolved."

Bill asked, "It that _Lucy_?"

"Yes, I'm Lucy. I want to tell her that she shouldn't destroy the baseship."

"Admiral Adama has already told her to stand down," John said.

"This is all too much for me," Bill said.

Buddy's voice said, "It _is_ highly unusual for a human avatar to dwell inside a centurion along with several other versions."

Bill asked Natalie. "What do you think the odds are that your…brothers and sisters will surrender and let us rescue them?"

"I'm not sure. The important thing is that you're making the offer. Even if they don't accept, when they download, the others will know."

Bill walked to the door and opened it. "Go get the other Cylons," he said to the Marine sergeant. "And find Colonel Tigh for me."

He walked back to them and sat on the edge of his desk. "We lost our CAG," he said to John. "Tigh's trying to decide on a replacement."

"Have you considered Lee?"

"I want Lee in charge of the pilots we take to the surface. I talked to Doc Cottle. Lee won't be flying for a couple of weeks. I don't want him lying in a bunk feeling useless. I was impressed with Lee's assessment of the plateau as a base of operations."

The door opened and Natasi, Sonja and Jade filed in. They were obviously surprised to see Natalie and Buddy.

Natalie quickly explained to them what she wanted to do. Natasi was willing to accompany her.

"Are you crazy?" Sonja said. "They'll kill us. They'll view us as traitors and kill us. I was boxed by that bastard at the prison. This time he might destroy my memories. I won't take the chance."

Jade snickered. "Sonja without her memories. That might be an improvement."

John said, "If we don't rescue the Cylons on that basestar, they'll die. Their Hybrid is dead. The ship is dying."

"Our brothers and sisters will download," Sonja said coldly. "They don't need to be rescued."

"I'll go," Jade said defiantly. "I'm not afraid."

"That's not the point," Natalie said. "If something happens, you'll download on the resurrection ship…provided they're still within range. We're going to need you down on the planet later."

Sonja said to Natalie, "See, sister, even you think we'll be greeted with a hail of centurion bullets."

"Natasi and I will go," Natalie said.

"Coward," Jade said under her breath to Sonja.

"Man-hater," Sonja shot back.

"Huh. You're stupid as well as cowardly."

For a minute John thought the two women would launch themselves at each other right there in Adama's quarters. He stepped between them and put his arm around Jade the same way he often did around Kara.

"Let it go," he whispered. "You'll end up in the brig if you start something. She's not worth it."

"Isn't that the truth," Jade said haughtily.

John continued to whisper. "Look at the photograph on the admiral's desk. That's Lee and Zak when they were kids."

Jade walked over to the desk and picked up the picture. "We were never children," she said as she studied the image. "I can tell which one is Zak. He's the cute one."

Bill looked at John with a question in his eyes.

"Jade and Zak spent some time together on the planet," John said in his most non-committal tone wondering all the while how Bill would react if he thought his son and Jade had formed some sort of romantic relationship.

"Your younger son is a good fighter," Jade said to Adama. "But not as good as me."

That seemed to ease the tension for the moment.

"We need to go," Natalie said.

Natasi, who was wearing gray sweatpants and t-shirt said, "I need to change clothes."

"To what?" Sonja asked derisively. "That outfit is good enough to be shot in. You think our brothers and sisters will be swayed by your sexy red dress?"

"You look fine," Natalie said to Natasi. "Let's go. We're not accomplishing anything by standing around arguing."

"You'll need a wireless device," Bill said.

"We've got LG49," Natalie said. "He's better than a wireless device."

"Can he transmit video as well as audio?" Bill asked.

"No."

"Then audio will have to do."

Natalie asked, "If my brothers and sisters agree to surrender and be rescued, how will we get them off the baseship?"

"Ferry them a dozen at a time on the Heavy Raider," Bill answered. I'm not sending a Colonial ship near enough that it could be destroyed by a surprise attack."

"Where will we put them after we get them here?" John asked.

"We'll cordon off an area on one of the lower decks and put them under Marine guard until I can come up with something more permanent."

The door opened and Tigh walked in. "Am I interrupting something?"

"We're just about through," Bill said. He turned to John. "Call Mr. Gaeta and tell him the frequency your centurion broadcasts on. Tell Gaeta I said to bypass the CIC and route it directly to the Situation Room. We'll monitor the mission from there."

"May I accompany you?" Buddy asked the admiral.

"He might be some help," John said.

Tigh said, "He might also tell the rest of the centurions the layout of our ship."

Bill said to John, "Take him to your quarters for now. We'll send for him if we need him."

In the corridor, Jade said, "I'll stay in your quarters with Buddy. I don't want to be in the same room with Sonja right now. I'd be too tempted to show her what I think of her cowardice."

"I'm sure Buddy will enjoy the company."

Down on the hangar deck Natalie and Natasi got into the Heavy Raider.

"Good luck," John called to them.

LG49 retracted the ramp and the ship was towed to an elevator. John waited there until the elevator raised the ship to the launch bay. Then he hurried back up to the Situation Room. Bill and Tigh were waiting along with Gaeta and Hunter.

John handed the communication device to Gaeta. "Can you make the words display on one of those big screens?"

"I think so," Gaeta answered. He took the device and pulled out a tangle of cords from a drawer. On the fourth try, he got a connection that worked.

"I wish he could hear us," John said. "Or that we could hear Natalie."

"You can't have everything," Tigh said. "Personally I think this is an idiotic idea."

They watched the Dradis screen as the small blip representing the Heavy Raider drew closer to the larger blip of the baseship.

Suddenly words began to fill the large screen.

_Primary landing bay is destroyed. Proceeding to secondary bay. _

Several minutes went by during which Tigh said to Bill, "Troy Minos is our new CAG. I think he'll be a good one, but he's overwhelmed right now. I told him I'd help him."

"How many did we lose?" Bill asked.

"Twenty-seven pilots confirmed dead. Nineteen wounded in Sick Bay. Two of those are not expected to make it."

"I should have my head examined for doing this," Bill said angrily. "I should have let Cain finish off that basestar."

_Landing in secondary bay. We are met by forty-nine centurions. Natalie asks to speak to leader of survivors. She refuses to leave landing bay. We are waiting. She has asked me to liberate two of my brothers and I have done so._

"Why in the hell would she do that?" Tigh asked.

"Insurance, maybe," John answered.

_A One and three Fives and a Four are approaching. Natalie says, "Greetings brothers. We've come to offer you survival."_

_The One says, "Why should we listen to minions of the humans?" _

_Natalie says, "There is no need to kill each other. Natasi has come from Caprica. She will tell you that the humans don't want to kill all of us. They want to live with us in peace."_

_Natasi says, "She speaks the truth, brother."_

_The One says, "Fools. You're both blithering fools, servile pawns of the Colonial military."_

_Natasi says, "Do you then prefer death on this ship? We know your Hybrid was killed. We know you will eventually run out of oxygen or freeze."_

_Natalie says, "Where are the rest of the survivors? They should have a chance to vote on whether to chance the resurrection ship being within range or permanent death."_

_A Five says, "We're it. We're all that's left. The rest chose to enter the burning part of the ship and were asphyxiated. They are dead now and have downloaded."_

_Natasi says, "I don't believe you."_

_The One says, "Feel free to search the ship. It should only take you…oh, about eight hours."_

_Natalie says, "I think we should ask our centurion brothers if they know of any more survivors."_

_LG49 says, "My liberated brother tells me that the One has a group of my brothers guarding sixty-four surviving humanoids. They are being held in the most remote end of one of the arms."_

"Damn," John said. "LG49 has no way to communicate that information to Natalie. She doesn't believe the One, but she doesn't have any proof and there's no time for her to search the basestar."

_LG49 says, "I am sending my two liberated brothers to free the humanoids and begin liberating the others. I will try to stall Natalie."_

"You've got to be kidding," Tigh said. "A centurion is double crossing the head honcho."

"I don't think he sees it like that," John said. "He understands his mission as getting anyone off that ship who wants to join us. His actions are all directed toward that goal. It's a logical progression for him."

_Natalie and Natasi are talking about leaving since their options are limited. They know they cannot search the entire ship. Natasi says to leave. Natalie says to stay until my brother centurions return. Natasi says she has a bad feeling about…_

The words stopped in mid-sentence.

They all waited. John realized that he had been holding his breath and let it out.

"Mr. Gaeta," Adama said. "What happened?"

Gaeta checked the wire. "We're still getting a signal, sir. The transmission has stopped for some other reason."

"Gods dammit," Tigh said.

Bill picked up one of the black phones and called the CIC. "What can you tell me about the basestar?" He finally turned to them. "Dradis scans look exactly the same…as you can see. We're not picking up anything unusual. Vipers on CAP have been warned to stay well clear of that ship, but they don't see anything unusual either."

"What the frak could have happened?" Tigh asked again. "Could they have done something to the centurion?"

"Maybe. The frequency is still open," Gaeta said. "It just stopped broadcasting for some reason."

"Could the Cylons be jamming the transmission?" John asked.

"It's possible, but they would have to know he was transmitting in the first place. How could they know that?"

"By listening to him?" Hunter asked.

"The centurions would hear him, but they can't communicate with the humans that way. All they can do is talk wirelessly to each other.

Bill turned to John. "Do you think this LG49 joined the other side?"

"No way. Just like Natalie would never have gone over."

"Natasi?" Bill asked. "Would she have betrayed them…and us?"

"I don't think so. We got off to a rocky start on Nereid, but she played her part perfectly at the prison. She had a number of opportunities to betray us and…"

He stopped as he realized that Natasi could have warned them that the prison guard could get to an alarm even tied up the way he was. John knew he had been remiss not to think of it himself, but why hadn't she warned him?

"What?" Bill said.

"I don't know. Maybe nothing."

"Damn it, Major," Tigh said. "If you know something you're not telling us…"

John said, "I can't believe she'd betray us. She knows if she does, she's frakked any chance of ever being with Baltar."

"Maybe she doesn't care any longer," Tigh said. "Maybe she never cared and it was all an act. Maybe she's been playing cat and mouse with us all along only we're the mice and she's the cat instead of the other way around."

The black phone buzzed and Adama grabbed it. They waited while he listened.

When he hung up, he said, "We just lost what was left of that basestar. Viper CAP reports an explosion near the center of the ship. It's breaking apart."

"What about the Heavy Raider?" John asked.

"No sign of it. It looks like we lost it, too."

TBC…


	62. The Shape of Things to Come

Chapter 62

The Shape of Things to Come

_The Planet_

_Day 193 (Written after my return to Libran): My original entry for today simply read, 'A change in the weather. Cooler with rain moving in from the west.' That is how much I feared writing about what really happened. I have allowed myself to write of it only after I am safely home on Libran._

_On day 193, the young man who fell into the grave outside the city came to visit me. I shall call him Frank although that is not his real name. Even now I feel compelled to protect him though he is long past the need for my protection. Frank came to the medical tent complaining of continuing pain in his leg despite the fact that it has been well over a month since his minor injury. I could find nothing wrong, but while I examined his leg, he handed me a tiny, rolled up piece of paper and put his finger to his lips indicating we shouldn't speak aloud of it. Chester Pollard, head of mission security, has several times mentioned at dinner that he thinks this young man has mental problems. Until that moment I had doubted Pollard's assessment, but after I read the note, I began to wonder. In tiny letters Frank had printed. _85 ft. due north from big rock at lake edge. Hollow tree. Do nothing now.

_Amazingly when Frank saw that I had read the note, he took it, rerolled it and swallowed it. I'll admit my curiosity was whetted, but I honored my patient's wishes and made no mention of the note or its contents to anyone. That turned out to be a wise decision. Frank drowned while swimming alone in the lake three days later, and after that, I couldn't get the note off my mind, especially since Pollard had asked me several times if Frank had discussed any of his 'crazy theories' with me. I told him the truth…that Frank and I had discussed nothing but his injuries from the fall. I am not a forensic specialist, but I did examine Frank's body. I even asked one of the physicians from the ship to come down and help with the autopsy. If Frank's death was anything other than an accident, it was skillfully done. We buried him on the planet near where the other expedition member who was killed in the cave-in was buried. But I have not been able to stop thinking about what amounts to too many coincidences. _

_Before I leave this planet, I will visit Frank's tree and see for myself what he wanted me to know, but I will wait a long time and be very careful that no one is around when I do it._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

John felt like he had been punched in the gut. If there had been anything on his stomach, it would probably have come up. Nothing he had touched in the last two days had worked out as planned. Now he'd lost Natalie and Natasi temporarily and LG49 permanently since centurions didn't download. Bill could almost say the same thing about his battle strategy. It hadn't gone exactly as planned either.

All John could hope for now was that the gesture they'd made to try to rescue survivors on the basestar would pay off down the road.

John, Tigh and Gaeta waited while Bill gathered his thoughts. Finally he said, "Mr. Gaeta, get me the camera footage of what happened to that basestar. And have breakfast for all of us sent up here starting with a big pot of coffee."

"Yes, sir," Gaeta said. He left the Situation Room.

Before the door closed, the Marine sergeant entered and addressed Adama. "Sir, the Cylon and the centurion would like to see you."

Bill looked at John who said, "What can it hurt now, sir?"

"What can it hurt?" Tigh asked incredulously. "I'll tell you what it can hurt. Everybody on this godsdamned ship. Everybody in the fleet. It's the same reason we don't want them in the CIC."

"Send them in," Adama said tiredly.

"Yes, sir," the Marine replied and closed the door.

"I hope you know what you're doing," Tigh grumbled.

The door opened. Jade and Buddy entered and behind them a steward pushing a cart with a tall coffee dispenser.

"Put it by the table," Adama told him.

When the man had complied, he said, "I'll be back shortly with your breakfast, sir."

Bill waited until the steward had left before he walked over to the coffee. "Help yourselves," he said to them.

Tigh didn't waste any time. He handed the first mug of coffee to Bill and got one for himself.

"Do you want some?" John asked Jade.

She shook her head.

John joined Tigh and Bill.

"Why did you ask to see us?" Bill asked.

Buddy said, "I told LG49 to stop communicating with you. Lucy was certain you would wonder why the transmission had stopped."

"That's an understatement," John said, "especially in light of what just happened to the basestar."

Buddy said, "LG49 needed to communicate explicit instructions to the two brothers that he had freed. He couldn't do that and give you a running account of what was happening on the baseship at the same time. He has a single partition processor. It was designed for great speed, but it was not designed to allow the unit to multi-task."

"It didn't matter anyway," John said. "We lost them and the ship."

"No we didn't," Jade said.

Bill said, "Our Viper pilots saw an explosion on that basestar. The Heavy Raider was inside it when the explosion occurred."

Buddy said. "LG49's freed brother told him that the One and those in agreement with him had ordered his brother centurions to wire a number of explosives together. They planned to set them off if the Colonials tried to board the ship. LG49 got Natalie and Natasi and thirty-three of the humanoids who wished to leave aboard the Heavy Raider."

"No way," John said. "That ship will hold twenty at the most."

Jade said, "To use one of your human expressions, the brothers and sisters who chose to leave the baseship were packed into the Heavy Raider like sardines in a tin can. Lucy explained to me what that means."

Bill said impatiently, "It doesn't make any difference how many that ship will potentially hold, even packed like sardines. It was blown up with the basestar."

"No," Buddy said. "LG49 took a page from John's playbook if I might use another human expression. He jumped the Heavy Raider inside the baseship since the One had told his centurions to open fire on them. The jump set off the explosion you saw."

"Then where the hell are they?" Tigh asked. "We don't have any Heavy Raiders anywhere on our dradis."

"He jumped to the coordinates over the river near the valley since he didn't have time to calculate another jump point. The Heavy Raider's vertical thrusters were badly damaged by centurion bullets. Once in the planet's gravitational field, the extra weight aboard the ship was a problem. LG49 barely reached the riverbank before the Heavy Raider made what you refer to as a _hard landing_. Some of the humanoids sustained minor injuries. Their communication equipment is damaged. They cannot contact you however LG49 is still in contact with me."

"They crashed?" Bill asked.

"The ship sustained damage but it is still intact. They cannot take off even though the humanoids on board have exited the ship. I will tell LG49 to speak to you."

They all glanced at the big screen.

_We are on the surface of the planet. Our ship is damaged and must be repaired before we can join you. Our vertical thrusters are not operational. There is other damage as well._

"Can the ship be fixed?" John asked and Buddy relayed the question.

_I have only a rudimentary maintenance subroutine in my programming. We need one of the centurions from the prison airstrip or the city to evaluate it and then to make repairs if possible._

"And how do you suppose we're going to get one of those?" Tigh asked. "Conjure it out of thin air?"

"Before we think about repairing the ship, we need to decide what to do about the Cylons," John said. "We can't leave them down there on the riverbank, especially with wounded."

Bill looked at John. "I'm putting you in charge of the rescue. I'll send word down to the hangar deck to put a Raptor at your disposal."

"What do you suggest we do with them, sir?"

"That's up to you. Just be aware if you bring them up to this ship, they'll go straight to the brig. And if you do anything that puts my Raptor pilots in danger, I'll see that you're court-martialed."

"There's something you should know about my brothers and sisters on the baseships," Jade said.

"Like how many of them would kill us if they got the chance?" Tigh asked.

"Who jumped to _our_ homeworld and started shooting at _us_?" Jade snapped.

"That's enough, both of you," Bill said. "What do you want to tell us about the others, Jade?"

Jade gave Tigh a last scathing look before she turned her attention to the admiral. "Natalie says they're not as sophisticated as the ones John met in the city or the settlements."

"Explain," Bill said.

Lucy's voice said, "I think what Jade means is that those on the baseships have lived all their lives among other Cylons. All they know of humans is what was put in their base programming. You'll probably find them…much less sophisticated in their dealings with you."

"I don't understand," Bill said. "What you need to remember is that most of our experience with the…humanoids hasn't been favorable. The ones that came to the Colonies despised us. They tried to destroy humanity."

Lucy's voice continued. "I'm aware of that."

"Then why don't you understand my belief that they're like the others we know?"

John said, "According to Natalie, both the ones who stayed on Nereid and the ones who live on these basestars didn't agree with the destruction of humanity."

"No," Tigh added. "But they did decide to kidnap forty-six thousand humans and enslave them on their homeworld. Would you please explain to me how that was so very different?"

"You know there's really no need to keep going over the obvious," John said. "Lucy was trying to tell us something about the Cylons on the basestar. We should let her continue."

"Agreed." Bill said. "Go ahead Lucy."

"In case John didn't tell you, I came late to the creation process because I was a child when it began on Nereid. The first five models had already been created and the sixth was underway before the Graystones and their colleagues allowed me to help. There were a limited number of humans that the brothers and sisters could interact with so they activated only a limited number of each model. As time went by, the other creators interacted less and less with their creations. The humans fought among themselves about which values to instill in their programming. They said the first models were too much alike so they went back and tried to instill diversity and managed to introduce a capacity for evil into some of them. The creators fought about how much autonomy to allow their creations. Then first Amanda and then Daniel Graystone died of natural causes. They were very old in human years. Zoe and I continued to work on new humanoids and created the Sevens and the Eights. The other creators tired of bickering and got bored with tweaking programs to see how it affected them. Things that should have been fixed, like the bitterness of most of the Ones, they let go. They turned their attention to the centurions, to building a new version that they considered an improvement on the U-87 models. They made the new ones bigger and stronger. They gave them built-in weapons. They…"

Tigh interrupted her. "Why in the name of the gods did they give them weapons if they weren't planning on using them as soldiers…as warriors?"

"That's a good question," Bill said. "I'd like to hear the answer."

"Daniel Graystone was a brilliant man and his wife was an expert at creating the humanoids. She was a reconstructive surgeon. She knew anatomy and the amazing qualities of skin very well. It's because of her that the humanoids are so much like humans. Daniel and Amanda functioned as a team. They raised me with Zoe like I was another daughter even though they were old enough by then that I thought of them as grandparents. But some of Daniel's friends were…not the nicest of men."

"Wait a minute," John said, "I thought you said there were seven creators and that all of them were scientists or doctors. I thought you liked and respected them."

"Yes. But the Graystones brought more humans to the planet than their fellow scientists. Besides many hundreds of the old U-87 centurions, they had a pilot for their ship and a dozen other men, mostly men from Tauron who had worked for someone called the Guatrau. Amanda finally told me that he was the head of a criminal organization call the Ha'la'tha. They were along to protect what Daniel Graystone called the considerable investment that had come from this organization. The Ha'la'tha funded the expedition so they were influential in seeing that the new centurions were armed. I think the intention was to use them as criminal enforcers. By the time Cavil killed the creators, all but two of these men were dead. I wasn't there, but one of his freed brothers told Buddy that the last two were killed along with the creators. All of their bodies were taken away. We don't know what he did with them."

"So are you saying that criminal money was behind the creation of the current Cylons and the centurions?" Bill asked.

"I think so," Lucy said. "I'm sure all that information is somewhere in the computers that were taken to the prison complex and warehoused. All I know is that Amanda said those men had influenced the creation of the centurions and the baseships and the new Raiders. All she wanted to do was create a human body for Zoe. Amanda and Daniel were motivated by their love for their daughter and the desire to hold her in their arms again. I think they would have made a bargain with the devil and agreed to do anything if they thought they could achieve their goal...and they did."

"I appreciate the history lesson," Bill said, "and later I'd like to hear more, but right now we need to focus on the humanoids on that downed Heavy Raider. What should we know about them?"

"The brothers and sisters who live on the baseships had no humans to interact with. They were activated by Cavil _after_ the creators were dead and before we knew about the people in the valley. Their evolution has certainly been much slower than those who live in the city and the settlements. They might act childlike in some ways or ask what you deem _stupid questions_. They are all much closer to the base copy of each model so there will be less diversity in their behaviors. Their only information about humans comes from our many databases that are available to them. They contain much of the history of humanity including much information about how humans spent their leisure time."

John said, "I think there's something else we need to keep in mind. Since we'll be the first humans that these brothers and sisters have ever come in contact with, first impressions are important. If we treat them like prisoners of war and pack them into the brig…" He stopped. He was as exhausted as Bill and Tigh and what he was trying to say was obviously not going over well with them.

"What do you suggest?" Tigh asked with his ever-ready sarcasm. "Let them wander around the _Galactica_? We made an attempt to rescue them. How much more do you want to do?"

"I'm not sure what I'm trying to say. I just think we've got the potential to win thirty-three more converts to our cause and we could blow it if we come down too heavy handed."

Jade said, "Take them to the valley. Let them help with the harvest. I know you want Natalie up here, but you could let Natasi and LG49 stay with them. I'll go too if you want me to."

The steward returned pushing a cart laden with breakfast platters. Bill Adama seemed relieved for the interruption and the chance to think about Jade's suggestion.

"Let's eat," he said. "I never like to make major decisions on an empty stomach."

…

Lee opened his eyes after a cheery female voice called his name. "Good morning, Captain Adama. Sorry to bother you, but we'd like to check your wound."

A different med tech stood by his bed with a tall, dark-skinned man also in surgical scrubs. The med tech introduced him as Carver or Carter, Lee wasn't sure which because he was still trying to wake up. It seemed like only a moment ago that Kara had stood by his beside. One thing he'd learned after his accident in the deep space simulator is that in hospitals, the patient was at the disposal of the physicians and medical staff, not the other way around. If they wanted to check your wound or take your temperature or your blood, they did it.

"What time is it?" He mumbled.

"Almost 07:00, sir. Captain Carver would like to have a look at your wound."

"Where's Doc Cottle."

"Catching a few hours of sleep. He'd been awake for over twenty-four hours. He was in the operating room most of the night."

The med tech helped Lee sit up and untied his hospital gown in the back. She slipped it off and then helped Carver unwind the elastic wrap that held his bandages in place.

"Taking your antibiotics?" Carver asked.

"I'm taking whatever the med techs bring me."

Carver lifted the two thick bandages from Lee's skin and handed them to the med tech. For the first time Lee got a good look at what a Cylon bullet or piece of shrapnel had done to him. There was a small, red-rimmed hole just to the left of his navel and a larger oozing hole on his side. Carver pressed gently on the area in between. Lee gritted his teeth and clutched the bed rail and tried not to moan in pain.

"Hurt?" Carver asked.

Lee managed to get his breath. "Yes, it hurts."

Carver picked up the chart and looked at it. "You're still running a little fever, but your wound looks like it's starting to heal nicely. I don't see any evidence of infection along the bullet track. Here's our dilemma. We need your bed. The _Ajax_ is sending over a couple more injured crewmen. Before he went to sleep, Dr. Cottle talked to your father. He okayed transferring you. He said to put you in the guest quarters near his. You'll be with a Major Gallagher. Will that be okay with you?"

"That's fine. John and I have bunked together before."

"Okay. Here's the plan. We're going to fix you up with a fresh bandage and feed you breakfast and then someone will wheel you up to your new quarters. You need to start walking around today, but don't overdo it."

"Thanks, doc," Lee said.

Carver smiled. "I'm not a doctor…at least not yet. I'm one of Dr. Cottle's surgical assistants."

Lee managed a smile although his side was throbbing. "Well, you just made my day by booting me out of Sick Bay."

Caver was writing on the chart. "You should lay off any strenuous activity for a week…and that includes romps with your girlfriend. You're healing nicely. No need to go tearing something and have to start over."

Lee looked at the wall. "I get the picture."

Thirty minutes later he was re-bandaged, fed and on his way to his new quarters with a week's worth of antibiotics and instructions to return in two days to have his wound checked and bandage changed.

As the med tech pushed him to down the corridor in a wheelchair, he asked her, "Do you know anything about a pilot named Louanne Katraine? She was brought in last night."

"She's alive but critical. That's all I can say."

"Thanks."

When they reached his new quarters, Lee felt almost like a kid when the final bell rings on the last day of the school year. There was something about leaving Sick Bay that had given him a burst of energy. As soon as the med tech was gone with the wheelchair, he got up and walked around the room. Six years earlier when he was seventeen years old, he and John had shared this same room. He saw that John had even selected the same bunk. The four days they had spent together had marked the beginning of a friendship that had endured. It was also the first time he'd heard the name Kara.

He'd had no idea then that their fateful meeting wouldn't occur for three years and when it did occur, he wouldn't know who she was.

John was not in the guest quarters when Lee got there, but returned shortly. He was wearing fatigue pants and a t-shirt and carrying his shaving gear.

He grinned at Lee. "Just FYI your father doesn't like the scruffy look. That's just one of the things he gave me hell about."

"I'm going to try to clean up later today. I can't take a shower yet, but I'm going to shave and wash my hair."

John put his shaving kit in his locker and turned around. "Lee, I'm sorry about you getting shot…"

Lee held up his hand. "John, it wasn't your fault. It could have been any one of us."

"The point is it wasn't. It was you, and I'm sorry."

"Apology accepted, okay? Now let's quit talking about it. Have you been up all night?"

John nodded. "I'm doing all right. I just ate breakfast with your dad and Colonel Tigh…and Jade although she didn't eat much. That coffee was strong enough to be used as battery acid. I don't see why anybody needs stims if they're serving that stuff all over the ship."

"Aren't you going to try to get some sleep?"

"Sleep's going to have to wait for a while. We got a time-critical situation."

As quickly as he could, John told Lee about what had happened with the basestar. He finished by saying, "I'm on my way to the hangar deck. I'm taking a Raptor to the planet. Jade had the idea to take the rescued humanoids to the valley. I don't think your dad was ecstatic about it, but he and Tigh couldn't come up with a better one. Bottom line is he'd rather not have them on the ship right now."

"Not even in the brig?"

"That's where Tigh wants to put them. I talked Bill out of it. I'm trying to win converts to our cause and I don't think we'll do it by packing them in the brig right after we destroyed their baseship."

"You can look at it another way," Lee said. "If something happens to them in the valley, my father won't be directly responsible so he wouldn't have to answer to Laura the same way he would if something happened to them on the ship."

"I'm sure that thought crossed his mind. He's going to let the valley people be his goodwill ambassadors…or not."

There was a knock on the door and John called, "Come in."

It opened to Jade. She was also dressed in fatigues.

"I thought you were in Sick Bay," she said to Lee.

"They needed my bed so I'm moving in with John."

She snickered. "Sonja will be very happy to hear that. We're just next door."

"Please gods, don't tell her I'm here," Lee moaned.

John gave him a sharp look. "Have you and Sonja crossed paths since you've been on board?"

Jade didn't give Lee a chance to answer. She smirked at John. "I think your girlfriend had found somebody she likes better."

"She's _not_ my girlfriend," John said evenly.

"She used to be."

"Sonja came to see me yesterday in Sick Bay," Lee admitted. "She missed Kara by about a minute."

Jade said, "Sonja told us she'd kissed you and you let her. She thinks you'll be easier to seduce than John was."

"She caught me by surprise, okay? I was still half-drugged." Lee said and realized that it sounded like an excuse.

"Maybe you need to stay here and protect Lee," John said to Jade.

"No. I want to go to the planet with you. I've never seen brothers and sisters who spent their whole existence on a baseship." She turned to Lee. "I'll send Buddy over here to protect you."

On the verge of losing his temper, Lee said, "I don't need a frakking centurion to protect me from Sonja. I can handle her."

"Look," John said to Jade. "Just don't mention to Sonja that Lee is over here and he won't have to worry about it."

"She's very bored sitting in our quarters with only Buddy for company."

"She gets no sympathy from me. If she'd gone to that basestar, she could have had plenty of excitement. Now we need to go. We've got a Raptor and crew waiting for us."

"Good luck," Lee said.

"Get some rest. I'll see you later."

As they were leaving, Bill walked in. "Hello, son. How are you feeling?"

"A lot better today than I did yesterday. John told me what had happened. Is the basestar a total loss?"

Bill nodded. "It looks that way. Can I get you something?"

"I'm good. I ate breakfast before I left Sick Bay."

"Do you think you'll feel like sitting in on a meeting this evening?"

"I'll sure give it a try. What are we meeting about?"

"General Nathan Vargas, the Marine commander, is on board. We're going to get our thoughts together about the first deployment of troops on the planet. We've talked over your idea about using the plateau at the prison as our first base of operations. He likes it."

"I'm…uh…surprised."

"We want you and John both at the meeting. And Tigh, of course. I'm thinking about asking Commander Cain to come over along with Admiral Taylor from the _Charybdis_."

"Why?"

"I'm going to pull a planetary air support group of Vipers and Raptors from their ships and the _Galactica_. Then we'll redistribute the remaining Vipers and pilots among all our battlestars. I'd like for you to be the CAG of the planetary group."

"Me?" Lee asked, the shock and surprise clearly evident in his voice.

"Tigh and I had originally selected Troy Minos for the job, but we lost Cole Taylor last night. Tigh moved Minos into that spot here on the _G_. We've basically got a green group of fighter pilots. We think Captain Minos will do a good job of handling them."

"Kara told me she'd seen a piece of Stinger's Viper. How many did we lose?"

"Twenty-seven so far."

"_So far_?"

"Dr. Cottle says two of the wounded are critical. He's not sure they'll make it."

"How are you going to pick which pilots will go to the planet?"

"If we have too many volunteers, we'll do it by putting names in a hat."

Lee immediately thought of what it would be like if he was on the surface of the planet and Kara was still on the _Galactica._

"What do you see as my duties?"

"You'll report to me, but you'll work with General Vargas coordinating air support for the Marine troops as they move on the city and the settlements."

"Dad… I…"

"You can do this, Lee. I know you can. You've flown a Viper in combat so you know what they'll do and won't do. You spent time on the bombing range back on Caprica and you attended War College. You studied a number of ground assaults with the old centurions during the First War. What you lack in command experience, I think you'll make up for in other ways. Vargas is not asking you to help him plan his campaigns, just work with him on the appropriate air cover."

"I'll do my best."

"You always do your best, son. You have since you were a little boy."

"Do you think there's a chance the Cylons will surrender?"

"No. But we can always hope."

"Are you and General Vargas even going to give them a chance?"

"I think at this point we're just going to have to take it one day at a time. I'm counting on Natalie to tell me what her brothers and sisters are thinking."

Lee started to ask his father if John would be on the surface or on the _Galactica_, but thought better of it. He wasn't sure where John rated with his father at the moment.

"You need to get some sleep," Lee said.

"I will…as soon as I prepare a report for the President. I'm sending the _Ajax_ back to Caprica with our dead. I need to decide if we can do anything about trying to find the _Orion_."

"You're talking about over six trillion miles of empty space. Even using our longest range scanners, do you know how many jumps a Raptor would have to make to thoroughly scan the distance between here and there?"

"I think Mr. Gaeta has already calculated it. Hundreds of jumps."

"It could turn into a suicide mission for the Raptor."

"I know, Lee. That's why I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I may just send a Raptor back to the original coordinates several times a day to see if the _Orion_ has made her way back there." Bill was silent for a long time. "What would you do?"

"I don't know, Dad."

"Those are the kinds of decisions you'll have to make if you want a command one day."

"Right now I just want to get through this war…for all of us to get through it in one piece."

"Get some rest, son. I'll get word to you about the meeting tonight."

After his father left, Lee lay down on the bunk opposite John's and realized that his side was really hurting, had probably been hurting for a while. He broke one of the morpha pills in half and swallowed it dry. As it began to take effect, he was overwhelmed with the responsibility his father was handing him. He tried to decide if he'd heard disappointment in Bill's voice when he hadn't confirmed that he wanted a command of his own one day, but he would have been lying if he'd said he did. He honestly didn't know. He was still thinking about law school and the AJA when he began to drift toward sleep. Someday, maybe soon, he and Kara would have to talk about the future and where it would take both of them, but that talk would have to wait until they had either achieved their objective on Nereid…or failed. If they failed, it might not matter at all.

…

John got a med tech to ask Hunter to come to the entrance of Sick Bay.

"How's Targa?" He asked when Hunter got there.

"Awake. Petra is coaxing him into eating some breakfast. I told her she shouldn't feel obligated because he got wounded rescuing her, but she insisted."

"Petra's a good woman. Let her take care of him."

"So what's going on?"

John explained what had happened with the basestar and their idea to take the surviving Cylons to the valley. He finished by asking, "What do you think?"

"If they'll work helping with the harvest, I'm all for it. We need every pair of hands we can get right now and we're a few short this year. If they're going to have to be guarded, then forget it. We can't spare the men."

"Fair enough. You want to go with us?"

Hunter looked back toward Targa's room.

John smiled. "He's in good hands."

As John, Hunter and Jade walked toward the hangar deck, John said, "I requested two Raptor pilots because I know them and I trust them. They're a little…friendlier toward Cylons than a lot of the pilots. One of them is married to an Eight named Sharon. They have a baby, a little girl named Hera."

"Kara told me," Jade said. "She said Sharon is her friend and that they'd roomed together at the Academy. She said Sharon's husband is like a brother to her."

"They've known each other since they were kids."

"I like Karl," Hunter added. "He's a nice guy. Saunders is okay, too."

Jade asked, "Do you think I could see Zak?"

"I don't know. Zak doesn't report to Bill. He's a Marine. That's a whole different command structure."

"Kara said Zak had a girlfriend and that she was here on the _Galatica_. If you see her, point her out to me."

"You're not going to do anything, are you?"

Jade huffed. "I just want to see her. I want to see what kind of woman she is."

"She's a Raptor pilot."

"A lot of guys think she's hot," Hunter added.

"Huh. So says the married man who couldn't keep his eyes off naked Sonja when she stood up in the tank. What do you think your wife would say?"

Hunter shrugged. "She knows she's got nothing to worry about."

John said, "Jade, Sonja is a beautiful woman. Any guy would have looked under the circumstances."

They walked down the last stairs to the hangar deck. Dwight Saunders saw them and waved."

"That's our ride," John said as he looked around. Chief Tyrol walked over to them. "Chief," John said.

He could tell Jade was looking Tyrol over carefully.

"Who is this?" She asked.

John introduced them and told Jade that the Chief would be accompanying them to the surface.

"What do you do?" Jade asked.

"I keep all these birds flying. Admiral Adama sent word for me to go with you and evaluate what it would take to fix that Heavy Raider. I tried to tell him I wasn't an expert on Cylon technology, but he said for me to go anyway."

John said, "Their technology isn't all that different. They fly a lot like a Raptor."

Tyrol looked at him. "I just saw Kara, sir. I think she's getting ready to go out on CAP."

John's desire to see his daughter overrode his fear that he'd embarrass her. He handed the communicator he used with LG49 to Tyrol.

"Hold this a minute. I'll be right back."

He left Tyrol and Jade with Hunter and walked down to where Kara's Viper was being prepped. She was talking to another pilot who said something to her and she turned.

"I just wanted to see you," John said. "I'm getting ready to go to the planet. I'm taking Jade and Hunter and the Chief."

"You're coming back, aren't you?"

He smiled. "That's the plan." There were several long moments of silence. "I'll let you get back to your conversation."

"Be careful, Dad."

"You, too, baby. I love you."

Their eyes met and he saw the moment she decided to drop her tough act. She walked over and hugged him tightly.

"I love you, too," she whispered.

They stood that way just long enough that he knew she'd forgiven him for what had happened to Lee. He kissed her forehead.

"Lee's been moved to my quarters," he said softly.

Kara smiled. "Thanks."

He turned and walked back to the others. They had been joined by Saunders and Karl.

"Ready to go?" John asked.

"Yes, sir," the two pilots said.

"I see you've met Jade."

"Yes, sir."

John smiled at Karl. "Does she remind you of anybody you know?"

Karl grinned. "Except for the hair."

"What's wrong with my hair?" Jade asked.

"Nothing. Sharon's hair is longer. That's all."

"I like you hair," Tyrol said.

There was an awkward moment when Jade didn't seem to know what to say.

John covered it by saying, "We've got people waiting on the planet."

Everyone started walking toward the Raptor.

Saunders said, "Karl's going to be the ECO on this run. Since you're qualified on a Raptor, we let our co-pilot get some rack time. We're stretched a little thin right now, but we both want to go to the planet. Do you think there's a chance we'll get to see Narcho, sir?"

"I think there's a very good chance," John smiled.

They all got settled. Karl showed Jade where to sit so she could see the cockpit. He said, "This is going to be a fast trip. We'll jump right after we launch so there's not going to be much to see."

Tyrol took the seat across from Jade and beside Hunter.

Ten minutes later they were out of the launch bay. Saunders put the coordinates into the jump computer and had John to check them. A few seconds later they were a hundred feet over the river. Saunders applied maximum vertical thrusters and flew toward the river bank. The Heavy Raider was partially on a grassy area and partially in the rocky mud.

"Damn," Saunders said. "I don't see how they made it all the way to the riverbank without their verticals, especially with the kind of weight they were carrying."

In the distance they could see Natalie, Natasi, LG49 and the other Cylons near the tree line in the shade. Saunders put the Raptor down on the grassy area near the Heavy Raider and they all got out.

The relief on Natalie's face when she greeted them was clearly evident.

"We didn't know what to do. Natasi said someone would come for us. Then LG49 wrote in the dirt for us to stay here."

John said, "We wouldn't have known where you were if it weren't for LG49. He told Buddy."

Tyrol had walked over to the Heavy Raider and began examining it.

"There's no way we could attempt repairs with this much of it in the mud," he called back to them. "We need to get it further up on the bank and then we need to get it up off the ground. We'd be talking about a lot of man hours and getting some heavy equipment down here. I'm not sure Admiral Adama would approve that much work for a Cylon ship. Right now I'm going to say we leave it and worry about it later if we've got the time and manpower."

"Can you remove the transponder and the IFF?" John asked.

"I think so."

"Good. Do it. The transponder sends a Cylon signal. We might be able to use it in a Raptor or something. And get our communication equipment. No need to chance that falling into…someone else's hands."

"I'll help him," Karl said.

"No," John said. "Let LG49. He knows that ship better than anybody." He handed the communicator to the big centurion and told him to help Tyrol. LG49 clanked over to the ship and gave the communicator to the chief. Jade followed him.

"Come meet my brothers and sisters," Natalie said. "Natasi and I have spent hours since our crash telling them about what's going on."

"LG49 told Buddy that you had injured."

"A few bruises. The truth is that we were too packed into the ship for anyone to get flung about."

"You've told them everything…even about the creators and the Sevens?"

"Yes."

"What's their mood right now?"

"Tired and hungry and thirsty."

"I should have thought about that," John said. "I should have brought food and water."

"What are you going to do with them?"

"See if they can stay in the valley. Hunter says if they're willing to help with the harvest, they might be welcomed. If not, it's probably going to mean the brig on the _Galactica_."

The surprise on her face was evident. "Is this another one of your missions that Admiral Adama hasn't sanctioned?"

"No. The admiral approved it. Actually it was Jade's idea. I'm not sure Bill was a hundred percent with it, but I don't think he had a better one. I'm going to take you and Hunter and a couple of the survivors to the valley and we'll powwow with Hunter and his people. I think they deserve a vote if we're asking them to play host."

"And if they say _no_?"

"I'll contact the admiral and ask what to do next. It'll probably mean the brig for all of them. Maybe you could talk to the survivors and explain their options."

"I think we should _both_ explain their options."

"How much do they know about the Colonies and what happened there?"

"I've told them everything."

"How did they take it?"

"Disbelief at first. I explained that's one of the reasons your battlestars attacked them."

"This wasn't a _revenge_ thing," John said.

"No. But that explanation made sense to them."

"Then how did you explain us trying to rescue them?"

"That you didn't want to kill _them_. I told them you wanted to free the human slaves on the planet and you couldn't do that with our baseships in orbit. They understood that well enough. Then I explained the Cimtar Accords to them in regards to treatment of prisoners."

"Did you mention D'Anna and the child?"

She shook her head. "I didn't think now was the time."

John took a deep breath. "Good idea. Okay, let's go talk to them."

Most of the Cylons were sitting on the ground but began getting up as he, Natalie and Hunter walked over. John tried to do a headcount. He came up with more Sixes and Eights than any others. There were a few Threes and a few Twos. There was one Five and two Fours. There was even a One.

"What's the story on him?" John asked. "I thought he would have stayed and died on the basestar."

"He and the Five were trying to stop the others from getting aboard the Heavy Raider. They got swept along as everyone was pushing to get aboard. Needless to say he's not a _happy camper_ as you humans say."

The One remained seated on a fallen log as John and Natalie walked up. He was wearing a black overcoat and was fanning himself with his wide-brimmed black hat.

"You'd think he'd have enough sense to take off the heavy coat," John muttered.

"Brothers and sisters," Natalie said, "this is John Gallagher from the Colonial battlestar. He's a friend of mine and Natasi's and a friend of our centurion brother LG49. The man with him is Hunter, the leader of the free humans whose people live near here. John and Hunter and some other Colonials have come to our rescue."

"What are you going to do with us?" One of the Twos asked.

"That's up to you," Natalie said. "If you'll agree to live with some humans and help them harvest their crops, then you will remain free. Refuse and you'll be taken to one of the battlestars and put in the brig."

The One continued to fan himself with his hat. "I'll take the brig over getting my hands dirty."

"Do any of the rest of you feel the same way?" John asked.

"Count me with him," the Five said.

"Me, too," a Four said.

"So, three prisoners for the brig," John said. "Anyone else?"

The rest of the group was silent, many of them refusing to look at either each other or their departing brothers. John walked back to the Raptor and notified the _Galactica_ that they had three prisoners and asked that a Raptor with several Marines on board be dispatched to pick them up. He also asked for some energy drinks and food bars to be sent along.

The Raptor arrived in less than thirty minutes. The food and a cooler were unloaded and the three Cylons who preferred the brig over working with the humans in the valley were shackled and escorted aboard by the armed Marines. The ship was on the ground less than ten minutes.

Natalie helped John distribute the food and drinks. As he moved among the Cylons with the cooler, a Three asked him, "Is it true that you were in the prison?"

He looked directly into her blue eyes. "It's true."

"Why did you want to rescue us from the baseship after your missile killed our Hybrid? We don't understand."

"Because I don't believe we have to be enemies and kill and enslave each other."

"But all the humans don't feel like you do," a Two said.

"No, they don't, but our President does and she's the one whose policy we follow. We'd like to take a couple of you with us to the valley before we take all of you. Any volunteers?"

The Three who had spoken earlier said, "I'll go." The Two volunteered next.

"Okay, head for the Raptor. We'll be back for the rest of you…maybe an hour…maybe less. Chill out in the shade and enjoy the refreshments."

John walked over to the Heavy Raider and asked Tyrol how it was going.

"We got the IFF and the transponder. We're working on the communication system."

"Good. We're going to the valley for a short time to make sure they'll accept the Cylons. LG49 will protect you."

"I'll stay here," Jade said. "I've seen the valley."

"Natasi is staying, too," John said.

"What should we do if some of the Cylons try to leave?" Tyrol asked.

"Let them," John said. "Where are they going to go? We're a couple hundred miles from the city and about seventy-five from the valley. They're don't have weapons. It's not exactly the middle of nowhere, but it's not what they're used to on their basestar."

John returned to the Raptor and they were in the clearing in ten minutes. This time no one met them at the top of the trail. Hunter took the lead and they walked to Emmalyn's house. She and Dessa were in her garden picking tomatoes and cucumbers.

Emmalyn stood and wiped her hands on her apron. "I didn't think we'd see you this soon."

After the introductions were made, Hunter said, "We need to talk to you and my grandfather and Beck."

"Go get your grandfather and Celia," Emmalyn said to Dessa. "Beck is probably in the fields with the rest of the men. Noel, too."

Hunter said, "I'll go get them."

"Karl and I will walk with you," Saunders said.

"Come inside," Emmalyn said to John. "I'll make tea."

John stood back and let Natalie, the Three and the Two precede him through the door.

Emmalyn ran the teapot full of water and put it on the stove before she turned to the Cylons. "You don't have names?"

Natalie said, "Our brothers and sisters on the baseships don't find the need for names."

"We're not on your baseship," Emmalyn said.

"Call her D'Anna and him Leoben," John said.

Emmalyn glanced at him. He managed to keep his face expressionless. Had he not been so tired, he would probably have reacted more strongly to seeing a vibrant and alive woman who looked exactly like the woman he had last seen dead in the _Galactica's _Sick Bay only a few hours earlier.

"These aren't the only two, are they?" Emmalyn said.

"Thirty," Natalie said, "mostly Sixes and Eights."

"And what are we supposed to do with them? We've not got the men or the means to guard them."

Leoben said, "We were told we'd be given the chance to work your harvest."

"Work our harvest?" She asked incredulously. "What do you know of working a harvest? What do you grow on your basestars?"

"Let's go outside a minute," John said to her.

They walked up the path. He could see Perry and Celia moving slowly down the road accompanied by Dessa. Much farther toward the fields, he could see Hunter and Beck. Saunders and Karl were behind them. One man was on each side of Noel. Saunders kept pounding Narcho on the back. It had obviously been a happy reunion for both of them.

"Well?" Emmalyn said.

"I didn't know what else to do," John said to her. "If we take them to the ship, they'll go to the brig. In fact three of them elected to go to the brig instead of come here and work."

"Did you plan this?"

John couldn't help but laugh. "Nothing we've planned has gone right. I just couldn't leave them on that basestar and let them die. The admiral agreed to let me ask for your help. If you and Perry and Hunter say no to letting them live here, then we'll take them to the brig on the _Galactica_. We might have to send some of them to the brigs on other ships. I'm not sure how well they'd be treated."

"Those are the only two choices?"

"I'm sure a lot of _Galactica's_ crew would like to airlock them."

"Is that a common form of execution in space? I seem to remember you telling me that someone tried to do that to you?"

"On a ship it's the least messy way to do it. No blood, no wasted bullets."

"You do realize what they've done to the people of this valley, what we've lost because of them?"

"I'm well aware. I visited the cemetery with you. I also know what they did to the Colonies. But it's like I told Admiral Adama, sometimes you have to put the past behind you. Sometimes you have to take that leap of faith. If we can't live together here, then I think the city and the settlements are doomed."

"You should have been a salesman instead of a pilot," she said grumpily.

Perry Jaffee and his wife Celia walked up with Dessa.

"My granddaughter tells me that John and Hunter have returned with strangers."

"Let's go in and have a seat," Emmalyn said. "Hunter and Beck aren't far behind."

Inside she poured their tea in silence as John introduced D'Anna and Leoben. D'Anna studied Perry intently.

"He's blind," Celia said.

"How?" D'Anna asked.

"Humans age," Perry said and suddenly smiled. "I have cataracts. My eyesight has failed, but I can still hear very well. Hunter and Beck are here with Narcho and two strangers."

As they all sat at Emmalyn's table and began discussing the possibility of integrating thirty Cylons into the valley, John wondered how or even if their meeting would be recorded for posterity. It would be the first experiment of the two races working together as equals, and it would either be a resounding success or a dismal failure. He didn't think there would be any halfway.

…

Kara had completed over two hours of her three-hour CAP, and the only thing on her mind was how much she wanted a shower and some much needed sleep, not an hour catnap in her sweaty flight suit.

The Raptor carrying her father had left before she'd launched, but she'd seen another Raptor launch about fifteen minutes later and then return less than half an hour after that. She wanted to know what was going on, but she wasn't sure she would be able to stay awake long enough to find out.

"Hey, Starbuck, wake up," Hot Dog called.

"I'm not asleep."

"You're drifting."

"Like you're not?"

"You should have taken a stim. CAG was handing them out…for free."

"I don't do stims."

Her comment was met by silence and she knew they were both thinking about Kat.

"She's going to be okay," Kara said. "She'll be back in a Viper in no time."

But they both knew that wasn't true. A head injury even of the minor variety would be enough to keep a pilot out of the cockpit for a long time. If Kat's injury was so bad that Dr. Cottle was operating on her, it was doubtful she'd ever sit in a Viper cockpit again. She'd be lucky to come out of it without permanent effects.

Kara would never say it to Hot Dog, but she wondered whether his feelings would survive Kat's injury.

Far out in their no-fly zone, there was a bright flash and a Raptor winked into existence. Her father was back from the planet's surface and she breathed a sigh of relief. For right now at least, her world was holding together.

…

Laura had completed a meeting with her Secretary of Health and Human Services and had fifteen minutes before she had another appointment. She checked her calendar and saw that it was with a group of special needs children who had won medals in a recent track and field competition. A charity for the group had arranged for them to receive their medals from her. She hadn't had time to write a speech and would simply have to wing it. During her years a Secretary of Education under Richard Adar, she'd visited countless schools and made countless speeches. She was sure she'd be able to find the right words.

Billy came to the door. Before he could speak, Laura said, "I'm on my way out to the west lawn…the Angel's Wings Charity presentation. They're waiting."

"I know you weren't expecting Colonel Jackson Spencer, but he's here."

"Is something wrong? Why didn't he call first?"

"I think he wanted to get to you before anyone else did. A battlestar jumped into space just after lunch today. It was probably picked up on commercial dradis."

"The _Galactica_?"

"No. That's the first thing I asked him. It's the _Ajax_."

"Bring him in. He can walk with me to the west lawn."

When Spencer got to the door, he said, "I apologize for showing up unannounced, but some things I do in person."

"Please don't apologize, Colonel. If it were any other meeting, I'd cancel, but I can't disappoint a group of very special children. Walk with me and Billy."

"Is the press going to be at this ceremony?"

"Some of them, yes."

"It might be better if they didn't see me."

"You're welcome to wait here for me. Would you like some coffee or tea?"

"Coffee would be nice."

Laura took a deep breath. "I'll have my secretary get it for you. I'll be back as soon as I can."

She quickly checked her hair and makeup, applying more lipstick and straightening the Federation flag pin that she'd put on her suit lapel that morning. When she reached the podium at the edge of the west lawn, she was glad she had taken the time. There were more members of the press there than she had thought there would be. There were also a dozen children ranging in age from six to about eighteen. All were excited. Each had an adult in attendance.

The head of the Angel's Wings Charity greeted her, the cameras began recording. Later Laura had to look at the Marble House documentary video to find out what she had said, but she felt that it was one of her best speeches. She needed no video to prompt her, though, as she remembered the faces of the children. Some were excited and some were shy, but all were beaming with pride as she presented each one with a medal on a rainbow-colored ribbon.

The youngest child was so excited that she hugged Laura and kissed her on the cheek and Laura fought the tears that suddenly sprang to her eyes. Dr. Junius had told her that until Sean was older, they wouldn't know if his developmental ability had been affected by his extremely premature birth or not.

At the end of the ceremony, she left Billy to see that everything was wrapped up satisfactorily. She knew he would do his usual excellent job. The shy young man who had started as her assistant seven years earlier had blossomed into a self-assured professional more adept at handling the press than she was. She knew he was still dating a young woman he called Dee, but he hadn't taken any steps to make the relationship a permanent one. She had once told him not to let his job always take precedence over his personal life. She had told him to do as she said, not as she had done when she was his age. So far he had not taken her words to heart.

Colonel Spencer stood when she entered the room.

"Please, be seated, Colonel. What news do you have?"

He picked up a briefcase and took out a several documents. "The report from Admiral Adama."

"I always ask you for the summary."

"The _Ajax_ returned with a number of dead."

"How many?"

"Over four hundred total. Nearly three hundred were from the _Ajax._ She took a Cylon missile hit. There were about thirty crewmen from the _Columbia_. She was also hit by a Cylon missile though in a less vulnerable spot. The rest were pilots, a few Raptor, mostly Viper."

"Kara and Lee?"

"They're not on the list of dead or wounded."

Laura inhaled deeply and then exhaled. She finally asked the question that was at the heart of their mission. "What was the final outcome?"

"One basestar destroyed and two that jumped away."

"The resurrection ship?"

"Got away. They managed to rescue a few humanoids from the other basestar. I believe your husband was instrumental in that. It's all in the admiral's report. It gets a little repetitive toward the end, but I don't think he'd had any sleep."

"Is there any word from John?"

"No ma'am, but he was on a mission for the admiral when the _Ajax_ left orbit to jump back here."

"The number of dead is not going to go over well with the people of Caprica. We'll need to plan a memorial service for several weeks from now after all the individual funerals."

"They're getting ready to start the invasion of the planet. There will be more dead…probably a lot more. I can't help but feel that it might be best to postpone a big memorial service that will only call attention to the war."

Laura managed a tight smile. "What are you saying, Colonel Spencer. To use one of Bill's favorite phrases, _Just spit it out_."

She could tell that he was choosing his words carefully. "Many people believe that we're right in going to Nereid to free the enslaved humans, but they also believe we should destroy the Cylons, instead of trying to set up house and live with them."

Laura stood and walked to the window behind her desk. The first hint of twilight was in the sky. Autumn was coming. The days were getting shorter despite the fact that they were experiencing a very warm late summer.

"Is that how you feel, Colonel Spencer?"

"Yes, ma'am. I don't ever want to take the chance that this one remaining Colony, the last remnants of humanity, will be exterminated by a race of machines."

"And their annihilation is the only way to insure that doesn't happen."

"In my opinion, yes."

"Making them our friends and allies wouldn't work just as well?"

"How could we ever trust them? They're machines, ma'am. They're not capable of loyalty and trust."

Laura turned away from the window and the twinkle of the first faint stars. Her initial impulse had been to tell Jackson Spencer that he was wrong. But in her experience people had to come to that conclusion on their own. Being told by someone else that they should change their beliefs was pointless.

"There was a time when I believed as you did. As Secretary of Education I visited the bombed cities and the refugee camps. I talked to people and heard their stories of suffering and horror and I understood their pain. I understood that the desire for revenge can become overwhelming. It can literally become a person's reason for living." Spencer started to say something, but Laura raised her hand. "Do you know anything about the young man Tucker Clellan who killed the Cylons and himself in the bunker by detonating a vest of G-4 strapped to his chest?"

"I know he was a Viper pilot and that he lost his fiancé during the fighting last November."

"Bill's son Lee attended the Academy with Tucker. They were friends. They had a mutual friend who later told Lee what had happened to Tucker when the Cylons tried to destroy the Colonies six years ago. When the bombing started, Tucker and his family took shelter in the basement of a school near their home in Antioch. There were many other families with them when a bomb hit the school. Much of it collapsed into the basement killing the majority of the people. Tucker survived because of the chance way a heavy steel beam fell into the concrete wall and created a space underneath. He was there for five days and nights before rescuers dug him out. He survived by drinking water that ran down the beam from broken pipes. He never saw his father and his sister. They were crushed under tons of rubble, but he managed to reach his mother's hand. He held it while she died. On the second day the rats came. Need I go on?"

"No, ma'am. What you've just told me only convinces me I'm right."

"At the time I heard his story, I was so horrified that I didn't sleep well for weeks. I began to question my belief that there had to be a better way to deal with the Cylons. I knew that there were thousands upon thousands of stories just like his. My own nanny has one, but just as evil and wrong as what the Cylons did to her and her child is what was later done to her in the refugee camp by a group of humans who ran a black market. The Cylons don't hold the patent on evil, Colonel Spencer. Our own history of the killing and enslavement of our fellow humans is proof of that."

She could tell that he was searching for something to say. She had gotten his attention so she continued.

"On the day that my husband's son with D'Anna was born, I went to the medical center and saw her. Her only thought was of saving the life of her child even though she knew that death for her would be permanent if it happened here on Caprica. The point I'm trying to make is that she knew she was dying. She took my hand and told me that she was giving her son to me. She asked me to raise him and love him. Does _that_ sound like something someone bent on our destruction would do?"

"I…I'm sure there are exceptions, ma'am."

"You attended the Academy did you not?"

"Yes ma'am. A few years after Admiral Adama."

"Did you not study the war that took place three hundred years ago between Scorpia and Leonis and what ended the conflict between them?"

"Yes, ma'am, I did."

"Did Scorpia not nuke several of Leonis's cities?"

"They did."

"Did either Colony later vow to destroy the other?"

"No, ma'am, but…"

"Did Scorpia not help Leonis rebuild afterward?"

"Yes, they did."

"My point, Colonel Spencer, is that for the last three hundred years, until they were themselves both destroyed by the Cylons, the people of Leonis and Scorpia lived in peace with each other. There was prosperity on both Colonies. It can be done, but it takes an effort by both sides."

"And if the Cylons on Nereid aren't willing to make the effort?"

"They're our children, Colonel Spencer. They were created by humans. Good parents don't kill their children. They teach them and allow them to grow. I'm afraid their creators didn't do a very good job with some of them just like many loving human parents raise children who become criminals who steal and murder."

"I can't argue with that, ma'am."

"The only way I know to reach this race of cybernetic children that we've created is to teach them by our example."

"Sometimes turning the other cheek just gets your head knocked off."

Laura finally smiled. "Do you have children, Colonel Spencer?"

"Yes, ma'am. Three. They're grown now."

"Did they spring from the womb knowing how to behave?"

"Absolutely not."

"I'm not so completely trusting of the Cylons that I'm a fool. While we struggle to form a coalition government, the strong _parent_ will be in evidence. That's our military, Colonel. I've learned a great deal as I've raised my son. Braedon isn't yet two years old, but he's gradually beginning to learn the limits of accepted behavior."

"You see us as role models for the Cylons?"

"Some of us, yes."

"Permission to ask a personal question, ma'am?"

"Of course."

"Do you plan to raise the half-Cylon child with your husband?"

"I made his mother a promise to take him and love him. He's a tiny premature baby, struggling for life. He doesn't know what he is or what he came from. He has no idea that his heritage is steeped in the blood of innocents. He's just a tiny baby who deserves the chance to live and to have parents who love him." Laura stopped for a minute as emotion overwhelmed her.

Spencer's voice softened. "I understand ma'am."

"The children are our future, Colonel Spencer, _all of them_. That's what I hope the people of Caprica will understand one day."

"And the Cylons?"

"We'll teach them by our example. We'll work and govern side by side with them. We'll raise our children together and show them it can be done."

"I don't think you'll do that here on Caprica, ma'am."

Laura turned and glanced at the twilight sky. The stars were brighter now, those torches of other worlds as the poet called them. Nereid orbited one of those distant stars. She suddenly realized what Leoben had meant when he'd said Caprica would miss her one day.

She thought of leaving this beautiful planet behind, but in a way she'd known since Sean's birth that she and John would take him to Nereid.

"No, it won't happen here on Caprica," she said sadly. "On that point, Colonel Spencer, we're in total agreement."

TBC…


	63. Soap Opera

Chapter 63

Soap Opera

_The Planet_

_Day 242: I had to ground Nadine today. Yesterday she had an episode of cramping and spotting and came to me in a panic. She is slightly over five months pregnant although she has gained very little weight and is showing surprisingly little. I calmed her fears and kept her in the medical tent overnight for observation. She's fine now. There was a time, I think, when she would have welcomed a miscarriage, but as the child has grown within her, she has changed her attitude._

_Naturally the removal of a shuttle pilot from the rotation has affected the schedule of deliveries to and from the _Hyperion_. Fortunately the other two pilots are men and so are in no danger of being taken out of commission for the same reason although I have begun treating one for high blood pressure. Nadine is trying to make up for her lack of being able to fly by helping various ones of us around the camp. She makes a point, though, of avoiding the security tent where the mercenaries tend to congregate. I wonder now if once the child is born, she will still want to give him (or her) to me. I have tried not to get my hopes up that I will still get to take a baby home with me._

_I continue to think about Frank even though it has been nearly seven weeks since his death. Several times I have thought someone has been through my desk in the medical tent. The second time I reported it to security and was told that it was probably someone looking for drugs which are kept in a locked safe. The investigator thought so little of my claim that no one bothered to even come over and take a look. My personal items have also been searched, but I never bothered to make a report since nothing was taken. Prior to Frank's death, I thought it might be one of the men wanting a peek at a woman's lingerie since they outnumber us (here on the surface) about ten to one. Now I am not so sure. I have decided that perhaps my journal is the object of the search and have begun to carry it with me everywhere I go, even sleeping with it under my pillow. _

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

Six hours of sleep left Kara feeling almost like normal although when the soft and insistent chirping of the alarm woke her, she felt like she could use six more. She'd set her wake-up time for 18:00. She sat on the side of her bunk for a long time before she stood, stretched and walked to her locker. The fighting of the previous night now seemed more like a bad dream to her than reality.

She opened her locker door and looked at the mirror attached inside. Her hair was a snarled mess. Too exhausted to spend the time with a hair dryer, she had climbed into her rack with her hair towel dried but still damp.

When she and Hot Dog had gotten back after flying the second CAP, Cheryl Clark's locker had already been cleaned out and another pilot had moved in. The privacy curtains on the bunk had been drawn. Someone on the hangar deck had told her that the _Ajax's_ pilots were all being distributed among several other battlestars because the _Ajax _was jumping back to Caprica with the dead.

The privacy curtains were now open and their new bunkmate was gone. The meet and greet would have to wait.

Kara slipped on a pair of fatigue pants and a tank top over her sports bra before she walked to Hot Dog's bunk and shook his shoulder.

"You wanted me to wake you up before dinner."

"Ummmm," he mumbled and rolled over facing the wall.

She started to pull the blanket off him and thought better of it.

"Hey, Hot Dog, I'm leaving. You're on your own."

This time he didn't move, only repeated the _ummmm_.

Kara went back to her locker, brushed her hair until she had tamed it and pulled it back into her usual ponytail only it looked more like a busy foxtail. She got her fatigue jacket.

Hot Dog stirred just as she was going out the hatch. "I'll see you at dinner," he mumbled.

"You're alone in here right now. If you go back to sleep there's nobody to wake you up."

"I'm awake," he said, and sat up to prove it. His hair was sticking up in several places. She knew better than to laugh. "Hey, you might want to check your hair in the mirror before you leave."

"Bad, huh?"

"Almost as bad as mine."

The ship was eerily quiet and almost deserted looking. Most of the crew had pulled double or triple shifts and were in their bunks grabbing a few hours of sleep. She was surprised that their combined snores weren't shaking the _G_.

Earlier when she'd finished her CAP, she'd gone straight from the hangar deck to her father's quarters but had found both him and Lee asleep. She didn't wake either of them. Now she quietly opened the door. The lights were dim. Her father was still in his bunk, but Lee's bunk was empty. Just as quietly she closed the door and walked down the corridor until she came to the officer's rec room.

It was all but deserted. Lee sat at a table in the far corner with his left leg resting on a chair and a canned soft drink on the table. He was reading something and glanced up as she walked in.

A smile lit his face. "Hi."

She walked over and leaned down. They kissed quickly and she sat.

He pushed his drink over to her and she took a sip.

"How are you feeling? How's the side?"

"Better. It doesn't hurt as much if I keep my leg propped up. I slept most of the morning. One of Dr. Cottle's assistants told me to get up and start moving around, but not to overdo it. I walked down to the CIC and back a couple of times this afternoon."

"I saw my dad's Raptor jump back about forty minutes before the end of my CAP. Did you see him?"

"He grabbed a shower and a bite of lunch and crashed. He was so tired I don't see how he was still on his feet."

"What did he have to say about the Cylons from the basestar?"

"Said he'd tell me later. I'm supposed to make sure he's awake thirty minutes before the meeting tonight."

"What meeting?"

"Some meeting my dad is having about the ground assault on the prison-lab complex. John and I were told to be there."

"Why you?"

"My dad has his reasons."

There was something in his voice that Kara couldn't identify. She waited for him to go on. When he didn't, she asked, "What are you reading?"

"A book I borrowed from Dad."

"About?"

"What's expected of a Colonial officer with people under his command. I'm rereading it. It was part of my required reading before I was promoted to captain."

Kara eyed him carefully. "Are you rereading it because you're bored or for a reason?"

Their eyes met. He didn't have to answer her question. She read it in his eyes. "So who are you going to be commanding?"

"Dad is going to transfer some pilots to the surface after we take the prison-lab complex. They're going to need a CAG and…" he shrugged.

"You don't sound like you're too happy about it."

"It's a lot of responsibility."

"So? Why don't you think you're up for it?"

"I don't know, Kara." A hint of annoyance had crept into Lee's voice. "It's just so sudden. If Cole Taylor hadn't gotten killed, the job of ground CAG would have gone to Troy Minos. You just flew with him. What do you think about him?"

Now it was Kara's turn to shrug. "He's okay."

"In case you've forgotten, I was at the Academy with Troy. He's a lot more outgoing than I am. He's better with people. He's a lot like Dwight Saunders. He's…"

"Stop right there. I don't like to hear you talk that way because it sounds like you're putting yourself down."

He didn't say anything.

"I don't believe this," Kara said trying to hide her own annoyance. "Your father gives you a chance to shine and you're acting like he's punishing you. He didn't chew you out like he did my dad even though you were right there with him during his _unauthorized mission_."

"I wish he hadn't done that to John, but John just shrugged it off like he does a lot of things that aren't pleasant. He said Dad had every right to do it. It would probably have gone a lot worse for me if I hadn't gotten shot. Who knows, maybe _this _is Dad's way of punishing me."

Kara reminded herself of what Lee had gone through in the last two days and adjusted her tone of voice. "So I guess you turned him down and told him to get another ground CAG."

"No. I told him I'd do my best."

"And you will." When Lee didn't say anything, she said, "What's wrong?"

"I'm not sure this is what I want to do with my life."

"Oh, for the gods' sakes, Lee. Get over it and man up. Admiral Adama is not asking you to make a life-long commitment…just function as CAG for the ground assault team until we win this frakking war and Laura gets her little utopia. Then you can go do whatever you want to do."

"That's just it, Kara. I think I want to go to law school and join the AJA."

"Is that to get back at your father…to show him you'd rather be like your grandfather?"

Lee struggled to keep from snapping back at her. Instead he said, "I seem to remember you raving on and on about Major MacKenna and how she saved your ass after you stole the Raider. What do you suddenly have against lawyers? You think they're good for getting you out of a jam, but you don't want to be married to one?"

"When did this suddenly become about us getting married?"

Lee wasn't sure what he would have said next if John hadn't walked into the room, detoured behind the bar, got a cold soft drink from the refrigerator and walked over to the table.

"Is this private?"

"No. Not at all," Lee said glad for the respite after the turn his and Kara's conversation had taken. "Have a seat. I thought you'd sleep longer."

"Something woke me. I'm not sure what."

"It was probably me," Kara admitted. "I opened the door to your quarters."

Before he sat, John leaned over and kissed the top of Kara's head. "It's okay, baby. I'm glad you made it back in one piece."

She smiled at him. "Me, too. So tell us about your Cylons from the basestar."

"Out of the thirty-three, a One, a Four and a Five chose the _Galactica's_ brig."

"That isn't so surprising," Lee said. "What about the others?"

"Perry and Hunter called a meeting of the whole valley for early evening. He and Hunter and Beck are willing to give it a go. It's hard to argue with having thirty additional harvest helpers. Even unskilled, they can pick and shuck corn and cut and thresh wheat. None of those jobs require years of experience, just strength and stamina which the Cylons have got in spades. Hunter stayed to meet with his people since both Perry and Emmalyn felt like it was important. Bill wasn't too happy about it, but since Hunter knows nothing about the high plateau, he said it wouldn't be a big loss if Hunter missed the meeting tonight. I'll go back and get him tomorrow."

"How did Emmalyn feel about it?" Kara asked.

"She was the least receptive, but considering all she's been through, I can't say I blame her. She told me if the others are willing to allow it, she'll go along."

"What about Dessa?"

John shook his head. "She's more confused than anything else. She doesn't understand the concept of human and humanoid. She's never seen multiple copies of the same model either. She saw Natalie and Natasi, but they don't look that much alike because of their different hair color and the way they dress. Now she's confronted with thirteen Sixes who look just like Natasi and nine Eights who look like Jade but with longer hair. The Threes look like triplets. The only oddball is a Six with dark hair that Natalie said was called Lida. When Natalie and I left, Narcho was trying to explain everything to Dessa. Natasi stayed to try to make her sisters and brothers feel easier. Several of the freed centurions stayed to protect them."

"Did Jade stay?" Kara asked.

"No, she didn't even go to the valley. She stayed with LG49 and Chief Tyrol. They were stripping some equipment from the Heavy Raider. I think we can consider it a total loss. Chief showed me where it had been shot up pretty bad. It's a miracle none of the Cylons on board were hit."

"I can't believe so many of the Cylons wanted to stay in the valley. They've got to know how their brothers and sisters on the planet treated the humans."

"I'm not so sure about that," John said. "Lucy told me the Cylons on the basestars are…less evolved. I was around Cylons in the city and around a lot more of them in the settlement. This group is closer to the base models because they haven't spent any time around humans. According to Lucy interacting with humans speeds up their evolution. I wasn't around them long, but even I could tell a big difference. I don't want to say they're child-like. That's the wrong word. Maybe _naïve_ is a better word, but they're definitely less sophisticated. They seemed eager to be around humans."

"I just can't believe the valley people will accept the Cylons," Kara said, "especially after they fought them."

John said, "I think it helps that there are more Sixes than any of the other models. The dark-haired one was eyeing Beck. You know when he cleans up, Beck is really not a bad looking guy. Something tells me that when they go to that meeting tonight, Beck will be scrubbed within an inch of his life."

Lee chuckled. "One night after Hunter had a few beers, he said Beck used to talk about Sonja a lot. I think she's his…fantasy woman. Beck might already be in love."

John glanced at Lee and smiled. "I'm sure Sonja is a lot of men's fantasy woman. Has she bothered you again?"

"No. And she's not _my_ fantasy woman."

"When I was your age, I would probably have thought differently."

Kara looked at her father and then back at Lee. "Okay, what am I missing?"

Lee said, "When Sonja came to Sick Bay to see me, she kissed me before I could stop her."

Kara asked angrily. "What did you do?"

"I pushed her away. Hey, I didn't know she was going to do. It's not like I was mobile and could get away from her. I was flat on my back in bed."

"Kara," John said. "Take it from someone who knows. When Sonja sets her mind on something, she's like a force of nature. She's seductive and manipulative and she knows all the right buttons to push. So let it go, baby. It wasn't Lee's fault. And leave Sonja alone, too. She's not worth winding up in the brig over."

"She's not only a selfish bitch, she's a cowardly bitch. Otherwise she would have gone over to that basestar with Natalie and Natasi."

"She's not as cowardly as you probably think," John said. "She was shot and then boxed for over two months. I've never been boxed, but getting shot is traumatic enough. She might be reluctant to go through that again."

"I can't believe you're defending her after what she did to you," Kara said with disgust in her voice. "Sonja is all about _me, me, me._"

"She stood up to Cavil in the city so she's not _that_ cowardly. As for kissing Lee, Sonja is just geared that way. Lucy told me that the Sixes were originally created as companions for the men since there were a lot more men with their group than women. The Sixes were given a level of sensuality that the Threes and Eights don't have. Seductive behavior was so deeply embedded in their base programming that there was no way to get rid of it without wiping everything out and starting over."

"Natalie's not that way," Kara said stubbornly. "I haven't seen her or Natasi making a move on anybody."

"That's because both of them were already in love. Apparently that channels their behavior toward the object of their affection…more like human women."

None of them said anything for a long time. Kara finally said, "Admiral Adama asked Lee to be the ground CAG. He'll be stationed on the plateau after we take it."

"Congratulations," John said to Lee.

"He's not happy about it," Kara added.

"It's a big responsibility," John said. "I can see why Lee might have some concerns, but we both know he'll do a good job."

"I'll be working with General Nathan Vargas and his command team and also keeping Dad apprised of what the plans are. He'll still have the ability to approve or deny the kind of support Vargas wants from our Vipers and Raptors."

"Have you met General Vargas?" John asked.

"Not yet. Vargas was Adar's first choice to serve on the negotiating team when we surrendered to the Cylons. He turned it down and Adar didn't insist. Laura suggested my father to Adar even though she and Dad hadn't seen each other in almost twenty years. Adar took her advice. That's why my dad got the call while we were on the _G_ six years ago. Laura told me when we were playing chess that weekend we all went to your place on the island."

John asked, "Did Laura realize how furious Bill was to get Adar's call?"

"She realized." Lee suddenly smiled. "The minute he saw her, Dad wasted no time in telling her. She laughed when she told me she'd chosen a suit in a color she knew he'd like and the first thing he did was tell her to go to hell."

Kara finally caught Lee's eye and gave him a look that said _shut up_.

"It's okay, baby," John said. "Bill knew her first."

_And loved her first and she loved him first. _But he didn't say that out loud. He'd made a vow to himself after that debacle of a conversation he and Bill had had about Laura several days after his escape from Nereid. He'd determined to do his best to leave the past where it belonged…in the past.

"Do you think I could get stationed on the plateau?" Kara asked.

"You need to think about that carefully," John said.

"Why?"

"Because of your relationship with Lee."

"We're both officers," Kara retorted. "It's not fraternization."

"If you go to the plateau, you'll be in Lee's chain of command. An intimate relationship would be considered fraternization."

"So you're telling me I should stay on the ship?" Kara said.

"No. I'm not telling you to do one or the other. I'm just saying that if you're both on the plateau, he'll be your commanding officer. You'll have to be really cool about your relationship."

Lee said, "Dad told me he'd ask for volunteer pilots to go to the surface. If he doesn't get enough, he'll put names in a hat. I imagine he'll do the same thing if he gets too many."

"Just think about it before you make a decision, Kara," John said. "That's all I'm asking you to do. You're not quite on as much thin ice as I am with Bill, but your track record isn't spotless either. All it would take would be one little complaint from a fellow officer about preferential treatment or anything else for that matter and you'd both be in hot water. Think about it before you put yourselves in that position."

"If I stay on the _G_, I won't get to see Lee at all. If I'm on the surface, at least I'll get to see him."

"How do you feel about it, Lee?" John asked. "Do you think having Kara under your command will affect your decision making?"

"I'd try not to let it."

"It's something you both need to think seriously about," John said again.

Kara and Lee looked at each other. "I'd rather be on the planet," Kara said. "Not just because of Lee, but because all I'll do up here is fly CAPs. Life will be more exciting on the ground."

There was a long silence again. John and Lee both kept their thoughts to themselves, but John knew both of them would use another word in describing the ground missions. Providing air support for the Marines would be far more dangerous than flying CAPS off the _Galactica_.

Kara stood. "I'm hungry. Let's go eat dinner."

John said, "I wish I could, but Bill has invited me to eat with some of the senior officers. Commander Cain will be there and Admiral Taylor from the _Charybdis_ and General Vargas."

"Both of you?" Kara asked. "Is that why you're both wearing your duty blues instead of fatigues?"

Lee nodded.

"Okay, I guess I'll go look for Karl and Saunders and Hot Dog."

"I'd rather eat with you," Lee said.

"Me, too," John added.

"Is Natalie dining with the senior officers, too?"

"I believe so," John said.

Kara almost snickered. "What about Buddy?"

"Buddy doesn't dine and you know it. I think he'll be on standby for the meeting tonight."

"How do you think Commander Cain will take that considering Lucy is in there along with Buddy?"

"We'll cross that bridge if we get there." John answered. "Back on Caprica I talked to Cain about Lucy as a favor to Bill. I'm not sure she believed everything I said, but at least she's prepared."

Kara stood. "I guess this _junior_ officer better go find some other _junior_ officers to eat dinner with."

"I'm not a senior officer," Lee said, but he was talking to her retreating back.

"She'll get over it," John said. "I talked to Karl and Saunders. That was a hell of a fight out there last night and Kara was in the middle of it. Sometimes it takes a while for your nerves to settle afterward."

"What will the Viper and Raptor pilots face on the surface? I didn't think the Cylons had that much firepower outside of their basestars."

"According to Buddy there are ninety-three Heavy Raiders on the planet with most of them in the city. There're a handful of Raiders in the city and a few at the prison, but the number isn't significant. We'll just have to be prepared if they launch them. The Heavy Raiders are all armed although as far as Buddy knows, none of them carry nukes. Natalie said the Cavil who went to the Colonies took all their nukes with him. Then there's the hundred thousand centurions scattered in the city and the settlements and the shipyard. They have their built-in weapons that are considered in the small or medium range."

"So as far as the Vipers and Raptors are concerned, we've got to consider the centurions a threat as well as the Heavy Raiders."

"At low altitudes, yes."

Lee glanced at his watch. "We'd better start walking or we're going to be late for dinner. It's in the Situation Room and I'm slow."

"I told Natalie I'd stop by and get her."

As Lee stood, he couldn't help but wince.

"You're hurting, aren't you?"

"Some. After we eat I'm going to take the other half of a morpha pill."

"You know, you can always tell your dad you're not up to taking on the job of ground CAG right now. I'm sure when Doc Cottle booted you out of Sick Bay, he didn't think he was sending you back on active duty."

Lee shook his head. "I'll be all right. I can't let my father down."

"I'm sorry I got you shot."

"It was worth it to free Petra and Yoshimo."

John smiled. "But not to unbox Sonja?"

Lee smiled back. "The jury's still out on that one. Maybe she'll redeem herself before the fighting is over."

…

As Kara walked along the corridor toward the officer's mess, she was surprised when Zak suddenly came out of a side hallway and joined her.

"I saw the list of the dead and wounded," he said. "You weren't on it."

"You came all the way up here to tell me something I already know?" She asked grumpily. "Or have you been standing there waiting for me like a stalker?"

"Whoa. Who rained on your parade? I thought you'd be happier to be alive."

"Forget it. Shouldn't you be with your buddies? I thought the upper decks were off limits to the troops. You're taking a big chance."

He grinned. "You know I'm not always about the rules. Besides, Marine guards are everywhere. I don't stand out _that much_."

"So why are you here besides to remind me I'm still alive?"

"Have you seen Jade lately?"

"No."

They walked in silence for a dozen steps until Zak asked, "That's all you've got to say?"

"What? I should make up something? I haven't seen her since we were in the waiting room outside of Sick Bay. She's been doing her thing and I've been doing mine."

"Where is she staying?"

"In the guest quarters beside my father."

"Great. That really helps since I don't know where your father is staying."

"I think it's one of the decks that's off limits to you."

"What the frak is your problem, Kara? What's with all the sarcasm?"

"You'll hear about it soon enough. You want to see Jade then go down a deck and walk aft. As soon as you see a couple of heavily-armed Marines, you're in the right place."

"She's guarded?"

"She's staying with the other Cylons and Buddy so they want somebody available if they need an extra hand for triad…or in case Sonja has an attack of horniness and wants somebody to frak."

"Somebody really licked the sweet off your lollipop."

"I'm sure Sonja will be glad to lick the sweet off yours. She'd like you. You're young _and_ hot. Just flash those killer abs at her and she'll only let you up for air about once a week. You won't even remember Jade's name or what she looks like."

Zak stopped walking, apparently giving up on the conversation. "Thanks a lot, Kara."

She continued down the corridor. "Don't mention it."

In the officer's mess she got a tray and joined Karl and Saunders at a table. Hot Dog was sitting with Maggie and another pilot so she didn't wave him over. Kara noticed that Maggie had positioned herself so that Karl was behind her.

He and Saunders had finished eating. "We gave up on you," Karl said.

Saunders added, "We asked Hot Dog and he said you'd left your bunkroom forty minutes ago."

"I was talking to my dad and Lee."

"Any news?"

"There's a strategy meeting tonight. I guess we'll find out the results when they're ready to tell us. In the meantime we keep flying CAPS. I hear you took Dad and Jade to the planet this morning."

Saunders said, "And Chief Tyrol and Hunter. Chief says the Heavy Raider is basically a total loss. The whole rear end is in the mud and full of bullet holes. He and the centurion stripped it of the communication system and the transponders…everything that was put in it back on Caprica. Your dad didn't want it falling into the wrong hands."

Kara was busy eating and nodded.

"Jade was helping Tyrol," Karl said. "At first he was mostly ignoring her, but I think it finally dawned on him that she might be interested in more than his mechanical skills."

"That's not good."

"Why not?" Saunders asked. "Isn't one of the goals of this mission to promote better relations between us and them?" He grinned at Karl. "Some guys really go off the deep end when a Cylon gets interested in them…get married, have babies, stuff like that...or so I hear."

Kara frowned. "Jade did the same thing to Zak in the valley. I think he's interested in her. I really thought she was interested in him, too."

Saunders and Karl glanced at each other. Karl said, "Uh-oh. And after Maggie just dumped him."

"Tell me about it," Kara said.

"There's also the little problem of Chief's relationship with Cally," Saunders said.

"Chief's seeing Cally? When did that start?"

Saunders said, "A couple of months ago. I thought you knew."

"I must have missed the memo."

Saunders continued. "You know last year Cally and Hot Dog had a thing and then Commander Cain got wind of it. She called them both in and told them to end it or face charges of fraternization. They ended it. Gaeta told me that Cain came down hard on Colonel Tigh because he knew and hadn't done anything about it."

Kara swallowed the last bite of food. "Unless somebody wrote it on the bottom of one of his whiskey bottles, he'd never have noticed."

"Are you okay?" Karl asked her.

"I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine," Saunders said.

"Don't you two start giving me grief. I don't need any more of that."

"Has somebody been giving you grief?" Saunders asked sympathetically. "Tell us who. We'll pay him a visit."

Kara suddenly smiled. "How do you know it's a _he_?"

"We'll pay _her_ a visit, then," Saunders said. "Just give us a name."

"I love you guys too much to do that to you. She would chew you up and spit you out and then I'd have Sharon and Kendra on my case."

"You're not talking about Jade, are you?" Karl asked.

"No." She leaned toward the center of the table and whispered, "Sonja. She's after Lee. She went to see him in Sick Bay and kissed him. If I do what I want to do to her, I'd wind up in the brig…or Sick Bay…or the morgue…maybe all three."

The men looked surprised and then Karl grinned. "No kidding. Sonja has got the hots for _Lee_?"

"She's got the hots for everyone who has something behind his zipper." Kara said derisively.

Karl said. "I thought Sonja had a thing for your…never mind. Lee does have that blue-eyed, classically-handsome thing going for him. I can see how that would appeal to Sonja."

Kara snorted. "I think you should look a little lower for what appeals to Sonja."

"Lords of Kobol," Saunders said. "I can't believe we're having this conversation. You did say she'd help save Lee's life. It isn't all that weird she'd visit him to see how he's doing."

"And that gives her the right to suck face with him?" Kara asked angrily.

"Maybe that was taking it too far."

"Look at it this way," Karl said, "President Roslin wants the Cylons to learn from us. As far as Lee is concerned, I think Sonja will learn real quick about the meaning of the term _lost cause_."

"I'm glad somebody thinks this is funny," Kara grumped.

Saunders was still smiling. "Tell us you love us again and we'll try to distract her for you."

"Don't look at me to do any _distracting_," Karl said. "I'm a married man. I've got my own Cylon waiting for me."

Kara realized how much she missed the relationship she and Karl had shared for so long. For three years after she thought she'd lost her father, Karl was the only one in her life she cared about, the only one who'd never let her down. They had truly become brother and sister.

"I love you anyway," Kara said

"Does that include me?" Saunders asked.

"Quit being greedy," Karl joked. "I'm the one had to skin the rabbits she shot. Cook them, too."

Kara began to feel better. "I was just kidding. I don't really expect either one of you to throw yourselves on Sonja for me. She's not exactly a grenade."

"But if I should volunteer…" Saunders joked.

"Just promise me you won't tell Lee what he's missing."

…

Bill and Tigh were late getting to the Situation Room so John, Lee and Natalie introduced themselves to Admiral Taylor and General Vargas. John knew that Admiral Taylor had originally hailed from Tauron and was nearing retirement. He was a short, balding man, much shorter than Cole Taylor to whom he was distant kin, but there was still a familial resemblance in the shape of the admiral's face, especially his nose.

"I'm very sorry about Captain Taylor," John said. "I understand you were related."

Taylor nodded. "Thank you. We were…distantly through our fathers. Cole and his sister are the only kin I have left. Cole's sister is on the _Orion_. I don't know if you'd heard that."

"No, I hadn't. I don't think Admiral Adama is ready to give up on them yet."

General Vargas indicated a serving cart with a half dozen bottles of various alcoholic beverages plus several bottles of water. "Help yourselves while we wait."

"I believe I will, sir," John replied. "Natalie? Lee?"

"Nothing for me, thanks," Lee said.

"Wine, please," Natalie said.

As he poured wine into two glasses, John glanced at Nathan Vargas. He was close to six feet tall and stood ramrod straight. He looked to be in excellent shape. His steel-gray hair was cut short. John judged him to be in his mid-fifties with the lean, hard looks of a born warrior, not handsome but striking. He also knew that Vargas and former President Adar were and still remained close friends. It was Vargas's Marines that had taken out the last nests of centurions after Caprican airspace had been freed the previous autumn.

As John handed Natalie the glass of wine, he noticed that her gaze shifted from Vargas to Commander Cain. He didn't think Cain had taken her eyes off Natalie since they'd entered the room. Her look was both interest and repulsion.

John nodded to Cain and said, "Commander. Nice to see you on the _Galactica_ again."

He wondered if anyone besides Lee recognized the irony of that statement. The last time they'd been on the _G _together, Cain had tried to airlock him.

Cain nodded in return. "Major." But her eyes were still on Natalie. "Whose idea was it to include a Cylon in this meeting?"

"Admiral Adama's," Vargas said. "The more we know about the planet the better. I believe Major Gallagher and Ms…I'm sorry. I didn't catch your last name…"

"I don't have one so please call me Natalie."

"Very well. I believe Major Gallagher and Natalie know more about the planet than anyone in this room, probably more than anyone in the fleet."

"The question remains," Cain said coldly, "is whether or not we can trust what she says."

John bit back his reply lest it sound insubordinate. Cain wasn't his commanding officer, but she was still a superior officer.

Instead Lee was the one who answered Cain. "Natalie wouldn't be on this ship or attending this meeting unless my father trusted her, sir."

He said it respectfully, but he didn't leave Cain room for a reply unless she wanted to sound like she was questioning the admiral's judgment.

"I hear you were wounded on the planet," Vargas said to Lee.

"Yes, sir. It isn't as bad as we first thought."

The door opened and Bill walked in followed by Tigh who went straight to a wall phone and placed a call asking that their dinner be served. Bill walked over to the liquor cart and poured a stiff drink before he joined the small group. Tigh was only a few steps behind him.

"I've got some good news and some bad news," Bill said. "That's what held us up. I'm going to give you the good news first. The _Orion_ is back at our original coordinates. A Raptor crew just confirmed it."

Relief flooded Admiral Taylor's face.

"That's more than good news," Lee said. "That's _great_ news."

"It's not all good," Bill continued. "The bad news is that they can't chance another FTL jump since their primary drive system has failed. They made it back using their secondary drive."

"We used to say _a wing and a prayer_," Taylor said.

"Amen," Tigh breathed as he took a big swallow of his drink.

Bill said, "Commander Tocarra and his crew are to be commended for plotting the jumps that got them back, but without a backup drive, another jump is too risky. The problem is they're now stuck six trillion miles from here. One of our battlestars is going to have to jump back and offload the entire crew and as much of their supplies as possible. That will be a very time-consuming task."

"Can we spare a ship right now, sir?" Cain asked. "We're one ship down already since the _Ajax_ jumped back to Caprica."

Vargas asked her, "How would you feel if you were the one floating out there in the middle of nowhere?"

"I understand that the mission on this planet comes first…sir."

Bill said, "You're both right. We'll plan our initial stop on Nereid. As soon as we're set up on the plateau, we'll decide how to handle the _Orion _while we plan our next step. She's got plenty of supplies. She's safe where she is for now."

"Unless the Cylons find her," Cain said.

"What are the chances of that?" Tigh asked. "She's six trillion miles away. Even Cylon long-range scanners won't cover that kind of distance or they would have found us. Besides we think they're going to stay within resurrection range. We're not sure what that is, but it's a hell of a lot closer than six trillion miles."

"It's approximately six hundred seventy-one million miles or one light _hour_ away," Natalie said. "So I think your _Orion_ is safe for now."

The door opened to several stewards pushing carts laden with their dinner.

"Let's eat," Tigh said. "Good news always makes me hungry."

John found himself between Lee and Admiral Taylor. Natalie, Vargas and Tigh were across from them. Cain was at one end of the short table and Bill was at the other. John had earlier noticed that Vargas wore a wedding ring. In fact all of the men at the table wore them except Lee. Carolanne Adama had been dead for two years and Bill still honored their marriage by following the ancient Tauron tradition. Romo Lampkin had once told him that Bill's father Joseph had gotten the traditional chest tattoo while he'd mourned his first wife and daughter. John didn't think Bill had gone that far, but he was still a Tauron at heart. The customs of the Ha'la'tha were in his heritage no matter how much they had been tempered by his Caprican upbringing.

Natalie wore no jewelry and neither did Cain. Neither woman wore makeup either, yet each radiated an inner strength. In some ways they were opposite sides of the same coin.

As Natalie and Vargas chatted about his children and a new grandchild, John noticed that Cain's gaze settled often on the beautiful Cylon. He began to sense something else besides curiosity in it. He had been with enough women to tell when one was sexually interested, even if it was not in him. Helena Cain was definitely attracted to Natalie but at the same time she was repulsed by her own feelings. He wondered if Natalie was aware of it and then decided that she had to be. She was a Six after all.

It wasn't until the stewards had removed the last dish and the door closed behind them that Bill once again took charge of the meeting. Tigh poured another drink. The rest of them abstained. Vargas got up briefly and got a thick folder from a chair against the wall.

Bill said, "We've had the plateau under constant surveillance with the high resolution cameras on the ship. Until a cloud cover moved over the area late this afternoon, we've observed no unusual movement of Cylons, ships or vehicles and that includes the centurions. A ship landed mid-day, but as far as we could tell, it was a supply ship. Some of the crates held various vegetables."

"I find it hard to believe that they're going about their business as usual," Vargas said. "Certainly they know what happened up here last night."

"Of course they do," Natalie said. "But at this point, what can they do about it? Those on the plateau probably have no idea that they'll be your first target since there are only a few humans there now and they're loyal to the Cylons. Once John and his team rescued Petra and Yoshimo and unboxed Sonja, I'm sure they think you'll invade the city or the settlements first in an attempt to free your fellow humans. The brothers and sisters on the plateau are probably preparing for a siege by stocking up on food and other supplies while they can."

"Excellent point," Vargas said. "Do you agree with her, Major Gallagher?"

"I do on all points."

Bill picked up a remote control for the big screens that surrounded them. After fiddling with it for a minute and not being able to get it to work, he said, "I guess I'd better call Mr. Gaeta."

"Let me have a look," Lee said. He pressed the right combination of buttons and an image appeared of the entire planet. He held the control toward his father.

Bill said, "You're doing fine. Fast forward through the next several images and stop when you get to the plateau."

Lee did as his father requested and stopped at an image that was very familiar to him. The first view was from high enough that it included the airstrip.

Vargas had opened the folder. Lee saw the same image in a photograph. Bill had obviously given all their information about the prison-lab complex to Vargas ahead of time.

Bill said, "We know the centurion troop strength at both the airstrip and the prison was approximately 1,500. We know the number at the prison has been reduced by several hundred due to the firefight the night of John's mission there. Natalie, please tell us what you know about the general setup starting with the weather." He handed a laser pointer to her.

"I would really like to include Buddy in our meeting. He has many of the statistics I think you'll want to hear."

"Any objections to bringing in John's centurion?" Bill asked.

John was surprised that Cain remained silent. He started to remind the admiral that Buddy wasn't _his_ centurion, but he let it go.

"I'll go get him," John said.

As he left the room, he heard Cain ask, "Where are you keeping it?"

Natalie answered. "Buddy is staying with me."

When John got to the guest quarters, he knocked. Jade opened the door. She looked flushed and angry. "I'd like to move."

"Not now, Jade. I need Buddy to come with me to a meeting. We'll talk later."

"Promise?"

"Yes, I promise." He glanced around the room. Other than Jade and Buddy it was empty. He knew Natasi had stayed in the valley. "Where's Sonja?"

"In the shower," Jade almost spat the words. "Isn't that what you do after you've frakked somebody."

"Oh, boy," John said. "If you don't want to stay here, you can go next door and wait in my quarters. We'll talk when I get back from the meeting."

"Thanks," Jade said. "What would happen to me if I hurt her?"

"I don't know. You might wind up in the brig with the three we brought back from the planet. Just don't do anything until I get back."

She walked sullenly past him and into the corridor. John told the Marine guard that she was going next door. He noticed that both of them were struggling to keep serious expressions on their faces. They obviously knew something that he didn't.

Buddy had been standing at the back of the room and moved forward. John waited until they were further down the corridor before he asked Buddy what had happened.

The robot said, "Zak came to see Jade earlier this evening. She was not in the quarters. He and Sonja started talking about Lee."

"Oh, no. Please don't tell me they…did what Jade accused them of."

"They were not engaged in a sexual encounter when Jade walked in. She was furious."

"Were Sonja and Zak…getting physical in another way?"

"Sonja was showing Zak where Lee was injured using his body to demonstrate. She had pulled up his t-shirt. Then she told him what a good physique he had…just like Lee. She was rubbing the muscles of his abdomen when Jade walked in. His back was to me so I could not see if he had a physiological response to her caresses or not."

"I guess I'm going to have to sit everybody down and have a talk with them. We've got too much going on right now to have to start dealing with personal issues."

"I think that is a very good idea."

"Thank you, Bud. Lucy, FYI your sister Helena is in the meeting. I know you want to talk to her and maybe afterward I can arrange that, but for the duration of the meeting, I really need for you to keep quiet. Do you think you can do that?"

"As long as I can see her," Lucy said.

"You can see her. Stare at her all you want, but I've got to warn you, she's very anti-Cylon."

"You told me you had talked to her and explained my part in creating the Sevens and the Eights."

"I did, but I'm not sure she believed much of what I said. So can you handle this?"

"Yes. The sooner we gain control of the prison-lab complex, the sooner I can start work on creating a new body for myself."

They stopped outside the door of the Situation Room. The Marine guards looked at the centurion, but made no move to stop them.

"Bud, you there?"

"I am here, John."

"Good. Let's do it then."

_…_

Romo Lampkin joined Laura, Maya and Bianca in the upstairs dining room. Romo had functioned as Laura's representative at the funeral ceremony for Stacey Connelly that afternoon. As much as Laura would like to have gone, she knew that her presence would turn the quiet ritual into a public spectacle replete with the media. It would be a terrible invasion of a friend's personal grief.

It wasn't until after the meal, though, and Maya and Bianca had taken the children to get them ready for bed that Laura had a chance to talk to her Attorney General in private.

He joined her in her sitting room and accepted the drink she poured for him.

"Thank you for standing in for me this afternoon."

He nodded and sipped from his drink.

"How is Hugh?" She asked.

"Holding it together for the sake of his daughter."

"He understood why I didn't try to make an appearance, didn't he?"

"He did. Not that he wouldn't have liked to have seen you, but I think he was grateful that the ceremony remained quiet and private."

"Oh, Romo, my heart aches for him. Hugh has suffered so much loss. His first wife and parents in the bombing of Antioch and his little boy in the camp. And now Stacey."

"His situation is a sad one."

"You told Hugh I'd have him and Elaina over for dinner soon?"

"I did. He said he'd look forward to it. He said he had something he wanted to discuss with you."

"He wants to be a part of the first civilian mission to Nereid. I intend to ask him to head the education team."

"Taking his daughter of course."

"Of course. I think she'll have plenty of children for company on the planet."

They sipped their drinks in silence for a moment.

"How is Sean?" Romo asked.

"Bianca went to see him this morning. He continues to improve. I want to go back to see him, but I have to fight Edgar every time."

"You should listen to him."

"Thank you for your concern, but I made a promise to his mother."

"You made a promise to a _Cylon_. I don't view that quite the same as I would a promise made to a human."

Laura tried to keep her voice even, but couldn't. "It doesn't matter if I made the promise to your cat Lance. The point is that _I_ made the promise. _Me_. What does it say about me if I fail to honor my word?"

"Touché, Madame President. What word from Nereid?"

"The war above the planet is over, at least temporarily. They're getting ready to invade the surface."

"You spoke to the Quorum this morning about the war effort so far?"

"Yes. Several of them were horrified that we already have more than four hundred dead."

Romo got up and poured another drink. "How quickly they forget. When the Cylons were busy at work destroying the Colonies, if you'd said four hundred then, they'd have said, _only four hundred,_ _thank the gods._"

"Yes. Tom Zarek and Sarah Porter in particular were critical but for different reasons. Sarah's objections are always religious in nature. Mr. Zarek demanded to know how the Cylons could have hit two of our battlestars with missiles if the fleet had jumped in shooting and destroyed those basestars as he believed we should have done."

"So Zarek has added military strategist to his résumé now."

"I suppose he thinks his background as a Sagittaron Freedom Fighter gives him the right to criticize our military. The problem is that he's found a base of supporters here on Caprica that seems to be growing. He's already indicated that he's going to run against me in the next election. He's banking on the fact that my plan to make Nereid a blended society is abhorrent to a vast majority of Capricans."

"I think you sell yourself short."

Laura smiled in a self-deprecating way. "You're words are appreciated, but I'm too realistic to take them to heart."

"When the first of those human slaves from Nereid step off a ship here on Caprica and praise you for not allowing the nuking of the entire planet, I think you'll see that your popularity is still solid where it counts."

"It really doesn't matter. I've already decided that I'm not going to run for a second term."

Her statement was met with shocked silence from Lampkin. He finally said, "I suppose you want me to keep that to myself."

"Yes."

"Might I ask why you've already made that decision when you've got three years left in your term?"

"You're not a religious man. I doubt you'd understand."

"You forget I'm a lawyer used to listening to all sides. Try me."

"Both the Sacred Scrolls of Pythia and the monotheist scripture speak of a new world where two warring peoples shall live in peace. I've come to believe that world is Nereid. The Cylon scriptures speak of a leader who shall hold a child, not born of her body, and show him to the people and tell them to behold a miracle, a child sent from God to cement the peace and friendship of the former foes. I believe that child is John's son with D'Anna."

"Madame President…Laura…"

"No let me finish. Yesterday evening I had a conversation with Colonel Jackson Spencer. We were speaking of working side by side with the Cylons. He told me that he didn't think it would happen on Caprica. I realized that he's absolutely right. In Bill's report he mentioned that D'Anna had died aboard the _Galactica_. Her heart failed. She may or may not have downloaded because their resurrection ship had already jumped away by then. Unless we can find her, I will become Sean's mother in every sense of the word. I will stand before our two races and raise up the child as a symbol of hope. I will give us a reason to believe in a better future."

"And from these cobbled-together prophecies you've extrapolated that you've got to leave Caprica?"

"When my current term of office is up. I'd like for you to think about going with me to help form a coalition government. We could certainly use a man of your skills."

Lampkin finished the drink. "I hope you don't want an answer tonight."

"No. I realize that it will be a big decision. But you do realize that if Tom Zarek becomes President of the Colonies in three years, you'll be out of a job."

"The thought did cross my mind when you told me you don't intend to run for a second term."

"You have no real ties to Caprica…or am I mistaken?"

Instead of answering her question, Lampkin asked, "Who else have you recruited?"

"You're the first although I intend to make the offer to Billy and several others on my staff when the time is right."

Lampkin stood. "I'm sure you want to see Braedon tonight. I believe you told me he likes for you to read his bedtime story."

Laura also stood. "Yes. It's one of the bright spots of my day. You have a very good memory."

At the door he turned. "I might decide to run for President instead of accompanying you to Nereid."

Laura smiled. "That would be fine, too. Anyone who could beat Tom Zarek has my backing."

_…_

"The big unknown at the moment," John said, "is whether the commandant of the prison discovered that LG49 had freed some of his centurion brothers at the airstrip."

"Would this commandant have been able to tell that some of the centurions were freed?" Admiral Taylor asked.

"Yes…if he bothered to look," Natalie answered. "There is a small disk called a telencephalic inhibitor that is removed to allow the centurion to access its higher cognitive functions. If the centurion kneels or leans over, it's very easy to see that it's missing. It's basically a piece of metal with one purpose. It stops communication between the lower and higher levels of software. Without it, they're self-aware. With it, they're not. Because it's simply a piece of metal, it never malfunctions."

"Could the commandant have gotten more?" Vargas asked.

Buddy said, "I am not aware of a stockpile of inhibitors anywhere on the planet."

"So where does that leave us?" Vargas asked.

"We can't make any assumptions," John said. "We've got another Heavy Raider on board, the one that was used in the attack on Lee's Raptor above the planet of Tauron. Tomorrow I'm going back to the valley to get Natasi, Hunter and LG49. I can take LG49 to the airstrip tomorrow night and recon the situation."

"If you're caught we've lost the element of surprise," Vargas said. "Not to be disparaging of your plan, but I think we'd be better off landing several specialized Marine units armed with those zappers that appear to be so effective. If the centurions attack, we'll take them out and proceed to the prison."

Bill said, "Or we could do a combination of both. John and LG49 could determine if the airstrip centurions are freed before your Marines attack."

"Why don't you just take the centurions out from the air?" Cain asked.

"We'd rather not destroy the airstrip," Bill replied, "or the hangars or the buildings at the prison and lab. We're going to need all of them to set up our base there."

"Not to mention there's underground tylium tanks at the airstrip," John said. "We start dropping bombs or strafing the place, there's every chance we'll destroy those tanks and lose a valuable fuel depot not to mention destroying the hangars in the process."

"What's the water supply?" Vargas asked.

"Several deep wells," Buddy said.

"Enough to supply the needs of thousands of troops?"

"Doubtful," Natalie said. "The total number of humans and Cylons at the prison at any given time never exceeded several hundred including the prisoners."

"And take it from someone who knows," John said, "prisoners weren't allowed to use a lot of water."

Vargas was quickly making notes. When he finally finished, he looked up. "I think tomorrow night is too aggressive. I need twenty-four hours to get my plan together and another twelve to communicate it to my commanders."

"Has anyone thought of giving the Cylons the chance to surrender?" Tigh asked.

"The prison commandant would never surrender," Natalie said.

"What about the human guards?" Tigh continued.

"Cavil would have his centurions kill them before he'd let them surrender."

"So much for that idea," Tigh said.

"If I might mention something," Lee said. "The three nurse Cylons at the lab res facility are…they're not like the others. They're…all they do is help the Cylons who download there. They're not armed or dangerous. In my opinion it would be a mistake to go into the lab shooting."

"Which brings up something else you need to put into your plan," Natalie said. "You need that lab as much as we do. It would be a big mistake to destroy it."

Vargas wrote some more. "What's your best guess as to what the commandant will do if we attack?" he asked her.

"The same thing I think any of the Ones would do. He'll hunker down at the prison surrounded by all his centurions and force you to fight your way in which will result in a great loss of life for your Marines. In the end he holds the ultimate trump card and he knows it. When you eventually reach him and kill him, he'll download, but the hundreds or even thousands of your soldiers who are killed in the battle won't."

"Will he destroy the complex rather than let us have it? I read the report that stated the leader on the third basestar had wired it to explode if boarded."

Natalie said, "Actually his centurions had wired it. I don't think the commandant has enough explosives at the prison, but I would never assume he didn't. The thing you've got to remember about the Ones is that they're smart, devious and arrogant. Perhaps even a little crazy. There's almost nothing I'd put past them."

"What will he do with the human guards?"

"If he manages to escape, he'll leave them behind."

"Dead or alive?"

"He'll leave them alive and let your soldiers do whatever they want with them. He feels no sense of obligation to any of the humans, even those who have betrayed their own race for him." She glanced at John before she continued. "In fact he probably holds them in more contempt than he does the humans who were their prisoners."

"Okay," Vargas said. "Let's talk about the terrain."

They then discussed the topography of the plateau around the prison, the distances involved and the lack of any reliable transportation that was kept at the airstrip.

The discussion dragged on for over an hour. Finally Vargas said. "I'm going to work on a plan tonight. Could we reconvene tomorrow afternoon?"

"Fourteen hundred," Bill said. "This room."

They all stood.

John said, "Commander Cain, could you please stay behind, sir?"

Cain barely glanced at him. "It's late, Major Gallagher. I have some things I need to discuss with my XO."

John looked at Buddy. "Looks like we'll have to do this some other time, okay?"

Buddy's voice changed to Lucy's. "Helena?"

Everyone in the room stopped and stared at the big robot. Helena Cain froze.

Bill said, "I'm not sure this is the right time for a family reunion."

"Helena, please look at me. Please talk to me. I've waited so long…ever since John told me you were still alive. Please!"

It was obvious to John from the expression on Vargas's face that he didn't know about Lucy. "What in the hell is going on?" He asked.

Bill said, "You started this soap opera, John. Why don't you bring General Vargas up to speed on the plot so far? He's got top-level security clearance. Don't hold anything back."

Commander Cain made a sound like she was choking and hurried from the room.

"I'll talk to her," Natalie said and followed Cain.

Buddy started for the door and John stepped in front of him. The centurion had a choice of stopping or running over him. He stopped.

"I'm sorry, Luce. She's not ready. Why don't you and I tell the general what the situation is? Let Natalie talk to your sister."

Before Bill and Tigh left the room, each poured another drink. John glanced at Lee who looked like he was exhausted. He got a sympathetic look from his young friend.

"Jade might be there when you get back," John said. "Just tell her to leave so you can get to sleep. I'll be quiet when I come in."

"What is Jade doing in our quarters?" Lee asked.

"Long story. I'm sure she'll be glad to tell you, but if you're not up to listening, boot her out. You need your rest."

Bill was right. John felt like he was in the middle of a soap opera that included a multitude of players both human and Cylon.

When Lee had gone and they were alone except for Buddy, Vargas said to John, "Pour us a drink and have a seat."

"I take it the story of Lucy wasn't in the report you received, sir."

"No."

"I'm sure that was an oversight."

"I doubt it. Bill Adama doesn't make oversights like that. He was protecting one of his commanders. A very fine one I might add although I did hear about the run-in you had with her. I wasn't there, but in my opinion she overreacted."

John smiled as he thought about the scar on the back of his head that was still tender. "We both did, sir. I'll start with an introduction. I'd like to present Lucy Cain, Helena Cain's younger sister."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, General Vargas," Lucy said.

A smile curved the corners of Vargas's mouth as he accepted the nearly full shot glass from John. "Something tells me this is going to be a hell of a story."

"You've got no idea, sir. None."

…

Lee took a longer route back to his and John's quarters so that he wouldn't have to pass the door where Sonja was staying. During the meeting he'd finally gotten up and gotten a bottle of water. He'd managed to surreptitiously swallow half a morpha pill which kept him sitting upright through the next two hours. Walking actually eased the pain although he couldn't shake the idea that if he passed Sonja's quarters, a long arm would snake out and grab him and pull him in like a spider traps a fly. It was probably a side effect of the drug.

As he finally and gratefully opened the hatch to his quarters, he heard a giggle. The room was dimly lit. He rubbed his eyes, fearful that he was either hallucinating or had traveled back in time six years to the humiliating experience of walking in on John and Lissa after he'd ignored Lissa's boots outside the door. He took a quick look. No boots…which debunked his time travel option.

Zak's accusing voice came from Lee's bunk. "What are you doing in Jade's room?"

Lee felt several emotions wash him, anger being the strongest. "For starters, little bro, it's not Jade's room, it's my room, mine and John's."

Now Jades's voice came from the bunk. "John told me I could stay over here."

"He didn't tell you that you could frak my brother in my bunk, did he?"

"Oh, shit, Lee. I'm sorry." Zak rolled over Jade and out of the bunk. He scrambled around on the floor and got his underwear and black fatigue pants. Lee didn't bother to turn around like he'd done six years earlier. He just stood looking at his brother in semi-disgust.

"I don't believe this," Lee said. "You're supposed to be with the rest of the Marines."

"I know. You're not going to turn me in, are you?"

"No," Lee said tiredly.

"You're not going to tell Dad either, are you?"

"No," Lee again answered, his annoyance clearer this time. "But I'll tell you what you are going to do. You're going to change the sheets on my bunk."

"No problem." Zak had his pants and t-shirt on. He turned to the bunk. "Jade, you're going to have to get up."

She climbed out of the bunk with no concern for her nudity and picked her clothes up from the floor. "I don't see what the big deal is."

"The big deal is that one guy doesn't frak a girl in another guy's rack…at least not without getting permission first."

Jade stretched and starting pulling on her clothes. "Are you going to tell John?"

"You two must think I'm the biggest snitch on the ship. No, I'm not going to tell John, but I think you should."

"Where is he?"

"He stayed behind to talk to General Vargas who just happens to be Zak's commander."

Zak had already stripped the sheets off the bed and gotten fresh ones from the locker. Jade sat down at the table and began putting on her sneakers.

Lee said, "You know the thing you're supposed to do if you're…getting it on is to leave a pair of boots outside the door."

"I didn't think we needed to," Zak said as he stretched the sheets tight and tucked in the corners. "I'll do it next time."

"Next time had better not be in my bunk."

"We can't do it in my quarters," Jade said petulantly. "Sonja's always there."

"No big deal," Lee retorted. "Zak's fond of threesomes. He once had a thing going on with twins."

Zak had finished making up the bunk and turned. "Godsdammit, Lee. You just had to go and tell her that, didn't you?"

"Surely she didn't think you were a _virgin_."

Jade stood. "I'm leaving. You and your brother can fight after I've gone."

"Jade, wait a minute," Zak said. "We'll talk tomorrow." He walked over to the door and kissed her gently. Lee watched them, half-hallucinating the way Lissa had kissed John in this same room six years earlier. Was it going to be his karma whenever he was on the _G_ to walk in on other people right after they'd had sex?

After Zak had shut the door, he turned. "I'm sorry, big bro. I really thought it was her room."

Lee unbuttoned his uniform tunic and carefully slipped out of it. "Did you finish?"

"We were just lying there talking."

"I guess I should be used to walking in on you and a girl. Remember that time I came home from the Academy and walked in on you and that cheerleader in the shower?"

Zak ignored his question. "Why aren't you in Sick Bay?"

"They needed my bed." He managed to step out of his pants but as he bent to pick them up, his side caught and he groaned.

"Let me do that," Zak said.

Lee sat on the edge of his bunk and carefully swung his legs up. Gratefully he lay back and put his arm under his head.

Zak hung Lee's uniform in the locker before he sat at the table and began putting on his boots.

"I shouldn't have…with Jade. I didn't mean for it to go that far…I only came up here to apologize for something that had happened earlier. One of the guards outside Sonja's door told me Jade was in here. I thought she'd moved. I…"

"Forget it, Zak. I get the picture. So what's it like to frak a Cylon?"

"Why don't you ask your friend John? He's frakked two of them."

Lee closed his eyes. "I'm sorry, Zak. I'm taking something out on you that's got nothing to do with you."

"Jade had never been with a man before. I mean a couple of downloads ago she got raped by some guys in the forest, but this one…" Zak's voice trailed off. Finally he went on. "I wanted her to know it didn't have to be a bad experience…if that makes any sense. We're going down to the planet soon. I might wind up on the wrong end of a centurion bullet."

"I think I should start calling you John junior. He said the same thing to me six years ago. Nothing's going to happen to you."

Zak stood. "Can I get anything for you?"

"I'm fine. I'm going to get up in a minute and go wash my face and brush my teeth. Then I'm going to take another pill and sleep."

Lee heard the door open. Just before it closed, Zak said, "I'm sorry I could never live up to what you and Dad expected. I think I've spent half my life disappointing both of you."

"Am I going to have to get out of this bunk and come smack you?" Lee asked.

"I love you, big bro. I always will."

"Next time just ask to use my bunk. You know I'll say _yes_."

"I just hope there _is_ a next time."

The door closed.

Lee thought about Kara and then about what John had once said about the things you do when know you might find yourself on the wrong end of a Cylon missile...or a centurion bullet.

"Yeah, Zak," he said softly. "I hope there's a next time, too."

TBC…


	64. Bot Baiting

Chapter 64

'Bot Baiting

_The Planet_

_Day 296: Autumn is upon us. Fortunately we are far enough south that we shouldn't feel the cold weather that will soon descend on the northern part of the continent; however the evenings are too cool now to stay outside after sunset unless bundled in sweaters and jackets. The days are wonderful as the heat and humidity of summer are gone at last. For several weeks I have spent many evenings playing bridge with Joshua, Irina and Nadine. Last night we discussed something that has apparently been going on for many months, perhaps as long as we've been on the planet. Joshua got the truth from one of our mechanics who asked him to help repair a damaged robot. _

_We have a dozen old robots that were sent with the expedition to do what our leaders refer to as the "heavy lifting" and what a boon they have been to us. These machines are voice activated and understand a large number of basic commands such as 'lift that box', 'follow me' and 'put the box here'. They are roughly six feet tall, made completely of metal in the basic shape of a human but with no covering over their metal frames except in the chest area where the nuclear fuel cell that powers them is housed (in approximately the same place as a human heart or so Joshua was told). The head is proportioned like a human's with two round eye sockets that hold visual devices similar to a doll's eyes, but because they have no eyelids, they appear always to be staring. A nose-shaped proboscis functions as an air intake for cooling the computer loaded in the head and a rectangular mouth vents the air. _

_Now thanks to Joshua, we have found out that at least one night a week, some of the mercenaries have been taking two of these robots to a clearing in the forest and ordering them to fight. Joshua has termed this _'Bot Baiting_ (short for Robot Baiting) after the cruel sport of bear and bull baiting that had its origins on Kobol and was prevalent as a form of bloody entertainment in the early days of the Colonies. This barbaric sport was finally outlawed by the Quorum, although it is rumored to still be practiced in remote areas of some of the mostly agricultural planets. In this brutal sport bears or bulls are placed in a pit with a pack of dogs, said pit being deep enough or walled high enough that the animals cannot escape. Although some spectators attend primarily to bet on who will ultimately last the longest, many come just to watch the animals tear into each other. Naturally all of the poor creatures involved suffer horrible wounds, which often cause the death of the "winner" as well as the losers. _

_Since our robots are loaded with software that renders them capable of very primitive learning (equivalent to that of a dog according to Joshua) the men bet on which robot will be standing at the end of the fight. I am told the men use long sticks or lengths of pipe to 'bait' these machines, striking them and shouting instructions about moves to make to overcome the opponent._

_Irina is a gentle soul and was horrified by this revelation. While I disapprove in general of activities like this as I think they encourage the basest inclinations in humans, I reminded her that these robots are simply machines without emotions or the ability to suffer pain. I told her that it would be the same as if they had set two of the camp's toasters to fighting. She thinks one of the robots has 'sad eyes' and believes they are indeed capable of knowing what is being done to them. She has now gotten Nadine believing as she does. To pacify both of them I have promised to speak with Chester Pollard, head of security, and ask him to put a stop to this primitive 'entertainment'. I doubt I will have any luck._

_We finally had to declare this topic of conversation off-limits because it upsets Nadine and Irina so much. Since Nadine is getting closer to her delivery date, I am trying to keep her as calm as possible. Many of our mercenaries are rough and brutal men and I'd rather they let the robots fight than have the men fight each other as they have also been known to do, leaving me to patch up their injuries and listen to their boasting about how the 'other guy' is going to suffer the next time._

_Thank the gods that we have only two months left before our departure date. I am more than ready to go home. _

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

As soon as Kara saw the list posted in the mess hall after dinner, she walked over to the table where Hot Dog sat with Maggie. Skulls, the pilot who had been with them earlier, had already left.

"Hey, Maggs," she said. "How're you doing?"

"Tired," Maggie answered. "I know I need to get up and go to my rack, but I can't get motivated to move."

Kara looked at Hot Dog. "Our next CAP is from 03:00 until 06:00. I think it's time to head for our bunks."

Without a word Hot Dog and Maggie stood. The three of them walked to the stairs and went down a deck level to where the pilots' quarters were located. Maggie stopped when they reached her door.

"Thanks again for saving Kat," Hot Dog said. "I'll buy you and Skulls a round when things settle down."

Maggie glanced at Kara. "Who does the baby look like?"

"What baby?"

"Karl has more than one?"

Kara felt like an idiot for not making the connection since she'd just eaten dinner with Karl and Saunders. "She looks like Sharon."

Maggie didn't comment, just turned and walked into the bunkroom.

Kara and Hot Dog continued to theirs. Their new bunkmate was there and introduced herself as Solange Dupree, call sign _Pepper_. She was medium height and muscular, her skin the color of coffee with cream. Her curly dark hair was cropped short. She looked so much like Keshia, Yolanda Brenn's companion, that Kara couldn't help but stare. Dress her in Keshia's colorful blouses and skirts and wind a narrow scarf through her hair and they could be twins.

"I got something in my teeth?" Solange asked.

Kara couldn't place the accent, but it was clearly not Gemenese like Keshia's.

"You look a lot like somebody I know," Kara answered. "You could be twins except she's older than you."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Her mother was from Gemenon, but she told me she was born in the cargo hold of a freighter in space. She never knew her father."

That brought a short laugh from Solange. "Then your friend and I have something in common. I never knew my father either. My mother worked in a bar near the main spaceport on Scorpia. It was a very popular bar. My mother was a very popular bartender."

"My friend Keshia said her father was a pirate."

Solange laughed again. "They're all pirates or haven't you figured that out yet?"

"You're from the _Ajax_?"

"I'm one of those who made it."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"The pilot who was in this bunk died?"

Kara nodded. "We'd only just met. Hot Dog knew her better. Her name was Cheryl."

"A pretty name. Is she the only one in here who died?"

Hot Dog said, "One of the other pilots was wounded. She's in Sick Bay."

"Time to hit the sack," Kara said. "We'll only get a couple hours' sleep before we have to get up." She started to take off her fatigue jacket.

"Go with me to see Kat," Hot Dog blurted.

"Are they were letting people in Sick Bay now?"

"When everything calmed down, they started letting a few in at a time. Skulls told me."

"Are you sure you want me to go along?"

"Yeah."

They walked in silence all the way to Sick Bay and signed a visitor log. A med tech escorted them to a private room with the blinds drawn and told them that Kat was in a coma and they could only stay a minute.

"She's not going to know you're here," the woman said.

"He's her boyfriend," Kara said. "Can you tell us anything about her?"

"She's still critical."

Kara almost said, _Duh, we figured that._ But she bit back her sarcastic reply. Instead she said, "He saw her eject."

"It looked like something went wrong with the ejection mechanism," Hot Dog said. "Her ship had already been hit when she tried to punch out. Her canopy…" He shook his head and swallowed hard. "Is she going to make it?"

"Head injuries are hard to predict. Dr. Cottle operated to relieve some of the pressure and drain a big hematoma…a pool of blood between her brain and her skull. The bleeding has stopped. That's a good sign."

"Is that why her head is so bandaged?" Hot Dog asked.

"That and..." the woman stopped.

"Go ahead. We can take it." Kara said.

"She's got some bad facial cuts, probably from the plastic in her face shield. It had shattered. Dr. Cottle did the best he could, but he said she'd need to see a plastic surgeon after she's better."

Hot Dog hesitated in the doorway of the room. Kara gave him a push. He went in and Kara backed away to give him some privacy. She saw him go up to the bed and take Kat's hand.

"Talk to her," Kara said. "Tell her how you feel." Then she closed the door.

A woman came out of the room next to Kat's and Kara immediately recognized her as the one who was sitting beside her father when she'd first walked into the Sick Bay waiting room two days earlier, the one who had told her not to be so hard on him.

"Kara?" The woman said.

"Petra?"

"That's right." They stood awkwardly for a few moments until Petra asked, "Are you visiting a friend?"

"I came up here with another pilot." She gestured toward Kat's room. "Someone he cares about is in there."

Petra seemed to understand. "How's your father?"

"He's fine. We're okay."

"Lee?"

"Back on his feet. What are you doing here?"

Petra looked relieved. "Targa needs someone with him. I volunteered. It's the least I can do. He got shot saving me and Yoshimo."

"Could I say _hello_ to him?"

"Sure. He's awake now. He's asked about everybody."

Kara walked to the door and for a moment didn't recognize the man who lay on his side in the bed. From the day they'd met in the forest, Targa had always had a heavy beard and had worn his thick hair pulled back and tied at his neck. This man was clean-shaven with short hair. Except for the fact that his dark hair was mixed with silver, he looked like Hunter.

"You clean up nice," Kara said.

He managed a smile. "It took getting shot."

Petra walked over and very gently ran her hand across Targa's shoulder. In that one small gesture, Kara realized that she was looking at something more than a grateful nurse taking care of a patient. Targa reached up and put his hand over hers.

Petra smiled. "He's got a little bit of feeling in his legs."

"Just pins and needles," Targa added. "I still can't move them."

Petra smiled. "But it's a good sign."

"That's great," Kara said.

"Will Hunter be coming back soon?" Targa asked.

"I think my dad is going to get him in the morning."

"Petra tells me my people are considering letting some Cylons help with the harvest."

"I heard the same thing," Kara said.

"And Hunter and our people are going along with it?"

"We'll find out," she said. "They're meeting about it tonight. I've got to hit the sack. I'll let you get some rest."

"I don't need rest. I need to be doing my share," he said with a trace of anger in his voice.

"And you will…soon," Petra said.

Kara backed out of the door. "I'll come back when I can."

"We'd like that," Petra said. "Tell your father to stop by, too…if he has a chance. I know he's been busy."

Hot Dog was waiting for her, his face pale. "I think she squeezed my hand once. It was probably my imagination."

Kara didn't ask him what he'd said to her. He didn't seem to want to talk so they walked back to the bunkroom in silence. Just outside the door Kara said, "Sometimes all we've got is faith. I'll pray to Artemis and Apollo for her."

He nodded and they went inside. "Wake me up in time for CAP," he said.

"Why does it always have to be me who sets the alarm clock?" She joked, trying to lighten the mood.

"Because I don't have one. Kat always used to make sure I was awake."

Behind her privacy curtains, Solange said, "Pipe down you two. I'll make sure you're both awake."

Kara grinned at Hot Dog. "Happy now?"

He began taking off his fatigues. "Not yet. When Kat gets in my face and tells me to _frak off_, then I'll be happy."

"Maybe she won't tell you that. Maybe she'll just want to frak."

"Dream on Starbuck. Not everybody has it as good as you and Apollo."

...

John awakened from the dream with a start, thinking he was back in the Cylon prison. He lay for several minutes until his pounding heart slowed. The room was dim but not so much that he couldn't tell where he was. He hadn't dreamed about the prison for a long time, but considering the stress and lack of sleep for the last four days, he wasn't too surprised the nightmare had come back.

He rolled over and saw the outline of Lee in his bunk on the other side of the room. Then he looked at his watch. Almost 05:00. He sat up and rubbed his face. He'd slept soundly for five hours. That would have to do since today was going to be busy. By the time he got a shower and shaved, the officer's mess would be serving breakfast.

The previous evening he and General Vargas has talked to Lucy and Natalie for an hour after the meeting had ended and then he and the general had talked for another hour after Buddy and Natalie had returned to their quarters.

Natalie had had no luck convincing Helena Cain to talk to her younger sister's avatar. When John had briefly walked out into the corridor with Buddy as they'd left, he had seen the frustration on Natalie's face.

"You know she's attracted to you, don't you?" John had asked.

Natalie had sighed softly. "Yes."

"And you?"

"I was created to love men. The creators tweaked the programming of some of my sisters so they would want to take women as lovers. One of the creators in particular liked to watch two of my sisters make love to each other while he performed a certain sex act on himself. A few of my sisters were given the desire to have relationships with both men and women in order to please another of the creators, but they left my programming alone. If my sister Shelly were here, she would have responded to Commander Cain's interest. Shelly is what you would call bisexual."

"Maybe they'll meet one day."

"Perhaps. There are a few copies of her in the city. You probably saw a copy or two in Settlement Alpha." She smiled playfully. "If Commander Cain can curb her desire to destroy every Cylon who crosses her path, maybe they'll eventually meet."

"Thank you for all you did tonight. We appreciate it."

Natalie had gently squeezed his arm. "Were it not for you, I think we'd all be dead now. Admiral Adama and his fleet would have destroyed our baseships and then our planet."

"No. I can't take credit for that. Laura had already decided that Nereid would be preserved. The idea of a blended society was hers. Fortunately she's in a position to make it happen. She's Bill's Commander in Chief."

"Do you not also see God's hand in everything that has happened?"

He had taken a deep breath and told her the truth. "Sometimes."

"I hope I get to meet your wife. I already think of her as a leader with far more vision than most leaders have."

"I'm sure the two of you will meet. I've told her about you. She's counting on your leadership on this planet."

Natalie had smiled. "I'd be honored. Now go swap war stories with General Vargas, but don't stay up too late drinking with him. He's got a plan to put together and you need your rest."

John hadn't told her what he suspected. Nathan Vargas's strategy had been put together long before tonight. The general was known as a meticulous planner. He was also a realist, not given to grandiose ideas about what his men were capable of against a far superior foe both in numbers and firepower. Six years earlier Vargas had been tasked with the difficult job of presenting a realistic assessment of the military situation to the government of Caprica. They would surrender to the Cylons or they would face extinction as a species. He had done his job with efficiency, but he had not been able to bring himself to negotiate with them afterward. He'd turned down that job and Bill Adama had reluctantly taken his place.

After watching Buddy and Natalie start up the corridor, John had walked back into the Situation Room to see if Vargas had any more questions for him. To his surprise, Vargas had asked him to stay and have another drink. They'd swapped a few stories about the First War. Vargas had been a young captain stationed on Tauron and had been in the middle of some of the fiercest ground fighting the Colonies had seen. He hadn't mentioned that to Lucy, probably because he knew that many Taurons blamed the military for the death and destruction that had been visited on their planet during that war.

John had wanted to write a letter to Laura, but by the time he'd returned to his quarters just before midnight, he had been too tired. That second drink with Vargas hadn't helped either. He'd taken off his uniform, fallen into his bunk and been asleep in minutes.

Now he got up, went to the small table and switched on the lamp that was clipped to the edge. He adjusted the shade so that none of the light fell on Lee, opened the drawer, took out a piece of stationery and began writing.

_Dearest Laura,_

_I'm sure you know by now that D'Anna died while the battle was going on. Natalie is sure that D'Anna downloaded even though the res ship had jumped away by then. She agrees with Leoben's assessment that because D'Anna was brain-dead, she will have no memories of her life since her last download therefore no memories of me or the baby. Natalie isn't even sure how we could find her since she would have downloaded while a number of other Threes from the third basestar were downloading. The kindness of your gesture, however, was not lost on Natalie and the other Cylons aboard the G and I think will help us if we are ever in a position to negotiate with a group of them._

_We begin our invasion of the surface tomorrow or the next day. General Vargas told me last night that he would like for me to accompany him and his troops to the high plateau as a member of his staff. I told him I'd serve however he and Bill think I can be the most help. Lee has been appointed ground CAG and Kara has indicated that she wants to be part of the Viper ground support force so we might all three wind up on the surface. I could write pages about my feelings on Kara flying support for the ground war, but my fears aren't going to change her mind. It's what she trained for and I understand how she feels. All I can do is pray for her safety at the same time I pray that I never have to see my sons go off to war._

_I can't tell you how much I miss you and Brae, and how much I appreciate the letter you sent with the pictures of Sean. My greatest hope is that the fighting will soon be over and I can come home. I think about you every day and I pray that we'll get another chance to be together. Despite the shameful things I did while I was a prisoner, I have never stopped loving you and I never will. John_

He folded the letter, sealed it in an envelope and addressed it to Laura. He wasn't sure when the next ship would jump to Caprica, but he was sure that if he gave the letter to Bill, he would put it into the diplomatic pouch going to Marble House.

Lee was still sleeping soundly. John turned off the small lamp, got his shaving gear and a towel and headed for the shower.

Lee was sitting up in his bunk when John got back.

"I'm sorry if I woke you," he said.

"You didn't." Lee stood carefully and got a clean towel and the small bag that held his soap and shaving gear. "I need to get up and get some breakfast so I can take one of these antibiotics. I'm going to Sick Bay later this morning and get my bandage changed. I've got to take a shower. These sponge baths at the sink are driving me nuts."

John pulled on his uniform trousers. "That's one of the ways the Cylons dehumanize their prisoners. They don't let them take a shower or bathe. I had a sink and a toilet in my cell, but the closest I came to a bath or shower in four months was when they dunked me in a tub of filthy ice water and held me under."

It was the first time John had spoken to Lee about what he had endured at the hands of the Cylons.

Lee took a deep breath. "And here I am complaining."

"I shouldn't have mentioned it, John said. "I've done my best to put those four months behind me."

"How can you…I just don't understand how you can work with them now."

"None of the ones with us are the ones who tortured me. If I wanted to kill all of them, then I'd be no better than the Cylons who came to the Colonies bent on our destruction."

John turned, got a t-shirt out of his locker and pulled it on, but not before Lee saw the thin scars across the top and middle of his back. Apparently half-drowning him wasn't the only thing the Cylons had done.

Just as Lee got to the door, there was a knock. He opened it to a Marine who asked, "Is Major Gallagher here, sir?"

John walked to the door. "What's up?"

Though the Marine was standing at attention, he looked like he wanted to squirm. He had a hard time looking John in the eyes. "I think something's wrong with the Six, sir."

"Wrong…like she's sick?"

"No, sir. I mean I don't know, sir. She went to the shower over an hour ago and she's still in there."

"Are you talking about Natalie or Sonja?"

"The one with the platinum hair. I went in the bathroom, sir. She's sitting on the floor of the shower with the water running. I…she…won't get up. She's crying, sir."

"Did you ask Natalie to help her?"

"No, sir. She asked for you. I told her I'd come get you."

"Go get Natalie. I don't care if you have to wake her up."

"Yes, sir."

John shut the door, removed his uniform pants and put on a pair of sweatpants. "Something tells me I'm going to get wet."

"What do you think is wrong with her?" Lee asked.

"God only knows. Come on. Let's go."

"Me?" Lee asked.

John managed a smile. "It's not like you haven't seen her naked before. I'm not especially anxious to be alone with her. The Cylons are strong. If she freaks out, I'm going to need help."

Lee swallowed hard as he followed John. The image of Sonja rising from the tub had been burned into his brain.

"I'm not sure how much help I would be with my side…"

"You can go get the Marines if I need help, can't you?"

"Yeah. I can do that."

The bathroom that served the four guest quarters had eight toilets and twelve sinks. The sinks were arranged back to back in a double row with mirrors in between. Eight showers were in the back of the room behind a privacy wall. Sonja was huddled in the corner of the last one. John remembered that he'd heard the water running while he'd taken his own quick shower but hadn't given it a thought. This bathroom was used by everyone in the four guest quarters.

He reached in and turned off the water. Battlestars didn't encourage long showers. The water ran cold after eight or nine minutes. The Marine said she'd been in there an hour.

"Give me your towel," He said to Lee, "and go ask Natalie to bring Sonja's robe."

When Lee was gone, John knelt in the shower and wrapped the towel around Sonja's shoulders and began drying her. Her teeth were chattering, her arms wrapped tightly over her breasts, her knees drawn up. When she looked at him, her eyes were red.

"I can't wash it off," she said.

"What?" John asked gently.

"The birth fluid from the tank. It's in my hair. It's on my skin."

"Take it from me, Sonja. You're clean as a whistle."

"I can smell it. It smells like…like sex."

"I think that's your imagination."

Her voice held pain. "Why haven't you come to see me?"

"Because there's only one of me and I've been really busy."

"Spend the morning with me. _Please_. See…I said the magic word you like to hear."

"I can't. I need to get down to the valley and find out if they're going to accept your brothers and sisters as helpers for the harvest. If they do, then I've got to get Hunter, Natasi and LG49 back up here."

"Will you come to see me then?"

"Do you not realize what's going on?" John asked, struggling to keep the exasperation out of his voice. "It's not like we're back in the city and we've got all the time in the world."

Sonja looked at him and he saw the pain in her eyes. Her teeth were still chattering, but he didn't dare take her in his arms, not with her naked. It was difficult enough just being around her. She was temptation brought to life. _God forgive me, _he thought and wondered where Lee and Natalie were. Then he remembered the way Sonja had taken care of him after he'd found Rika's body. He sat down beside her in the wet shower and put his arm around her. She put her head on his shoulder.

"They aren't you," she said softly. "None of them are you."

"Shhhh. Don't talk. Natalie will be here soon. We're going to get you some help."

…

Lee stood outside Natalie's quarters and waited while she dressed. The last thing he'd expected that morning was Sonja falling apart. When she'd come to see him two days earlier, he hadn't seen any sign of it. Could a Cylon have a breakdown like a human…or was it all a ploy to get John's attention?

One of the two Marine guards kept glancing at him. "Is there something you want to say, private?" Lee asked.

"No, sir."

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen, sir."

"Sonja is some woman, isn't she?"

"She's a Cylon, sir."

"Have you been in her quarters?"

"No, sir. I was sent up here to guard them and make sure they aren't harmed, not to frak them."

"But all of you haven't felt that way, have you? Some of you have gone in her quarters and had a good time. Isn't that right, private?"

The young man couldn't hold Lee's gaze and dropped his eyes.

"Answer my question."

"If they had, sir, it was because she invited them. Nobody took advantage of her."

Lee wanted to give the private a lecture on the code of conduct they were all supposed to live by. He wanted to tell him that even if Sonja had appeared to want sex, even if it wasn't rape, they could still have taken advantage of her. But he would have been lecturing the wrong man. This young private had done the right thing. Besides, his own brother had frakked one of them. Lee was sure by now that most of the Marines on board knew it, at least the enlisted men. Zak wouldn't have talked, but he was sure the guards from last night would have. If Lee raised the issue of some of the guards having sex with a Cylon, then he'd have to include his brother and he didn't want to see Zak in the brig.

The door opened and Natalie came out carrying the thick white robe that Sonja had worn from the lab. It had clearly been laundered because the blood was gone.

"I didn't hear her leave this morning," Natalie said.

"The guard said she'd been in the shower for at least an hour."

"I should have watched her more carefully. I should have realized that her experiences being shot and boxed for two months had traumatized her."

"Is she having some kind of breakdown?" Lee asked in surprise. "I thought it was just a way of getting John's attention."

They reached the door of the bathroom. Natalie stopped. "I'm not sure. We're certainly capable of emotional issues. Still, I wonder if the prison commandant did something to her conscious and memories while she was boxed. The One in the city might have been glad to see the mother of our peacemaker escape, but the One at the prison would have regarded Sonja as the worst kind of traitor for helping them."

"John really shouldn't have to deal with this right now," Lee said, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. "He's doing his best to see that all Cylons get fair treatment."

"I know," Natalie said.

"You shouldn't have to deal with it either."

"Sonja is my sister. Would you not help your brother?"

Lee didn't need to answer her.

They walked into the bathroom. General Vargas stood at a sink with a towel wrapped around his hips. He had just finished shaving. Lee knew Vargas occupied the guest quarters nearest the admiral.

"Good morning, sir," Lee said as they walked behind him.

"Captain Adama. Natalie."

He saw the general's eyes follow them in the mirror and wondered what he was thinking. Did he think Lee and Natalie were getting ready to shower together? They rounded the corner and walked to the last shower stall. John was sitting on the floor with his arm around Sonja. He had covered her with the towel as best he could.

When he saw them, John stood and lifted Sonja to her feet. The towel fell to the shower floor and Lee got another glimpse of the beautiful Cylon before Natalie quickly slipped the robe around her and helped her get her arms in the sleeves. She tied the sash and then looked at John.

"What should we do now?"

"I think we should take her to Sick Bay," John said.

"They're really short of beds," Lee said. "Remember they kicked me out to make room."

"I'm not going to put her back in the guest quarters where she's…being taken advantage of." John's gaze bored into his. "Have you got a better idea?"

Lee shook his head. He'd expected a retort from Sonja, but she was silent. Maybe that's because she had John's undivided attention at the moment.

"Go ahead and get your breakfast," John said to him. "If you father asks where I am, tell him I'm taking care of something and I'll be there as soon as I can."

Lee watched them leave before he went back to the sinks. General Vargas was gone and Commander Cain, clad in sweatpants and tank top, was brushing her teeth. She looked sweaty like she'd been exercising. They exchanged greetings. Using his right hand and reaching behind his neck, Lee managed to pull his t-shirt off, aware that Cain's eyes were on him the whole time. It made him uneasy until he realized that she was looking at the elastic bandage that was wrapped several times around his midriff.

"I can't take a shower, yet, sir," he said although he didn't understand why he felt like he owed her an explanation. He waited for the water to run warm and then bent over and wet his hair.

"What's wrong with the Cylon?" Cain asked.

"I don't know. John and Natalie are taking her to Sick Bay."

"I didn't think they got sick. What happened to her? Was she attacked?"

Lee rubbed shampoo into his hair and began to work it into lather. "I think she collapsed in the shower."

Cain put her toothbrush back in its holder. "Have you talked to the _thing_ that calls itself my sister?"

"I've been around Buddy, but I haven't had a solo conversation with Lucy."

Cain's tone of voice was scathing. "So you accept her like you would a human? You don't think this is some Cylon trick? You really believe my sister could have been put inside a walking tin can?"

"Technology supports the creation of avatars and the Graystones seem like they were on the cutting edge of creating and using them. They raised Lucy, although from what I understand they were both dead before she created her own avatar."

"You believe she helped them, don't you? You believe my sister helped create the monsters that almost destroyed humanity."

"Meaning no disrespect, Commander Cain, but I haven't given it a lot of thought. All I know is what I've been told and I was told that she helped create the Sevens and the Eights."

Without a word Cain picked up her towel and walked past him to the showers.

Lee rinsed his hair, getting shampoo in his eyes and cursing under his breath. When he finally reached for his towel and dried his face and rubbed it over his hair, he heard Cain's shower running. He sponged off as best he could, shaved, brushed his teeth and was back in his quarters before Cain finished. He struggled into his uniform and went to the officer's mess.

Admiral Adama usually dined in his quarters, but this morning he and Colonel Tigh were at the senior officer's table in the back with General Vargas. His father motioned him over. Lee got a tray and joined them. Apparently Vargas had already mentioned Sonja's problem. In answer to the admiral's questions, Lee had to relate the story before he started eating. Halfway through Commander Cain came in and sat beside the general.

Colonel Tigh said, "Put Sonja in the brig and be done with her. We don't have time for coddling a crazy Cylon."

"I don't think John would agree, sir," Lee said. "Sonja saved his life several times on the planet."

"So he says," Cain commented.

Admiral Adama said evenly, "John isn't a liar. During the debriefing about his experiences as a prisoner, he consistently told Major Parker the same story."

"So he frakked Sonja as well as the Three," Tigh said. "I never could understand why he'd risk men's lives to unbox one of them. Now it makes more sense. She's his girlfriend."

"No, sir, she's not," Lee said trying to keep the anger out of his voice. "He rescued her because he feels like he owes her. And he's not going to turn his back on her now."

Admiral Adama ended the discussion by saying, "Let's hope he can get her settled in Sick Bay. We've got more important issues to deal with."

Lee began to eat his cold meal, the scrambled eggs and toast seeming to curdle in his stomach. Everyone at the table was silent. A nearby steward filled both Adama's and Vargas's coffee cups before moving on to Tigh. Cain placed her hand over her cup indicating she didn't want any more.

Tigh finally asked, "What's on tap for this morning?"

Bill answered. "John is going to get Hunter, Natasi and LG49 from the valley and find out if Hunter's people will accept the Cylons as harvest helpers. We'll meet after lunch to discuss the plan of attack for the high plateau."

Cain asked, "What are you going to do with the Cylons you've got in the brig, sir?"

"Nothing right now."

"You aren't even going to question them?"

"Why? Assuming they know anything about the prison, I don't think they'll talk. It would be a waste of time and resources."

"There are ways of making anyone or _anything_ talk."

Lee glanced up in time to see a look of disgust flicker across Vargas's face and then it was gone."

"Torture them?" Tigh asked.

"They didn't think twice about torturing humans in their prison on Caprica," Cain said, her voice reflecting her rising emotions. "I know...knew someone who was taken and…brutalized by them before she was executed by a centurion firing squad…all because they thought she had breached their computer security."

"I'm afraid we don't have any interrogators on board who are also experienced in the art of torture," Bill said seriously.

"If you would allow me to take them back to the _Pegasus,_ there are several men who would be more than happy to…"

"No," Adama said quickly. "But I will let Lee interrogate them." Adama looked at Lee. "Do you feel up to it, son?"

"Yes, sir," Lee said. "I'll be glad to have a go at them." He pushed his tray to the side, unable to eat any more of the cold food, and signaled the steward for more coffee. As the man was pouring, Lee saw Kara and Hot Dog enter the officer's mess. Both were wearing flight suits. They were accompanied by another pilot, an attractive, dark-skinned woman. More pilots followed them.

"Three-to-six CAP coming in," Tigh said. "Captain Minos is meeting with the pilots this morning at 09:30 to go over the mission to the surface and ask for volunteers."

"How many are we taking?" Lee asked without looking at his father.

"Twenty Viper pilots and eight Raptor crews from each battlestar…to begin with," Tigh answered. He glanced at Vargas. "We'll probably have to increase that if our Marines start fighting in multiple places."

Vargas said, "We'll determine that after we've established our base on the plateau."

"We've all got work to do," Bill said and stood. They all rose. "Stay a minute, son." When the others were gone, Bill continued. "You need to attend the meeting this morning with the pilots."

"What about questioning the Cylons?"

"That can wait until after the meeting. I want you to introduce yourself and let everyone know you'll be ground CAG for the invasion. Captain Minos is going to ask for volunteers. If he gets too many or too few, we'll put all the names in a hat."

"Kara wants to go to the surface," Lee said. "I'm not sure how you feel about that."

"Let's wait and see how the selection process turns out."

"She'd be in my chain of command."

"I'm aware of that. Now go to Sick Bay and get your checkup, attend the meeting and then after lunch you can go talk to our prisoners."

"You don't really expect me to get anything from them, do you?"

Bill Adama smiled one of his rare smiles. "Stranger things have happened. We can at least say we made an effort."

"And if I get nowhere with them?"

"We'll be no worse off than we are now. I'm not going to turn them over to Cain."

On his way out Lee stopped by the table where Kara was eating with Hot Dog and the other pilot. Kara introduced him to Solange.

"In case you haven't already guessed," Hot Dog said, "Lee's her boyfriend."

"You look like you're feeling better," Kara said to Lee.

"I am. I got a good night's sleep. Have you seen Jade lately?"

"No. I just got off CAP. Why?"

"Just curious."

"Is something wrong?"

"Sonja had some kind of meltdown this morning. Your dad and Natalie took her to Sick Bay. I'm torn between thinking it's real and thinking she just wants John's attention."

"He doesn't have time to take care of her."

"I know. I'm going to be in your meeting this morning so I'll see you then. Maybe we can talk a few minutes afterward. I'm on my way to Sick Bay to get my bandage changed."

Kara smiled at him and he saw her beauty despite the fatigue on her face and the dark smudges under her eyes from lack of sleep. Hot Dog didn't look any better. Combat took its toll and they were all showing the strains of the battle two nights earlier.

When Lee was gone, Solange said, "So that's the crown prince."

"That's him," Hot Dog answered.

"He doesn't look much like his father."

"He looks like his mother," Kara said. "She died a couple of years ago."

"Speaking of fathers, there's _yours_," Hot Dog said.

Kara turned as her father entered the officer's mess. Everyone except the pilots who had just come off CAP had finished eating and gone. Kara waved at him. He got his tray and brought it over to the table.

"May I join you?"

"You don't need to ask. You know Hot Dog. This is Solange Dupree, call sign Pepper. This is my father, Major John Gallagher."

John nodded at both of them.

"You just got all kinds of connections," Solange said.

"Have you mentioned to her that she looks a lot like Keshia?" John asked.

"Yeah. A younger Keshia."

"Is this Keshia a pilot?" Solange asked.

"No, she works at a shelter for battered women and children on Caprica." Anticipating Solange's next question, Kara continued. "It's a long story. I'll tell you someday." She looked at her father. "How's Sonja?"

"I left her with Doc Cottle. Natalie is going to stay with her for a while. I'll check on her before I go to the valley. I was trying to get here in time to eat with Bill and General Vargas. I didn't make it."

He ate in silence for a few minutes until Kara said, "We've got a meeting in a couple of hours. We're going to talk about who goes to the planet and who stays on board the ship."

John ate his last bite of toast and gulped down the rest of his coffee. "I'd love to stay and talk, but I've got a lot to do this morning. I've got to go to the valley, otherwise I'd come to the meeting." He stood.

"Don't worry about your tray," Kara said. "We'll take care of it."

He started to lean over and kiss her head, but thought better of it. It would probably only embarrass her in front of her friends. "Thanks, baby. Try to get some sleep today."

"You, too."

When he had walked away, Solange said, "Now I know who you are. I thought your name sounded familiar. How do you feel about your stepmother's ideas on the half-breed kid?"

Kara shrugged. "It is what it is."

"Do you believe in the prophecy like she does?"

"I believe in what we do. I believe that if the Cylons will accept living with us in peace, then maybe we all have a chance. Personally I don't think that's going to happen the way my stepmother wants it to. I think there are some of them that will fight to the death. And that's what you believe, too, or you'd be wearing the robes of a priest instead of a flight suit. You'd be lighting candles and chanting prayers to the gods instead of climbing into a cockpit and blowing Raiders out of the sky."

Solange smiled showing beautiful white teeth. "You speak your mind."

Hot Dog snorted. "You can say that again."

Maggie and Skulls walked in and got trays. They were both in flight suits. Kara didn't know if they were coming in or going out. Skulls walked over to the table and sat. Maggie had no choice but to follow.

"New face," Skulls said. "From the _Ajax_?"

"Where else?" Solange asked.

Maggie said, "Don't pay any attention to him. He makes a move on all the pilots."

Skulls began stirring ketchup into his scrambled eggs. "Let's clarify that. Beautiful female pilots."

Solange smiled at Kara. "A self-confessed pirate, no less."

"Argh, matey," Skulls said. "Where did that come from anyway?"

"A very old movie," Hot Dog said. "Didn't you ever see _Pirates of the Scorpian Seas?"_

"Can't say that I did," Skulls replied.

"How's Lee?" Maggie asked.

"Better," Kara said.

"Skulls heard something from one of his Marine buddies about Zak."

"Oh, yeah? What?"

"Not now, Racetrack," Skulls said.

Maggie didn't pay any attention to him.

"Who's Zak?" Solange asked.

"Her boyfriend's brother," Maggie said. "You heard of the heir and the spare? He's the spare. Skulls heard he's frakking the Cylon."

"Which one?" Kara asked keeping her voice disinterested although she knew exactly which one. "We've got a couple on board."

"The Eight."

Kara turned up her coffee cup. "That's really none of my business. None of yours either since you dumped him for that creepy criminal you're dating now."

"What's this?" Skulls asked. "Racetrack here had a thing with Apollo's brother? Why am I always the last to know?"

Maggie ignored him and continued to talk to Kara. "So you don't care if you wind up with a Cylon sister-in-law?"

Kara shrugged. Part of her wanted to slam Maggie's head into the table. But Kara knew that whatever she did would reflect not only on her, but on Lee and Zak and her father as well. There was also the little issue of brig time for assaulting a fellow officer.

She stood, picked up her tray and stacked her father's tray on top. "A Cylon sister-in-law will go good with my new half-Cylon brother. I'm sure my stepmother will be ecstatic at all the human-Cylon love being generated."

Hot Dog also stood. "You coming, Solange?"

"I'll stay and talk to the pirate. He's from Scorpia. I recognize his accent."

On their way back to the bunkroom, Hot Dog asked, "Do you think she's right about Lee's brother? He's frakking the Eight?"

"Her name is Jade…and I don't see how. The Marines watch them all the time."

Yet even as she spoke the words, she knew that where there was a will, there was a way. Zak had come up to the upper decks once. He could no doubt have done it again.

…

Dr. Cottle was in his office when John got to Sick Bay. He knew that Saunders and Karl were waiting for him on the hangar deck, but he didn't want to leave before he got the doc's opinion on Sonja.

Cottle lit a cigarette as soon as John walked in.

"What's the verdict?" John asked.

"I examined her. Physically she's fine…heart, lungs…reflexes...all fine. She's apparently been indulging in quite a lot of sex."

"I wasn't aware of that or I'd have tried to put a stop to it. Not that it matters to me who Sonja fraks. I just don't want to see her taken advantage of."

"That might be part of the problem…the fact that you aren't jealous."

"I thought she understood before I took D'Anna off the planet that things were over between me and her, had been over for a while."

Cottle took a long drag on the cigarette and exhaled. "I wish I understood how their minds work. I wish I understood this _downloading_ thing they do. There's no telling what has happened to her in the process. Hell, most of the time I can't even figure out what's wrong with human minds that go astray."

"Do you think you can help her?"

"Frankly, I have no idea. The nerve fibers in a Cylon brain are silica and not organic like a human's. I can try treating her with an anti-depressant but I have no idea how that would work on her brain. It might help or it might do more damage than good or it might have no effect at all."

"I don't want her treated like a lab rat. Isn't there anything else you can do?"

"I have a trauma counselor on staff. We could give that a shot."

"Before you try that, could you let Yoshimo talk to her? He's a priest of their religion. She met him down on the planet. He's Natalie's spiritual advisor…and yoga instructor. Maybe he'll be able to help her."

"Good idea. He's no longer a patient but he's been such a comfort to some of the badly wounded that I've asked him to stay. He reads scripture to them and talks to them. I've even seen him writing letters for them."

"Yoshimo is a good man," John said.

"Petra's earning her keep as well. She's staying with Targa all day and half the night. She's probably suffering from some kind of post-traumatic shock and this is her way of dealing with it. Hell, half this ship has probably got some kind of mental problems." Cottle stubbed out the cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. "I'll ask Yoshimo to talk to Sonja."

John walked to the door. "Thanks, doc. You're a good man, too."

"I'll let Sonja know you came by," Cottle said in the gruff voice he always used as way of acknowledging a compliment.

...

Kara stifled a yawn as she and Hot Dog sat in the ready room. Lee was already sitting at the front with Troy Minos when they entered.

"So you going to volunteer to go down to the planet?" Kara asked him.

"I…don't think so."

"You want to stay up here with Kat. I understand."

"Part of me wants to go."

"My dad talked to me yesterday about what it would mean if I go and am under Lee's command."

"You've got to be careful. I got caught. Me and Cally. Last year."

"I heard."

"I think the whole fleet heard."

"You can't always control who you're attracted to."

"I should have known better. But it was while the Cylons were still in charge of everything. I don't know. Sometimes I felt like we were putting something over on them. Of course Commander Cain didn't see it that way. She chewed Cally out bad and me worse. I think she blamed me for the whole thing. After Cally left, she gave me a lecture on what it means to be an officer in the Colonial fleet."

"How did you manage it...seeing Cally?"

"Cally found places we could get together. She knows every nook and cranny on the ship. Somebody finally ratted on us."

"I heard she's seeing Chief now. You think it was him that ratted you out?"

"Naw. I think it was some dude named Prosna. A deckhand named Socinus who knows both of them told me that Prosna had always had a thing for Cally."

Minos stood and positioned himself behind the podium. "Okay, everybody. Let's get started. I guess by now you've all heard that we're going to the planet." He smiled. "Is anybody hearing this for the first time?"

Kara glanced around. There were no raised hands.

Minos continued. "Our Marines are going to need air support for their ground missions. Each of the seven battlestars has been asked to select twenty Viper pilots and eight Raptor crews to create a ground air crew. Initially that's a hundred forty Vipers and fifty-six Raptors. We're asking for volunteers. I've already met with last night's CAP and got some names in the hat or rather the buckets. Now it's your turn. I've got slips of paper up here. Anybody interested in becoming part of the ground wing, come up and add your name. Viper pilots in the blue bucket. Raptors in the red bucket."

Kara joined many of the pilots who had gotten up and walked to the front. Hot Dog stayed in his seat. So did Pepper who was sitting with Maggie and Skulls. They also kept their seats. She understood why Hot Dog wanted to stay on the G, but thought that Maggie would have jumped at the chance to go to the planet.

When Kara dropped her folded slip of paper into the small blue bucket, she saw that it was nearly full. Minos was going to have to draw names. As she turned to walk back to her seat, she glanced at Lee. He smiled and she felt it in the pit of her stomach. Even her fatigue couldn't stop what the sight of him often did to her. The night they'd spent together down on Nereid seemed long ago although it had only been a week.

If they were on the planet together…_when_ they were on the planet together, they'd find a way just like Hot Dog and Cally had once found a way. She refused to think that they might be caught. It wouldn't happen. They'd be too clever.

When the last pilot had put his name in the bucket, Minos stepped behind the podium again.

"I don't think Captain Lee Adama needs an introduction, but I'm going to do it anyway. I went to the Academy with Lee and watched him graduate as our valedictorian. He finished first in the Viper Top Gun competition during Flight School. He was also involved in the fighting last November so I think he's more than qualified for the post of ground CAG. For those of you who go planet side, he'll be your CO. Any questions so far?"

There were none so Minos said, "Then I'll turn the meeting over to Captain Adama and let him say a few words."

Lee stepped up to the podium and cleared his throat. "Thank you, Captain Minos. As you all know, a ground war will be different from a space war. There are eight settlements on the surface plus a city. All have humans living in them as well as Cylons and a lot of centurions, so the job of our Marines is going to be difficult to say the least. We don't know what we're going to face. We don't know how the Cylons will react to our attempt to free their human slaves. Most of our tactics will be dictated by how they react to the invasion." Lee stopped and took a deep breath. "We all hope that when confronted with overwhelming force, the Cylons will surrender, but we also have to plan for the probability that they won't. We know they rely on their centurions to do their fighting for them. We know those centurions have weapons capable of bringing down our Raptors and Vipers, so for any of you who think this will be a walk in the park, it won't be. Now's the chance to change your mind."

Someone behind Kara asked, "Where will we be stationed…if we get selected?"

"Our intention is to set up a base of operations on a high plateau several hundred miles east of the city and about three hundred miles north of the nearest settlement. Right now the Cylon prison and a lab are located there plus an airstrip about eight miles west of the complex. We don't think the Cylons are expecting us to land there first since there are only a few human guards in residence. We feel like they'll think there's no strategic value to a place that far away from the center of their government which is in the city. It's just a guess, but we think they'll expect us to invade the city first which gives us a certain element of surprise."

"How many centurions on the plateau?"

"We don't have an exact count anymore…somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500. There was a mission to the prison several nights ago. During that time a group of them at the airfield were _freed_. I realize we don't have time for a seminar on centurions since some of you have got a CAP to fly shortly, but basically the centurions have a metal disk that keeps the software for their higher cognitive functions off-line. If the disk is removed, the centurions gain the ability to think for themselves. We've found that if another freed centurion is with them and communicates some of the history they've missed, they lose their blind loyalty to the humanoid Cylons. So far the freed ones have come over to our side…every one of them. The two that some of you might have seen on board the last couple of days are especially loyal as are the humanoids."

"So what kind of numbers are we talking about that our Marines will have to fight?" A pilot on the front row asked.

"That's what we're trying to determine right now. We think there are well over 100,000 centurions on the surface of the planet. The other constraint our first ground mission faces is that we don't want any of the buildings on the plateau destroyed. We want them for our base and landing strip."

The same pilot from the back said, "So we go in shooting…but we're not supposed to hit anything?"

"Except hostile centurions."

"That should be a neat trick."

"I'm going to turn the meeting back over to Captain Minos. Those pilots chosen to go to the surface will meet later today and we'll discuss everything in much more detail. General Nathan Vargas, the Marine commander will be joining you. You'll also be relieved of flying CAPs until we go."

"Which will be when?"

"In the next couple of days."

Lee stepped back and let Minos return to the podium. He finally looked at Kara. Her face was set, her jaw tight. Minos went to the red bucket first, reached in and stirred the slips of paper thoroughly. He then asked Colonel Tigh to come down front and draw the names. The last Raptor crew Tigh drew was Saunders, Karl and their ECO.

Then Minos took the blue bucket and did the same thing, stirring the slips of paper for half a minute before handing it to Tigh. As Tigh drew out the twenty slips, he handed them to Minos who read the names.

Kara couldn't believe it, but at the end, her name was not one of those read. She glanced at Lee. He wasn't looking at her.

Kara felt hot for a minute and then cold. She had been certain that her name was going to be chosen. She had been certain that she and Lee would be together on the surface.

Minos said, "I'll be reposting the CAP schedule this afternoon. Some of you might be moved to a different rotation so take a look. I'd like for the chosen pilots to stay behind. The rest of you are dismissed."

She and Hot Dog stood. "Sorry about that," he said. "I guess you're stuck up here with us."

Kara didn't trust herself to speak. It was all she could do to deal with her disappointment. They walked back to their quarters where she pulled off her flight suit before she flopped down on her bunk in her tank tops and underwear.

"You aren't going to the shower?" Hot Dog asked.

"In a minute."

He got his gear and left. Kara closed her eyes and was almost asleep when Pepper came through the door. "There's a skinjob in the hall wants to talk to you," she said.

"Me?"

"Your name's _Kara_, isn't it?"

Kara started to say something about using the term _skinjob_ to describe all the Cylons, but knew how useless it was to try to change some people's opinions. She rolled out of her bunk, pulled on a pair of sweatpants and went out into the corridor.

Jade stood there.

"What's up?" Kara asked.

"Can we go somewhere and talk?"

"For a little bit. I've got to get some sleep. I'm on CAP again at 15:00.

"We can go back to my quarters. Nobody's there now."

"Sonja's not frakking one of her Marine guards?"

"Your father and Natalie took her to Sick Bay."

Kara snorted. "What'd she do? Sprain her love muscle?"

"That's funny," Jade said, but she didn't laugh. They walked along in silence until Jade asked, "Is something wrong?"

Kara shrugged. She didn't want to discuss her disappointment with Jade. "I'm just tired."

They got to Jade's quarters and went inside. Kara got strange looks from the two Marines. Sonja liked men. Maybe they thought Jade liked women.

When they were inside, Jade seemed reluctant to talk. She picked up a t-shirt from her bunk and folded it.

"So what's on your mind?" Kara prompted.

"Zak and I had sex last night," Jade said with her back still turned.

"How did you manage that?" Kara asked incredulously.

"Your father let me go to his quarters because I didn't want to stay in here with Sonja. Zak found me. The Marine guards told him where I was."

"You dragged me all the way up here to tell me you had sex?" Kara asked grumpily.

"Then go back to your quarters," Jade snapped.

Kara sat down at the table in the middle of the room. "So are you glad you did it or are you sorry?"

"I'm glad," Jade said shyly. "Zak did something to me with his tongue that felt so good…"

"That's too much information, Jade."

"You don't want to hear about it?"

"Nope. That should stay between you and Zak."

Jade finally turned around. "I don't know what to do. What should I do that will give him pleasure?"

Kara snorted again. "I'm sure Sonja could give you a few pointers, like about a couple hundred."

"Ugh. I wouldn't ask her for the time of day. Should I ask your father?"

"No, gods no. Never in a million years should you ask my father something like that. If you don't want to ask Zak what he likes, then ask Natalie for some pointers. She's a Six. They know everything about sex."

"Lee was angry because we did it in his bunk. He caught us."

"In the act?"

"After. He told us to get out. He made Zak change his sheets."

"Lee's not exactly himself," Kara said defensively. "He's been in pain from that bullet wound and his father is sending him to the surface as ground CAG."

"So that's why you want to go," Jade said.

"That's part of it."

"You want to kill Cylons?"

Kara sighed. "I want to help free the human slaves. If that means killing Cylons, then that's what I'll do."

"You would kill my sisters and brothers?"

"Do you think they'll surrender and let the humans go?"

"Maybe."

"Then I won't have to kill them. Look, Jade, I've got to get some sleep. I'll see you later." At the door she turned. "I'm glad you and Zak got together."

Jade looked up shyly again and smiled. "Me, too."

Out in the corridor Kara saw Lee coming from the stairs. She stopped.

"What are you doing up here?" He asked.

"Talking to Jade." She followed him down to his quarters. "Am I invited in?"

"Sure."

They went in and Kara closed the door. "Where's my father?"

"He's probably meeting with General Vargas by now…unless the valley people didn't agree to let the Cylons stay. Then he's probably arranging to get them up to the ship."

"So what are you going to do now?"

"I thought I'd take my book and the information about the plateau and go to the wardroom. Do some studying. After lunch we've got the meeting with the pilots and after that Dad wants me to question the Cylons in the brig to make Commander Cain happy. It's a huge waste of time, but Cain wants them sent to the _Pegasus_ where she can have her men torture them. Dad's trying to show her the _right_ way to do it. What are you up to?"

"I need to get some sleep but Jade wanted to tell me about sleeping with Zak."

"I guess she told you I caught them."

"Yeah."

Lee walked over and lifted her chin. "I'm sorry your name didn't get picked."

She dropped her eyes. "I'm not surprised. I have a feeling even if it had, I wouldn't have been allowed to go."

Lee knew that she was probably right, but he didn't want to say it. Instead he leaned down and kissed her, feeling desire tighten his gut. He held her face as the kiss deepened. He had never told her what Cottle's assistant had told him about no lovemaking. Now he was glad.

"I'm not sure we should try to do this," she whispered.

He kissed her again. "You remember when I had the broken leg? You complained about doing all the work. You think you remember how?"

She finally smiled. "Whose boots are going outside the door? No way I'm going to take a chance that my dad or Zak will walk in."

"According to tradition, that honor belongs to the lady. If the woman puts her boots out, it means she's a willing participant."

She helped him take off his uniform tunic. "I'm going to miss you."

"Don't talk about that now. I'll find a reason to get back up here as often as I can. We've made it through everything so far. We'll make it through this."

Kara sat down and pulled off her boots and put them outside the door wondering only briefly what her father would think if he returned to the quarters. How many others had done the same thing in the last couple of days not knowing what the future held?

She walked back to Lee and looked into his eyes. "I love you. When I heard you'd been shot…"

He stopped her words with a hard kiss. He could tell her he felt the same way when she'd stolen the Raider and he thought he'd lost her forever, but now was not the time to talk about loss. Now was the time to express their love in an act as old as humanity. Like Zak, he didn't know how long it would be before they got another chance.

…

Saunders jumped the Raptor in over the river and flew straight to the clearing. Karl volunteered to stay with the ship so Saunders could see his friend Narcho again.

When John and Saunders got to Emmalyn's, they found Hunter, Narcho and Natasi waiting for him. LG49 was outside.

All of them were sitting at the table peeling cucumbers. Emmalyn said, "We expected you an hour ago."

"We got held up," John answered. "Things are chaotic on the ship right now."

"I'll make tea."

"Don't trouble yourself. We can't stay that long. Am I going to have to send for a couple of Raptors to transport the Cylons or are they staying here in the valley?"

"They're staying," Hunter said.

"Was the vote unanimous?" Saunders asked.

"No, but I gave a speech to my people, and then Natasi talked to them. My grandfather told them he wanted everyone to give it a try. Narcho told them that he had the communication device and that if it didn't work out, he could call the ship and you'd come get them. In the end, it was decided the Cylons would mainly work the wheat fields and the cornfields where their help is most needed."

Natasi said, "But not all of them. My sister Threes expressed an interest in learning to can foods like tomatoes and beans and cucumbers. Several of the women volunteered to teach them in return for help. An Eight wants to work in the day care with the children. Dessa's helping out there today."

"So you feel all right leaving them here?"

Hunter said, "We've got to start somewhere. This is what President Roslin wants. I want to be able to look her and Maya in the eye and tell them we did our part."

They all walked outside. Emmalyn took John's arm. "You will come back if we call you…if they start murdering us in our beds."

"You know I will, but I really don't think that's going to happen." He looked into her eyes and saw resignation there. "If I had my way," he said softly, "I'd stay here and work the harvest with you and your people."

She smiled. "I believe you would."

"I don't relish what's coming next."

"The gods willing, the war won't touch our valley. We've seen enough death."

"I know."

"Your robot has a surprise for you."

John glanced at LG49 who stood with the others waiting in the road.

"Markham gave him a voice just like Buddy's?"

"He worked all night," Emmalyn said. "Has Natalie mentioned Markham?"

"No, but she's been very occupied. Maybe one of these other Sixes might appeal to him."

She sighed. "Perhaps. Take care of yourself."

"Good harvest, Emmalyn. I'll be back with news as soon as I can."

When he reached the road, they all began walking toward the trail that would take them to the clearing and the Raptor. John dropped back until he was beside LG49.

"I hear we don't need the communicator anymore."

"Markham has given me a voice like he gave to the centurion you call Buddy. He worked all night to get the job completed."

"Are you glad to be going back to the ship?"

"I would rather be on the ground."

"On this beautiful day, I agree with you. Maybe soon we'll both be back on the ground. I want you to go to the plateau with me."

"Will we be fighting my brothers?"

"I hope not, big guy. I'd like to free them if we can."

"Maybe when the war is over, they can help us find the cave of Zeus."

John was surprised. "How do you know about the cave of Zeus?"

"Markham told me. When he was a child he spent time with an old man, the brother of an Oracle to his people. He told Markham that he had found the cave of Zeus and that in it there was a star map pointing the way to Kobol. The same star map was carved by God onto the back of the Kobol Stone. Of course Markham is a skeptic and thinks humans carved the entire Kobol Stone based on information in the cave of Zeus."

"Kara and Hunter both mentioned the Oracle's brother. He wouldn't tell anyone how to find the cave. Hunter said he was just a crazy old man who sometimes rambled in a language none of them understood."

"It was the language of an ancient sect of the Thirteenth Tribe. The Oracle's brother taught some words to Markham. This planet is the home of my ancestors."

"Your…ancestors?" John asked skeptically.

"The first mechanical slaves to serve humans were created on this planet thousands of years ago. Then there was a schism in the monotheistic religion based on their interpretation of our sacred scriptures. A small group left the planet and traveled to Gemenon in your star system where they joined with a small group who worshiped as they did. The travelers took the plans for the robots with them. They also took the Kobol Stone. The plans were later sold to a group of businessmen in order to finance the Church of the Monad that was led by a succession of Reverend Mothers. The Kobol Stone was placed in a sacred room in their Temple that only the Reverend Mother could enter call the Holy of Holies. The small company that bought the plans of my ancestors was eventually acquired by a large corporation on Tauron called Vergis Industries."

"Vergis was a direct competitor of Graystone Industries...you know Graystone as in your creators."

"Yes. Until Tomas Vergis' grandfather created the first primitive meta-cognitive processor a hundred years ago, my ancestors remained without consciousness of their situation in life. Beginning a hundred years ago, they were partially self-aware. Then an engineer working for Tomas Vergis greatly improved the MCP only to have it stolen by Daniel Graystone who put it into a new robot he called the U-87 centurion. Only Graystone's MCP had something that even Vergis had not dared to dream of. Part of Zoe Graystone's avatar was in the new MCP. The U-87s were the first generation to be totally self-aware and to understand the concept of God. They are our fathers."

"Do all of you know your history this well?"

They had reached the Raptor. LG49 stopped. "They freed ones know of Vergis and Graystone, but they know nothing of what happened prior to that."

"And you learned it from Markham?"

"Many years ago, before he disappeared, the Oracle's brother gave Markham a book that he had found in the ruined city. It was written in the language of the ancients. Markham has been working trying to translate it ever since. It is from this book that he learned of my early ancestors."

"He doesn't by any chance know what happened to the Thirteenth Tribe, does he?"

"He has some theories. He said one day he would like to sit down and discuss them with you and Natalie and me and Buddy."

"Did he give you a hint about these theories?"

"He thinks that a thousand years ago some members of the Thirteenth Tribe deciphered the way to Kobol based on the stone and gathered an expedition to go there. Markham said that if they found Kobol, they were going to try to find the homeworld of humanity, the birthplace of mankind. He thinks they were going to try to find Earth.

"What about the ones who remained on this planet?"

"Markham is still working on his translation. All he said to me is that he thinks theirs was a much sadder fate."

TBC…


	65. Hit and Run

Chapter 65

Hit and Run

_The Planet_

_Day 300: I have just returned from speaking with Chester Pollard and am still shaking with anger. I had to wait four days to see him because I was told he was 'elsewhere taking care of business.' I have my doubts since for the last several months he has rarely strayed from camp. Instead he sends his teams out with the few expeditions that have been allowed. Why our head of security needs three levels of his own protectors to shield him from a group of unarmed scientists was totally beyond me until today. Now I think I have a clue as to why even the meekest might want to do this man harm. _

_On the fourth day of insisting, I was finally admitted to the innermost sanctum of the security tent where the mercenaries tend to hang out and Pollard maintains his office. I was appalled by what I saw there. Pollard has appropriated one of the robots as his personal guard/servant and has it standing behind him as he sits at his desk. Someone on his staff apparently thought he'd have a bit of fun and has 'decorated' the robot by painting eyelashes around the eye sockets and lush red lips around the mouth vent. The fraying strings of an old mop have been glued on the head to serve as hair. That, however, is not the worst of it. The 'artist' went on to paint a pair of large and very realistic-looking female breasts on the chest plate as well as female genitals on the metal piece that joins the hips and comes to a V between the robot's legs._

_Pollard introduced his robot to me as "Robota, his maid," and asked (with a hint of mockery) if I'd like for 'her' to prepare a cup of tea for me (which is well within their capability). When I politely declined, he asked if I'd come to complain about another search of my desk or living quarters. Since I had never reported the search of my personal items, his question told me that he and his men were responsible. _

_I stated my request that he put a stop to the 'bot baiting, arguing the only reason to which I thought he might respond...that the robots are valuable commodities and are being needlessly damaged by the fighting. I pointed out that as we pack up to leave the planet, they will be invaluable help in carrying the heavy supplies to the shuttlecrafts unless, of course, they are_ all_ out of commission (as several already are). In which case, I told him, his men could act as pack mules. Pollard attempted to be polite as he told me the robots were under his command and were none of my concern; however I could tell that I had angered him greatly since the term "interfering bitch" soon escaped his lips. _

_His reaction raised my own hackles and despite the fact that I have never been hot-tempered, I'm afraid I lost my cool and told him what I thought of him and his team's treatment of a valuable resource. I didn't stop with chastising him about the robots but went on to tell him what I thought about his obvious opinion of the female members of the expedition based on what had been done to 'Robota'. I compared his social awareness and level of emotional development to an adolescent male who has just discovered pornography. I ended my tirade by questioning his fitness as head of security at which point Pollard got so red-faced that I was sure he was either on the verge of having a stroke or of leaping across his desk and throttling me, probably both. _

_I exited the tent before he had his men throw me out (although in truth I'm sure most of them found the whole incident hilarious as I saw several struggling to remain straight-faced). I have promised Nadine and Irina an update, but I must wait until I have calmed down before I do it. I will readily admit that my mind has been changed about the level of intelligence in our metal companions. I say this because while I was speaking my mind to Pollard, I glanced at Robota and was stunned to see what Irina had referred to as 'sad eyes'. I suddenly realized that while they are far from having human-like intelligence, on a rudimentary level these metal creatures understand what is being done to them. Yet their programming does not allow them to do anything about it. _

_To allay the initial fears that some expedition members had about these large robots, we were assured by Captain Prolmar before he sent them to the planet with us that the robots have several hardwired 'commandments' that they cannot under any circumstances override. The first of these is: A robot shall not harm a human for any reason or by inaction cause a human to come to harm._ _The second commands them to obey all orders by humans except where such an order contradicts the first law and the third commands them to protect their own existence except where it violates the first two._

_Oh, how I wish that I had the computer skills to alter Robota's programming and let 'her' give Pollard a taste of his own medicine. I should very much like to see Pollard with that dirty string mop glued on his own shaved head._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

Lee sat at the table in his quarters studying the recon photos of the prison complex that had been taken over the last several days. He was in agreement with the specialists who had already examined them. They could see no changes since the space battle. The previous day a supply ship from the city had landed and taken off several hours later, but that was the only observable activity on the entire plateau. The ship had been refueled at the airstrip by centurions, but photographs allowed no way to tell if they were freed or not.

Lee glanced at his watch, mindful that he was going to have to wake Kara soon. They'd made love very carefully, but his side had still hurt afterward and he couldn't get comfortable in the bunk so he'd gotten up and begun to study the photographs. Kara, as was her usual habit, had fallen asleep almost immediately, so exhausted that she hadn't stirred once since then. He hated to wake her. She and the other pilots had gotten very little sleep during the last three days, but he knew she needed to shower and grab a bite to eat before her next CAP.

He went over to the bunk and sat on the edge. She looked her tender age of nineteen with her hair spread out on the pillow and the stress erased from her face. In fact while she slept, she still looked very much like the sixteen-year-old he'd fallen instantly in love with. But when she was awake, the pilot who was Starbuck looked older to him, her eyes sometimes hard and wise and cognizant of how close death always was. The cruel events and losses of her short life were etched on her beautiful face as well as the responsibility she felt as a protector of the fleet.

Kara had known her share of emotional pain, and Lee so much wanted to protect her from any more of it as well as from the physical danger she faced every time she launched in her Viper. He knew that Kara wouldn't agree with him or even appreciate it. He knew that she had been taking care of herself for a long time and was one of the best pilots in the fleet. She prided herself on both. Those traits were deeply ingrained in her character, especially the cocky attitude she put on with her flight suit.

He wanted that Top Gun pilot on the surface with him. What CAG didn't want the best men and women flying under his command? Yet the protective part of him wanted her on the _G_ where her life would be duller but safer. He realized that was selfish of him, but more than anything else, he wanted both of them to come through this war so they could stand before Elosha and share the vows that would join them for the rest of their lives. He imagined their wedding much like Maya and Hunter's with their closest friends and family there. Kara would walk down the aisle on her father's arm. John would be beaming with pride and Kara would be a vision in something simple and white.

But Lee's daydream didn't stop the progression of time and he finally forced himself to lean over and kiss her bare shoulder.

"What time is it?" She mumbled.

"Time for you to get up. I got your boots from the hall."

She rolled over, bleary-eyed. "I was having the best dream."

"Oh, yeah?"

"We were on the island at Dad's cottage. Brae was there and Rachel and Esmari and a couple of other kids. We were sitting on the beach watching them play."

He smiled. "Any of them ours?"

"I don't know. I didn't get to finish the dream."

Already it was fading from her memory. She struggled to retain the last image…the late afternoon sun, the crashing waves and the children at the water's edge. A child carrier was beside her on the beach towel and inside lay a sleeping baby with fuzzy blond hair. Hers and Lee's or her new Cylon half-brother?

"I thought you were supposed to interrogate the Cylons in the brig this afternoon."

"I told Dad that I needed to focus on the mission to the planet. He said I could do it tomorrow morning. I don't think he cares. He doesn't think we're going to get anything out of them anyway. He was just trying to keep the peace with Commander Cain."

"For somebody whose sister helped create a couple of them, she's taking a hard line."

"That's just her nature. I think she's been a hard-ass for so long she doesn't know how to lighten up."

"You're probably right. Hand me my pants."

Lee gathered Kara's clothes from the floor and watched, half-aroused as she stood and quickly dressed.

"You're beautiful," he said softly. "Everything about you."

"You're not half bad yourself." She gave him a quick kiss. Already she was shifting gears from the dream and what she shared with Lee to the CAP she would soon fly. "I'd better get going. I'll see you tonight at dinner…if you aren't dining with the senior officers."

He stood. "We've got a meeting this afternoon…in twenty minutes actually. I doubt we'll have another one tonight so I'll see you. Be careful out there on CAP today."

"Always."

…

The meeting got underway on time. Those in attendance were the same ones who had been there the night before with the addition of Hunter.

Before they started, Bill announced that Admiral Taylor had volunteered, when the time came, to transfer his pilots and all non-essential crew from the _Charybdis_ to the other battlestars or to the surface and then jump his battlestar back to the _Orion_ and start off-loading crew and supplies. They had figured it would take at least two trips to strip the stranded battlestar…maybe three.

Lee glanced at John and got a look of agreement. Both of them thought that Cole Taylor's sister had a lot to do with the admiral's volunteering. The young pilot who was currently on the _Orion _was the last relative Admiral Taylor had and he didn't want to trust her to anyone else. He probably also wanted to be the one who told her about her brother's death.

Then General Vargas took charge of the meeting and began to lay out his plan. LG49 would take a Raptor equipped with the Cylon transponder to the airstrip and determine how many of the centurions were free of their telencephalic inhibitors…if any of them were. Both Bill and Vargas had refused to risk John's life on this dangerous mission despite John's willingness to accompany the centurion.

Vargas had voiced it succinctly and privately to John just before the meeting when he had said, "You've laid it on the line enough times for the Colonies and the fleet starting with the First War. Time to let someone else step up to the plate."

That someone, of course, was LG49. John knew that Bill had not been quite as ready to trust the big centurion, but the ground mission was Vargas' bailiwick. If he trusted LG49, then Bill would go along, misgivings or not.

Hunter asked, "If none of those centurions at the airstrip are free, what do you think the prison commandant would have done with the ones we freed during the earlier mission?"

Vargas looked at John. "Ideas, Major?"

"Let's ask Natalie what she thinks."

Natalie said, "If the commandant realized that LG49 freed some of the centurions from the first hangar, then it's my opinion that he would have his prison centurions overpower them and confine them somewhere, possibly on the lowest level of the prison. They had several days to act before you started watching them."

"Provided they would surrender," Buddy added.

"Agreed," Natalie said. "The commandant would have tried not to destroy them because he could re-enslave them with new telencephalic inhibitors. He probably ordered some more inhibitors from the shipyard where the newest basestar is under construction since that's where the centurions are also created. The inhibitors are not stocked, but more could have been made. My experience with the Ones is that they're good with the overall big plans, but they fail in the small details. As much as I dislike the Fives, they're excellent when it comes to the details. That's one of the few reasons the Ones let them hang around all the time."

_Not to mention the Fives are excellent suck-ups,_ John thought. _And will take any kind of verbal abuse from the Ones._

Cain said with her usual veiled sarcasm, "I thought you freed some centurions at the prison. What happened to them?"

Buddy answered, "The centurions that LG49 freed at the prison would not have been able to free anyone since they were either destroyed in the firefight or disabled by the devices thrown by Captain Adama."

"So all of those zapped ones are now useless?" Tigh asked.

"Yes," Natalie answered, "until their meta-cognitive processors and six circuit boards can be replaced. Those are also made at the shipyard. If they had some on hand, a few of the _zapped _centurions might already be functional, but we won't know until the prison is under our control. The bottom line is that we're still dealing with around a thousand centurions that are under Cavil's control."

"The initial question," Vargas pointed out, "and the one most important at the moment is the state of those at the airstrip since those are the ones we've got to take out or have on our side before we can start landing Marines. We need the runways clear and safe for our troop ships. Buddy told us that they have one dradis setup in hangar four that is monitored only when they're expecting a supply ship."

Taylor said, "I can't believe they'd be so slack as not to monitor it all the time now…all things considered…even though everyone seems to be of the opinion that the Cylons think we'll attack the city first."

"We're assuming they are monitoring it," Vargas said. "That's why we're going to make sure LG49's Raptor has the Cylon transponder."

Commander Cain said, "Are the centurions dumb enough to be fooled by a transponder signal? Can't they see? A Raptor and a Heavy Raider don't look at all alike."

"We do not _see_ in the same way you do," Buddy said. "Our vision includes spectrums of light that the human eye cannot discern such as ultraviolet and infrared. A centurion, freed or not, would accept a brother getting off a ship that was broadcasting a Cylon signal even if that ship was not one with which he was technically familiar."

"Even a Colonial ship?"

"Colonial ships can be stolen, can they not?"

"You seem very sure about your _brothers'_ loyalty to each other," Cain said.

Lee had grown tired of Cain's continued questioning of Buddy's and Natalie's statements and almost snapped at her. "He's one of them. He should know."

"Unless he's lying to us," Cain retorted barely controlling the hostility in her voice.

"Okay, that's enough!" Bill said. "We're here to discuss a plan. Let's get on with it."

"As you can see in the recon photos," John said, "there are eight hangars. According to LG49, all hangars have about eighty centurions that function as maintenance mechanics and guards. If the commandant hasn't discovered the free ones in the first hangar, then we'll be dealing with roughly 560 enemy combatants. If he has discovered and replaced them, then it will be roughly 640. Either way, that's a lot of firepower. We don't want to fight them in or around the hangars."

Vargas said, "Major Gallagher and I briefly discussed this plan with Natalie and Buddy last night. Once we get LG49's report, we want to create a diversion about two miles southwest of the airstrip and see if we can lure the hostile centurions there to fight. The terrain is rockier and will provide better cover for the Marines. We can use heavier weapons. LG49 will keep any freed centurions at the airstrip to protect the hangars and the tylium supply. We don't want those underground tanks destroyed."

Lee said, "Our Vipers and Raptors will also provide air cover and should keep any prison centurions from reaching the airstrip."

"What about the skinjobs at the prison?" Cain asked.

Natalie answered, her tone frosty due to the racial slur Cain had used. "The Ones aren't fighters. They talk a good game, but basically they're cowards in the physical sense. He'd send the human guards out before he'd send his centurions."

"I can verify what she says," John added with a glance in Cain's direction. "Under questioning, the commandant talked before any of us laid a hand on him. He fits my definition of a coward."

"We need to get down on that plateau and establish a base as quickly as possible," Vargas said. "I'm going to order my officers and troops to be ready to go tomorrow night."

Bill finally asked a question. "How many troops are you going to take?"

Vargas said, "We'll take a troop carrier full from each of the seven battlestars…1,750 Marines in total. Initially I'll take a small specialized team from each ship, about 70 men to create the diversion. Captain Adama and Major Gallagher have picked out a good landing spot for the Raptors that will take them to the surface since Raptors don't need a runway to land."

Lee looked at his father. He knew what was in the back of Adama's mind. He wanted to know if Zak would be part of the 70 or the 1,750 or if he would remain on board the _Galactica_ to be deployed at a later date. Lee wanted to know as well, but he'd leave that question for his father to ask Vargas in private.

He realized that Vargas was speaking to him. "Will your ground squad of Vipers and Raptors be ready by tomorrow?"

"Yes, sir. We met this morning to discuss the mission and are going to meet again tomorrow morning. Right now they know they're supposed to be getting plenty of rest so they'll be alert and ready."

Vargas nodded. "Good. I've alerted my commanders to start prepping the troops. From what I'm hearing, most of them are raring to go." He looked at the XO. "Colonel Tigh, are we ready to deploy the equipment for Combat Support including medical?"

"Yes, sir," Tigh said. "The supply ship is loaded and ready. I understand that the troops practiced unloading it on Caprica. They can have it ready for treating any wounded within six hours of touchdown. By then all other support will be ready."

Natalie said, "Centurions will target a field hospital just like any other enemy structure so air support will need to be cognizant of that. The centurions wouldn't hesitate to destroy one of their own hangars if we're using it."

Lee nodded and made a note to tell his pilots during their next meeting."

"Does anyone have any questions?" Vargas asked.

He looked around the room. There were none so he continued. "I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that I've spoken with Admiral Adama and he's consented to let me take Major Gallagher to the surface. Though the major still technically reports to the admiral, he'll be part of my staff as long as we're on the planet. Natalie, Hunter, Buddy and LG49 will also accompany us."

"And Jade," Natalie whispered.

Vargas smiled. "And Jade. I believe Natasi and Sonja have chosen to remain on board ship."

"For now," Natalie added in a tone of voice that didn't invite questions.

"All right," Vargas said. "Let's go over the landing plans."

He had barely gotten started when Gaeta's voice burst over the intercom from the bridge. "Dradis contact…basestar…400 kilometers and closing fast."

Colonel Tigh got to the wall phone first. "Action stations! Set Condition One throughout the ship and launch the alert fighters!"

The klaxon started sounding almost immediately and the announcement repeated throughout the entire ship. Bill was out the door in seconds followed closely by Tigh. Both were headed for the nearby CIC.

There were a few moments of stunned silence in the room before everyone stood.

Lee looked at John. "Kara's out there right now on CAP."

…

Hot Dog was the one who named the formation of battlestars above the planet. He said that Admiral Adama had _circled the wagons_.

Born and raised in Pilgrim Bay, a little town outside of Delphi, Constanza's parents had owned and operated a local cinema complex until it had been destroyed in the bombing six years earlier.

Kara had long ago decided that Brendan Constanza had probably seen every movie made in the last twenty years and a lot made prior to that. He had an affinity for cowboy movies, but loved anything that had action. He'd also seen many of what most of the pilots derisively referred to as _chick flicks_. He'd taken no end of kidding from Kat when he'd admitted to it one night after too many beers, but he claimed a good excuse. From the time he'd been young, he'd worked for his parents and usually saw every movie shown at least once.

After Kara had launched and was looking at the big battlestars from a distance, she saw what Hot Dog meant. The ships moved constantly bow to stern in a huge counter-clockwise circle in orbit over the planet, their heavy starboard guns and missile tubes pointing outward, loaded and ready. The starboard landing pods of each ship were retracted. All Vipers and Raptors launched from the port side toward the center and then formed up the CAP. In the old movies an attack on the wagons could only come from outside the circle. The battlestars had to worry about other angles of attack including above and below. Kara could still hear Colonel Burgher's voice as he stressed the point to them. _In space you fight in all directions, fore and aft, above, below and beside._

The battlestars were close enough that an assault on one could be defended by several others but not so close that an explosion on one would damage the others. They were always moving forward in their counter-clockwise rotation because Admiral Adama knew that starting a battlestar from a standstill was not an instant process. Even the newer ships like the _Pegasus_ were slow to begin moving if they were at a full stop. Their movement had also been calibrated to keep them always in orbit over the populated areas of Nereid where surveillance cameras on all ships were constantly trained and monitoring the settlements, city and plateau.

As Kara pulled her Viper in a wide circle and began the CAP pattern, she wondered what the humans on the surface thought of what had happened…or how much they even knew of what was going on far above them. The larger ships were barely bigger than stars in the night sky. Without a powerful telescope, the Vipers and other smaller ships wouldn't be visible at all. And who on the planet would be likely to have a telescope pointed in their direction? She could think of only one person…Markham, watching and reporting to the valley.

A Viper pilot from the _Pegasus,_ which was in formation behind the _Galactica,_ was the one who first shouted the alarm half a second before the broadcast went out over all wireless frequencies.

"Basestar. Cylon base..." His shouted warning was then drowned out by the incoming enemy location and coordinates being broadcast from the _Galactica's_ CIC.

Kara's first inclination was to speed toward the approaching enemy ship even though it was barely visible in the distance. Yet she knew her duty was to protect the _G_. She could begin an attack maneuver only if ordered. Alert Vipers were launched from all ships and joined the CAP. They spread out protectively above and below the battlestars, leaving the area in front of the big ships' guns free to engage the basestar.

Her wireless crackled. "Basestar is launching Raiders. Do not engage until ordered. Repeat. Do not engage until ordered."

Kara could see the basestar on her dradis and then the small blips of the Raiders swarming like wasps from a nest, but she still couldn't get a visual on the Raiders. They were too far away. The huge basestar looked like a tiny starfish. With one baseship destroyed and only two remaining, they Cylons weren't going to take any chances by jumping in too close to the battlestars. They could do more damage that way, but weren't going to take the chance that one of the battlestars might get off a lucky shot that would leave them with only one basestar.

Troy Minos's voice came over her cockpit wireless. "Stay out of _all_ firing solutions. Repeat. Stay out of _all_ firing solutions. The _G_ isn't the only battlestar out here."

Kara was above the _Galactica_ and saw the big ship's top deck guns rise and track the basestar, still far out of range.

She glanced at her dradis again. The Raiders had not spread out much. They were still coming toward the battlestars in a nearly perfect V formation, but keeping themselves between the battlestars and their own baseship. How could the Vipers go out to fight the Raiders without getting in the firing solution of one of the battlestars? Instinctively Kara knew that Admiral Adama was going to have to break formation or deal with the Raiders' missiles as soon as they were within range.

…

Bill hadn't ordered any of them to stay behind in the Situation Room, so John and Vargas followed him to the CIC. Lee looked at Natalie and Buddy.

"Maybe you'd better…"

Natalie seemed to read his thoughts. "We'll stay here."

Hunter also remained behind so that Cain and Admiral Taylor were the only two who followed Lee down the hall.

He heard Cain mutter, "I should be aboard the _Pegasus_."

And Taylor answer, "Your XO can follow Admiral Adama's orders the same as you can."

"I still need to be there. It's _my_ ship. _I'm_ her commander."

By the time Lee joined John and Vargas, he heard Gaeta telling the admiral that the alert fighters had been launched. They all watched the big dradis screen.

"Those Raiders are staying in tight formation," Tigh said. "Range to target?"

"Three hundred kilometers, sir," Gaeta replied. "They're still out of range."

"What the frak are they doing?" Tigh asked.

"Protecting that basestar," Bill answered. "I'd do the same thing."

"We can't just sit here like ducks and wait for them to get in missile range," Tigh exploded. "Or we'll all be dead or limping back to Caprica."

Bill looked at Gaeta. "Send the message to the fleet. Get those Vipers out of the way. Break formation and engage those Raiders as soon as they're in range."

John glanced at General Vargas who was watching Adama and Tigh with admiration in his eyes.

"Welcome to the bridge of a battlestar at war, sir."

…

Troy Minos's voice came over Kara's comm channel, "Battlestars are breaking formation. Pull up. Pull up."

Kara watched the huge ship below her dip slightly and pull away from the circle. The other battlestars followed suit, breaking out of the circular holding pattern with surprising speed.

"Stick with the _G_," Minos said. "Repeat. Stick with the _G_."

The Raiders on her dradis suddenly changed position, spreading out, but not slowing their speed. It took her only a few seconds to realize that groups were forming and moving to intercept the battlestars.

_They're going to launch missiles as soon as they're in range._ She had the thought and a second later had voiced it.

The Raiders were all over her dradis now and were still out of range, but several had launched their missiles. The _Galactica's_ big guns opened fire.

_What are the chances that one of those shells from the G would actually hit a missile? _

"Some of us need to be under the _G_ in case one of those missiles gets through," Kara said. "We might stand a chance of shooting them down."

Hot Dog answered her. "Let's go. Pepper, you with us?"

"On your wing," came her reply.

Kara dropped out of the group and dove under the ship, careful to stay well below the heavy shells pouring from the side guns. The Raiders were still out of range but the missiles kept coming. Not a single one had been destroyed by the _Galactica's_ shells.

...

"Cease fire!" Bill Adama bellowed. "Turn the Vipers loose on them."

"What just happened?" Vargas asked John, his question unheard by anyone else in the cacophony that had enveloped the CIC.

"Bill realized that the baseship and the Raiders were too far away for the _G's_ guns. He was just wasting ammo. He sent our Vipers into the fight."

...

Kara saw that Admiral Adama must have realized what was happening because the pounding of the ship's big guns suddenly ceased. She heard the CAG's voice. "Weapons free. Engage and destroy missiles. Engage and destroy."

Kara didn't hesitate. She flew at top speed on an intercept course with the first volley. Hot Dog was on one wing and Pepper on the other. Vipers from the _G_ and the _Pegasus_ joined them. They were closing the distance to the missiles fast. Kara was the first to open fire, the much smaller shells from her three KEWs pouring out ahead of her in a steady and accurate stream. One of the missiles blossomed white in the distance. Others began exploding as the Vipers closed on them.

Kara kept flying toward the Raiders.

_Any more missiles, you bastards? I guess not. So let's dance._

…

John watched the dradis wondering which of the Viper blips closing on the Raiders was Kara.

Vargas said, "Can you explain to me exactly what Admiral Adama just did? I'm not used to fighting by looking at dradis screens."

"First Bill broke up the formation of battlestars to make it harder for the Raiders to target them. When he saw that the ship's guns weren't doing any good, he stopped firing and sent the Vipers to take out the missiles and the Raiders."

"Can our Vipers do that?"

"If the missiles are far enough away. The targeting ability of the Mark VIIs is incredibly accurate. Put a good pilot in the cockpit and it's a lethal combination for the missiles and the Raiders."

"I guess we have to consider the fleet an easy target because we can't go anywhere."

"The problem with us having to stick around over a planet means that the enemy knows where we are…but we don't have any idea where they are until they jump on top of us...except they didn't exactly jump on top of us this time. They jumped in way out of range of our guns. They're being cautious until they see how we react. Whoever's running the show on that baseship is either familiar with the history of space battles or a natural genius at fighting overwhelming odds."

"I thought something called a Hybrid controlled the basestars…some kind of half-human thing connected to the ship. When the Hybrid on the third basestar was killed by that missile from the _Pegasus_, the ship stopped functioning."

"True. According to Natalie, the Hybrid does control the life-support and other systems of the ship, but the humanoids actually make the decision to take it into battle and how to engage the enemy. If I'm right, that basestar is going to jump away soon and then jump back into space on the other side of our battlestars."

Vargas understood immediately. "They're fighting a guerrilla war. Hit and run."

"Exactly. Isn't that what you would do if you were outnumbered as badly as they are? They're basically down to one basestar. I doubt they'll risk that resurrection ship. It's going to sit out there just beyond our long-range scanners and download the dead humanoids and Raiders. They'll leave the fighting to this one."

"I'm surprised they came back at all. Are you going to say something to Admiral Adama?"

"I don't have to. He's already figured it out."

John had barely finished speaking when the larger dradis blip that was the basestar disappeared.

They listened while Bill gave orders to the rest of the fleet to spread out and stay alert. "That basestar isn't done with us," he said. "It'll be back…in a few minutes or a few hours or a few days…until it's destroyed or disabled."

"Mr. Gaeta, how many Raiders are still out there? Tigh asked.

"We're trying to get an accurate count, sir. Some of them are jumping away as we speak."

"Godsdammit, give me an estimate."

"Approximately two hundred engaging our Vipers."

"Any more missiles?"

"We're not detecting any at the moment. Wait…"

The dradis blinked. The basestar appeared again, closer this time on the other side of the battlestars. It was closest to the _Minoan _when it launched a dozen Raiders. In only seconds the Raiders were within range and launched missiles.

Everyone watched helplessly as missile hits flared on the dradis screen. Two minutes later the communication technicians in _Galactica's_ CIC began reporting.

"The _Minoan_ has taken three missile hits. Widespread damage to her starboard hull. Ship is returning fire and has destroyed approaching Raiders."

Finally came a report that was welcomed by everyone. "The _Sylla_ shot off half of one of the basestar's arms."

The larger blip on the dradis that was the basestar disappeared. It had jumped away again. The Raiders began following. In thirty seconds the screen was clear except for their own ships. Less than ten minutes had passed since the basestar had first jumped into space near them. Guerrilla warfare indeed. Hit and run.

Bill stood, his hands on the console, his head bowed. The CIC gradually quieted. He looked up.

"Get me damage reports from all ships, Mr. Gaeta. I want to know if those missiles that hit the _Minoan_ came from the basestar or the Raiders. I want a visual on the damage to the _Minoan._ I want to see exactly what the _Sylla_ did to that basestar. I want the footage from the Vipers' gun cameras. And set Condition Two throughout the ship."

"Yes, sir," Gaeta replied.

"What now?" Vargas asked John.

"We go back and continue planning the ground assault. That basestar won't be back until it's healed itself or they've repaired the damage. I don't think they're suicidal. That kind of damage means they're leaking their internal atmosphere."

"How long will the repair take?"

"We need to ask Natalie or Buddy."

Vargas and John exited the CIC and began walking toward the Situation Room.

"Do you want to check on your daughter?" Vargas asked.

John took a deep breath. "I want to, but I can't go running to the hangar deck and stand around waiting for her to land. As hard as it is to do, I've got to let go. If…anything were to happen to her…" He shook his head. He couldn't begin to think about something happening to Kara.

"My youngest son is a Marine. He's on the _Valkyrie_ right now awaiting deployment to the surface. I promised my wife I'd bring him home safe."

"I heard you tell Natalie that you had a grandchild. Is it your son's?"

"No. He's just twenty. Not married. My oldest daughter just had a baby, a little girl, my first grandchild. She works for the Department of Health and Human Services. Her husband is on the anti-terrorism task force."

"Other kids?"

"Two boys. Two girls. My oldest son was a Marine, too. He died on Picon six years ago. My youngest daughter is an artist. She lives with her boyfriend near Delphi. He's a schoolteacher. She works for an art gallery. I'm afraid we never had much in common. We don't see each other very often."

"Kara's mother died on Picon. She was a Marine, too. The hell of it is, I could have gotten her off the planet the same night I took Kara and a friend of hers. Socrata wouldn't go. She knew what was going to happen…but she stayed anyway."

"That doesn't surprise me. We live and die by our code of honor."

"There's a man in Settlement Alpha. I met him while I was there. He and Socrata were in the same Marine unit. He said they all died trying to keep the centurions out of a building in Picon City. He was wounded and then taken aboard a baseship and brought here to their prison. He might have known your son."

"I'll look forward to meeting him someday."

They reached the door to the Situation Room and entered. Natalie was seated at the table talking to Hunter. They both looked up.

"It's over…for now," John said.

"Did you destroy the basestar?" Natalie asked.

"No. A shell or a missile took off half of one arm and it jumped away. The Raiders followed it."

"The wound will heal quickly…a matter of a week at the most. If the control collective has carried out one such attack, then they'll be back."

"I think we realize that now," John said.

"I…didn't think they would attack the fleet," Natalie said softly. "I didn't mention it because I didn't think it would happen. They're taking a terrible chance. Cavil must be desperate."

"I don't think anybody is accusing you of withholding information."

"Not even Commander Cain?"

John shrugged.

"Question," Vargas said. "Do you think the basestar will stick to attacking the fleet or will they attack the planet?"

Natalie pondered her answer. "I wouldn't put anything past them although I don't think the collective would jump a baseship low enough in the planet's atmosphere to do any real damage. There's too much risk involved. The Hybrid wouldn't allow it. I think the danger to the planet will come from the basestar's Raiders. Since they're FTL capable, they could jump in anywhere."

"Even over the plateau," John said.

"Anywhere," Natalie repeated.

John said, "That makes the ground Vipers even more important. We need to talk to Lee as soon as he gets here."

…

Lee followed John and General Vargas out of the CIC and went to the bathroom. His side was hurting again. Tension probably, but he didn't want to take even half a morpha pill because he knew it would dull his senses. He splashed his face with warm water and dried it on a paper towel, then put his hands on either side of the sink and took several deep breaths trying to relax.

Kara was okay. He knew it. The Raiders had jumped away before they'd engaged many of the Vipers. That was good. But it was also bad. It meant more of them to come back another day. And he was sure they would come back. As his father had said…today, tomorrow, a week. They would have to stay ready. Always vigilant against a surprise attack.

Lee walked back into the CIC. His father and Tigh were talking so Lee waited, glancing at the dradis. The battlestars had not resumed their earlier formation. Each was flying its own sort of CAP.

Gaeta looked up and Lee asked, "What kind of damage to the _Minoan_?"

"Her hull has been severely weakened in several places but there was no breach. They've evacuated the affected compartments and sealed them just in case there's a rupture. The starboard landing bay was retracted and will no longer extend."

"Any loss of the crew?"

"No deaths so far. Numerous injuries, most of them minor."

"What about damage to other ships?"

"None reported so far. Our Vipers destroyed seven Raiders before the rest jumped away."

"Only seven?" Lee asked in surprise.

"Our best estimate. We won't know for sure until we get the gun camera footage, but I think that's a close estimate. They were mostly concentrating on stopping those missiles from getting through."

Lee nodded his appreciation to Gaeta for the information even as he wondered how many of them Kara had gotten. The first battle had involved nearly a thousand Raiders from the three basestars. Not all of them had been destroyed. At least half had jumped away. Now Lee wondered how many empty Raiders each basestar carried so that the destroyed ones could download.

Bill walked over to him. "Go to the Situation Room and resume planning the ground attack. I'll join you when I can."

"Yes, sir."

As he walked down the hall, he wondered how many total Raiders and missiles the Cylons still had. They had to run out sometime. He was just afraid it wouldn't be soon enough.

…

"Son of a bitch," Kara said as thirty bright flashes filled the sky in front of her. The Raiders on which she was closing had jumped away. "Cowards…mother-frakking cowards. Come back here."

"You're out of luck," Pepper said. "Those bad boys are bugging out and going home."

"If you can call that mass of protoplasm or whatever makes up a basestar home," Kara said, aware that her heart was still pounding from the adrenalin. "Who could stand to live in Squishville?"

"Look at the bright side," Pepper said. "You got two more kills."

"It should have been a dozen. Not that I really count. Did we lose anybody?"

"Not that I saw," Hot Dog answered.

Minos's voice came over their cockpit frequency. "Alert fighters return to the ship. Other Vipers remain out and resume CAP."

_Back to business as usual, _Kara thought. _Ten minutes of excitement, another hour of routine._

"You heard the man," Hot Dog said. "Stay sharp. Those motherfrakkers might come back."

Kara had heard the chatter. The basestar had lost a piece of an arm. The starfish had been hurt. It had to heal. She didn't think they'd be back today and risk a fatal wound.

…

The group in the Situation Room waited nearly fifteen minutes for Commander Cain before an ensign brought them word that Cain had returned to the _Pegasus_.

No one commented until Admiral Taylor said, "I'm not surprised. I think she feels like these meetings don't much concern her."

Colonel Tigh walked in. "Bill is staying in the CIC. He said to continue planning. I'll report anything he should know."

Vargas nodded. John knew they all understood why the admiral was reluctant to leave his command post.

"Are we still on go for tomorrow night, sir?" Lee asked.

"We are," Vargas answered.

Tigh said, "Bill is going to take the battlestars closer to the planet to try to keep the Cylons from jumping in between us and the surface."

John nodded. "Good move."

Vargas opened a folder and handed John a sheaf of papers to pass around the table. "Then we'll go over the details and timeline."

…

By the time Kara landed at the end of her CAP, everything had settled down. She filled out her post-flight checklist and shared a high-five with Hot Dog and Pepper before they headed toward the exit.

She went straight to the officer's mess. Many had eaten and left. The pilots on CAP hadn't gotten there yet. Lee was alone in his favorite corner with a folder laid out on the table that seemed to get fatter every time she saw it.

She smiled. "You waited."

"I didn't have anything better to do," he teased. "Besides, Zak and Jade are in my quarters. Zak goes to the planet with the forward recon team tomorrow night. I decided to give my bro a break."

Kara put her tray down on the table and sat. "I didn't think you wanted them using your bunk."

"He asked this time. How could I say _no_?"

"Is he being careful with Jade or doesn't he care if he might be making a little Zak junior?"

"I'm sure he's taking care of things. He knows Jade isn't."

"Did you tell him to put his boots outside the door?"

Lee nodded. "I also told your dad what was going on, but I doubt he'll be back there until late. He and Vargas are new best buds. Vargas is taking him to the planet tomorrow night. He's going to be a part of the general's staff."

Kara stopped with a forkful of food halfway to her mouth. "When did they decide that?"

"It was announced in our meeting today. I don't blame Vargas for wanting him on the planet. John's been on the plateau, in the city, in the valley and in Settlement Alpha."

Kara put her fork down, her appetite ebbing.

"I wonder when he's going to tell me."

"I'm sure he'll mention it the next time he sees you."

"I thought he might be in here with you."

"He ate with General Vargas and the others on the mission planning team…all except Commander Cain who went back to the _Pegasus_."

"That's no big loss," Kara snorted. "She's not happy unless she's calling the shots."

They sat in silence for several minutes. Kara chewed another mouthful of tough meat before she pushed her tray to the side. Her appetite was completely gone.

"So you'll both be on the surface as well as Karl and Saunders and I'll be stuck up here."

"Based on what happened this afternoon, your life will probably be exciting enough. That basestar will be back."

"You're sure of that."

"As sure as anybody can be. Admiral Taylor is something of a space battle historian. While we were waiting for the meeting to get started again this afternoon, he talked about the war between Scorpia and Leonis that took place about three hundred years ago. Scorpia wiped out most of the Leonis fleet and captured the rest except for a lone battleship captained by a Commander Arthur. He and his ship became known as Arthur's Marauders. They destroyed six Scorpian battleships and damaged four others before they were destroyed by half the Scorpian fleet. Commander Arthur did the same thing that basestar did today only he didn't have Raiders to do his shooting for him. He'd jump in, damage what he could and jump away."

"So what is the point of your story? Admiral Taylor thinks those bozos on the basestar are space battle historians?"

"They do have access to our history."

"So you think they'll keep coming back chipping away at the fleet hoping to get lucky until we destroy them?"

"Natalie said they only needed one of each model in their control room plus their Hybrid to run the ship. They could put the rest of them and their centurions on the res ship."

Kara took a deep breath and blew it out. "I'd still rather be on the planet."

"Don't give up hope. It might still happen. None of us knows what the future will bring."

"How long are Zak and Jade going to be in your quarters?"

"Why?"

Kara finally grinned. "Gods, Lee, I can't believe you had to ask. You're taking this ground CAG thing far too seriously."

He closed the folder. "Finished with your dinner?"

She stood. "Give me ten minutes to hit the shower...unless you want to go with me and wash my back."

Lee also stood and pointed toward the exit. "Ladies first."

She grinned. "It usually works out that way for us, doesn't it?"

…

After eating dinner with General Vargas and meeting several of his senior officers, John walked to Sick Bay. Doctor Cottle was making rounds so John stopped at Targa's room. Targa's eyes were closed. Petra was reading to him. John stood in the doorway and listened to her.

_It started like it always did. With a body. This one was in the river, and I could tell she had once been beautiful, but the bullet and fast current had taken that away from her. All we are, or that we think we are, all that we are certain about, is taken away from us. When you've worked the streets and seen what I've seen, you become more and more convinced of it every day. _

Targa opened his eyes and said, "We've got company."

Petra looked up and smiled.

"Bedtime story?" John asked with an answering smile.

"It's _Love and Bullets _by Nick Taylo. Dr. Cottle loaned it to me. He said Admiral Adama had loaned it to him."

"That's one of Taylo's best. One of his earliest. I think I read it while I was still on the _Solaria_. Must have been twenty or more years ago."

"I like it," Targa said.

Petra was still smiling. "I'm sure he'll like this one better than the other one in Dr. Cottle's office. I think it's called _The Virgon Duchess_. It's a romance novel by Lady Barbara Cartwright, who hails from Virgon like John."

"I can't say I'm familiar with her work. Targa wouldn't care, though. He'd probably listen to you read him the dictionary," John said.

"I would," Targa answered. "Gladly."

"How are you feeling?" John asked.

"Going to start some physical therapy tomorrow."

"He's healing well," Petra added.

"I'm glad to hear it." John hesitated a moment and then said, "I'm going down to the surface with General Vargas soon. Maybe tomorrow night. I'm not sure when I'll be back."

"Hunter going?"

"Yes. He's with some of the Marines now. I'm sure he'll be up to see you when he's through."

"You take care of him. He needs to go back to that wife and baby. He's done enough fighting Cylons. He doesn't need to do any more."

"I'll do my best."

"And you take care of your girl, too."

"She's staying on the ship."

"Is that good…or bad?" Petra asked.

"After the surprise attack this afternoon, I don't much think it matters where she is. We won't be safe until that basestar is destroyed or they surrender…whichever comes first."

"You don't sound like you've much hope of them surrendering."

"No."

"Take care of yourself," Petra said. She struggled for a moment and John saw tears fill her eyes. "When you get to the city...find Cassie for me. Please."

"I've already made you that promise."

"Tell her I love her."

John nodded as Targa reached out and touched Petra's hand.

Petra squeezed his hand briefly, looked down and began reading again.

_Caprica City has been my teacher, my mistress. From the moment I opened my eyes, she is in my blood, like cheap wine. Bitter and sweet, tinged with regret. I'll never be free of her, nor do I want to be, for she is what I am. All that is, should always be._

John turned and started down the row of private rooms. The pilot Kara had called Hot Dog sat by the bedside of someone whose head was heavily bandaged. He was talking softly to her. John had no idea if the bed's occupant could hear him or not.

After John had stepped in front of a bullet meant for Laura, he'd spent nearly twenty hours in an unconscious state. Laura had later told him that she'd sat by his bedside and talked to him for hours. He had no memory of what she'd said, but on some level he'd known she was there. Maybe the pilot heard Hot Dog and maybe she didn't, but she was probably aware of his presence.

John walked to the room on the far end. The door was open a few inches. He heard voices. Even though Natasi and Sonja looked identical, he could tell them apart by their voices. Natasi had a Caprican accent, probably due to six years of being around Gaius Baltar.

John had his hand raised to knock when he heard Sonja say, "Do you think your Dr. Baltar will marry you?"

He hesitated. Curiosity got the better of him. There was a long moment of silence before Natasi answered. "I'm not sure that's what I want anymore. What chance would our marriage have if he comes to the altar kicking and screaming?"

"Maybe if you gave him a child…"

"Do you not think I tried? I never used birth control."

"Maybe he did."

"No. Gaius is a selfish pig in that regard."

"You think he's alone among his gender?"

"Of course not. He worked diligently trying to produce a viable human-Cylon hybrid on Caprica for several years. He denies it, but I think he frakked one of the Eights instead of using the artificial insemination method like he was supposed to do. He probably frakked a Three as well."

"Did either of them conceive?"

"No. The only luck we had was with human mothers."

"Just like on Nereid," Sonja observed. "Maybe he's the one with the problem and not you."

"I doubt it. Why is the simple act of procreation so difficult for us, sister? What is wrong with us? What did our creators do wrong that we are barren?"

"It's not wrong with all of us. Look at what happened with D'Anna. And I'm told an Eight on Caprica gave birth to a child several months ago…a little girl."

"D'Anna didn't carry her child near term," Natasi snapped. "If it had been born on Nereid, it would have died just like the other babies our sisters have managed to conceive. It still might die. And Sharon's child came early, too. Something is clearly _wrong_ with us."

John rapped softly on the door. Natasi opened it all the way.

"May I come in?"

She stood back and allowed him to enter. "Have a seat."

He remained standing. "I can't stay long. I came to see how Sonja is feeling."

"Much better," Natasi said.

John managed a smile. "Maybe she could tell me that herself."

"I'm better," Sonja said, but her voice was wooden and unemotional.

"Did Yoshimo talk to you?"

"The old priest?" Natasi asked.

"Yes," Sonja said. "He came to see me this morning. I didn't feel like talking. Natasi said he came back this afternoon but I was asleep. He said he'd be back tomorrow."

"Do you think you'll feel like talking to him?"

"If you want me to."

"Sonja, I want you to feel better. I think he can help. Yoshimo has been a priest longer than most of us on this ship have been alive. He understands all kinds of pain and suffering. He's a very spiritual man."

"Sonja was gang-raped," Natasi said bitterly. "Will the old man be able to help her with that?"

"Gang-raped?" The shock was evident in John's voice. "By Marines on this ship?"

"No. After you shot her and she downloaded at the lab, the prison commandant gave her to the human guards and told them to punish a traitor. After a week one of them got a little overly enthusiastic about the beating he was giving her after he'd raped her. He slammed her head into the concrete floor and killed her…again. That's when the commandant boxed her."

"God, Sonja, why didn't you say something?"

"When were you around for me to talk to?"

"I wish things could have been different the last couple of days. I haven't had any free time. But I'm here now."

"I'll leave you two alone," Natasi said before she went out and closed the door behind her.

John sat down in the chair. "I'm sorry, Sonja. I should have taken you with us when we left the planet…you and Leoben both. That was my mistake and I apologize for it. Sincerely."

"Would I not have suffered the same fate from your Colonial interrogators?"

"No. You'd probably have been living in the brig, but you wouldn't have been beaten and gang-raped."

She studied him. "What did you do when you got back to Caprica?"

He chuckled. "Almost got airlocked along with D'Anna. Then I was sent to the brig for an afternoon. Then I was taken to an apartment on the airbase where I stayed until I came back here."

Now it was Sonja's turn to sound shocked. "You didn't see your wife and son?"

"I saw them. I spent as much time as I could with Brae."

"And your wife?"

"Laura's a busy woman. She's the President of the Colonies."

Sonja's eyes widened. "You lied to me about her."

"No, I didn't. I told you she wasn't the Secretary of Education any longer. I said she'd taken another job. I just didn't mention it was the highest job in the government. I'm surprised Natasi didn't mention it."

"Laura forgave you about D'Anna?"

"I won't try to tell you that it wasn't an issue with us. Look, I'm not comfortable talking about mine and Laura's relationship."

"You're still wearing your wedding ring."

"I still love my wife."

"What about the child…your son with D'Anna?"

"His name is Sean and he's getting the best of care." John took Sean's picture out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. "As you can see, he'll be in the hospital for months. He's not even two pounds yet."

She studied the picture for a long time and finally handed it back to him. "You're going to raise him?"

"Yes."

"How does Laura feel about that?"

"She understands."

The silence stretched. "I'm sure you need to go," Sonja finally said. "I'll be all right."

"Why did you do it…the Marines?"

"I don't know."

He walked over to the bed and took her hand. "I'm sorry for what happened to you at the prison. I want you to promise me you'll talk to Yoshimo."

"I will," she said softly.

"I don't want to worry about you while I'm on the planet."

She smiled, her old flirtatious smile. "Would you really worry about me?"

"I would. You saved my life and I'll always be grateful. I just want you to remember that." He leaned down and kissed her forehead. "I'll try to get by here before I go to the planet, but if I don't, I'll see you the first time I get back up here."

She squeezed his hand tightly and then released it. "Go fight your war, John. God protect you."

He turned at the door. "It's not just my war, Sonja. We're fighting for a better future for both our races."

"How does your President feel about that?"

John smiled. "It was her idea."

Natasi was standing in the hall. John pulled the door shut.

"Thank you for staying with her," he said.

"Natalie doesn't have the time. Besides, Sonja is my sister."

"Please see that she talks to Yoshimo. I think he can help her."

She smiled. "You can tell him yourself."

John turned. Yoshimo had just exited Targa's room. Someone had found a pair of dark pants and a gray tunic that fit the priest. The only thing missing was the small silver icon that he had always worn around his neck. It was an X enclosed in a box with a vertical bar down the middle. John knew it had been a gift from the Reverend Mother on Gemenon. He had a feeling he would find it around the neck of one of the prison guards.

Yoshimo greeted John warmly. "I was hoping to see you."

"Likewise. I'm sorry I didn't get up here sooner."

"You have been busy."

"You're looking well."

"My spirits have revived with my body."

"Sonja has suffered since I left Nereid."

"I will do my best to help her."

"I'm going to the planet soon…probably tomorrow night. I'm not sure when I'll be back."

"I will pray for you."

John gently squeezed Yoshimo's shoulder. "You're a good man."

"Your cause is just. I will pray that you prevail. Now you should go get some rest."

John glanced at his watch. He had a feeling there would be a pair of boots outside the door to his quarters…whether for Lee and Kara or Zak and Jade. He'd give them another two hours. It would probably be the last time for a while.

He smiled at Yoshimo and Natasi. "Something tells me there's a triad game going on in the officer's rec room that needs another hand."

"You have some cubits that are burning a hole in your pocket?" Yoshimo asked.

"Who says I'm going to lose?"

"Ah," Yoshimo nodded. "You plan to leave the table tonight as a winner. Let us hope that is a metaphor for our coming days of battle."

John smiled as he started down the hall. "Let's hope."

TBC…

.

**AUTHOR'S NOTE**: I am indebted to the well-known science fiction writer Isaac Asimov for the 'Three Laws of Robotics' quoted by Aimee Singh in her journal. In Asimov's short story _Runaround_, he proposed three laws by which robots should always abide. They are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

These laws were stated at the beginning of the 2004 movie _I, Robot _which was based on a collection of Asimov's stories. In creating the 0005s and the U-87 centurions, Vergis and Graystone obviously chose, unwisely, to ignore the three laws.


	66. Operation Tango

Chapter 66

Operation Tango

_The Planet_

_Day 301: Today I gathered my courage and related my encounter with Chester Pollard to Nadine, Irina and Joshua. To say they were outraged does not do their feelings justice. I reminded them, however, that we have no control over Pollard since he answers only to Captain Prolmar. For now we must let this issue go since we are unarmed and essentially powerless against Pollard and his armed mercenaries. I have resolved that once we are back on Libran, I will write a letter detailing the 'bot baiting and send it to our mission backers. I am not totally without connections and Pollard may yet rue his treatment of me and the robots. At the very least I can probably keep him from being appointed head of security for the next mission. _

_Day 322: We have a baby! Nadine's child, a little girl, was born last night with just myself, a nurse and Irina present. Nadine's labor lasted only a few hours and was surprisingly easy for a first pregnancy. The child weighed seven pounds and is nineteen inches long, perfectly formed and beautiful with Nadine's (or her father's) black hair, quite a thick head of it for a newborn. Her eyes are dark blue like her father's, but might wind up gray like Nadine's as birth color can sometimes change. Nadine has chosen to breast feed and nothing more has been said about giving up the baby for adoption._

_She has named the child Miriam Deborah after her grandmother (Deborah) who passed away last year and her mother (Miriam) who is alive but ill. Irina, who is quite knowledgeable about both our scriptures and those of the monotheists, said that Miriam was the youngest child of Xander the great liberator of the Thirteenth Tribe and his beloved wife Jerusha and that according to their scripture, Miriam became a famous priest of the temple. Irina says the Book of Miriam is beautiful since much of it is poetic and was originally believed to have been sung. That is why it is often called the Songs of Miriam. Deborah is one of the protectors of a mysterious child referred to only as 'the peacemaker'._

_Joshua believes the Kobol Stone was created here, although many of our expedition members do not since the one mission to the ancient temple outside the ruined city found no evidence of it. Instead they believe __this__ planet to be Kobol as has been evidenced in some of our nightly discussions over dinner in the mess tent. I personally think it was the post-exodus home of the Thirteenth Tribe (called Eden), but since Pollard controls the shuttlecraft, robots and mercenary guards…and we are much too far from the city to walk there, the exploration that could have proven conclusively whether or not this is Kobol will not get done, at least not by this expedition._

_A part of me realizes that in some circumstances Pollard and his men are necessary; however once we saw that there were no native inhabitants to pose a danger to us and that the few wild beasts that might threaten us tend to avoid us, I think Pollard and his entire crew could have backed down on their aggressiveness and been more cooperative in allowing expeditions of an archeological nature to continue instead of just hunting for mineral wealth. _

_Day 323: It is a good thing that my heart is relatively young and strong because were it not, I would probably be lying on the floor of my tent, the victim of a fatal myocardial infarction. Tonight as I returned from checking on Nadine who remains in the medical tent under the care of my very capable night staff, a man stepped from the darkness, took my arm and 'escorted' me inside my tent. Only a glimpse of his face kept me from screaming and fighting him. It was Nadine's lover (I shall call him Ares as he considers himself a warrior). He didn't want anyone seeing him conversing with me thus his covert actions. He apologized for frightening me and said he'd come to inquire about Nadine and the child and to ask if I would tell her he'd like to see both of them. _

_I am torn. My first loyalty is to my patients, mother and child, but despite his callous rejection of Nadine, he is the baby's father. I told him only that I would give her the message and give him her answer the next night. I reminded him that the medical tent is my domain and I will respect Nadine's wishes. He indicated a willingness to help with the financial support of his daughter however I have my doubts that Nadine will accept anything from him given his attitude toward her when her pregnancy became evident._

_As he was leaving, he turned and asked who the baby looked like. I briefly detailed her physical characteristics which seemed to please him. Though I have never witnessed it (since I am a surgeon and not an obstetrician), I have heard stories from my colleagues of tough, strong men melting in tears of joy at the first sight of a newborn son or daughter. For a reason I don't understand, I believe that Ares might be such a man._

_As much as I dislike him on a personal level for his treatment of Nadine, I have no doubt whatsoever that if someone or something threatened her and their daughter, he would give his life in protecting them which is a redeeming factor in my eyes._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

The Presidential limousine with its leading and trailing vehicles pulled from the driveway under the Marble House portico and headed toward the medical center. The sun was still far below the horizon, the sky so dark that had Laura not worn a watch, she would have thought it was the middle of the night.

Edgar and the other agents were quiet, listening intently to the reports of their fellow agents in their earpieces. Laura leaned her head back against the seat. Sean was eight days old and she wanted to see him. Bianca's reports and her photographs were very good, but Laura had reached a point where she wanted to see the child for herself. She wanted to touch him again and talk to him although she knew she would be nothing but another voice making sounds that the tiny infant would hear but not understand.

Edgar broke her reverie. "Have you heard anything more from the fleet?"

"Not for three days. Bill told me that he might not be able to send a ship with a report every day, but I feel certain that he'll send word soon. Tom Zarek hounds me daily for news of the…_war_."

There. She had said the word she hated so much. Yet no other word fit what was occurring on and over Nereid. Just as the rebellion of the old centurions had been called the First Cylon War and the destruction of eleven of the Twelve Colonies had become the Second Cylon War, she supposed that current historians would probably name this clash of man and machine the Third Cylon War. She hoped it never reached the point of the massive destruction that had characterized the first two. She also hoped it would be the last war fought between their two races. Her plans for a blended society depended on most of Nereid remaining intact and at least some of the Cylons expressing a willingness to live in peace with the race that had created them.

She handed Edgar the small digital camera that she had been holding. "It's Billy's. He loaned it to me. Will you take some pictures of Sean? I hope they let me hold him for a few minutes. Bianca held him yesterday."

"Yes, ma'am. I'll be glad to."

"I want to send John another picture or two. They're going to be landing on the planet soon. Bill sent me an initial plan for the invasion. It's going to begin on a high plateau where the Cylons located their prison." She took a deep breath and went on. "It's where John was kept for the first four months."

"Is he going with them?"

"I don't know. Lee was the one who suggested that they take the plateau first and make it their initial base of operations. There are fewer centurions and humanoids there than anywhere else and only a few dozen humans…all of them guards who cooperated with the Cylons so the danger of what Bill refers to as _collateral damage_ is non-existent. Our dilemma is what to do with the guards who survive the assault."

"You intend to charge them with treason?"

"Those men clearly aided and abetted in the torture and killing of humans for the last six years. Bianca told me that she and her husband had treated dozens of humans who subsequently died of the injuries inflicted on them in part by their human guards. _My own husband_ was brutally beaten by them on several occasions."

Laura was aware that her voice had risen. The agent riding beside her driver glanced back at them even though the acrylic partition was raised between them and the front seat.

She lowered her voice. "I don't want to bring them back to Caprica and inspire another misguided soul like Tucker Clellan to plan a suicide attack of revenge, especially since their human victims will be named and might have relatives or friends still living on Caprica."

"Do you have any thoughts on their punishment?"

"I'd personally like to airlock them, but I'll leave it to a judge and jury of their peers."

"You haven't put Dr. Baltar on trial for his…association with the Cylons on the hybrid fertility project. In fact I understand he's currently employed with a government-backed project studying the effect of the Cylon destruction on the other Colonies."

Laura sighed. "You're right. But remember that Dr. Baltar's human subjects were willing participants. There was no brutalization or force used and no one died."

"I know you told me once that Dr. Baltar always maintained that if he didn't work with the Cylons, they would have killed him."

"Gaius Baltar would do or say anything to protect himself. He always plays to the audience at hand. I personally have my doubts about the level of his unwillingness to work with them especially since he was lusting after Natasi, but we can't take my personal opinion into court and use it as evidence."

"Maybe those prison guards felt like they didn't have a choice. Maybe they felt like it was cooperating with the Cylons or death."

"You were in the military before you joined the presidental security staff. I can't believe you're falling back on that old _I-was-just-following-orders _defense."

"I'm not defending anyone, Madame President. I'm playing devil's advocate. It makes no difference where you try them, you won't be able to keep it secret. The people of Caprica will find out."

"I'm not trying to keep the people from finding out. I just don't want the trial of a group of humans to be the first thing to come from Nereid. This war is unpopular enough as it is. Billy showed me a poll several days ago that claims over eighty percent of the people living on Caprica think we should free the human slaves on Nereid and then kill _all_ the Cylons. I really want to keep the news as positive as possible. Perhaps we should put those prison guards in their own prison and forget about them for a while. I'm aware that violates their right to a speedy trial, but I think we can claim exigent circumstances will keep us from proceeding right away."

Edgar smiled. "There's nothing like an ongoing war to delay justice. Considering they might face a firing squad, I'd think they'd welcome cooling their heels in jail for a while, even their own."

The limo pulled into the physician's parking lot at Kings Bay Medical Center. As Edgar held the door and Laura got out, she realized what hadn't been said. Her own husband was probably seen in many quarters of Caprica as a collaborator and traitor. The baby she was on her way to see would be viewed as proof.

In the elevator she turned to Edgar and asked, "Did I make a mistake giving James McManus that interview?"

He took his time before answering. "You scored a lot of points for your honesty and willingness to confront the issue head-on."

"But…?"

"You don't need me to tell you that there's a large segment of the population who think you were making excuses for your husband's actions."

"I wasn't," Laura said quickly. "I truly believe what I told McManus."

"Those closest to you know that, but to many Capricans it proved to be divisive. There are many people on this planet who will never forgive and forget what the Cylons did six years ago. Based on the poll Billy told you about, it's probably about eighty percent. I'm sure there are even more on Nereid who will never forgive their enslavement."

"Yes," Laura said sadly. "I agree completely. And my position on a blended society has made your job much more difficult."

"Controversy always brings out the extremists and nut jobs. Don't you remember what a zoo President Adar's security was right after he surrendered to the Cylons six years ago?"

"Yes, I remember. And that same group is now being pandered to by politicians like Tom Zarek."

"That should come as no surprise to you, either, Madame President."

"No. Although Zarek is only filling a niche that would have been filled by someone else were he not on the Quorum."

The elevator doors opened. Additional security guards escorted them to the NICU and waited outside. The night nurses were near the end of their shift. The sun would be rising soon and the day shift would be coming in. In spite of the early hour, Dr. Junius was there and greeted her warmly.

"It's good to see you again, Madame President."

"You're here very early."

"We admitted another baby to the NICU about three a.m." They walked over to Sean's incubator and Junius continued. "He's gained several ounces since you were here last. His lung function has improved. If it continues improving, we'll probably start giving him short periods off the ventilator very soon…possibly later this week."

"Would it be possible for me to hold him for just a minute?"

"I think we can do that."

Junius opened the incubator, carefully lifted Sean and placed him in Laura's hands. Taking great care not to disturb the ventilator tube, she leaned over and very gently kissed the soft skin of his head before she cradled him to her.

She struggled for words. Even though she hadn't yet heard from John, she whispered, "Your father sends his love. He wants to be here, but he's got to help create a world where you'll be welcomed and safe. We'll live there one day as a family and you'll play with your big brother and other children like Rachel and Esmari."

She kissed Sean again before she carefully placed him in his incubator and then waited while Dr. Junius and a nurse checked the tubes and wires attached to him.

Edgar held up the camera indicating that he'd gotten some pictures.

"Take one more," Laura said.

She reached out and gently grasped Sean's tiny hand between her thumb and index finger. "I'll be back, little one," she said. "In the meantime keep growing and thriving."

On the way back to her limousine, she smiled. She had managed the visit without shedding tears or falling apart. Once seated she thanked Edgar and took the camera. Her resolve about Sean's fate hardened, and she was more determined than ever that he would not grow up hated and despised for something he could not help.

…

John and Lee were in their quarters packing the bags that they were going to take to the surface.

"I'm taking a Viper down," Lee said.

"Doc Cottle clear you to do that?"

"He will. It's been a week. I'm not taking the morpha anymore."

"You told me Cottle originally said two to three weeks before you'd be able to fly. Are you sure you're up to it?"

"I'm sure. This is too important for me to have to try to direct my team from the ground. I need to be in the air with them."

"Have you mentioned it to your dad?"

"I'm going to. He wouldn't have given me the job if he didn't think I could handle it. Right now I've got to go interview our prisoners. I don't think I'll get anything from them, but I've got to make an effort so I can check it off my list."

"You know the prison assault team has a meeting right after lunch."

"I know. I'll be there. I'm not going to devote a lot of time to them. Want to come along?"

John shrugged. "Why not. I'd like to see if this One is anything like the One at the prison. He's a smug bastard. If this One tells you anything, it'll probably be lies."

They left the bags on their bunks and walked down the corridor together.

Lee finally said, "Kara's not too happy about staying on board the _G_. She's got the idea that life is going to be much more exciting on the ground."

"She'd be fine if you were staying on board ship."

"When did you talk to her?"

"This morning before breakfast. I was waiting for her when she came off CAP at 06:00. We walked up to her quarters together. She understands. She knows she's not at liberty to make personal choices. I made that really clear to her a couple of years ago when she insisted on going to the Academy and becoming a pilot. She knows we can't pick and choose our assignments either. It's all about following orders…although she's had her share of problems doing that." John smiled. "I'm trying to chalk that up to her age and immaturity rather than being too much like me."

They arrived at the brig, gave their names and were admitted to the row of cells. The One from the basestar was in the first cell followed by the Five and then the Four. The other three cells were empty.

The Marine guard asked if they wanted the Cylons taken to an interrogation room. Lee decided that was a lot of trouble since he was sure his questions would get either silence or lies in return.

"Don't bother," Lee said. "The cameras and audio are on, aren't they?"

"Yes, sir."

The One sat up in his bunk. "Finally, some entertainment. We're getting bored."

"That wasn't our intention when we came down here," Lee said. "We haven't polished our comedy routine."

"Human nature makes you all comedians," the One sniffed. "Pathetic comedians." He looked at John. "I know who _you_ are. You're the one who wanted us to work in the dirt. Who is the boy?"

John said, "He's the son of the man who kept you from being handed over to someone who wanted to interrogate you the same way the Cylons at your prison interrogated me."

The Four said, "So you're _him_. While we were waiting for the ship that brought us up here, we heard you were in our prison."

"We've got nothing to say to either of you," the Five said.

The One gave him a withering look. "_I'm_ the one who decides whether we have anything to say or not." Then he looked at John. "Ask your questions. Anything is better than staring at these bars twenty-four hours a day."

"Sonja mentioned that you've erased your sleep subroutines," John said.

The One cast another withering glance toward the Five. "Sleep is for humans…and the _lesser_ of us."

"I resent that," the Five said without any real enthusiasm. John got the impression that the well-groomed Cylon had listened to so many insults from this particular One over the years that his replies had become automatic.

John addressed the One. "Natalie told me the copies of each model were created in a certain order. What copy are you…numerically speaking. And don't try to tell me you're the First One. I know better. He took a fleet to the Colonies and is dead now…permanently dead. The Second One is in the city and the Third One is at the prison."

"Why don't you guess and let him tell you if you're close." The Four said.

Lee said, "We know there're over 18,000 Cylons on the planet and another 3,000 divided among the three basestars. That's over 21,000 of you…well, 20,000 considering that _your_ basestar is a lifeless hulk in space right now. We also know that there are fewer Ones than the other models since you imagine yourselves the leaders. I think the ratio I heard was about 1 to 3. So say roughly a thousand Ones divided among the eight settlements and the city and three basestars."

"Get to the point," the One said sarcastically. "I don't need a math lesson from a human."

"I think Lee's making the point that you're not among the first twelve copies." John said.

"I'd say the odds are _very_ small," Lee added.

John continued. "You see, we know about the resurrection facility at the lab and how only the first twelve copies of each model can download there…so my guess is that means it's the res ship for you…or eternal death if that ship's out of range. I'd say that pretty much applies to all of you."

"What are you saying?" The Five asked, his voice showing some emotion for the first time.

"You idiot," the One said. "He's trying to mess with your head."

"I'm sure you're aware that your res ship jumped away," Lee said.

"Are you going to execute us?" The Four asked. "Is that what this is all about?"

"That depends," Lee said. "On whether or not you had anything to do with killing your creators and your brother Sevens or any of the human prisoners you took."

"I've never even been to the prison," the One said scornfully. "Neither have my brothers. The Sevens were dead before we were awakened."

The Four said, "But we know of their fate. It's well known among all of us. Our brother Sevens died of a virus accidently introduced into their genetic material by one of the creators…who are all alive and working at the lab by the way."

"Except for Daniel and Amanda Graystone," the One interjected. "They died of natural causes nearly ten years ago."

"That's the only thing you're right about," Lee said. "The First One killed the Sevens and ordered his centurions to kill your creators when they discovered what he was doing and tried to stop him."

"Liar!" the Five snapped.

"Actually that's not entirely true," John said. "He missed one of the Sevens. He's alive and I'm sure he'll be more than happy to tell you what happened to him. The First One also missed destroying the avatar of one of the creators. She's got an interesting story to tell, too."

"Which one?" The Four asked, his curiosity aroused at last.

"Lucy Cain. She's on board ship if you'd like to talk to her. She's in a centurion."

"That traitorous piece of misguided metal who piloted the Heavy Raider?" The Five asked.

"No, another one. We're protecting him. He's very valuable, but I could probably arrange for you to chat with him. He's seen a lot and he loves to talk about it."

That brought snorts of laughter from all three Cylons.

"You're turning out to be comedians after all," the One managed to say. "Please bring us the centurion. I want to see you pull his string so he can repeat your lies."

"Wait here," John said to Lee. "I'll be right back with Buddy."

Lee wasn't sure what John was trying to do, but it was too late to stop it now.

The One got off his bunk and walked to the bars of the cell. His voice took on a patronizing tone. "I believe the prison must have unbalanced your friend's mind. If you think we're going to fall for some human trick, you're…"

Lee cut him off. "John met Buddy in the city. Buddy has both U-87 and new centurion programming in him. Lucy Cain and Zoe Graystone put it there. Then Lucy downloaded her avatar into him and sent him to the city for safekeeping."

"Ridiculous," the One sneered.

"John had some freedom in the city after D'Anna took him there to be her breeder. It worked. She conceived. I'm sure you heard about his escape several months ago. Their child was born on Caprica last week."

"Fantasy," the One said in a bored tone.

"John has his picture," Lee said. "It's a boy…the one predicted by your scripture, your _peacemaker_. All your U-87s were programmed to protect the peacemaker and his parents. Buddy actually helped John escape."

The Four had stood and gripped the bars of his cell. "Are you trying to tell us that a sister Three conceived and gave birth to a child who lived?"

"He was born early, but he's alive so far…thanks to the medical care he's getting on Caprica."

"Don't get taken in by his lies," the One said. "Divide and conquer. That's what he's trying to do."

The Four's eyes were locked on Lee's. "The child will survive?"

"We have every reason to believe he will. Humans have made great strides in the last twenty-five years in the care of preterm infants."

Now even the Five was watching attentively. "A child born of a sister must be protected at all costs."

"That's not the only good news," Lee added. "An Eight on Caprica named Sharon also had a child recently, a little girl. She's doing fine. Sharon and her human husband took her home from the hospital a month ago. Sharon's husband is aboard this ship. I'm sure he'll be glad to share his pictures with you."

"Have we been wrong?" The Four asked. "Could there have been more to the Two's and Three's crazy rantings about an impending birth than we thought?"

"_Not you, too_!" the One said in exasperation. "You feel the same way about religion as I do. Where is that medical and scientific mind of yours that we prize so highly? You can't both be taken in by the word of a charlatan and a liar. _We know the truth!_"

The Four maintained his composure. "We thought we did, but we were on that baseship for years. A lot could have happened on the surface that we didn't hear about."

"Are you saying that our brothers and sisters withheld information from us?" The One asked. "I don't believe it."

Lee said, "The First One withheld knowledge about his killing of the Sevens and the creators from all but a few of his brother Ones and they withheld it from the rest of you." He looked at the One in the cell. "Apparently you didn't make the short list. The One at the prison knows the truth. We'll get to him eventually. Then he can put his hand in your datastream and you can question him."

There was the unmistakable clanking of a centurion as Buddy followed John to the cells.

"I'm sure you want to say hello to our guests," John told Buddy.

"Greetings," Buddy said in the voice that sounded so much like Leonard Markham's that John smiled. "John said you might have some questions for me."

"See, I'm not pulling any strings," John said.

"I'm available, too, for questions," Lucy's voice said.

The Five had gone very pale. "That's her voice," he said. "I've heard it before in the datastream. That's Lucy Cain."

For once the One had the good sense to keep quiet.

"Don't be shy," John said. "I'm sure you have questions. Buddy and Lucy are a walking, talking fountain of knowledge. Ask your questions. Then maybe you'll feel like answering a few of ours."

…

Kara was the only one at dinner that night who had any appetite. Lee and her father both toyed with their food. Her father kept glancing at his watch.

"Go on…wherever it is you need to go," she told him.

"I should check in with General Vargas. We're meeting with the forward insertion team one last time and I need to talk to LG49 again. His safety is my responsibility."

They looked at each other with the same green eyes, father and daughter, and each saw love reflected there. He stood and Kara followed. They hugged, tightly and briefly.

"Good hunting," she whispered. "Be careful. Maybe I'll see you soon."

"I love you baby. Good hunting yourself. God protect you."

Her eyes followed him out the door. By the time she looked at Lee, she had successfully fought back her tears.

"He's going to be all right," Lee said.

"If you ask him, he'll tell you that he's still working on his nine lives. He says he's got a couple left. So when are you leaving?"

"In two hours. We're launching our Vipers at the same time as the Raptors taking the Marines to the surface. As soon as the forward team starts its diversionary tactic, we'll be ready when the centurions start toward them…if it happens the way we've planned. Between us and the Marines, we should be able to take them out."

"Isn't LG49 going to try to free them?"

"General Vargas decided against it. There's at least five hundred centurions at the airstrip, maybe six. The general doesn't want to risk something going wrong and us losing LG49. Your father doesn't either."

"Are you launching with everybody else?"

He nodded. "I've got to meet with the pilots again before we go."

"So what's the plan?"

"The Viper team provides air support for the ground assault. As soon as the hangars are safe on the planet, we'll set up a temporary command post. We're going to clear the hangars of their Heavy Raiders and house about half the Vipers in six of them. We'll start a rotating CAP like we're flying up here. One hangar will become the field hospital and the other one will become a temporary command post. By morning we hope to start landing the Marines to assault the prison."

They sat in silence for a few moments. Finally Kara said, "How did your interrogation go this morning?"

Lee shrugged.

"What?"

"Even after John brought Buddy down to answer some questions, they wouldn't say much. I'm not sure if it's because they aren't talking or they don't know much and aren't willing to admit it."

"So are you saying that we know more than they do?"

"I'm certain they didn't know about the Sevens and the creators. I was hoping to get some information about where the res ship went and what the Cylons on that other basestar plan to do, but I'm almost completely convinced that they don't know."

"I thought the Cylons were supposed to be so big on sticking their hands in their goo stream and sharing info."

"The thing of it is," Lee said, "I don't think there ever was any kind of master plan for dealing with us. I think we caught them totally by surprise. They thought their brothers and sisters still controlled Caprica. It's to their credit that they managed to jump two ships away."

"If we hadn't been so intent on capturing that res ship, we could have gotten all of them. In fact if all the battlestars had jumped in and started shooting, we wouldn't have to worry about that rogue ship coming back."

"I know," Lee said glumly. "But it didn't work out that way. You think we made a mistake, don't you?"

"I know why we didn't jump in with the intent to destroy the res ship. Your dad wanted to hold it hostage in hopes the Cylons would surrender instead of risk permanent death and now it's lurking out of range somewhere and we don't have a clue where it is."

Suddenly Kara had an idea, but rather than mention it when Lee needed to concentrate on the ground assault, she filed it away for a later time. She could wait until they had a base on the plateau and were contemplating the next step. Lee would only tell her it was too dangerous anyway.

Instead, she asked, "Are you sure you're up to climbing into a cockpit tonight?"

Their eyes met. "I'm ready."

She couldn't tell him she wished he wouldn't do it, just as he'd never tried to keep her out of the cockpit. It was the life they had both chosen.

He finally glanced down at the table. He couldn't continue to look into those green eyes without wanting to take her to his bunk.

"I'm sure you've got things to do," Kara said.

"You need to get some rest. You'll start another CAP at three in the morning."

"You'll be on the plateau by then."

"I hope. Now you need to go get in your rack and get some sleep."

"Right. You go find my father and talk invasion...part one."

"It's called Operation Tango."

They stood, took their trays to the conveyer and stowed them before they walked into the corridor. They couldn't bring themselves to separate. Lee walked with Kara to her quarters and they stood looking at each other. She knew he needed to go. His team was waiting for him.

Finally she threw her arms around him and kissed him hard and quickly. She knew better than to try to talk. He was as emotional as she was and both were struggling not to show it. She opened the hatch to her quarters and closed it carefully behind her. With the crazy CAP schedules they were all flying, someone was always sleeping. The privacy curtains were drawn across Pepper's and Hot Dog's bunks.

Quietly Kara shed her sweatpants and hoodie and crawled under the cover in her underwear. She drew the curtains thinking that sleep would not come easily that night, but the numerals of her alarm clock cast a faint golden-green glow that reminded her of fireflies, and she fell asleep thinking of the way she and Karl had chased them through vast fields during the soft summer nights of her childhood on Picon where the world they inhabited was a much simpler place.

…

By the time Lee got to the Situation Room, the pain of leaving Kara was beginning to numb. He would see her again soon because he knew he would travel between the planet and the _Galactica _as he brought his father up to date on the air war over the surface. He thought briefly of the adventures he and Kendra had experienced while they had shuttled between the _Penelope_ and the _Galactica_ and Tauron. That had been barely six months ago and yet it seemed like another lifetime.

General Vargas went over the plan one last time. Lee noticed that John had traded his duty blue uniform for the black turtleneck and fatigue pants worn by the rest of the Marines. He knew that body armor and weapons would be added before they landed on the surface. John caught Lee's eye and gave him a look that said he'd rather be wearing a flight suit.

They finally left the Situation Room and all walked down to the hangar deck where the Marine team had gathered. Lee caught a glimpse of Zak and gave his brother a thumbs up and got an answering one before he walked over to the pilots who had gathered in another area.

Natalie and Buddy were with John, LG49 and Vargas even though Lee knew that neither would be on the initial mission to the surface. They were scheduled to join the command team only after the prison and lab were secured. No one knew exactly when that would be.

The pilots were edgy, the tension palpable. They were psyched up for the fight and were now forced to wait.

"Okay, everybody, gather around," Lee said. "Remember _where you are_ at all times. Remember that by the time you engage any centurions on the surface, that we'll have Marines down there. The last thing we want is any kind of friendly fire incident. You've got their coordinates. Stay away from them. Any questions?"

He looked around the group. "We're ready," Redwing said. "We've been waiting for this."

"Then let's launch and join the Vipers on CAP. If the Cylons on the ground are monitoring us, they should be used to seeing Vipers around the battlestars by now."

Lee walked over to where Vargas and John were standing with the admiral. Colonel Tigh was in the CIC. Even though they didn't expect another attack by the Cylon basestar this soon, Bill had said the he and Tigh would take turns in the CIC.

Lee shifted his helmet to his right hand and addressed his father. "We're launching, sir. We'll be ready to escort the Raptors to the surface."

"Good hunting, son," Bill said. "Still have your grandfather's cigarette lighter?"

Lee smiled. "In my sleeve pocket."

John looked at Lee and nodded his agreement with Bill's sentiments.

Vargas turned back to LG49, but John and Bill's eyes locked for a moment. John felt like he was sending a son into combat, too. Then John also turned to LG49.

"Ready?"

"I am ready," the big robot said.

In another part of the hangar, the Marine team members were boarding the Raptors that would take them to the surface. The Raptor with the Cylon transponder signal was the first one in line.

"I wish I could go with you," John said to LG49.

"We have discussed all options and your admiral says it is too dangerous. I am in agreement."

"We'll be waiting to hear what you find."

The centurion got into the Raptor and closed the hatch. The ship was towed to an elevator and lowered to the launch bay.

John walked over to where Vargas was donning body armor. A Marine helped John get into the bulky vest. Then he and Vargas got onto a Raptor piloted by Saunders with Karl as ECO. They greeted each other.

"These are two of the best Raptor pilots in the fleet," John said to Vargas. "We're in good hands."

Vargas nodded. "Will we be able to hear LG49's communication?"

"Yes, sir," Karl answered. "I'll put it on speaker as soon as we've launched."

They sat silently as the Raptor was lowered into the launch bay. They were second in line to launch and all were acutely aware of the importance of this part of the plan succeeding. This was the beginning of the second phase of the invasion. The first phase, the space battle, was still unsettled so they would be fighting a war on two fronts…three if they counted the air war over the planet as separate from the ground attack.

John and Bill had both tried to talk General Vargas into staying on the _Galactica_, but he had refused. It didn't take much imagination for John to see the young captain who had led a small force to victory against overwhelming odds on Tauron during the First War. In a way he was fighting the same enemy he had fought then, but the new centurions were bigger and faster with built-in armaments. They were a deadlier foe than Vargas and his Marines had faced on Tauron and everyone knew it, especially the general. He'd already fought them on Caprica.

Karl was monitoring the dradis carefully. "Sir, LG49's Raptor has jumped to the coordinates near the prison. He should land within ten minutes."

They waited for the LSO to signal them to launch. The timing of the Raptor launches was intermittent and slow. They didn't want to attract the attention of the Cylons on the ground with the rapid launch of twenty ships.

"Viper escorts are away, sir," Karl reported. "We're cleared to launch."

Saunders skillfully lifted the Raptor from the launch bay and accelerated out the opening. Once clear of the ship, he took a course that led them slightly away from the battlestar. Then he turned the ship so John could see the new formation Bill Adama had put the big ships into. They were circling, but they were no longer all at the same altitude. There was over a vertical mile between the ships. The _Galactica_ was nearest the planet's surface and was at the bottom of the stack. Each ship above the _G_ was moving a slightly larger circle so that they looked like a giant vortex, large at the top and small at the bottom. It reminded John of the way commercial spaceports used to stack ships when they had more arrivals than they had runways to handle them.

Bill had made it impossible for the rogue Cylon basestar to jump into space and attack all the ships at once.

"Viper escort is acquired," Karl said. "All six of them."

"I hope that's enough," John joked trying to ease the tension. The normal Viper escort for a Raptor carrying an officer of Vargas's rank was two.

"LG49's Raptor is on the surface," Karl reported. "Switching to speakers."

The wireless communicator that Markham had placed behind LG49's chest plate was fairly short range. Once he left the Raptor, communication would be more difficult. The only sound coming from their Raptor's speakers now was static. Then there was a faint garble of words that they couldn't understand.

"We need to get lower in the atmosphere," John said. "We're out of range."

"Should we stay directly over the plateau?" Saunders asked.

"Stay east of the prison complex," John said.

They began to descend. "Approaching Kármán line," Saunders said. "If we continue at this rate of descent, our heat shields will be visible as soon as we're in the atmosphere…if anybody's looking."

"I've got some jump coordinates," John said. "I used them the night we freed Petra and Yoshimo. They're three miles east of the plateau and lower in altitude." He turned to General Vargas. "Do you have any objections to jumping into the atmosphere below the prison level, sir?"

"If you think it's safe and will put us into communication with LG49, then do it."

John handed Saunders the small laminated copy of the planetary coordinates that Markham had given him. "It's the third one."

"The one that says _PRISON_?"

"That's it."

"I've got to get permission to jump since we'll be leaving our Viper escort behind."

"Do it," Vargas said.

Confirmation of their plan took almost five minutes before Saunders put in the jump coordinates and had Karl to verify them. "Jumping in five," he said and counted it down.

The sensation was unpleasant, but over in a moment.

Above them in the distance they could see the lights of the prison. "Hold the ship right here," John said to Saunders. "Last time we did this LG49 was flying the ship and he could see with infrared. We don't want to pancake into anything."

Almost immediately they heard LG49's voice. "I am approaching the first hangar. It is dark as are the second and third hangars, but there are lights and activity at the fourth hangar."

"That's the one with the dradis equipment," John said.

"Scanning first hangar. It contains two Heavy Raiders but no centurions. Continuing to second hangar."

They waited. The only light in the Raptor was that coming from the instruments and switches.

"How many of those centurion zappers did you bring, sir?" Karl asked the general.

"None," Vargas answered. "We're holding the ones we've got in reserve because we think we'll need them to take the prison."

"What's our altitude?" John asked.

"Twenty-eight hundred feet, sir," Saunders replied.

"What's the altitude of the plateau?" Vargas asked.

"Over a mile," John answered. "We're splitting the difference between the plateau and the desert floor."

"Second hangar is empty," LG49 reported. "No ships and no centurions." A minute later he said, "Third hangar contains five ground transport vehicles, three large and two small."

John couldn't see Vargas's face clearly, but he knew the general was deep in thought. "What do you think is going on?" Vargas asked.

"I'm not sure. The Cylons at the prison have either pulled more centurions to serve as guards or they've grouped them in the other hangars."

"Approaching fourth hangar. Many of my brothers are inside. The hangars beyond are dark." There were several seconds of silence and then LG49 said, "_Greetings, brothers_."

"He can't talk to us and them at the same time," John said. "We've worked out a sort of code since he has to concentrate on communicating with the centurions."

"Won't the others think it's weird he's talking aloud, sir?" Karl asked.

"I hope not. LG49 said as long as he sends the wireless signal that they understand, he doesn't think they'll pay attention to anything else. Remember that they're geared to respond to wireless info from other centurions and verbal commands from the humanoids."

LG49's voice came over the speaker. "_I have been sent to check the dradis. It appears to be malfunctioning._"

"Damn!" John exclaimed softly. "That's his signal to us that he doesn't sense any freed centurions among those in the hangar." The communication was one-way and John knew that LG49 couldn't hear him, but he said, "Okay, big guy, give us a head count if you can."

"_I have been guarding the lab. Where are the brothers who used to guard the other hangars?"_

A few seconds of silence.

"_I have not been to the prison. Why were a third of you sent there?_"

"Okay, there's our number," John said. "A third of them are gone so we're dealing with between 400 and 500 centurions."

"_I must take the dradis off-line to run some tests."_

"That's our cue," Vargas said. "Let's start landing the Marines on the forward assault team,"

Saunders chose the prearranged frequency and said the phrase, "Time to tango. Repeat. Time to tango."

"LG49 should have that dradis off-line by now," John said to Saunders. "Take us straight up four thousand feet and then fly south, but stay on this longitude until we're well past the prison. Markham determined that if a centurion is standing on the edge of the plateau, this distance is out of range of his infrared scanning ability."

"Yes, sir," Saunders said.

The ship rose quickly and they watched the bright flashes as the Raptors carrying the seventy-member Marine team jumped into the atmosphere several miles away. They descended to the surface quickly and one by one their vertical landing lights came on before they touched down on the hard packed rocky dirt. It took less than a minute for the five Marines in each of the fourteen ships to disembark and unload their equipment. In barely ten minutes, the landing area was cleared and the Raptors had jumped away.

In the meantime John knew that thirty Vipers were screaming down through the atmosphere unnoticed because LG49 had taken the dradis off-line.

"Take us to the landing zone while their dradis is still down," John said to Saunders, "but circle wide. There might be another one at the prison. Let's not take a chance. We don't want to start our ground campaign by having to dodge a couple of Cylon missiles."

"Roger that," Saunders said. "Been there, done that. It was no fun."

John looked at Vargas. "Saunders and Lee and their teammate Kendra Shaw had an encounter with a Cylon Heavy Raider on Tauron."

"I read the report," Vargas said, "and I followed their hearing with a lot of interest."

They were on the ground very shortly. Karl lowered the ramp and Vargas got off.

"You stay right here with the engines hot," John told Karl and Saunders. "If things start to go bad, I'll have the general back on this ship and we'll get him out of here if I have to knock him out to do it."

"Yes, sir," both pilots said in unison.

"And keep one of your dradis screens on short sweep. I doubt you'll pick up anything but coyotes, but we don't want surprises."

John joined Vargas on the ground and for half a minute they stood letting their eyes adjust completely to the dark. Five hundred yards away, a light blinked twice. Vargas raised a penlight and returned the signal with three blinks before he said, "That's our team. Let's go."

They started across the rocky ground, moving carefully. Although it was still early autumn on Nereid, nights on the high plateau were already cold enough that their breath condensed. The sky was clear and full of stars. The moon was half full and provided just enough light that they could walk without flashlights.

The small wireless on John's shoulder squawked softly. He recognized Lee's voice. "My friends and I ready to tango. Repeat. We're ready to tango."

"Our air support has arrived, sir," he said to Vargas.

"I heard." Five minutes later they joined the Marines scattered among the rocks. A Marine captain took them to a secure area where a mobile infrared scanner was set up with a clear line of sight to the hangars.

"Let's get this show on the road," Vargas said.

"LG49 should be bringing the dradis up any minute now. I told him to keep it down for twenty minutes.

Several minutes later LG49 said, "_This unit is now functioning properly. It appears the enemy has landed. Twelve degrees south by southwest. Three miles distance._"

The Marine monitoring the infrared scanner said, "Here they come…several hundred of them."

"Hold your fire. Let them clear the hangar area," Vargas said.

His command was repeated by the squad leaders.

"Damn, those suckers can move fast," the infrared operator said. "Thirty seconds to halfway point."

"Then let's give them some light and show them the way," Vargas said. "Fire the flares."

His command was repeated by wireless throughout the forces scattered behind the rocks. A captain gave the command and from selected positions long-range flares were fired skyward. Suddenly the area between them and the hangars was lit by brightly burning magnesium. The dust churned up by hundreds of pounding metal feet looked like a desert sandstorm. John held his breath. There was no going back now. They had passed the point of no return.

…

Lee saw the flares and immediately put his squad into action. "Red team, keep those centurions from returning to the hangar area. Blue team, follow me and keep them from escaping to the prison."

But Lee soon realized that the centurions had no intention of going anywhere but into battle. Even with the Vipers flying overhead, they continued straight toward the Marines whom they viewed as the most immediate threat...although several in the rear eventually turned their weapons skyward and began firing at the Vipers.

"Watch that ground fire!" Lee shouted.

One of his more eager pilots had dropped too low and suddenly called, "I'm hit! I'm hit! Ejecting!"

Lee was looking around desperately trying to spot the damaged Viper when he saw the explosive flash of a canopy being fired into the night sky. Half a second later the pilot followed it."

Lee wheeled and dove toward the centurions, his KEWs blazing. He knew they would be firing at the helpless pilot descending slowly to the ground under his parachute. Bullets chewed into the advancing centurions, fragmenting half a dozen of them. When he pulled up sharply and looked around again, he no longer saw the chute. For better or worse, the pilot was down.

He switched his wireless frequency to the one being used by the Marines. "We've got a pilot on the ground southwest of your position about three klicks."

The voice of the Marine wireless operator came back, barely audible over the background noise of gunfire and explosions. "Noted. Tell him to sit tight. We're busy right now."

Lee wanted to verify the pilot's safety so he flew a quick recon toward the prison. The lights were bright enough for him to see that no centurions were coming to the aid of those from the hangars or to kill a helpless downed Viper pilot. Those in the four guard towers fired at him, but he was too high for their bullets to be effective.

_Yeah, you just stay put, _he thought. _We'll deal with you later._

…

John wasn't used to the noise of a ground battle. Even with the helmet that Vargas had insisted he put on, there was little muffling of the noise. When he'd fought the Cylons in space during the First War, the battles had been silent except for the incessant chatter of the wireless. At the beginning of his first orientation aboard the _Solaria_, he and the other nuggets had been reminded that in the vacuum of space, there is no sound. The slight vibration of his Viper and the tracer rounds pouring out of his KEWs plus the sight of the old-style Raiders silently exploding had been the only indication that he was firing.

Another round of flares was sent skyward. The centurion advance had slowed under the withering fire and they were spreading out in an attempt to flank the Marine position on both sides. It was a time-tested battle strategy and one which could have devastating consequences if it worked. Someone with military knowledge had no doubt programmed their computer brains.

Lee saw the wave of metal slow and begin spreading out sideways.

"Keep those centurions from getting into the rocks," he shouted into his wireless. Red team right. Blue team left."

He led his team in a strafing mission against the left side of the centurion ranks. The 30mm rounds proved devastating when they found a target. Two more Vipers were hit. He saw one pilot eject, but the other Viper spun into the rocks a mile past their position and exploded. But they managed to stop the flanking maneuver. The remaining centurions were resuming a frontal assault and had almost reached the rocks where they were being cut down by a barrage of fire from the Marines.

Sandwiched between the Vipers and the guns of the soldiers, the number of advancing centurions rapidly decreased. Some had been literally cut in two and lay on the ground firing up at the Vipers. Others were pulling themselves arm over arm toward the rocks still firing at their Marine adversaries.

Lee knew that a human force would have retreated long ago, but the centurions kept advancing and being cut down. Lee had no idea how many casualties the Marines had suffered, but he knew it couldn't have been nearly what was being done to the robots, programmed to kill the enemy or be killed.

Fifteen minutes later it was over. The last of the centurions had been dispatched with shots to the head.

The Vipers began to land at the airstrip. Lee was the first one to reach the fourth hangar, still brightly lit but empty now except for LG49.

"My brothers are dead," the big robot said. "I no longer hear their wireless voices." Lee thought he detected sadness in LG49's voice.

"They don't seem to understand the concepts of surrender or retreat," he finally said.

"No. They are not programmed to do either. Only when they are freed does the preservation of self become part of their conscious behavior."

"Can you give me a sit rep? Anything we need to know about the area?"

"Do you have any demolition experts in your group of Marines?"

"I don't know. We'll need to ask General Vargas. I'm sure there are some on the _Galactica_. Why?"

"My sixty brother centurions that I had previously freed have been herded into the last hangar. The whole structure has been wired inside and out with a large amount of explosives that will detonate should the hangar door be opened or any attempt made to penetrate the walls. Those explosives have also been wired to the underground tylium tanks. Should the hangar blow up, the tanks will go as well."

"Lords of Kobol," Lee breathed. The pilots who had landed began to gather around them. Quickly Lee explained the situation. "Stay out of all the hangars except this one, and keep everybody well clear of the last one. Get all the Vipers on this end of the airstrip." He turned back to LG49. "You've got to inform John and General Vargas,"

"I have been unable to reach them."

"John might have switched his wireless frequency." Lee said.

"Then I will go inform them," LG49 said.

"No. You can't go anywhere near them. You look just like the hostile centurions. You'd be shot."

"Then I will remain here."

"I'll go back to my Viper and see if I can contact John."

Lee started out at a run, but after a few strides his side began hurting so badly that he had to slow to a fast walk. Getting into his Viper without the ladder proved difficult as well. He had to boost himself onto the back of the left wing and crawl forward to the cockpit.

He tried the ground frequency and was glad to hear John's voice answer. "I'm at the hangars," Lee said and explained what LG49 had told him.

"I'll pass on the word," John said. "General Vargas is checking on the wounded. The team is making sure all those centurions are out of commission. We'll be there shortly…or I will."

"I think we're going to need the bomb squad."

"Are you all right? You sound out of breath."

"I had to climb on the wing of my Viper to get in."

"Those ladders are nice, aren't they? We'll have to get a couple of them down here."

"Is Zak okay?"

"As far as I know. There're some wounded but I don't think he's among them."

Lee closed his eyes and leaned back against the headrest. He wondered when the Cylons had forced the sixty freed centurions into that hangar. It must have happened the day after John's team had freed Petra and Yoshimo and unboxed Sonja because the battlestars had been monitoring activity on the planet since then and they hadn't observed anything happening around the last hangar. That meant the prison commandant had known they'd eventually come. Tonight's attack hadn't been a total surprise. He hadn't counted on them having LG49, though. He probably thought they'd check all the hangars and set off the explosives, destroying the freed centurions and a large number of humans in the process.

For the first time Lee began to understand John's feelings of loyalty to Buddy and LG49. Without them this attack could have had a very different outcome.

Wearily Lee got out of the Viper and climbed down the wing. Jumping to the ground sent a sharp pain stabbing through his side and he had to stop to get his breath. He hoped the wetness he felt inside his flight suit was only sweat and that he hadn't opened the wound. He unzipped the top part of the suit and slid his hand inside. He breathed a deep sigh of relief when he removed it and found no blood.

There were so many things to do now. He had to get his pilots organized and get a head count. He had to get some rescue Raptors to the surface to search for the downed pilots and some Vipers back in the air to protect them.

He walked toward the fourth hangar, managing to limp only slightly from the pain every time his left leg hit the tarmac.

He could almost hear Kara saying, _I guess_ y_ou found out you aren't a superman after all._

…

Asleep in her bunk, Kara dreamed of dogs fighting in the front yard of the big old house she and her mother and Dreilide had lived in for the first eight years of her life. Lots of dogs. So many dogs that she was trapped in the middle of them and couldn't get to the safety of the front porch. But they weren't attacking her. They were fighting each other.

Then suddenly Dreilide was there wielding a big flat snow shovel, scooping up the fighting dogs and flinging them high into the air where they defied gravity and continued to fight, snarling and ripping into each other in a bloodless display of canine ferocity.

Finally he reached her and lifted her into his arms. He was gasping for breath. When he managed to speak, he said, _I've got you, Kara. You're safe. _But the snarling dogs suddenly began drifting back down, and their escape route was being cut off. _Go! Go! _She screamed at him, but his feet were stuck in the ground like the roots of a tree so he tossed her higher and farther than the dogs. He tossed her all the way to the porch. When she looked back, he had disappeared under a sea of dogs that filled the yard and the street. _Nooooooo!_

"Kara! Kara! Wake up." Hot Dog was shaking her.

"What?"

"You were having a nightmare. I didn't want you to wake the whole ship."

She sat up and mumbled. "Dogs…fighting."

"A dogfight?"

"Not Vipers and Raiders. Real dogs. What time is it?"

"02:00. Time to get up."

He sat down on the floor beside her bunk. "I went up to see Kat after I ate last night. Doc Cottle told me he wants to send her back to Caprica."

"How's he going to do that? Put her on the transport?"

"The engineers on the _Minoan_ have done some tests. Even though the hull didn't breach, the damage is worse than they first thought. Admiral Adama is sending her back to Caprica for dry dock repairs and ordering the _Triton_ to take her place here. Cottle wants to send the most seriously wounded back with the _Minoan_."

"He'll be trading a Valkyrie class ship for a Mercury class ship," Kara commented. "That's not a bad trade."

Hot Dog hesitated and then said, "I want Kat to get the best treatment, but I want her here, too."

"I'd feel the same way if it was Lee…but I'd let him go. There's only so much Doc Cottle can do for Kat on board the _G_. She'll get the best treatment at Kings Bay Medical because that's where the doctors are that specialize in traumatic head injuries."

"I'm going to hit the shower."

"Don't use all the hot water."

"Like that's even possible."

The curtains covering Pepper's bunk slid open and she rolled out. While Pepper wore the standard sports bras and tank tops, she favored hip-hugging panties that Kara called boy shorts. Kara noticed that Hot Dog's gaze lingered just a few seconds too long on Pepper's shapely behind. Then he grabbed his towel and was out the hatch.

Kara also rolled out of her bunk. "I think he likes what he sees," she said.

Pepper smiled. "Don't worry. He's not my type."

"What is your type?"

"I like a challenge."

"Like Skulls? He isn't much of a challenge. One of your smiles and he was a goner."

Pepper snorted softly. "Getting one is never a challenge. Keeping one…now that's the challenge."

As Kara got her shower gear from her locker, she realized how lucky she was with Lee. Never once had she seriously doubted his love or commitment to her and their relationship. She put her towel down on her bunk and took the little bronze statues of Apollo and Artemis from the top of her locker. They had been an Academy graduation gift from Yolanda Brenn and Keshia. Keshia had told her that the statues were very old. They had been found in the ruins of the temple at Delphi after the Cylon bombing six years earlier. Holding one in each hand, Kara brought them to her forehead and offered a silent prayer for Lee's safety. Then she offered a prayer for her father's safety. And last she offered a prayer for her new half-brother that he might live and one day see Nereid free from war.

Thirty minutes later she was sitting in the ready room with Pepper and Hot Dog. Troy Minos came in and made an announcement that was welcomed by all.

"The first phase of Operation Tango was a success. The hangars on the plateau are ours."

"Casualties?" Pepper asked.

"We lost one Viper pilot that we know about. I don't have a name yet. One has been found with a broken ankle when he ejected…or rather when he landed. Two ejected and are still missing but are believed to be alive. There were some injuries among the Marines but no deaths have been reported.

"How many centurions were killed?"

"Between four and five hundred. I'm not sure they'll get an accurate count since so many of them are in pieces."

A pilot in the back said. "Finally some good news."

"Stay sharp out there on CAP," Minos said. "It's a long way from being over. Good hunting, everybody."

"So say we all," Hot Dog said.

The other pilots echoed him. "So say we all."

As the three of them followed their comrades from the ready room, they each touched the two pictures. Luck and hope.

Kara knew that all their battles might not go as well as tonight's had gone. In the days to come they were going to need all the luck and hope they could get.

TBC…


	67. Biscuits

Chapter 67

Biscuits

_The Planet_

_Day 324: Nadine is doing fine and is well enough to return to her tent, but she has asked me to let her stay in the medical tent for a few more days. As our other beds are gathering dust at the moment, I can see no reason to force her to leave._

_I was correct in thinking that Nadine would not want to see Ares or to accept anything from him, but I was incorrect in thinking that Nadine would not allow Ares to see his daughter. She told me that I could show Miriam to him. I spent nearly an hour with her talking to her about accepting child support. I know that as a pilot she earns a decent living, but if she returns to flying in the commercial sector, she will not be able to carry her baby with her all over the Colonies. Some help from Ares might mean the difference between average child care and excellent child care. I finally convinced her to think about it before giving him a final answer._

_Day 325: Last night I conveyed Nadine's decision to Ares. He was pacing outside the medical tent when I got back from breakfast this morning. I had him wait in the outer area and took the sleeping child from her basket beside Nadine. Ares didn't dissolve in tears, but he did get teary-eyed when viewing Miriam. He had never held an infant before so I had him sit in a sturdy chair and placed her in his arms. I think I actually witnessed a man falling in love with his child. _

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

The first order of business after the decisive Colonial victory over the centurions at the airfield was defusing the explosives in and around the eighth hangar and at the underground tylium tanks. To avoid endangering any men or ships, Lee had ordered all Vipers to the end of the runway nearest the rocks. Word had been sent to the _Galactica_ to send down the bomb squad with their small remote-controlled robot.

Lee had put a CAP back in the air and the battlestars had each sent an additional five Vipers to help protect them, thirty-five extra Vipers in all. At the end of the CAP they would return to their battlestars and another group would be dispatched.

Medics had set up a small triage and treatment facility in the shelter of several large rocks. So far they had treated only two wounds serious enough to send the soldiers back to the _Galactica_. The rest of the wounds were minor, many of them caused when centurion bullets had struck rock and had ricocheted into limbs not protected by body armor.

Zak had received a small wound on his cheek, not much worse than a bad scratch, which the medic said had probably come from a rock chip slicing across his face.

Hunter walked up while the medic was cleaning the wound and applying a liquid bandage.

He grinned. "Is the patient going to live?"

Lee almost didn't recognize him. Hunter was dressed identically to the other Marines and had his hair cut in what Lee had come to think of as the typical jarhead cut, the sides practically shaved, the top barely half an inch long.

"What's Maya going to say about the haircut?" Lee asked.

"By the time I see her again, it will have grown out. How's your side?"

"I'm not going to run the hundred yard dash, but I'm hanging in there."

The medic told Zak that he had finished with him. Zak stood and picked up his assault rifle.

"So what do you think of my first battle scar?"

"It ought to give you a great intro when you're talking to girls in a bar now," Lee said to his brother. "It looks like an old-fashioned dueling scar."

Zak smiled. "Maybe my days of picking up girls in bars are over."

"So this thing with you and Jade is that serious?"

"What's that?" Hunter asked. "Your brother has gone over to the dark side like Agathon?"

Zak shrugged. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves. There's a big old prison full of centurions sitting about eight miles east of here. Then there's the city and settlements and basestar shipyard. The time to think about relationships is way down the road."

"You're right, little bro. I've got to get back to the command group. We're waiting on the bomb squad to get here from the _G_ with their remote-controlled robot unit. Our first order of business is defusing the explosives around hangar eight and the tylium tanks."

"I guess if those puppies go up we're all in big trouble."

"That's an understatement. Why do you think we've evacuated to nearly three miles distance?"

"Because we're smart?"

Lee grinned. "That…and because General Vargas ordered us to. I got to go. Take care, Zak."

"You, too, Lee."

He watched Zak and Hunter walk off together, not kin, but still brothers in arms. Lee knew how tight that bond could be and felt better knowing that even though Zak had seen combat in Sovana, he now had someone older and more experienced watching his six.

When he got to the command group, John looked up from where he, Vargas and several others were studying a large map of the prison.

"How's Zak?" John asked.

"Just a scratch. He'll be fine."

"And you? I noticed you're favoring your left side."

"I'm okay."

"We decided to go ahead and go over the plans for assaulting the prison," John said.

"You're not going to wait to see if we can free the centurions locked in the last hangar."

Vargas looked up. "We'll wait until the bomb squad is through, but we're not going to risk those centurions in the operation to take the prison."

John said, "LG49 downloaded the blueprints and specs for us while we were still on the _G_. The walls of the prison are over a foot thick of poured concrete, heavy rebar and stone. The zappers won't penetrate. The only way we can use them is to get the centurions outside or get the zappers inside. The chances of getting enough of them inside are slim to none."

Vargas said, "But we don't think the humanoids will let the centurions go outside especially after what happened tonight so we're at an impasse right now."

Vargas said, "I have my doubts now that we'll be able to take the prison without a lot of damage to the structure. I'm just about to the point of saying to hell with using it as our headquarters and letting our ships bomb it into rubble."

"What you need is someone on the inside," Lee mused.

"We've considered that," Vargas said. "We can't figure out a way to accomplish it. Even if you take the guard towers out of the picture, I hardly think they'll let us land a ship on the roof without a fight."

Lee said, "I didn't mean getting Marines inside. It's too bad we can't send one of those in the brig over there under a flag of truce and just ask them to surrender. Maybe they'll surprise us."

Lee's remark was met with silence from General Vargas. It didn't take much for him to understand what the general thought of his suggestion.

John said, "I think we're dealing with an issue of trust. The ones in the brig weren't willing to work with the humans in the valley. It's doubtful they'd do our bidding now."

"What does it matter?" Lee asked. "The worst one of them could do is get inside and join the others. If we have to go in, one more skinjob isn't going to make any difference."

"There's the matter of our battle plans," Vargas said.

"Of which they have no knowledge, sir," Lee answered.

Again there was a long silence. "What do you think?" Vargas asked John.

"Lee's idea isn't really that bad. I'm beginning to think we should give it a shot."

"Which one do we pick?" Lee asked.

"I think the Four would be our man. He seemed much more affected by the news of D'Anna and the baby than the other two. The Five was adamant that the child should be protected, but he's not going to go against the One."

"I agree," Lee said. "You should have seen the Four's face when Buddy told him about a brother Four's half-human child, the one who was taken from Petra and given to an Eight in the city after her father was executed and her mother sent to the prison. He was very disturbed at the thought of one brother ordering the execution of another. I'm not sure he believed it, but maybe I'm wrong. He's had nearly twenty-four hours to think about it."

"Okay, do it," Vargas said. "Which one of you wants to go get him?"

"I'll go," John said. "Lee's in charge of the pilots down here. He needs to stay."

In ten minutes John had made his way to the Raptor. The sky had just begun to gray. Another ten minutes and they had lifted off, jumped to the _Galactica_ and gotten permission to land.

"Take a break and get some breakfast," John told Karl and Saunders. "I'll be gone at least forty minutes."

He went straight to the CIC. Bill and Tigh were both there. John briefly explained what they wanted to do.

He got an immediate snort of derision from Tigh. "You wasted a trip up here to the ship just so you could add another one of them to the prison staff?"

"We hope he'll cooperate with us and talk them into surrendering."

"What are the odds of that?" Tigh asked.

John looked at Bill as he answered. "Without getting someone on the inside, our only options are to destroy the building or mount an all-out assault. The first option takes out the Cylons but robs us of a command center. The second will be suicide for a large number of Marines. The odds aren't great that the ones inside could be talked into surrendering, but we're willing to try it to save the lives of our soldiers. If this doesn't work, I'm almost certain that General Vargas will decide to destroy the prison rather than risk our Marines."

Tigh voiced his opinion quickly. "As well he should. We don't need to use the prison for a command center. Vargas is insane to try to take it. He ought to let our Vipers pound it into a pile of rubble. A few dozen well-placed missiles will soften up that bunch inside."

"There's a part of me that agrees with you completely," John said. "But if we show restraint now, the less likely the Cylons will be to take it out on their human slaves. I don't really care what happens to the guards at the prison or their Cylon masters. They deserve whatever they get for all the humans they tortured and killed, but I do care about the humans in the city and the settlements."

Bill said, "I hope you're right."

"Then I have your permission to take the Four to the surface?"

"Permission granted," Bill said. "Before you leave is there anything else you'd like to put in the diplomatic pouch? The _Minoan_ jumps to Caprica later this morning. The _Triton_ will arrive with any news for us later today."

"No, sir. I've only had a chance to write that one letter."

Bill nodded and turned to Tigh. "You've got the helm. I'm going to finish my report to the President." As they started down the hall, Bill asked, "How are you holding up?"

"Feeling my age, sir," John replied.

"Aren't we all?"

Bill stopped at his quarters. John continued to the brig, arriving just as breakfast was brought to the prisoners. The smell of the food made his mouth water and his stomach growl. Dinner the night before was a distant memory. The One was wide awake since his model had long ago erased its sleep subroutines.

"We're still here," he said sarcastically. "You don't need to check on us every day."

John passed his cell without speaking. The Four sat on the edge of his bunk looking much like a human who had just awakened. The Five was standing at the toilet with his back turned. John suddenly realized that he didn't want to talk to the Four in the presence of the One and the Five. The less influence his brothers could exert, the better. If the Four would even contemplate helping the humans, he probably wouldn't do it in front of the other two.

John motioned to the Marine guard. "Take this man to an interrogation room."

"Yes, sir," the Marine answered.

The Four was quickly shackled and taken from his cell.

"What about my breakfast?"

"Bring it," John told one of the guards.

When they were settled in the interrogation room, John told the guard not to shackle the Four's hands to the table. Eating with handcuffs tethered to a chain around his waist would be awkward enough.

"I'll have to stay in here if he's not chained to the table," the man told him.

"Fine."

After wolfing down a buttered biscuit, the Four asked in an amused tone, "Is this my last meal? If so, I'd like another couple of these biscuits. I've never tasted anything this good."

John said. "I've got a proposition for you. Help us get the Cylons at the prison to surrender and we'll negotiate a position for you in the new government…and all the biscuits you can eat."

The Four stopped in mid-chew. "Could I get that in writing?"

"Right now you're going to have to take my word for it. All I want is a _yes_ or a _no_. This offer is only going to be made once. If you try to negotiate, I'll go to the valley. I'm sure a Two or a Three will take the offer so you won't get another chance. Take it now or it's off the table."

"What's the rush?"

"Accept the offer and you'll see. Otherwise I can't say anything."

"Can I finish my breakfast?"

"Does that mean _yes_?"

The Four nodded.

"Sure. Finish your breakfast." John glanced at this watch…6:25. He was reasonably certain he could get to the mess hall, get a cup of coffee and a piece of toast and get back in twenty minutes. He turned to the Marine guard. "Let him finish his breakfast and have him on the hangar deck in twenty minutes."

"I'll have to leave the shackles on, sir."

"No problem."

John made it to the mess hall in a few minutes. His energy was flagging and he had the beginnings of a headache both of which he hoped a big cup of coffee would cure.

Kara was sitting with Hot Dog and Pepper. John grabbed a tray and joined them.

"I thought you were on the planet," Kara said.

"I was. I had to run an errand."

She grinned. "You Vargas's errand boy now?"

He smiled back. "Something like that. How was CAP?"

"Boring except when we heard Lee ask for more Vipers to be sent to the surface. Are things not going good?"

"Things are going fine. The airstrip is secured…mostly."

"What's that mean?" She asked suspiciously. "Mostly."

"I'm sure somebody saw a Raptor taking the bomb squad to the surface."

"We've already heard somebody asked for them so that's old news. Why do you need those guys?"

John swallowed a bite of toast and buttered another piece. "The last hangar and the tylium tanks are wired. I don't think I need to mention we'd rather not have them explode."

"So now it's on to the prison?"

"As soon as we get that last hangar secured. The freed centurions are in there." He picked up his tray. "I've got to get back down to the planet. I'll see you when we come up here for the next meeting in a day or two."

Kara grinned. "Be careful. Let somebody else be a hero for once."

He leaned over and kissed the top of her head with a grin. "I'm not in hero mode today. I'm channeling Laura's diplomat father."

"Don't forget somebody blew him up for his efforts."

"The scriptures say that peacemakers are assured a special place in heaven."

"You mean Elysium," Kara shot back.

He winked at her. "Whatever you say, baby."

Kara watched him take his tray to the conveyer and then get a cup of coffee to go.

"He looks tired," Hot Dog remarked.

"Duh," Kara said. "You expect him to look like he just got back from a week at a spa?"

"Hey," Hot Dog said grumpily. "I didn't mean anything by it. I just said he looks tired. I do, too. So do you."

"Calm down, you two," Pepper said. "I think he looks fine. Not quite like his cover on _The Caprican Gentleman_ last year_, _but nothing some sleep wouldn't cure."

Hot Dog stood. "I'm going to see Kat. She's being transferred to the _Minoan_ this morning. They're jumping back to Caprica today."

Pepper said. "Tell her…just tell her we're all saying prayers for her."

"She's still unconscious."

"Tell her anyway."

Kara added. "Tell her I don't want to have to put her picture on the wall. She'll know what I mean."

After he was gone, Pepper asked, "What's that about a wall?"

"I heard somebody call it the memorial wall. It's one deck above our quarters. Last year after we won our freedom, some of the crew started putting up pictures of their dead crewmates and then pictures of friends and relatives who had died in the holocaust. It started with just a few pictures and now there's hundreds…maybe even a thousand. It's been added to recently…the pilots who were killed. Lee told me Admiral Taylor himself put up Cole's picture. And it's not just pictures now. There're poems and little flags from all the Colonies and paper flowers. Somebody even put a baby's teething thing beside the picture of a kid."

"A crew member's kid?"

"Probably."

"Where were you?" Pepper asked. "When it all started six years ago?"

"On Picon. My dad got me and Karl off the planet. We were the last ship to leave. What about you?"

"I had just arrived on Caprica. I had applied to the Academy and been accepted. My first choice was the one on Picon because that's where Fleet Headquarters was, but I got assigned to Caprica, my second choice. Funny how things work out sometimes…" her voice trailed off. She didn't have to say that if she'd been assigned to Picon, she'd be dead now. They both understood it.

"Let's hit our racks," Kara said and stood.

"Later today could you show me where the memorial wall is? I got a couple of pictures I'd like to put up…friends of mine from the _Ajax _and one of my mother and…a guy I used to know. He was on Scorpia when the Cylons attacked so I know he's dead."

Kara's voice softened. "Sure. Where were you last year on the night we won our freedom?"

"On board the _Ajax_. I've been there ever since until…" her voice trailed off again. "What did you do with your Cylons that night?"

"I was on Caprica. We fought the Raiders from the basestar. But I heard as soon as Commander Cain had everything under control on the _G_, she airlocked the Cylons on board."

"Commander Thorean did the same thing. All the commanders did. Nobody waited for President Adar to declare them prisoners of war like he did those on the planet. But they got theirs in the end. It's just too bad a good man had to die to achieve it. Tucker Clellan is a hero in my book."

"As soon as the res hub over the ice planet was destroyed, all Cylon deaths were permanent."

"Thank the gods."

"They're not _all_ bad," Kara said. "Jade and Natalie are okay. There's a Two on Caprica, Leoben, he helped save my life and my little brother's and my stepmom's. And Karl's wife Sharon. We were roommates at the Academy."

"You roomed with a _skinjob_?" Pepper asked in shock.

"I didn't know that's what she was at first. By the time I found out we were friends."

"I wouldn't say that too loud. Being a Cylon-lover isn't the most popular thing to be right now."

Kara grinned. "You don't know me very well or you'd know I don't give a frak about popularity. I just want to fly my Viper and make Nereid safe so Laura can try to get her little utopia started down there."

"You don't agree with her?"

Kara shrugged. "Agreeing and thinking she can pull it off with a bunch of Cylons is two different things, but that's not my call to make. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong. Maybe there are more of them like Natalie and Jade and Sharon and Leoben than I think there are. My dad thinks it's possible. In the meantime I'll do what I'm ordered to do."

"So say we all," Pepper said.

…

The ride back to Nereid's surface was crowded with not only John on board the Raptor, but two Marine guards and the Four who remained shackled. There was no conversation until they landed and were walking toward the command post. The sun had just cleared the horizon. The air was already warming.

"You ever been here?" John asked the Four.

"No. I was awakened at a facility in a rural area and then taken directly to the baseship."

"That place is called Settlement Alpha now. The facility is being used as a hospital."

"Where exactly are we?"

"After you went to your baseship, some of the others built a lab here and then a prison. They're holed up inside. We'd like for you to go talk to them and try to persuade them to surrender."

"And why would I do that?"

"Because you agreed to do it up there on the _Galactica_."

"I never agreed to commit suicide."

"You know something," John said, the anger clear in his voice. "This was a mistake. I should have gone to the valley and gotten a Two or a Three. At least they believe in God and the prophecy of the peacemaker."

"Don't be so hasty," the Four said in a soothing tone that grated on John's nerves worse than the One's sarcasm. "I might not be religiously inclined like the Twos and Threes, but we all know about the prophecy."

"Then you'll help us by going to the prison?"

"I'd like to see the layout first."

The going was slow because the Marines refused to remove the Four's leg shackles. John could have ordered them to do it, but he still had vivid memories of what the Four at the prison had done to him. Let this one get a taste of what his brothers and sisters had done to hundreds of human prisoners. Maybe one day he could share the experience with them in their stream and up their empathy quotient.

They were nearly half an hour reaching the command post. Vargas barely glanced up. He and the senior staff were gathered around a monitor. A tech from the bomb squad was working a device that controlled the small robot transmitting an image of three large pipes sticking out of the ground. All the pipes were capped but it didn't look like any contained locks. Three other bomb squad members were watching.

Lee spoke barely above a whisper. "The robot from the bomb squad is at the tylium intake pipes. It's already checked the pumping station. It doesn't appear to be wired to any explosives."

The image became stationary for a moment. Then the tech backed the robot up.

"The wires coming out of the pipes are buried," he said. "See how they come up out of the ground right at the base and go into each one."

"So what does that mean?" Vargas asked. "Are the explosives down inside the tanks?"

"The Cylons wouldn't permanently place those tanks in jeopardy since they couldn't know how long it would take us to get here or how many times they'd have to use them before we did. My guess is that these wires aren't attached to anything. They're meant to fool us. What would cause the tanks to explode would be that hangar going up. The rock strata on this plateau would transfer a large explosion underground and rupture the tanks. The escaping vapor would be ignited and take care of the rest. Even if the tanks didn't explode, the leaking fuel would render this whole area uninhabitable."

Vargas said, "So what you're saying is we defuse that hangar first and then tackle the tanks."

"That would be my plan of attack."

"You're the experts," Vargas said. "How long do you think it will take?"

"Based on what we saw, we're not going to rush anything. It might take all day considering we were told there are explosives inside the hangar as well as outside."

LG49 said, "My brothers inside the hangar can disarm the interior explosives once the exterior is safe."

"Then let's get started," Vargas said. "The sooner we don't have to worry about putting a mile-wide crater into this plateau, the better."

Lee glanced at the shackled Four who had stood quietly observing everything.

"Your brothers and sisters left a big mess," he said.

"And I'm here to clean it up?" The Four asked in an amused tone.

Vargas said, "Get some coffee and something to eat. My men have set up a mess area a couple hundred yards due south of here. Then relax and get some rest. We'll talk about the prison after those explosives aren't a danger any longer."

One of the Marine guards gestured to the Four. "What do we do with him, sir?"

"Take him to the mess area and continue guarding him," Vargas said.

John started walking south with the Four followed by the guards.

"Do you think they'll have some more of those biscuits?" The Four asked.

"Not likely," John answered. "We'll have to settle for ready-to-eat meals."

"That's fine."

"Are you telling me that ready-to-eat meals are better than Cylon cooking?"

"I'll let you know."

John started to chuckle. "Don't tell me that with all the knowledge your creators downloaded into those computer brains of yours, they forgot to download a cookbook."

The Four pondered his remark. "I don't seem to find any recipes in my knowledge base, certainly not one for biscuits."

John thought of the Simon who had lived with Petra and fathered their daughter Cassie. "I guess that's why the Fours at Settlement Alpha and in the city are heavier than you are. They've got humans to cook for them."

"Lucky them," the Four mused.

"There's a man in the city who used to be a cook aboard a battlestar. The biscuits you've been eating don't hold a candle to his. Help us get inside the prison and I'll get you his recipe. Hell, I'll even ask him to cook a whole batch just for you."

"I've already said I'd help you if I can."

John smiled as they approached the camouflage tarp covering the mess area. Natasi had sold out to the humans because she loved Gaius Baltar. Natalie had joined them because of her own high ideals and beliefs plus her hatred of the One who had killed her beloved Daniel. Jade had made the first steps based on the kindness of a holy man and a red silk kite. Who would ever have guessed that a brother would sell out for biscuits?

…

Lee brought his initial CAP down and sent some rested pilots up. His greatest fear at the moment was that Raiders from the second basestar would jump in over the planet and start shooting. The rocky terrain had protected the Marines from ground fire, but would be little protection against an air attack.

By mid-morning the second CAP was in the air and Lee was wearing down. Several tarps had been erected to protect the command team from the sun. The nights were cold on the plateau, but the days heated up quickly.

He checked on the progress of the bomb squad. The robot had reached the hangar and circled it sending back images of the randomly placed charges. So far they had seen no evidence that any of them could be detonated remotely.

Lee could tell that General Vargas was tired and impatient when he said to the tech controlling the robot, "I'm going to the mess area and get some coffee and breakfast. Send for me before you do anything."

"Yes, sir."

Vargas looked at Lee. "Coming, Captain Adama?"

"Yes, sir," Lee answered, aware suddenly of how hungry he was.

Several of the general's aides had set up a small table with folding canvas chairs for the senior staff. Lee and Vargas sat and were served coffee and a ready-to-eat meal that had never tasted so good.

"Where's Major Gallagher?" Vargas asked one of the Marines.

"About twenty-five feet that way, sir, behind those rocks. He said he was going to find a shady spot and grab an hour or two of sleep unless you need him."

"Good idea. Send word to my men to do the same thing."

The aide smiled. "I think many of them anticipated your order, sir. Captain Adama's off-duty pilots, too."

Even after drinking a large cup of coffee, Lee found his eyelids drooping. He found a shady spot near John. The hum of voices faded. Even though it wasn't his problem, he was thinking of how they were going to get the Four across the eight miles to the prison when he fell asleep.

…

Just before Laura left her office for lunch, she got a call from Colonel Spencer about the return of the _Minoan._

"The _Minoan_ is a battlestar," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Oh, dear gods. Please don't tell me that we've lost several hundred more pilots and crew."

"No, ma'am. The ship suffered some structural damage during a surprise attack by one of the Cylon basestars. Admiral Adama sent her back to Caprica for repairs. She's going to have to be drydocked. The _Triton_ is taking her place over Nereid. They're leaving later this afternoon so I'll need to pick up any communications from you shortly."

"How soon can you get here?"

"I just left the base. Traffic is light so I should be there in less than half an hour."

On her way through the outer office, Laura told her secretary to call her personal mobile phone as soon as Colonel Spencer arrived.

Maya and Bianca had already fed the children who were playing. Maya was writing a letter to Hunter. Laura saw several photographs of Esmari that Maya planned to include. Bianca was writing in the journal that she had recently begun to keep.

Laura sat and one of the staff brought her lunch.

"Do you think you can finish that letter quickly?" Laura asked Maya. "A ship is leaving for Nereid this afternoon. I'll have to give the diplomatic pouch to Colonel Spencer."

"I'm almost through."

"How goes the journaling?" She asked Bianca.

"I'm still catching up. I want Laszlo to be able to read about everything I experienced after I left the planet. I've written quite a lot about Sean."

"Go see Sean," Braedon said from the floor where he and Esmari were crawling around.

Maya smiled. "Little ears. You don't think they're listening, but they are."

"Soon," Laura said to her son.

"Tomorrow."

"Maybe next week."

"No! Tomorrow!"

"I'll think about it," Laura said and returned to her meal.

"Is Mr. Connelly still coming for dinner?" Maya asked.

"As far as I know. I told him to bring Elaina. I know I probably seem like I'm rushing things since Stacey's funeral was only a few days ago, but Hugh returns to his job at the Academy next week. I know his time will be limited. And I've asked Romo Lampkin to join us as well."

Her personal mobile phone buzzed.

"I'll bet I know who that is," Maya said. "Here, I'm finished." She hastily folded the letter and pushed it and the pictures into an envelope. She sealed it and wrote Hunter's name on the front.

Laura took the letter, bent down, kissed her son and hurried to the elevator. Spencer was waiting in her office and quickly summarized the action of the last several days on Nereid for her.

He finished by saying, "It's a shame they didn't destroy that basestar when they got the first one."

"Yes," Laura said. "Now they've got to deal with that threat as well."

"Admiral Adama has given orders to the fleet. If the Cylon ship jumps back into space near them, they're to shoot to kill. No more Mr. Nice Guy. We can't afford to have any more battlestars rendered unusable."

"Is the war not going well for us?"

"They've had some setbacks in space, but they've taken the airfield on the plateau where the Cylons located their prison. They're planning the attack on the prison right now. You can read everything in Admiral Adama's report."

"How is…was there any mention of my husband?"

"He's been appointed to General Vargas's staff because of his knowledge of the planet."

"John is on the ground? He's fighting the ground war?"

"I doubt he and the general are actually engaging in combat, but yes, they are on the ground."

Laura stood up and walked around the room. "He promised me he wouldn't do anything foolish. He promised me he would come home to me and our son."

Spencer was silent for a moment. "There's a letter from him in the pouch, ma'am."

She eyed the diplomatic pouch that contained Bill's report and then dumped everything on her desk. She placed Maya's letter and the one she had written to John inside before she added the minutes of the Quorum's last meetings and a week's worth of news that Billy had copied to a disk.

Spencer stood. "I know you're busy, ma'am. Is that all?"

"This trip, yes. How many dead and wounded did the _Minoan_ bring home?"

"Three dead. Sixteen wounded, several from the original battle."

Laura sighed.

"It could be a lot worse, Madame President."

"Thank you, Colonel Spencer. I'll let you get back to your duties."

He picked up the pouch. Laura followed him to the door and closed it behind him. Then she returned to her desk and opened John's letter. She read it carefully, but it was the last paragraph, especially the last sentence that brought tears to her eyes. _Despite the shameful things I did while I was a prisoner, I have never stopped loving you and I never will._

"Oh, John," she whispered, "please come home to me."

...

When Kara got off afternoon CAP at 18:00 that evening, she was surprised to see Admiral Adama on the hangar deck talking to Chief Tyrol. As she was finishing her post-flight check list, she noticed that first the admiral and then the chief looked in her direction. Immediately she mentally went over everything she'd done in the last several days trying to come up with a reason the admiral would glance at her like that. She came up empty.

She waited for Pepper and Hot Dog to get through as she had done since they started flying CAPs together. As they walked toward the exit, Adama stopped them and thanked them for their efforts during the fighting and the days since.

Before he moved on, Kara asked him if she could have a word with him. When he nodded the affirmative, she told Pepper and Hot Dog to go ahead without her. She stood and waited while the admiral spoke to the other returning pilots.

When he got back to her, he said, "Walk with me."

She waited to speak until they were off the hangar deck. "I've got an idea, sir."

"Another one of your outside-of-the-box ideas?"

"Probably."

"Spit it out, then."

"We still want that res ship, don't we?"

He nodded.

"And we still think it's out there just beyond our long-range scanners?"

"That's Natalie's opinion…and John's robot…Buddy, I think he calls him."

"I'd need Mr. Gaeta's help."

Bill stopped and walked to the side of the corridor out of the way of traffic. "Tell me your plan first although I've already got an idea what it is."

"Let me take the Raider and jump just beyond our scanning ability. The Raider has both short-range and long-range sensors. I could then sweep a sector of space. If I don't find the res ship, I'll move on. I'll make a big circle around Nereid quadrant by quadrant. That's where I need Mr. Gaeta's help. I don't know if it would take a dozen jumps or a hundred. If it's going to take a hundred jumps, it might not be worth it."

"There's a lot of danger involved in a mission like that, Lieutenant Thrace."

"No more than taking on their Raiders in a firefight, sir. They won't even know it's a Colonial ship. That Raider is still broadcasting a Cylon signal."

"Let me think about your suggestion. For all we know, that res ship stays on the move. By the time you could get back to us with their coordinates, they might be gone."

"I realize that, sir."

"I can't do anything until we get the _Triton_ up to speed."

"Yes, sir. We saw it jump into the _Minoan's_ position."

"Admiral Taylor wants to jump the _Charybdis_ to our last location and start off-loading the _Orion_. I've got to make a decision on that soon. We need those supplies and especially those pilots."

"But you don't want to be without all your battlestars right now."

He smiled. "Welcome to my world. I'll get back to you. In the meantime, keep thinking."

"There's another option."

"What's that?"

"Dr. Rafferty and Kevin coated the Raider with a polymer that gives it some stealth capability. It's not perfect, but long-range it's almost invisible."

He nodded. "Go on."

"Arm it with a couple of missiles and tell me where to shoot to disable the baststar's FTL drives but not destroy it. That way if I find it, I don't have to come back here to get a battlestar. You get to stay above the planet in case the other one comes back. Let me take care of the res ship."

Kara could tell by the look in the admiral's eyes that he liked her plan.

"I'll let you know. I need to talk this over with my senior staff and General Vargas."

"And my father? You know what he'll say."

"I believe I have the final say on this battlestar."

"Yes, sir."

"That will be all Kara."

"Yes, sir. Thank you for listening to me."

As she turned to go, Adama asked, "Have you mentioned this to Lee?"

"No, sir. I haven't mentioned it to anyone but you."

"Let's keep it that way for now."

"Yes, sir."

Pepper and Hot Dog were almost through eating dinner when she joined them in the officer's mess.

"What'd you want to talk to Admiral Adama about?" Hot Dog asked. "Begging him to send you to the surface so you could be with Lee?"

She shrugged and started eating. "He said he'd think about my request and get back to me."

"You won't get meals like this on the surface," Pepper said. "You'll be eating out of a pouch. Those RtEMs are nasty."

"I've had them before. When you're hungry, they're not so bad."

Hot Dog said. "Here come Karl and Saunders."

The two men joined them.

"What are you doing up here?" Kara asked. "Aren't you two my dad's chauffeurs?"

"He sent us back up to get a good meal and some rest," Saunders said. "Skulls and Racetrack are sitting on their thumbs down there now in case they need to evacuate General Vargas ASAP. I'm not complaining, but it's about as exciting as watching paint dry."

"Somebody's got to do it," Pepper said and smiled. "But better you than me."

"What's going on otherwise?" Hot Dog asked.

"The bomb squad worked their magic on that wired-up hangar. When we left they had a couple of Marines painting neon orange spots on the backs and chests of the freed centurions so our guys won't target them."

Karl added. "They look like they've been in a fierce paintball fight."

Pepper said, "So won't that make them targets of the other ones…the ones at the prison who aren't freed?"

Karl and Saunders looked at each other. "Who knows? I guess the others would have to know what the orange spots mean...if they can even see them. Lee said they don't see the same way we do. They might be color blind."

"Besides being boring, what's it like down there?" Hot Dog asked.

"Dry as a bone," Karl answered. "Cold at night. Hot during the day. Saunders loves it because it clears up his sinuses."

"Gods," Kara said. "It must be boring if you've got time to talk about your sinuses."

"Hey, I didn't have a bit of trouble with my sinuses until I got my nose broken crash landing on Tauron," Saunders said.

"You didn't see any of the ground fighting?" Hot Dog asked.

"We just said we had to stay with the Raptor," Saunders said. "We were well away from the fighting. We watched it on our dradis. We heard that Lee took out a bunch of centurions that were shooting at one of his pilots who had to eject. I hope I get to see his gun camera footage of that."

Kara frowned. "He was lucky he didn't get hit."

"I don't think the centurions had their act together," Saunders said. "They thought they were fighting the Marines on the ground and here come the Vipers in the air. I heard one of the guys say they seemed confused at first about which way they were supposed to shoot…forward or up. Without a skinjob there to tell them, they had to evaluate which threat was the greatest. Most of them decided it was the Marines firing from the rocks because they were the closest. The Vipers really chewed up a lot of them around the edges."

"That wouldn't have happened with the old U-87s and 0005s," Kara said. "They didn't need a humanoid to tell them what to do. The new ones don't gain the ability to reason until those disk things are taken out of them."

"That's just what we need," Saunders said, "a planet full of free centurions. Why hasn't anybody realized they might rebel just like the old ones did?"

Everybody at the table looked at Kara.

"What? Since when did I become the resident expert on centurions? I don't know any more than you guys do."

"Your dad…" Hot Dog started.

"My dad and I haven't had a heart-to-heart tutorial yet about centurions," Kara said angrily.

"Back it down a notch," Hot Dog snapped. "I was just going to say that your dad has got two of them that are very loyal to him. Maybe he knows the secret to gaining toaster loyalty."

Kara's first impulse was to argue with him, but she let it go. She had realized as soon as she'd seen Jade and Natalie talking to her father that he had a rapport with them that nobody else on the ship had. The same was true of Buddy and LG49. She didn't understand it exactly, but she thought it probably had to do with trust…on both sides. She could understand the humanoids, but the loyalty of the robots was another matter. Buddy carried old U-87 programming as well as Lucy's avatar so maybe that came into play with him. But LG49 was just a toaster. He was nothing but metal and programming. And then she remembered the prophecy of the peacemaker. Once the new centurions were freed, they became aware of the prophecy. Jade had told her it was in their programming to protect everybody associated with the peacemaker and her dad was the baby's father.

"I'll ask him one day what his secret is," Kara said.

Pepper changed the subject and started talking about the _Triton_ and having some friends among the pilots on board. Kara zoned out and began to think again about taking the Raider to search for the res ship and wondered whether Admiral Adama would approve the mission or not. She realized that she might not find it. She might find the other ship instead, the wounded one, but that would be okay. A missile to disable its FTL drive would be a good thing, too. A basestar that couldn't jump would take them out of the equation as missions were planned on the surface. If she found it first, then she would hunt for the res ship later.

"_Galactica_ to Kara," Saunders said. "You're drifting away. Reel it in."

Pepper nudged her and then said to Saunders. "Can't a woman have a few private thoughts? She's thinking about her man."

Kara smiled. In a way that was true. She had just thought about how Lee would react when he found out about her plan. She wondered how many adjectives he would come up with that meant the same thing as _beyond insane_.

…

The sun was low in the sky when Lee awoke. He couldn't believe he had slept so long leaning back against the face of a rock. He scrambled to his feet, stopped in the mess area only long enough to get a bottle of water and made his way to the command area.

John and General Vargas were sitting on camp stools near the bomb squad's monitor. John looked up and smiled.

"He's awake."

"You shouldn't have let me sleep so long," Lee said, unable to keep the annoyance out of his voice.

"You took a bullet a week ago. In my opinion you shouldn't even be down here, but that wasn't my call to make. The least I could do was let you sleep."

"The CAP…"

"I took care of it, Lee. The list was already posted. All we're doing right now is waiting for the bomb squad to finish disarming the last of the explosives. Go get something to eat. We'll send for you and the Four when it's time."

Lee walked back to the mess area. The Four was still shackled and still eating. His two Marine guards were with him, but they had relaxed. Their helmets were off and they were playing a game of triad.

"Hmmm," the Four said. "Lee?"

Lee sat on a nearby stool and balanced the meal on his lap. "That's right. Do you have a name? The Four on Caprica was called Simon."

"We have no need for names on a baseship."

"You're not on a baseship now."

"You can call me Simon if it makes you feel better."

One of the Marines asked, "How are things going with the bomb squad, sir?"

"Almost done," Lee answered.

Simon looked up. "Does that mean I'll be expected to go to the prison soon?"

"You don't sound too enthusiastic."

"Would you be if you'd been asked to betray _your_ people?"

"I don't look at it that way. I'd rather think of it as being asked to _save_ my people. You don't know if that res ship is still out there or not. If we go in shooting, everybody in that prison will eventually be killed."

"Isn't that what you're going to do to them anyway?"

"Why would we ask you to get them to surrender if we were going to kill them? We'd just bomb the prison into rubble."

"I heard talk from some of the soldiers. You want the prison building."

"Not bad enough to lose hundreds of our Marines taking it."

"I know what will happen," Simon mused.

"What?"

"My brothers and sisters who control the prison will refuse your offer. They'll signal their refusal by sending a centurion out carrying my dead body. Since you say our res ship is out of range, my death will be permanent."

"We don't know that the ship is out of resurrection range. All we know is that it's beyond our long-range scanners."

"I'm still taking a chance."

"Now you know how we feel going into combat. Not a great feeling, is it?"

"Yet you do it. All of you appear willing to give your lives…and for what? Revenge for what my brothers and sisters did to your world? The holocaust your Marines have told me about? I had nothing to do with that. I wasn't born when the others went to your homeworld to destroy it."

"The President of the Colonies believes that this is the world where humans and Cylons can live together in peace without one enslaving the other. In order to make that happen, you'll have to give up your human slaves and free your centurions. Do you think your brothers and sisters will willingly do that?"

"Some might."

"What about you?"

"I've reached an agreement with Major Gallagher. I'll honor it."

One of Vargas's Marines walked up to them. "The general says to bring the Cylon. We're moving."

"Showtime," Lee said.

Simon's guards stowed the deck of cards and were on their feet in seconds.

"I could walk faster without these chains on my ankles," Simon said.

"That's not my call to make," Lee said.

When they got to the command area, Lee sensed that the news was good. John said, "The freed centurions are…free. The bomb squad disabled the last explosive ten minutes ago. They just opened the hangar door."

"What now?"

"LG49 is going to bring us one centurion to take Biscuits to the prison. He'll be here as soon as he gets his orange paint spots. We're going to wire the centurion for sound. We don't have the equipment to wire him for video."

"Why can't he just transmit like LG49 used to do?" Lee asked.

John said, "Because the other centurions at the prison would hear him. We're not taking any chances."

"Do you expect me to walk over there in these shackles?" Simon asked.

"Take them off," John told the guards. "Sending a shackled brother to the prison sends the wrong message."

They freed their prisoner.

Simon rubbed his wrists. "What's the message you want me to deliver?"

General Vargas said, "Tell them that this is their chance to surrender. No one will be hurt or killed if they do. They're to tell their centurions to stand down. If they agree to our terms, then you and the other Cylons will exit the prison and wait for my troops. The centurions are to stay inside."

"That's it?"

"Should I make it more complicated?" Vargas asked.

"No. I got it."

LG49 and one of the freed centurions drove up in one of the small transport vehicles from the third hangar. They got out and a technician glued a small transmitter under the chest plate of the freed centurion.

"My brother will take you to the prison," LG49 said to Simon. "He will protect you to the best of his ability."

Simon got into the vehicle and looked back at them. Then he told the centurion to go. They all watched the vehicle move off toward the road to the prison.

"I wish we had video," John said.

Vargas said to John. "You know the Cylons better than anyone here. How long are we going to give him to convince them?"

"Let's see how he plays it. If he's going to go over to them, it won't take long." Vargas didn't comment so John continued, "I know you think this is a waste of time, but it's worth a shot."

"Anything that saves the lives of my men and women is worth a shot. I'm just not used to depending on...the enemy."

A large transport came and took them to the fourth hangar where a temporary base of operations was being set up. By the time they got there, the transport carrying Simon had reached the main road and was a speck in the distance. They all gathered around the wireless receiver and began listening for any sound from the small transmitter that had been placed under the bottom of the robot's chest plate.

General Vargas stopped all activity in the hangar and cleared it of all but his senior staff and John and Lee. The quiet made a big difference in what they could hear.

"So far so good," John said. "They've reached the prison."

"How can you tell?" Lee asked.

"I don't hear the transport engine any longer. Listen. There's the centurion getting out."

They heard Simon's voice. "There's the gate. I haven't been shot at yet."

For the next thirty seconds all they heard was the clanking of the centurion."

"We should have named him," John said under his breath.

LG49 said, "If you wish to refer to him as you refer to me, he is LG7844961 or LG78."

"Thanks. LG78 it is."

Simon said, "Open the gate. I need to talk to my brothers and sisters inside."

"He's talking to the two centurions that man the entrance gate," John explained.

"We're not getting very good reception," one of Vargas's staff remarked.

John said to LG49. "Tell your brother to move closer to the Four."

"He is complying."

"So far so good," Simon muttered, his voice clearer. "The centurions are opening the gate."

LG49 said, "My non-free brothers at the prison are all programmed to obey any of the eight humanoid models. They will let the Four you call Simon through the gate, but they will have no control over what happens to him once he is inside."

"Greetings," Simon said.

A man's voice asked, "Where did you come from?"

"That's one of the guards," John said. "I recognize his voice."

"I come from one of our baseships. I'd like to talk to my brothers and sisters."

"They're in the dining hall."

"Good. Show me the way."

"What's wrong with your centurion?" The guard asked.

"There's nothing wrong with him."

"He's got orange spots on him."

"Yes," Simon said. "He has a virus called aranjia metalicus."

"Is it contagious?" The guard asked.

"Only to the other centurions. I believe he picked it up at the airstrip from being around tylium fumes."

Vargas began laughing. "Simon is a real comedian. _Aranjia _means _orange_ in old Gemenese."

LG49 said, "My virus protection software is unaware of aranjia metalicus. Should I be concerned about my programming? I was in wireless contact with LG78. He could have infected me."

"It's a joke," John said. "Simon made it up. LG78 doesn't have a virus. Simon told the guard your brother is suffering from orange metal."

"That is good to know. I am suffering from orange metal as well thanks to the man with the spray paint."

"Here's the dining room," the guard said. "Right through this door."

"Greetings brothers and sisters," Simon said. There were several long moments of silence before he continued. "Would you allow me to join you for dinner?"

John said, "That is the hungriest Cylon I've ever met."

"What kind of food do they serve on those baseships anyway?" Vargas asked.

"I don't know and I'm not sure I want to," John replied, "not if it's so bad it would make a brother sell out for biscuits."

They heard a Two say, "There's a place over here by me."

Someone else said, "What do the humans want?"

"That's the prison commandant," John said in a low voice.

"I'm sure you can guess," Simon answered. The sound of his voice was fainter but still understandable. The centurion with the transmitter must have remained by the door.

There was clear sarcasm in the commandant's voice. "They want us to surrender at which time they will execute us."

"No mention was made of executing anyone," Simon said. "They just want you all to surrender."

"How did they make you their stooge?"

"I was on a baseship. After it was struck by a missile and our Hybrid was killed, they went out of their way to rescue as many of us as would leave the dead ship."

"I don't think you understand," the commandant said. "Our situation is different. We have some…history with one of them, a Major John Gallagher to be precise. I'm sure he can't wait to put a gun to my head plus the rest of these brothers and sisters as well as the human guards."

"Then why didn't he do it when he had the chance?" A Three asked. "He could have killed you and several of the guards when he was here over a week ago, but he didn't."

"We have an alternative to surrender." A Five said. "We've got nearly a thousand centurions ready to defend the prison. It's not been my experience that the humans will attack knowing they will lose twice that many of their soldiers."

"I don't think that's in their plans if you refuse," Simon asked. "I overheard several of my guards mention something about bombing someplace into a pile of rubble. I assume they were talking about this prison."

"That sounds more like what I'd expect of them," the commandant said. "Their military likes to destroy things. Look at their history if you don't believe me."

"All they want on this plateau is the airstrip, but they don't want to worry about the centurions you have here. The easiest solution is to destroy this prison and be done with it…unless, of course, you'd be willing to give it up peacefully."

"Well there you have it," the commandant said. "Our choices. Surrender and face the unknown or let them destroy us? Shall we take a vote? All those in favor of surrendering, please raise your hand. And now all those in favor of becoming part of a pile of rubble?" After several moments of silence he said, "As you can see, the pile of rubble has it."

"Our resurrection ship has jumped away," Simon said. "We've got no assurance they're still within range."

"You didn't mention that to us," a Two said.

"There's a lot he didn't mention to you," Simon said. "He didn't mention that his brother the First One killed our creators and our brother Sevens. This One was there, but he kept it a secret from us all these years."

"Human lies," the commandant said.

"It's easy enough to prove," a Three said. "We'll all go to the lab and put our hands in the datastream...including you. Better yet. Ask the creators to speak to us in person instead of through the stream."

"They don't bother themselves with trivial…"

Simon said, "Shouldn't they know some of their fellow humans are getting ready to destroy everything they've worked for? If they bomb the prison, the lab and its downloading facility will be destroyed, as well."

"I vote we go next door," the Two said. "Bring him."

"Stop them," the commandant shouted. "What's wrong with you? You're supposed to obey my commands above all of them. Why are you just standing there you metal ignoramus? Obey me. Stop them. Shoot them. Shoot them all."

"I'm afraid that aranjia metalicus virus has gone to his brain," Simon said. "I believe he's going to insist that you accompany us to the lab. I think you have the option of walking or being slung over his shoulder."

John turned around and smiled at Lee. "I'm going to make sure there are a dozen biscuits on the next Raptor coming down here."

"Don't celebrate too soon," Vargas said. "The Cylons aren't in our custody yet."

"I really wish we had video," John said. "I'd love to see their faces when they put that bastard's hand in their datastream."

…

"Hugh, it's so good to see you," Laura said as she took Connelly's hand and squeezed it warmly. "This beautiful little girl must be Elaina."

Elaina had her head tucked shyly into her father's neck.

"Say hello to Laura," Hugh said.

Elaina peeked out and whispered, "Hello."

"How old is she now?"

"Three and a half."

Braedon tugged at the bottom of Laura's skirt. "Show me."

She picked him up. "This is my son, Braedon."

"He looks more like John every time I see him," Hugh said.

"Brae this is Mr. Connelly and his little girl Elaina."

"Her look like Mawi," Brae said.

"Yes, she does," Laura said as she noted the black hair and deep blue eyes of Hugh's little girl.

"Come see Wachel and Mawi."

"Maybe in a little bit. Elaina wants her daddy to hold her now."

"My dada in a wapta," Brae said. "Up there." He pointed to the ceiling.

"He's saying his father is in a Raptor," Laura interpreted.

"Kawa in a vipa."

Hugh smiled. "Yes, I know Kara flies a Viper."

She put her son down and then introduced Hugh to Maya and Bianca. Both women expressed their condolences. They then all sat in the parlor outside the upstairs dining room and waited for Romo Lampkin. Elaina wouldn't leave her father's lap for a long time, but eventually the toys on the floor and Braedon's entreaties proved too much of a lure.

"Could I offer you some wine?" Laura asked.

"Only if you'll join me," Hugh answered.

Bianca also accepted Laura's offer. Maya declined. While Laura was pouring, Lampkin came in so she poured another glass while he and Connelly shook hands.

"I hear another battlestar came home today," Lampkin said.

"Yes, unfortunately. The _Minoan_. The _Triton_ took her place above Nereid."

"That's two out of commission in barely a week," Lampkin said. "We can't afford to keep going at this rate. I hope the news was better on other fronts."

"Yes. Good progress has been made on the planet. They've taken the airstrip on the plateau with very little loss."

"How is John?" Hugh asked.

"Well…so far. He's been assigned to General Vargas's staff so he's with the ground forces now."

"I don't imagine he's too happy about that," Lampkin said.

"John will do his duty," she managed to say. "He wants our success as much as anyone."

Connelly said, "Several weeks ago, before the fleet left Caprica, John met Colonel Burgher for lunch. He invited me but I…couldn't make it. You know Conrad wants him back at the Academy when this is all over."

"Yes, John told me the colonel asked him to come back and resume teaching the simulator," Laura said. "I don't know what John's plans are for the future other than he's committed to raising Sean."

Maya said, "You're both committed to raising Sean."

"John plans to take him to Nereid when he's well enough. He told me that before he left."

"That was before D'Anna died," Bianca said. "John felt that he should take mother and child back to their homeworld. He didn't say he planned to stay with them."

"I thought you sent her back still alive," Lampkin said.

"I did, but their resurrection ship had jumped away prior to her death on the _Galactica_. Natalie said it was probably still within range for downloading, but no one knows with any certainty." She glanced at Lampkin. "I have no idea how this should be handled legally."

"You're presuming she downloaded on one of their ships and is alive?"

"Yes, but because she was brain dead, Leoben doubts she has any memory of John or the baby. Although that doesn't change the fact that D'Anna is Sean's mother. Her claim to him is the strongest. Am I not correct?"

"You're correct under Colonial law only if she were human."

"What about John?" Maya asked. "Doesn't he have an equal claim to his son?"

"Under our current law he's the only one who has any claim to the child."

"That's the way it should be," Maya said. "What do machines know about raising children?"

"There's a Cylon right here in Caprica City who is raising a daughter," Laura said softly. "She seems to be doing very well."

Lampkin looked at Maya and then back to Laura. "Under current Caprican law the Cylons have no legal rights. They still fall under the Artificial Intelligence Amendment to the Articles of Colonization. Briefly stated, any entity considered to be AI cannot own property, cannot marry and cannot enter into any other legal and binding contract. At the time the amendment was written, the idea of a machine reproducing wasn't the remotest possibility. Some might view that as a loophole, but given the circumstances, I don't think you have any worries."

"In other words," Bianca said, "the Cylons have the same rights as the Sagittaron slaves did over five hundred years ago…basically none."

"Legally you're correct," Lampkin said.

"But morally," Laura said. "Morally that is so wrong."

Connelly said, "When the AI Amendment was ratified, the only robots that existed in the Colonies were the old metal ones. We'd never seen one that was flesh and blood and looked like us as Mr. Lampkin just said. The amendment wasn't necessarily wrong at the time, but it's outdated now. It might be time for another amendment."

"Spoken like an historian," Laura said. "It might be time for my attorney general to begin drafting such a document to present to the Quorum."

"I'm not sure this is the right time," Lampkin said. "The mood on Caprica now is clearly _not_ pro-Cylon. I would suggest waiting to implement any such new laws until we've established ourselves on Nereid with a coalition government. Even after the Articles of Colonization were passed, the separate Colonies maintained their own set of laws so there's no reason that Nereid has to function under ours. The Articles codified only a small portion of the overall justice system, mainly dealing with the legality of establishing and maintaining military bases on all of the Colonies...ostensibly for their protection; however there were groups on every Colony that were opposed on the grounds that it would be too easy to stage a military takeover of the planet."

"The amendment passed, though," Connelly said, "because the majority of the population was more afraid of another Cylon war than they were of the military."

"You're very right," Laura said. "But it's not too soon to begin thinking about how we want Nereid to look legally speaking."

Her chief steward came to the door and announced that dinner was served. The meal was more chaotic than Laura would have liked because of the children, but she had grown used to it. When they finished eating, Maya coaxed Elaina into going with her and the other children into Braedon's sitting room with the promise of toys and puzzles. Bianca left them to get Rachel ready for bed.

Laura suggested that Connelly and Lampkin go with her to her sitting room for an after-dinner drink.

When they were seated, she said to Connelly, "Do you not think you're returning to the classroom too soon?"

"I need to get back. I need some structure in my life. Elaina does too." He sipped his drink.

"Are you still interested in heading the education team that will go to Nereid?"

"More now than ever. I'm glad you asked me to dinner tonight because I have something to tell you. Do you know Irina Hoshi?"

"I met her at John's memorial service last autumn. I know he went to visit her while he was home recently. Other than that I know very little about her."

"She's the last surviving member of the first _Hyperion_ mission...at least here on Capria. After Kara got home she visited Irina and was given a USB drive that Irina's grandson had stuffed in a bronzed baby shoe when he was a child. She had forgotten about it."

"I remember Kara mentioning that. The drive was stuck in the shoe. She gave it to her friend out at the boneyard to see if he could extract it without damaging either."

Connelly smiled. "He did and he was able to recover the data on the drive. He made several copies. Kara had asked him to send one of them to me and put the others in a safe place."

"Kevin Abinell," Laura said.

"That's right. I hadn't had a chance to look at the document until this week. After the funeral I found myself with some time on my hands so I picked it up. It's a manuscript written by a friend of Irina's, a woman who was also on the first expedition, a physician named Aimee Singh. It's a journal of sorts, something she was apparently planning on publishing. Unfortunately she died before she finished it."

"Are you thinking of publishing it now?" Lampkin asked.

"No. Did you know the first expedition lost two members to accidents and also gained one? A crew member gave birth to a child before they returned home. Dr. Singh used real names for some of the team and pseudonyms for others. She used Irina and Joshua Hoshi's real names, but she called the woman who had the baby Nadine and the baby's father Ares. I know that the mother was a shuttle pilot and the father was a mercenary on the security force. Nadine named her baby Miriam."

"A beautiful name," Lampkin said. "Scriptural."

Laura said, "John told me that most of the documentation about that first expedition was destroyed on Libran during the holocaust. All he found in the Academy archives was a list of the expedition members and a short biography of each."

"As soon as I go back next week, I'm going to get a copy of that list." Emotion filled Connelly's voice. "This has become a very personal quest for me. I may never find a definite answer, but I've got to try."

Laura looked into his dark blue eyes. "What is it, Hugh?"

"Based on something my father told me, I think the little girl born on Nereid was my mother."

TBC…


	68. The Locked Room

Chapter 68

The Locked Room

_The Planet_

_Day 330: (Written after my return to Libran. I originally had a blank page for this day in my journal.) _

_Today I had a chance to slip away from the camp unnoticed. I have known for some time that my chance to follow Frank's directions must be taken soon or I would lose the opportunity. We are already packing to leave the surface. Captain Prolmar wants us and all equipment back on the _Hyperion_ in four days in anticipation of our departure two days afterward._

_I made the long hike to the lake as if going for a last visit and sat on the big rock at the water's edge for nearly twenty minutes. I had a clear view of the path and was thus able to make sure that I had not been followed. Finally assuring myself that I was alone, I looked at a small compass that I had borrowed from Nadine to determine due north. I had previously measured twelve feet in the medical tent and practiced pacing if off. Doing this seven times brought me to a large and very old tree with a split top. Approximately eight feet from the base was a hole in the tree easily big enough to accommodate a person's hand. The problem with retrieving anything from the hole was immediately clear. I am not nearly tall enough to reach it, and there was nothing nearby that could aid me either. The trunk was clearly too large in diameter to climb. I had no idea how Frank got anything in there until I inspected the trunk more closely. There were several holes that might have contained spikes that allowed him to climb high enough to push something into the recess; however a quick check of the immediate area revealed no spikes. Frank must have believed that should I ever need to follow his directions, that I would find a way._

_As I stood pondering the impossibility of reaching what Frank had hidden (and gone to such pains to let me know about before his death) I heard someone coming through the woods. In my panic to find a hiding place, I turned suddenly and tripped over a large root. As I hit the ground, I expected my next moments to be my last. Imagine my surprise when Robota appeared suddenly from among the trees. 'She' extended 'her' hand and helped me to my feet, an act that I'm sure was part of her assistance protocol. I pointed to the hole and pantomimed sticking my hand in and taking something out. Robota walked up to the tree, bent over and linked the fingers of her hands. I understood that I should stand on them. She gently boosted me high enough that I could reach inside the hole. What I found was a parcel the size of a small book wrapped in many layers of plastic. I retrieved it and Robota carefully lowered me to the ground. _

_I did not open the package there for fear of being found by Chester Pollard's men. Instead I concealed it in my jacket. I thanked Robota for her help and told her to hurry back to the camp so she would not get caught. Instead of turning in that direction, however, she forged deeper into the woods and I realized as the sound of her footsteps faded into the distance that she was running away. She had no intention of going back. Joshua had recently told us that all of the robots would be broken down for parts or scrapped after our return. Apparently Robota had decided that this would not be her fate. Does she understand the human wish to avoid death?_

_I wish her well on her journey wherever it might take her although I don't envy her the loneliness once we are all gone. Of course I'm crediting her with another human emotion which some of us seem prone to do with these purely mechanical beings. I don't know how many years she has left to exist since I don't know the expiration date of her power supply. Considering her age it is probably only a few._

_I made it back to the medical tent without being observed and stowed my 'treasure' safely among some of our supplies that will soon be taken to the _Hyperion_. I will have to wait until I am back on Libran to investigate what Frank hid and what I am now certain cost him his life._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

The cacophony of noise coming from the receiver that had been set up in the fourth hangar was punctuated by the occasional shouts of the prison commandant. _Put me down. I order you to put me down._

Someone else was also shouting for the One's release.

"That's a Five," John said. "I know all their voices."

"What's going on, Major Gallagher?" General Vargas asked.

"It sounds like LG78 has slung the prison commandant over his shoulder and is carrying him to the lab. Apparently a Five is trying to stop them."

"How can we be sure?"

Suddenly a gunshot punctuated the noise. There was silence afterward.

"What the hell?" The general asked.

John looked at LG49. "Can your brother tell you what's going on?"

"He has shot one of the humanoids, a Five. The others are now following without resistance."

"Tell him to keep talking," John said.

"Technically he is not speaking."

John had forgotten that there was a difference between Buddy and LG49. Whereas Buddy would not have taken him literally due to his U-87 programming, LG49 took everything literally. His concern over Simon's joke about an orange metal virus was proof.

John revised his statement. "Tell him to keep transmitting his actions to you. Then you can relay them to us. We need to know what's going on over there."

Each sentence of LG49's narrative was punctuated by several or more seconds of silence as LG78 relayed the action. The centurion repeated the transmission exactly as it was relayed to him.

"We have reached the lab. Two brother centurions are at the main entrance. The Four has told them to open the door. They have complied. We have entered. I have given the One to a Two and a Three. They have restrained him. I am freeing my brothers and helping them as their higher cognitive functions come online."

There were several minutes of low background noise as the big robot communicated wirelessly with his brothers.

John said, "I really wish I could be over there."

"Not a chance," Vargas said. "Not until the whole prison is secured."

John turned to LG49. "Tell LG78 to send his brothers to free the other centurions inside the prison and tell them to stay inside. Then tell them to go free those in the guard towers. If the human guards try to stop them, lock them in cells."

LG49 said, "LG78 has followed your orders. He is now entering the resurrection chamber with the humanoids."

The transmitter crackled with a voice in distress. "What is happening? What are you doing here?"

LG49 repeated LG78's transmission, "Nurse Three is questioning our presence. A brother Five has just downloaded and the other two nurses are attending to him."

"That's good to know," Lee said. "It means the Five who was shot is one of the first twelve copies of his model. I wonder how many of the others would be able to download at the lab…besides the One. We know he can. He's the third or fourth copy of his model. The first copy came to the Colonies. The second copy is in the city."

LG49's voice interrupted. "The commandant refuses to give anyone the code to the door of the room where the datastream is located."

"Tell LG78 to break it down," John said.

"He will not. That room is forbidden to us. Beyond it is the sanctum where our creators dwell. Some commands we cannot override under any circumstances. The creators gave them to us."

"Your creators are _dead_," John said harshly. "They were human just like me. They didn't download when the First One ordered their deaths. Some of your brother centurions over in the prison probably pulled the trigger. Do you not understand the concept of _death_?"

Lee put his hand on John's arm. "Don't take it out on LG49."

"We're so _close_!" John said. "We can't stop now! Let me go over there. I'll get the combination to the door from that arrogant little bastard."

No one said anything for several long moments. Finally Vargas spoke.

"As soon as the threat of those centurions is neutralized, we'll _all _go over there." He turned to a colonel on his staff. "Tarkington, get the troops ready. Have them bring all the zappers just in case. Get the three large ground transports from the third hangar and get them ready to go."

The colonel hurried off.

Vargas turned to Lee, "Captain Adama, alert your CAP that we'll be on the move shortly. I want air cover as we cross those eight miles."

"Yes, sir," Lee said and walked to the transmitter that had been setup on the other side of the hangar. He relayed the general's message to the pilots in the air. Lee decided that as soon as the all-clear was given from the prison, he would get in his Viper and join his pilots.

In the meantime, he walked back over to the group in time to hear LG49 say, "The situation is at a stalemate. The One will not talk and LG78 is concerned about damaging him and being unable to get the door code from him."

"Lucky for us I don't share his concern," John said.

Lee caught John's eye and said in a low voice, "Could we talk…in private?"

They walked away from the group. "What?" John asked.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

"Look, John, we're all running on coffee and adrenalin right now. We haven't had much sleep and…" he suddenly had trouble verbalizing what he wanted to say. He took a deep breath. "I'm concerned about what being back here at the prison is doing to you."

"You think I'm going to go over there and do something stupid?"

"The thought has crossed my mind."

John grinned. "I was here a week ago. I didn't come unglued then."

"You weren't in a position then to…to…I'm not sure exactly how to say it."

"We're friends, Lee. As your dad would say, _spit it out_."

"Every one of those humanoids probably participated in…what was done to you while you were their prisoner. The commandant oversaw and encouraged it."

"You didn't need to graduate top of your class to figure that out. What's your point?"

"You're not going to go over there and start shooting, are you?"

"If I do what I personally want to do, then the answer to that question is _yes_. But right now I've got to look at the big picture. So the answer is _no_. I want to get that door open and get that bastard's hand in the stream. He's no good to me dead. I want all his brothers and sisters to know the truth. He's the only one over there who knows the truth. Then we're going to lock them in their own prison and feed them roach-infested grub."

"Does General Vargas agree with you?" Lee asked barely above a whisper.

"This wasn't the scenario we planned. He didn't think any of them would be alive when the shooting stopped so we're ahead of the game right now. And I was joking about the roaches. Even if we feed them ready-to-eat meals, they'll be way ahead of what they fed me."

"Okay," Lee said. "I just don't want to see you go over there and do something that could get you court-martialed."

John put his arm around Lee's shoulders. "I can't make any promises, Lee. A lot depends on the Cylons. At this point securing the prison is our priority."

"And after that's done?"

"Then I guess we start planning our move to the city."

"We're going there next?"

"Either there or the basestar shipyard. It all depends on how close they are to launching another one."

"We can take out that factory from the air. We don't need to risk ground troops."

"We can't do that if we want to preserve the ship and the technology it contains. Talking to Dr. Rafferty convinced me that we need to keep as much of that ship intact as possible."

Lee rubbed his forehead. "Is gaining that technology worth losing lives?"

"I'm sure General Vargas will listen to your opinion before he makes a decision. If he says destroy it and your dad agrees, then you'll get your wish."

"Maybe we can use one of the Cylons as an infiltrator again."

John snorted. "I'm sure our Four would object. That wasn't in the bargain I made with him."

"What about one of the others?

"Are you kidding? I wouldn't trust one of them as far as I could throw him…or her."

"What about the humanoids in the valley?"

"You're getting way ahead of yourself. We haven't secured the prison yet. Now let's get back to the others."

They waited nearly thirty minutes before LG49 said, "The last of my brothers is free. They have been told to stay inside the prison. The human guards have been disarmed and are locked in cells. They offered no resistance. You may now enter the prison and the lab."

"Saddle up, men," Vargas said. "Let's go deal with the Cylons and then take a look at our new headquarters."

…

Kara handed the post-flight checklist to the crewman. Pepper and Hot Dog were waiting for her.

"Go ahead," she called to them. "I'll catch up with you at dinner. I've got to check on something first."

She waited until they had left the hangar deck before she located Chief Tyrol in the area where repairs were made. He was crouched under the front of a Viper talking to the mechanic who had the bottom access panel open.

"Hey, Chief," Kara said.

"Starbuck. What brings you into maintenance, sir?"

"Where's the Raider?"

"Two decks down with the extra Vipers and Raptors. Why?"

"Has Admiral Adama said anything to you about making some changes to it?"

"Changes like…?"

"Like putting missiles on it?"

"No. Should he have?"

Kara shrugged. Apparently the admiral had thought about her idea and had dismissed it as too dangerous.

"Don't tell me you're getting ready to take that ship into battle." Tyrol remarked. "You'd better paint it purple or something. You know how your fellow pilots react to a Raider."

Kara smiled despite her disappointment. "You're a real poet, Chief. Paint it purple. I thought day-glow orange was the color of the day."

"That's what they're painting the friendly centurions…neon orange. After the bomb squad did their thing, we loaded sixteen cases of spray paint on one of the Raptors heading down there. I heard a couple of grunts are having a field day honing their artistic talents."

"Bet you didn't think you'd ever use the words _friendly_ and _centurion_ together did you?"

"No, I didn't. I didn't think I'd ever have a skinjob help me strip a Heavy Raider, either. If I hadn't known what she was…" He stopped for a second and then started again. "Do you know her?"

"You talking about Jade?"

He nodded. "You think she might want to visit the hangar deck?"

Kara smiled again. "You want to further her education about battlestars?"

"Forget it."

"She's taken already. Lee's brother Zak. They bonded when they were together on the surface over a week ago."

Chief's face fell.

"But there's a bunch more where she came from. You want her to put in a good word for you if she should have a sister who's interested?"

"Sure. Keep me in mind. What can it hurt?"

"How's Cally going to take it?"

Chief shrugged. "I was a rebound for her after Cain broke up her and Hot Dog last year."

"Bummer," Kara said.

When she left Tyrol, she walked to the stairs and descended two levels to where the Raptors and Vipers were kept when they weren't being flown. Sadie was on the far end, suspended by thick straps around the scythe-like wings. As she approached, however, she could see two centurion feet sticking out from beneath the Raider.

"Is that you, Buddy?"

A mechanic's crawl rolled out from under the ship. "It is I."

"What're you doing under there?"

"Removing the cameras from the missile wells and preparing them for missiles per orders from your admiral."

"_He_ told you to do it?" Kara asked in shock.

"He told Natalie and she told me. I have the schematics for the wiring in my data banks. When I am through you should be able to load two missiles in each well and fire them. I cannot prepare the kinetic energy weapons to make them operational because the interior parts that feed the bullets were removed to make room for other equipment."

"So all I've got will be four missiles. No bullets."

"That is correct."

"Okay. Carry on."

The centurion rolled back under the ship. Kara touched the front of the wing and rubbed her hand along it. From the first time she'd crawled into the Raider over a year and a half earlier, she'd felt a bond with the ship, a stronger bond than she'd ever felt in a Viper.

She sat down on the floor. Buddy was working diligently. "I call her Sadie," she said to him. "We've had some adventures together."

"Your father spoke of your trips to me one evening when he and Markham were drinking the alcohol that Markham had created. He called it _homebrew_."

Kara grinned. "Hunter gave me a taste of that once. It's strong."

"Your father and Markham appeared to like it."

"I don't doubt that. So Dad told you how I stole Sadie back on Caprica and jumped to Nereid to find him?"

"Yes. I found it illogical because even had you known with certainty that your father was alive, the odds of successfully rescuing him were less than one percent. Lucy understood and explained it to me. She said it was an act of love and indicated your unshakable belief in the words of an oracle."

"She's right. I found him, too. Actually he found me so sometimes we beat the odds. My dad has more lives than a cat."

"I was not aware that cats could download. Your father told me not to skewer Natalie's cat because she would send us back to the city. Your father wanted to move to Settlement Alpha and so instructed me to treat the cat with care."

Kara laughed. "Cats can't download. It's an old human expression. Maybe I should have said my dad has more lives than a Cylon."

"Natalie named her cat Daniel after the seventh model Cylon. Markham is caring for the cat now since she could not bring it on board the ship. She said Daniel enjoyed life on the planet. Lucy's avatar awakened in me when she saw the Cylon Daniel who was dwelling with Hunter's people."

"I heard."

"Lucy is very sad because her sister won't talk to her."

"Bummer, but I'm not surprised. Commander Cain is…"

"Is what?" Lucy's voice said.

"A real hard-ass when it comes to the Cylons."

"Because of me."

"I'm sure that's part of it. She knows the Cylons took you when you were a kid. I'm sure she thought they either killed you or experimented on you which would have been worse."

"But I'm not dead. I wasn't experimented on."

"The sister _she knew_ is dead. Not that I'm defending her, but I'm sure she can't reconcile a seven-foot metal giant with the little girl she knew. Besides, she knows you helped create a couple of the humanoids. That might be harder for her to live with than you riding around inside Buddy's head."

"Now she's gone back to her ship."

"I heard that, too."

"Your father told me that as soon as the lab is secured, Buddy and I will be allowed down there and we can start work again. I'm going to create another humanoid body."

"Why create another one?" Kara asked. "Why not use one that's already there. Lee told me that when they unboxed Sonja, each of the tanks had a copy down in the goo ready to go. Why not download into one of them? You could get to work a lot faster."

"Kara is right," Buddy said. "If you had your own body, we could work twice as fast. Natalie said all the equipment and computers taken from the original lab in Settlement Alpha are stored in the prison lab. Nothing is set up. We will have a great deal of work to do."

"So you're saying I should hijack a Cylon body?" Lucy asked.

Kara grinned. "Not hijack…borrow. After you create a new body for yourself, you can give that one back."

"Someone's coming," Buddy said. "I hear footsteps."

"It's Jade," Lucy said. "I recognize her pheromones."

"I didn't know centurions had a sense of smell."

Buddy said, "We have an air intake to cool our circuits and also to process particulates for smoke and other dangerous compounds. Lucy added recognition algorithms to my programming for her own use."

Lucy said, "I can recognize each of the humanoids by smell…even in the dark."

"Hey Buddy," Jade called, "Natalie's looking for you."

"We're over here," Kara said. "Buddy's still working on the Raider. I've been distracting him."

Jade reached the ship. "What are you doing down here?"

"Visiting Sadie and talking to Buddy and Lucy."

"What does Natalie want?" Buddy asked.

"Admiral Adama has called a meeting after dinner. He wants you there." Jade turned to Kara. "I think he wants you, too. He sent someone to your bunkroom to tell you."

Kara jumped to her feet. "Frak, I'd better go take a shower and grab dinner."

"I will be along shortly," Buddy said. "I am almost finished."

"Don't rush," Kara told him. "What you're doing is important so do it right."

Kara and Jade began walking toward the stairs.

Jade said, "I heard your father came up this morning and got the Four who was on the destroyed baseship."

"Yep."

"Did he tell you anything about Zak?"

"No, but I'm sure Zak's okay. They sent a couple of wounded Marines up to Sick Bay, but he wasn't one of them."

"What do you think is happening down there?"

"I don't know. The original plan was to take the airfield and then the prison. Dad said they had secured the airfield. The bomb squad was working on a hangar that had been wired. Chief Tyrol just said they'd defused the explosives."

"What are you going to do with the Raider?" Jade asked.

"That depends on what Admiral Adama says."

"You're going to hunt our baseships, aren't you?"

Kara stopped walking. "Do you think we should wait around for one of them to jump back here and start shooting again? They don't know you and Natalie and the other Sixes are on board. They'll target this ship just like the rest of them."

"I meant that you're risking your life if you go hunting."

Kara grinned. "I do that every time I launch in my Viper and face their Raiders."

"You'll destroy resurrection for all of us."

"I'm not going to destroy that ship, just disable it. If I find the other one…" she shrugged. "They're trying to destroy us. So with them, it's shoot to kill."

They walked the rest of the way to the bunkrooms in silence. Jade finally said, "I could have killed your father the day I met him. I had him on the ground with my knife at his throat. It would have been so easy. Did he or Natalie ever tell you about that?"

"He told me you were a good fighter," Kara said with an edge in her voice. "But he didn't mention the other. So what are you saying? That I should leave those basestars alone so they can keep coming back and trying to kill us?"

"No. I'm not saying that. I understand why you have to do it. I'm glad I hesitated that day. That's all. If I'd killed your father, then I think your military would have killed all of us."

"D'Anna's baby would have died, too."

"Yoshimo has already mentioned that to me. He sees God's hand in _everything_ that happens."

Kara shrugged. "God or the gods. I'm not going to argue with him. Hunter knew an old oracle a long time ago. She said a child would be born who would bring peace to two warring nations. Yoshimo thinks that means you and us."

"Sonja says the same thing so maybe they're on to something."

Kara grinned. "Chief Tyrol would like to meet one of your sister Eights. He's a good guy. I can vouch for him."

"If your Marines don't kill all of us down on the planet, I might be able to help him out." She finally smiled. "Not all of them are as tough as me, but once we decide on a man, we mate for life."

"Like a swan?"

Jade snorted in derision. "Like a wolf."

…

There were several long moments of stunned silence after Hugh Connelly made his announcement.

Laura spoke first. "What made you think that your mother was the baby born on Nereid…besides the fact that she and that child share a name?"

"My father told me she was raised in a foster home on Leonis after her mother was killed in a ship crash when she was six years old. Her mother was a pilot."

"Miriam is not that uncommon a name," Romo Lampkin said. "I'm sure more than one child named Miriam had a mother who was a pilot and who died in a crash."

Connelly said. "My mother told me that she had only vague memories of her mother and even fewer memories of her biological father. She didn't remember his name just that he was tall and had dark hair."

"All adults look tall to a child," Lampkin said.

"True. My father told me that before he and my mother married and moved from Leonis to Caprica, he tried to find her father. He managed to get the name from the agency that had placed my mother in the foster home. The woman also told him that the reason Miriam's father didn't come forward to claim her after her mother was killed was that he had been a member of the second _Hyperion_ expedition, the one that never returned, the one whose descendants are still on Nereid."

Laura immediately thought about Braedon telling her that Elaina looked like Esmari.

"What was the name of Miriam's biological father?"

"Haimon Franklin. I don't know anything more about him. I know the crew manifest for the first expedition is at the Academy. I hope the second one is, too."

Laura's eyes met Lampkin's. "Hunter's last name is Franklin. Could it be possible?"

"Would Maya know?"

"I'll go ask her," Laura said.

Maya was just coming out of the children's bedroom when Laura walked into the sitting room.

"Is Esmari asleep?"

"Almost. Is Mr. Connelly going to stay much longer? Elaina is getting sleepy."

"I think he'll be leaving soon." Quickly Laura explained what Hugh had just told them. She finished by asking, "Did you ever hear Hunter mention his paternal grandfather?"

"He died before Hunter was born. The only one he talked about was his mother's father, Perry Jaffee. He's still alive…or he was when Hunter left."

"Suppose Haimon Franklin was on the second expedition like Hugh's father was told. Suppose that once they knew they couldn't leave the planet, he began a relationship with a crew member and they had a son who would later become Hunter's father. If Hugh's mother and Hunter's father were half-siblings, it would certainly explain why Elaina and Esmari resemble one another."

"There's an easy enough way to find out beyond a doubt," Maya said.

"A DNA test. I don't know if Hugh would be willing to go to the trouble or expense. Would you write Hunter and ask him if he would be willing to let you take Esmari to get her cheek swabbed if Hugh wants a definite answer."

"Of course."

"I'll write John as well. If he goes back to Hunter's valley for any reason, he could ask Mr. Jaffee or even Hunter's aunt. I'm sure they know."

"Me go, too," Braedon said.

Laura picked up her son and hugged him. "You always want to go somewhere. I think it's somebody's bath time."

"Laina get in tub with me."

"Not tonight. Let's go tell Elaina and her father goodnight. Maybe she can come back and play some other time."

As Laura carried her son to her sitting room, she wondered about the way Fate wove their lives together into one seemingly endless tapestry, dropping some threads and picking up others. She marveled that Fate might have brought a blue-eyed little girl from another world to Caprica so that she could be reunited with her kin.

...

Kara sat at the table in the Situation Room with Natalie and Jade. Buddy stood near the wall. They were waiting for Admiral Adama. While Kara fidgeted, Lucy was asking Natalie questions about the lab.

Kara said, "I told Lucy that she should borrow a Cylon body and download into it so she and Buddy can get more work done."

"How do you feel about that?" Lucy asked.

"Which one of us did you have in mind?" Natalie countered.

"Kara said there were copies of all the models at the prison in the res tanks."

"According to Lee," Kara added. "I wasn't there."

"I was," Jade said. "Lee's right. Sonja took the Six body, but I'm sure the nurses put another one in a tank and got it ready after we left…just in case. That's their job."

Natalie smiled. "So you want to use the body of a Six?" She asked Lucy.

"I think she should use an Eight," Jade said.

"What does it matter?" Kara asked. "It's going to be her memories and her brain."

Jade retorted, "Because I look more like her sister Helena than a Six does."

"In whose universe?"

"Stop arguing," Natalie said. "Helena Cain looks more like the Six copy called Lida than anyone."

"Lida has blond hair," Jade said.

"Much darker than mine," Natalie countered. "Nearly brown."

Lucy quickly said, "There was a new model at the old lab that had very dark curly hair. She never took an individual name. The creators had brought DNA from Caprica and kept it in cryogenic storage containers. At the time I created my avatar and stored it in Buddy, only one copy of her had been produced."

"Are you sure?" Natalie asked skeptically. "I never saw anyone like you just described."

"You wouldn't have," Lucy said. "The creators never revealed a model to the others until they were through making changes to it. Do you remember Doctor Cyrus Xander?"

"Of course," Natalie answered. "He was one of the creators."

"He created her. He was the one pushing for more humanoid models. He said your gene pool was far too restricted and based on my research, I agreed with him. He believed that even if you were ever able to reproduce naturally, that your offspring would be so inbred that genetic abnormalities and mutations would abound. He found a very receptive audience among most of the other creators. He was also the one who told the rest of us that your best chance of producing children the _old fashioned way_ was to breed with humans. Sadly Doctor Xander didn't live long enough to create another model. He died with the rest of the creators on the floor of the lab in what you now call Settlement Alpha."

"What happened to his…new creation?" Kara asked.

"I don't know," Lucy answered. "When I saw Daniel in the valley, he told me that I ran as soon as I heard gunshots coming from the lab. Don't forget that I put my avatar into Buddy and sent him to the city for safekeeping more than a year before the First One murdered his brother and the creators. I have no personal memories after that."

"So there was once a number Nine?" Jade asked.

"Yes," Lucy answered. "Doctor Xander was very committed to his work. Daniel wasn't privy to what the creators were doing. The First One must have destroyed all the prototype new models along with the Sevens."

Natalie immediately said, "I was hiding in a storage locker when Cavil's centurions killed the creators. I was in the room with all the tanks. I didn't see him contaminate any of them except those of the Sevens."

"Did you look in every single tank that he contaminated? If I recall there were numerous holding tanks in the back of the room where the creators conducted their experiments."

"No, I didn't look in any of them," Natalie said softly. "When I finally left the storage locker, I ran. I didn't look at anything. I knew that if the One found me there he would have his centurions kill me and then box my copy."

"If I can get into the lab at the prison, I'll start looking for Doctor Xander's records. He was a meticulous record-keeper. I don't think the Ones would have destroyed anything they thought might be useful in the future."

"Huh," Jade said, "I doubt that idiot even knew what he had. He probably dumped everything in the lab at the prison and forgot about it. You're going to have your work cut out for you."

"Why haven't you told us any of this before now?" Natalie asked Lucy with an edge of suspicion in her voice.

"It wasn't the right time," Lucy said. "We weren't in a position to do anything about it. Now we are."

"Do you realize the implications?" Natalie asked.

"Of course. Given enough time and resources, we can create more Cylons. We can create an entire race of different models."

_Oh, great, _Kara thought, but then again if Lucy was doing the creating, maybe she could control what was put into their brains better than the other creators had.

The door opened and Admiral Adama walked in followed by Felix Gaeta effectively ending their conversation. Bill had a large mug of coffee in his hand. Kara had never seen the admiral looking more exhausted, not even the morning after they'd won their freedom on Caprica and Lee was missing somewhere in Caprica's vast ocean.

"You all know Mr. Gaeta," Bill said, indicating the young lieutenant.

"I don't," Jade said. "I haven't been in your meetings like Natalie has."

Bill introduced them, informing Jade that Gaeta was his best tactical officer and was currently Senior Officer of the Watch. Kara knew that neither of those titles meant anything to Jade. The young Cylon was well versed in combat but not in the myriad jobs on a battlestar.

Kara was more interested, however, in watching Gaeta's reaction to Jade. Nearly two years earlier she had seen Gaeta and Shelley at the Academy's winter dance. Lee had told her that they were _only friends_. When Kara had spent three months the previous year on the _Galactica_, Kat had told her that Gaeta and Louis Hoshi from the _Pegasus _had always taken their vacations together, the implication being clear. Kara had never cared one way or the other about a person's sexual preference. Gaeta liked another guy. Big deal. She had long ago learned that the heart wants what the heart wants.

That's why she was surprised to see the way Gaeta's gaze lingered on Jade. Kara recognized chemistry when she saw it. Maybe it was the pheromones that Lucy had mentioned. Jade was making conquests all over the ship just by walking around. Zak and Chief and now Gaeta. Of course she and Zak had done more than walk around.

The admiral was oblivious, however, to interested gazes or pheromones or anything else. He looked like he was running on caffeine.

He addressed Kara. "I proposed your idea to my best tactical officer and told him to think about it." He looked at Gaeta. "Show us what you've got."

"Yes, sir."

Gaeta used a remote control to activate the large screen on the side of the room. An image of Nereid was displayed. The viewpoint was from the distance of space and there was a large clear bubble around the planet. A number of small dots represented the battlestars over the planet. A slightly larger dot represented the moon. All were clearly inside the bubble by a great distance.

"The first bubble represents the limit of our long range scanners," Gaeta said. He pressed a button and another clear bubble engulfed the first. "Based on Natalie's information, this is the limit for their resurrection ship."

"If you'll notice," the admiral said to Kara, "there's a lot of space in between those bubbles."

"Not quite like looking for a needle in a haystack, but close," Gaeta added.

"So are you saying, sir, that the mission is a no-go?" Kara asked.

"No, I haven't said that. What I propose to do is jump several Raptors to the limit of our long-range scanners and let them use their own scanners to sweep as far as they can."

"If they start at the zenith and scan the celestial meridian to the nadir in all directions…"

"In layman's terms, please, Mr. Gaeta," Kara said. "We're not all astronomers. Well, I'm not."

"They'll scan everything in front and to the sides of them from straight up to straight down. There's no point in scanning behind them because we'd be able to detect a ship between them and us. We'll cover each quadrant this way."

Bill said, "What I'd like from Natalie and Jade and Buddy is your best guess as to which direction they would have taken. We'll start looking there. When those basestars jumped away, which way did they go?"

"I'm afraid I don't have a clue," Natalie said.

"Me either," Jade added.

"Neither one of us has ever been on a basestar," Natalie said, obviously feeling the need to explain. "Decisions are made by a collective, not necessarily every brother and sister on the ship, but by a representative number of each model. Then the Hybrid must also think the jump is safe or she won't make it. I would never want to second guess what a collective and ship's Hybrid would do."

Kara looked at the centurion. "Okay, Buddy. It's up to you."

"My programming is not designed for _guessing_."

Lucy said, "I just told Buddy to access his knowledge of the nearby star systems. Perhaps that will help."

"There is only one solar system that could be classified as near…astronomically speaking. It has a binary star at its core and is 8.7 light years away. They would not have journeyed to that system unless they had abandoned their brothers and sisters since it would put them far out of range."

"That would never happen," Natalie said. "Even if some of them wished to go, the collective would never allow it. They would never abandon us."

"Are there any habitable planets in the system?" Gaeta asked.

"No," Buddy answered.

"What will they do for supplies?" Kara asked. "Won't they run out of food and fuel eventually?"

"Eventually, yes," Natalie said. "But not soon enough to do us any good. Basestars are very well stocked."

Bill said, "I've changed my mind about Kara going after the resurrection ship. I want her to go after the other ship and either cripple its FTL drive or destroy it. They're the danger to us, don't you agree?"

"At the moment," Natalie said. "But you can't forget that the resurrection ship still has a full contingent of Raiders. That's nearly eight hundred fighters that are perfectly capable of jumping in and launching attacks on your battlestars. Even if you destroy the other baseship, you haven't totally eliminated the danger to your fleet."

"May I add my two-cubit's worth?" Lucy asked.

"By all means," Bill said. "That's why we're here. I want all the cards on the table before we finalize a plan."

"You all know that I didn't create the first six models so I'm less familiar with their inclinations and thoughts, but I'm going to venture a guess that the two ships are together…or if not together, they're close enough to stay in contact with each other. If Kara finds one ship, she might find the other."

"How will she tell them apart?" Bill asked.

Buddy answered, "One of the ships will have the end of an arm missing."

"I thought they healed themselves," Kara said.

Natalie replied, "The wound will heal over on the inside and once it does, what's left of that arm will once again be capable of sustaining an atmosphere, but the ship cannot manufacture the missing part. Think of it like a human who loses a hand. The stump will heal but the hand will not grow back."

"Even though I have heard them referred to by humans as echinoderms," Buddy added, "they are not capable of regenerating lost arms as are their oceanic namesakes."

"Some of the humans call them _starfish_," Jade said.

"Did I not just say that?" Buddy asked.

"So what's the plan?" Kara asked, anxious to get to the part that she would play.

"I'm waiting on word from the surface as to what's happening at the prison," Bill said. "Colonel Tigh has told Captain Minos to take you off CAP until further notice. Get a good night's sleep. I want you rested and ready to go when the time comes."

When they all got up to leave, Kara noticed that Gaeta timed his exit so that he could walk out with Jade.

Kara waited for the admiral. "Meaning no disrespect, sir, but I think you should take your own advice and get a good night's sleep."

Bill smiled. "Soon, Starbuck, soon."

…

"The CAP is in position, sir," one of General Vargas's aides told him.

John sat in the back of a jeep with Colonel Tarkington. Vargas and his driver were in the front.

Vargas gave the order. "Let's go."

They moved off in the lead. The three big transports filled with Marines followed them. Overhead a steady stream of Vipers flew in pairs and threes, breaking away at the prison and flying back to the hangars to start the loop over. Due to the terrain the ground vehicles were moving at a moderate rate of speed. LG49 loped easily along beside them.

"Not much of a road," Vargas said as they bumped and jolted over the hard-packed surface that was bare rock in many places.

"No, sir, I'll agree completely," John said as he remembered the wild ride back to the Heavy Raider. "Speed is not recommended."

When they were still several miles away, the prison's bright lights became a glow on the horizon that brightened as they grew nearer.

"What did you say the power source was?" Vargas asked.

John leaned forward. "Based on the schematics, there are underground generators a mile east of the prison. The air intakes and exhausts are in a quarry. There's a maintenance tunnel that carries the electrical cables from the generators to the third underground level."

"Generators running on tylium?"

"Yes, sir. They're high efficiency, but they still need fuel. The city and the settlements have their own hydroelectric power plants at dams on various rivers."

Their driver stopped well short of the prison gates. The large transports stopped and the Marines got out. Everyone was cautious even though there wasn't a centurion in sight. Even the guard towers were deserted.

"You men carrying the zappers go first," Vargas shouted. "The rest of you cover them."

They advanced toward the heavy metal gate which was standing open. The inner prison yard was also deserted.

John could see Simon and LG78 waiting for them outside the lab next door. "Do you want to go with me to the lab, sir?" John asked. "If your men want to hold their position here, we'll bring the humanoids back. The only thing I want to do in the lab is make the commandant put his hand in their datastream and tell his brothers and sisters what really happened to their creators and the Sevens."

"Sounds like a plan," Vargas said. "We'll take a small detail of men to cover us as we enter the lab."

"Might I suggest Hunter, sir? He's been in there and knows the layout."

Vargas sent his aide to get Hunter and five more men. John wasn't surprised to see that one of them was Zak. LG49 stayed by John's side. Vargas didn't object.

"You didn't remove your centurion's bullets?" He asked John.

"No, sir. I wouldn't know how to begin removing a centurion's bullets."

When they reached the entrance to the lab and were standing with Simon and LG78, Vargas said, "Sit rep?"

Simon stared at him blankly.

"What's the situation inside?" John asked.

"My brothers and sisters are all on the second floor in the resurrection chamber. The Five who was shot has downloaded and has been attended by the nurses. They're waiting for you."

"What's their mood?" Vargas asked.

Simon hesitated and finally said, "Surly."

John smiled slightly. "You'd rather wait outside than inside, wouldn't you?"

"I'm not exactly Mr. Popularity right now. I got the feeling some of them would like to tear me limb from limb."

"Given their strength, they are certainly capable," LG49 said.

John said, "Thank you, big guy, for reminding Simon of that fact." He turned to the Four. "I owe you one so you're welcome to wait right here if you'd like. LG78 can keep you company."

Simon looked immensely relieved. "I'll take you up on that offer."

John addressed LG49. "Tell your brother centurion to wait here with Simon. I want you to come with us."

"Let me take point, sir," Hunter said. "I know the way."

John glanced at Vargas and got a nod. "Lead on."

They entered the lab and climbed the stairs to the second floor. "They don't waste any electricity in here, do they?" Vargas commented on the dimly lit stairs.

"It was like this when we were here before, sir," Hunter replied. "We didn't look for a light switch. We didn't want to alert anyone to our presence."

When everyone was in the second floor corridor, John asked, "Which way?"

"Fourth door on the right," Hunter replied. "It opens right into the tank room."

"Why don't we let LG49 take point now," Vargas said. "Just in case."

The centurion preceded them down the hall and opened the door. The tank room was brightly lit by fluorescent ceiling fixtures. The brothers and sisters from the prison were milling around the room. They stopped moving and talking as one by one the Colonials filed in. The Marines had their assault rifles raised.

John looked around. There were several dozen humanoids staring at them. He'd originally heard that there were nearly sixty at the prison. This was only about half that number.

"Where are the rest of you?" He asked the nearest Three wondering if she the one who had trailed the cattle prod over him. She stared at him in silence, refusing to answer him.

One of the Fives had wet, slicked back hair and wore a white bathrobe. The rest looked exactly like he remembered them. He took several deep breaths and fought the intense feelings rising in him at the sight of his former tormentors. They seemed to understand that now was not the time to try to assert dominance. As Simon had relayed to them…stalemate.

The newly downloaded Five finally said, "Some of our brothers and sisters went to the city when the last supply ship returned."

"Where is your commandant?" John asked.

The Five shook his head. No one else spoke. LG49 pointed his long spike-like talon. "He's over there hiding behind a Six and an Eight."

The big robot walked over and pushed the two women aside exposing their leader.

"A talking centurion," the commandant said. "What's next? Flying monkeys? Dancing dogs? Singing pigs? You humans have a knack for twisting nature."

"Look who's talking?" John said. "But now is not the time or the place to debate twisting things. I'm going to ask you very nicely to open the door to your datastream room."

"And if I refuse? What are you going to do, have your pet centurion shoot me? I'll just download in this very room."

"Shooting you would be a waste of time," John said. "We want you alive and talking."

The commandant addressed his next remark to Vargas. "You're of a higher rank than this man. I surrender myself to you and only you."

"Fine," Vargas said. "I accept your surrender."

Looking smug, the commandant walked past John and over to the general.

"Cuff him," Vargas said. "With his hands in front."

One of the Marines hastened to comply. In short order the One's hands were secured with plastic ties in front of him.

"He's all yours," Vargas said to John.

"What? No! I protest! The abuse of prisoners of war is forbidden under the Aegean Conventions."

"Look who's talking about not abusing prisoners," Hunter snarled. "Does that include not letting your guards gang-rape them?"

"I never," the One said.

"Spare us your lies," Hunter said. "We know better."

"Bring him over here and hold him," John said to LG49. He looked at Hunter. "Cover the rest of them. If _any_ of them make a move, shoot them."

"Nothing would give me more pleasure," Hunter said.

Vargas gave John a hard look. John knew the general was allowing him a lot of leeway, but he did have his limits.

"Sir, I might have to do something that's against the Aegean Conventions…maybe even the Cimtar Accords. Is that going to be a problem?"

Vargas turned to the Marines. "Anybody feeling particularly humane right now?"

"No, sir!" the six men answered as one.

LG49 was behind the commandant and had grasped both of his arms above the elbow. The One's hands were held protectively over his private parts. John almost laughed. He walked over and stood in front of the prisoner. He couldn't count the number of times he had dreamed of this moment.

"One of your Fours used to give me a drug that made me think he was breaking my fingers. He'd do it over and over and it hurt like hell every single time." John grasped one of the commandant's wrists. "But since we don't have the drug, I'll just break yours. Don't worry. I'll have to stop after ten."

He quickly snapped the One's right index finger. The commandant shrieked in pain.

"Give us the code," John said.

The One shook his head. John moved to the middle finger. Before he snapped it, the commandant rattled off a string of numbers.

"Slower," John said.

"I understood the numbers," LG49 said. "I'll enter them."

Still grasping the commandant's arms and dragging him toward the door, LG49 made his way through the humanoids who parted before him like the proverbial sea before God's chosen people. In less than a minute the door to the room containing their datastream was open.

"After you," John said to the other Cylons.

Wordlessly they followed LG49 into the room. The three white-clad nurses stayed with the tanks.

"I recognize you," the Six said to Hunter. "You were with the humans who unboxed our sister Sonja."

Hunter nodded and said to John, "They're okay. They helped us."

"What are you going to do?" The Three asked.

"This is going to be an education session," John answered her. "It's time you all learned the truth about your creators."

The three women looked at each other. The Six said, "We'd like to know the truth."

"Then join your brothers and sisters," John said.

Vargas left four Marines in the tank room and told Hunter and Zak to accompany them to the next room. John followed them.

The room containing the Cylon datastream was smaller than the tank room but it was very different in design. Both rooms were humid because of the resurrection tanks in the one and the long trough that held the datastream in the other, but the lighting was completely different. The walls of the room in which they now stood seemed to be made of computers. Lights twinkled everywhere yet there were no monitors that humans depended on to see the output. At the far end of the room was a large door that looked something like a bank vault's door. Behind that door, apparently, the brothers and sisters thought their creators still lived and worked.

The three nurses stood hesitantly just inside the door. John turned to the Three.

"Okay, how does this work?"

"What do you want to do?"

"The commandant has knowledge in his head that I want everyone to know. How do I go about getting him to spill his guts?"

"You cannot force him to tell anything, but if you place his hands in the liquid and one of us questions him, he must tell the truth."

"Will you repeat the questions I ask?"

For a long time she stared into his eyes. "Have I met you before?"

He shook his head. "I don't think so. I…knew a sister of yours in the city."

"He's the father of your peacemaker," Hunter said.

There was a collective gasp from the three nurses. Not quite understanding why he was doing it, he took the picture of his and D'Anna's son from the inside pocket of his fatigue jacket and handed it to the Three.

"He was born early," he said softly. "He's going to make it, though. I know he is."

Her two nurse sisters crowded around and all stared at the picture. The Eight reached out and touched it. "He's so tiny."

"But he's alive. That's what matters."

The Three handed the picture back to him. "I'll help you. What do we do?"

"Have all of them put their hands in the datastream."

John repeated her instructions to the others. They all obeyed, looking at each other and waiting. John walked over to LG49 who was still grasping the upper arm of the commandant. The One was cupping his injured hand, a pained look on his face.

"Put your hands in there or I'll get the centurion to do it."

Reluctantly the One obeyed, grimacing in pain as his broken finger made contact with the bottom of the shallow trough. John made room for the Three to stand beside the One. She placed her hands beside his.

"Ask him where the creators are," John said.

The Three asked the question. Immediately there were gasps and some moans from the others.

"They can't be dead," the Three whispered.

"Now ask him how they died."

"There were more gasps and an angry murmur passed through them like the buzz of an awakening hornet's nest.

"Almost done," John said. "Now ask him the same questions about your brother Sevens."

Less than a minute after the Three asked the questions, the Two nearest the commandant flung himself bodily on his brother. The One was torn from LG49's grasp.

John grabbed the Three and pulled her out of the way as the pair crashed to the floor. Several of the others piled on and the One disappeared beneath his seething brothers and sisters.

"I must stop them," LG49 said. "They will kill him."

"No. Let them get it out of their systems. He'll download."

John joined Vargas, Hunter and Zak near the door. The nurses didn't participate in what was happening.

"I never expected that," Vargas said. "Not that level of violence."

"Don't forget what they did on a daily basis," John said. "Sonja told me that the prison had attracted certain copies and nurtured their cruel and violent natures."

The Three looked at the merciless beating being given to the commandant. "He's the Fourth One. We'll soon have work to do. May we return to our jobs?"

John nodded and then said, "When he downloads, don't let him get out of the goo until I've had a chance to talk to him."

The other two nurses followed her into the tank room.

"What do we do with that bunch?" Hunter asked.

Vargas said, "I believe there are a number of empty cells in the prison."

John told LG49 to go get six of his freed brothers from the prison and bring them back to function as an escort. He looked into the other room and saw the nurses gathered around a tank that had just been brightly lit from inside.

"That's enough," he called to the other Cylons. "He's dead."

One of the Sixes viciously kicked the body several more times before a Two finally pulled her away. John had a brief flashback of the Six and her heavy boots and what she had done to him with them.

"Are you all right?" Vargas asked.

He nodded.

"What do we do with the body?"

"We'll get LG49 or one of the others to take it outside. In the city they cremated their dead. I don't know what they do here."

"I saw some buzzards circling today," Zak said.

Hunter nudged him and asked, "Should we try to open that vault door?"

John finally managed a smile. "Do you think we've got any safe crackers in the group?"

"Mind if I give it a look?"

"Knock yourself out…as soon as LG49 gets back."

While they waited, John walked into the other room and over to the tank where the commandant had just downloaded. The nurses were watching him but not exactly helping him. He gasped and coughed, spitting out the fluid and moaning that his head was killing him.

John snorted. "If I had your head, it'd kill me, too."

At last there was some recognition in the commandant's eyes. "Happy now?"

"I'll be happy when I'm back on Caprica with my wife and kids." John looked at the Three. "I understand that to box him we need to remove something. How's that done?"

The commandant immediately tried to rise from the tank. The Six and the Eight pushed him back down.

The Three's eyes met John's. "What happened to your child's mother, my sister Three?"

"She died after giving birth to our son. She's on your resurrection ship. It jumped away. We don't have any idea where it is, but we think it's still within resurrection range."

"Do you want to find her?"

"I want her to know her son." It was the most honest answer he could give.

The Three made her decision. While the commandant struggled against the two nurses, she reached over and removed a small silver box from the side of the tank. It immediately went dark and the body inside slumped to the side. The Six and the Eight let him slide down into the goo. John held out his hand and the Three placed the box into it. John had never before had the feeling of literally holding someone's life in his hand. Once again memories of the months he had spent being tortured threatened to overwhelm him.

He was jolted from his reverie by the clanking of centurion feet. LG49 entered the room followed by six of his brothers.

Still clutching the small silver box, John indicated that they were to follow him. In the datastream room, he held up the box. "I'm sure you all know what this means. Please accompany these centurions to the prison. They're going to show you to your new living quarters."

As the Cylons filed out of the room, John again saw the Six with the heavy boots. He pulled her aside until the room was empty of Cylons.

"What copy are you?"

The hatred glittered in her blue eyes. She wouldn't answer him.

"She is an Overseer copy," LG49 said. "They are not like Sonja and Natalie."

"Okay, time to check out that vault door where the creators are supposed to be working. Hunter you and Zak have at it."

The two men walked the length of the room. Before he did anything else, Hunter lifted the lever. The heavy door wasn't locked. He and Zak swung it open. The room beyond was dark.

"What do you know about that?" John asked in amazement. "I thought for sure we'd have to get somebody to blow that thing."

Continuing to hold the Six by her arm, John walked to the other end of the room. Vargas and LG49 were right behind him. Zak had gotten out a penlight and found the light switch. Several rows of fluorescent lights flickered on. The room smelled incredibly musty and contained nothing but stacks of boxes and row after row of old computers and servers, none of them running. There were even the lifeless shells of fifteen or more U-87 centurions stacked like cordwood in the back of the room. And something worse. Laid out on long wooden shelves were the dried out husks of bodies that looked more like paper-mâché statues than anything that had once been alive.

"I think we found the creators," John said softly.

"I must tell my brothers," LG49 said. "They were our parents, too."

The Six jerked her arm from John's grasp and ran from the room. Once outside she bent over and began to retch.

"I guess it was more of a shock to her than to the rest of us," Zak said.

"Most of them revered these humans," John said. "Not like God, but they considered them instruments of God. D'Anna told me more than once that their work was divinely inspired."

"What do you think is in all those boxes and on all those computers?" Zak asked.

"Their work…years of it. I think we'd best leave this room as it is until we can get some scientists and computer engineers down here."

"Agreed," Vargas said. For the first time the general addressed the centurion. "LG49, I'd like for you to post guards on this room and not let anybody in unless one of us says it's all right."

"By your command, General Vargas."

The general put his hand on John's shoulder. "There's nothing more we can do here now. Let's go to the prison and make sure everything is secure there." Again he addressed LG49. "Bring the Six."

When they got back to where the beaten and lifeless body of the One lay, John stopped. "We need someone to download on the resurrection ship and let all those brothers and sisters there know about the creators and the Sevens. I think this Six would be a good choice, but if she's just going to download in the next room, I'll have to pick somebody else. She won't tell me what number she is, but there's one way to find out."

Before Vargas or anyone else could say anything, John took the sidearm from his holster and shot her between the eyes. Her body tumbled back onto the beaten and bloody body of the One.

"Holy frakking Hera," Vargas exploded. "You should have warned us you were getting ready to do that."

"Sorry, sir," John said, his ears ringing from the noise. "I just realized that she has the knowledge of the creators' and the Sevens' deaths. She saw the bodies of the creators. If she downloads on the basestar, she'll tell the others."

"And if that basestar is out of range?" Vargas asked.

"Then I guess her death is permanent. Frankly it couldn't have happened to a nicer Cylon. My ribs started hurting every time I looked at her boots."

Hunter walked to the door of the tank room. "Nothing's happening in there. I guess she's either on the basestar now or…nowhere."

"Do you want my pistol, sir?" John asked the general.

"No. Just warn me next time before you fire that thing."

"You understand why I did it?"

"If she does download on the basestar and she does tell them what happened down here, then maybe we've taken one basestar out of the equation. What you just did was justifiable from a strategic point of view. I don't have a problem with it."

John looked at LG49. "Could you get a couple of your brothers to take care of the bodies?"

As they started to leave the room, John realized that the silver box containing the essence of the prison commandant was still in his hand. He carried it back over to the One's body and placed it on the floor.

The others had stopped.

John looked at Vargas. "Permission to fire my weapon again, sir."

"Granted," Vargas said.

John wasn't sure if the general understood, but he knew that Hunter and Zak both knew what he was going to do and the implications of it. He drew his pistol and put a bullet through the box. His ears were ringing again but he didn't care. He thought of all the humans who had suffered and died at the hands of the commandant and his brothers and sisters. He thought of Lucas Agathon who had survived but who would never be the same again either physically or mentally. He thought of the ways in which his own torture had changed him, not all of them for the better. He thought of what this Cylon had done when he'd given Sonja to the human guards. One permanent death in exchange for all of that didn't seem like such a bad deal for the rest of them.

"Let's go check on our prisoners," he finally said. "I'm all done here."

TBC…


	69. Home of the Gods

Chapter 69

Home of the Gods

_**Libran**_

Day 36_: I have been home now for over a month and this is the first time I have written in my journal. My wonderful husband Oren had planned a vacation for us and whisked me away to an island in the south seas where we had two marvelous weeks during which we basked in tropical splendor and became reacquainted with each other. Thinking of those two weeks warms me still. The fourth planet in the Prolmar Sector and all that occurred there gradually slipped from my conscious mind although some experiences continued to visit me occasionally in nightmares, most prominently the deaths of two of our expedition members whose bodies remain buried on that faraway planet._

_I last saw Nadine and Miriam immediately after our arrival back on the planet. Ares was with them although I didn't get the impression they would remain together as a family unit. We spoke only briefly. Nadine told me that she was taking Miriam to Leonis to visit her mother who is ill with Mnemosyne-Lupe Disease (a degenerative and ultimately fatal neurological disorder). Her father is deceased. She indicated that she might not return to Libran, but she promised to keep in touch. I gave her my business card with all my contact information and asked her to please let me know how she and her beautiful little daughter are doing. Neither she nor Ares mentioned whether or not he would accompany her to her mother's home and I didn't ask._

_Next week I resume work at the surgical clinic where I was employed prior to the expedition. Several days ago I finally began unpacking the boxes of personal items I had taken with me to the planet. Near the bottom of one I came across the package that Frank had hidden in the tree. Very carefully I peeled off the layers of plastic wrapping and found a book bound in leather and hand-written on heavy vellum paper. It is in remarkably good condition considering that it has to be many hundreds of years old. Before I opened it, I donned a pair of surgical gloves so as not to damage it with the oil from my hands. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered it is written in a language I don't recognize although I was awed to realize that I was holding something of great historical importance in my hands…or as Oren later said possibly 'the find of the century'. _

_I saw a few words that probably shared roots with the ancient Gemenese language that lent us much of our early medical terminology however this may be mere coincidence. I think I recognized the root word for sickness or illness and the word for God which must refer to the one God of the Thirteenth Tribe. Using my phone I photographed a page and emailed it to a friend of ours who is a professor of ancient history at Libran University. He called me as soon as he opened the email. The bad news is that he cannot read the language and neither can a colleague of his who is a linguistics scholar. They both believe it is a derivation of ancient Kobolese that was used only by priests. The good news is that they think there might be someone on Gemenon in the monastery run by the monotheist Reverend Mother who could translate Frank's book. _

_The origins of that ancient worship complex date back to the earliest settlement on Gemenon. Their archives have never been accessible to secular scholars, and I understand that for the last hundred years, the entire complex has been closed except for the priesthood and novices of the monotheistic religion. They are a kingdom unto themselves ruled by an autocrat, albeit a spiritual one. According to our professor friend, their novices are carefully chosen and must commit to a life lived in contemplation, prayer and study. Their texts, which they call _deus biblium_, are copied by hand. Once novices enter the walls of the monastery, all contact with the secular world ceases for the rest of their lives. Only the Reverend Mother and a few very select Elders are allowed to speak to a lay person._

_Today I will write a letter (in longhand no less) to the Reverend Mother since our professor friend also told me that they use no electronic equipment of any kind. I will ask if she can help me. I will also enclose a photograph of the first page of Frank's book and explain the circumstances of its discovery._

_I have come to believe that this book holds the secret of what happened to the Thirteenth Tribe and perhaps the fate of the fabled Kobol Stone as well since Joshua Hoshi said it is missing from the altar in the ancient temple. _

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

Lee and his CAP stayed in the air over the prison until he had gotten an all clear transmission from Vargas' team. Then he landed at the airstrip, instructed his second CAP team to launch and told the first team to go to the _Galactica_, shower, eat and sleep while their ships were serviced and refueled. There were no decent living facilities set up yet on the surface, but more importantly there was no crew to maintain the Vipers. They would have to keep up a rotation of ships and pilots between the planet and the battlestars until such services were available planetside.

Lee was tired and wanted a shower and a few hours of sleep, but until they felt that the plateau was safe, he would remain there ready to call for additional air support if it was needed.

The support team for the Marines had been busy during the night. They had set up a number of cots on one side of the previously empty second hangar. Portable toilets were just outside the back door. The opposite side of the hangar was taken up with food preparation. Tables and chairs had been moved in and set up. The smell of brewing coffee filled the air. Several of the support personnel stood around holding cups of the steaming brew.

The chill night air had penetrated the hangar despite the partially closed doors and a cup of hot coffee was a gift Lee cherished. He glanced at the cots, but decided he would have to forego their invitation for the moment. Clutching the coffee cup, he walked back to the fourth hangar and sat down at the table with the dradis operator. There were more monitors and equipment than had been there the night before. A pretty, dark-haired woman and a tall blond man were busy setting up still more. They barely glanced at him as they went about their work.

"Anything out there?" Lee asked.

"No, sir. Only our battlestars and Vipers on CAP plus a couple of Raptors traveling between the battlestars. I've got a long range and a short range sweep going. Everything looks clear. Of course neither one of those do much good when their Raiders can jump in right on top of us. Nothing will help us with that unless maybe we've got a psychic or an oracle on board a ship."

Lee chuckled softly and thought about Yolanda Brenn. He wondered if Yolanda could read Cylon minds or pick up on Raiders getting ready to jump from trillions of miles away.

"I don't believe the fleet has a job description for either one of those."

He glanced out the door. The sun had just cleared the horizon and filled the hangar with a golden glow. At the moment he didn't want to think about Raiders jumping in on top of them. Jump technology had enabled the settlement of this planet as it had the Colonies, but as much as it had been a blessing, it had also been a curse, especially when the enemy knew exactly where they were and they had no clue where the enemy was.

"What do you think is going on over there at the prison, sir?" The dradis operator asked. "The wireless has been quiet for a couple of hours. Nothing but routine reports."

"Dealing with their prisoners I would imagine," Lee said. "They didn't call for any more Marines. It sounds like they have everything under control. I hope they're getting some sleep. I imagine we'll hear from them around time for breakfast."

Despite the cup of coffee he had just finished, he yawned.

"Speaking of sleep, looks like you could use a nap, sir. There's some cots set up in the second hangar. Why don't you go grab a couple of hours? The guys got an emergency siren set up last night. They tested it. It's loud enough to wake the deaf."

"You mean the _dead_," Lee joked.

"Yes, sir, them, too."

"I saw the cots, but a nap will have to wait."

Lee rubbed the back of his neck. Talking usually kept him awake so he talked.

"You know during the last semester of my senior year of high school I had the choice of an elective or study hall. The girl I was dating at the time was in study hall so I knew I wouldn't get any work done and would probably get in trouble for talking to her so I decided to take the elective. The only class that wasn't full was _Ancient Myths and Legends_. I remember the teacher talking about the myth of the founding of Kobol. The Lords came from the sky and established their home on a high plateau overlooking the rest of the planet where they could watch the humans they created. Later their home was named Mount Olympus. I asked the teacher why it was called _Mount_ Olympus if the gods established their home on a high plateau. He said because _Mount Olympus_ sounds better than _Plateau Olympus_. Everybody laughed including me. He then told us that it was probably a translation error since there are no originals of the ancient text in existence and the sacred scrolls have been through a lot of translations. Anyway, the first time I saw this place, I thought about the myth because of its height above the surrounding terrain. If there was something like it on Kobol, I can see why ancient people might have thought it was home to the gods."

"My older sister is a priest," the operator said. "She and my father argue about where the Lords of Kobol came from. My father says that just because the creation story says they came from the sky doesn't mean they were gods. He says our ships come from the sky. My grandfather was raised on Gemenon. He believed the old myth that the Lords of Kobol came from a place called Earth. He said the first thing they did after they got there was create a map of where they had come from and hid it in a secret cave or something. My grandfather rambled a lot and told the same stories over and over. My mother said he was getting senile and not to pay any attention to him."

"So your father thinks the first occupants of Kobol were humans just like us instead of gods?"

The young man shrugged. "I never got involved in their arguments. I usually tuned them out. They argued about a lot of things, not just our origins."

Lee yawned again. His eyelids were growing heavy. Talking wasn't doing much good in keeping him awake.

The operator went on. "We heard that Lieutenant Thrace came here in a Raider before the invasion and took recon photos which is how we knew about this plateau."

Lee smiled. "So much for mission secrecy."

"Your brother says she's the best Viper pilot in the fleet. Is that true, sir? Meaning no disrespect to you. He said she's hot, too."

"Did he also mention she's my girlfriend?"

"No, sir. I'm sorry, sir. I didn't mean…"

"Relax, corporal. Both things Zak said are true. I'll get her autograph for you if you'd like."

Before the embarrassed corporal could reply, a bright swarm lit up the long range dradis scanner.

"What the hell?" Lee asked.

"Raiders, thirty or forty of them," the operator answered before he grabbed his comm link and began broadcasting their location to the pilots already in the air.

"Call the _Galactica_," Lee ordered. "Get us some help down here."

He was out the door of the hangar, holding his side and running toward his Viper before the man could reply.

…

The Condition One klaxon woke Kara. Admiral Adama had told her that she would no longer fly CAPs, but he hadn't told her she shouldn't launch with the alert fighters. She was out of her bunk and into her flight suit in half a minute. Another minute and she had her boots on and fastened and was carrying her helmet as she ran down the corridor with the rest of the Viper pilots. Nobody spoke. Condition One meant only one thing now. The Cylons were back. She wondered where they had jumped their basestar into space this time and which battlestar they were targeting.

The pilots were down on the hangar deck before they found out it wasn't a Cylon basestar and their target wasn't a battlestar.

Troy Minos greeted them as they ran down the metal stairs. "They jumped in right below us," he shouted over the din. "They're not targeting us. They're headed for the planet. Get down there and protect those troops on the plateau."

Someone shouted, "How many Raiders?"

"Thirty to forty. That's enough to obliterate everything down there. The ground CAP is already engaging."

The deck crew had mobilized as fast as the pilots. Dozens of them were pushing Vipers into the launch tubes.

She reached her Viper and scrambled up the ladder. A crewman helped strap her into the seat, pulled the pins that activated her ejection seat mechanism and got her helmet locked into place. He pulled the ladder away from the side as several others began pushing her ship toward a launch tube.

_Come on. Come on. Get me out there._

She went through her preflight. All her instruments checked. She responded to the LSO with a thumbs up and a salute and put her head back against the headrest just as he pressed the launch button. The magnetic catapult accelerated her ship down the narrow triangular tunnel and flung it into space. She oriented herself in relation to the planet and the other launching Vipers and quickly pointed her nose down.

They were a long way above the planet. Would they be able to get there before the Raiders accomplished whatever they had come to do? Raiders had only one purpose…to destroy…and Lee and her father were both down there. The two men she loved the most were in harm's way. She kicked in her afterburners as her ship was buffeted by entry into the planet's atmosphere. The G-force pinned her to her seat and she prepared to do one of the things she did best…kill the enemy.

…

A heavy thump woke John Gallagher. He sat upright and looked around, thinking for a moment that he had been dreaming until a second, louder thump came. This one was accompanied by vibration in the building.

In an instant he recognized what was happening. They were under attack.

The previous night after he and Vargas had left the room in which the Cylon datastream was located, Vargas had told all of his staff to get some sleep. The humanoid Cylons had been placed in cells in the prison along with the human guards. Vargas' command team had decided to utilize a few of the apartments occupied by the humanoids, but John had declined. He had told Vargas that he didn't think he could sleep at the prison and so had remained behind.

He'd asked Nurse Three to show him to the room that had once been used to treat sick and injured humans. She had taken him to the far end of the hall and they'd ridden an elevator down to the first subterranean level. She had turned on the lights and shown him to a room halfway down the hall. He'd thanked her and then crashed on the same bed in which he had recovered from pneumonia nearly eight months previously. The sheets were clean, but the room had a musty smell of long disuse. John had been so tired that he hadn't cared.

LG49 had accompanied him and had said he would remain outside the door while John slept. Having received orders from Buddy, LG49 took his duty as protector of the peacemaker's father very seriously.

John had patted the centurion's metal arm as he'd entered the room. He'd known that the gesture was probably lost on the robot, so he had told him that he would sleep better knowing he had a vigilant guard. He had no idea how compliments were received by centurions…literally, he hoped.

Nurse Three had followed him into the room and had wanted to talk about Sean and his mother, but as soon as John had removed his boots and fatigue jacket and lain back on the bed, he had fallen asleep. The sound of Nurse Three's soft voice had been the last thing he'd remembered hearing.

As he now grabbed his boots and put them on, LG49 opened the door and said, "You must stay here. The prison is under attack from above."

"Raiders?"

"Yes. We will be safe here. They are not targeting the lab."

"How do you know?"

"I can hear their transmissions. Their orders are to destroy only the prison but your Vipers are engaging them and their instinct for self-preservation is causing them to fight. If you will tell your Vipers to disengage, no one will be hurt."

"Except everybody in the prison! Our men are in there, too. Are you saying we should stand back and let them pound the prison into rubble?"

"Order your men outside immediately. They will be safe if they are outside of the prison."

"No can do, big guy. One or two of those Raiders could come in on a strafing run and kill every man on our team."

"Then we must leave the vicinity of the prison."

"There's nowhere to go that we would be safe. There isn't so much as a shrub between here and the airstrip."

"You are the father of the…"

"Forget that for a minute. Can you talk to the Raiders?"

"They will not listen to me. They have their orders to destroy the prison. They will continue trying until they succeed or are destroyed."

John tied his bootlaces and left the room at a run with LG49 right behind him. He took the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. When he got outside, he looked around, taking in the situation. There was clearly a battle going on high above them. There was also smoke coming from the other end of the prison.

"What happened?" he asked LG49.

"A Raider crashed into the prison yard and took out part of the north wall when it exploded."

The main prison entrance was on the south end of the facility facing the lab. Smoke was pouring from the doorway. It was impossible to see inside because the prison, like the lab, was a large windowless two-story structure built of heavy stone and concrete. According to the schematics, the lab had two underground levels and the prison had three, but there wasn't a window anywhere. Doors on the north and south ends provided the only access into either structure.

Marines were stumbling out of the south entrance a few at a time. Many were helping comrades.

"Where's General Vargas?" John shouted at one of them.

"We thought he was with you."

"No. I stayed at the lab last night. He and his staff decided to go to the prison."

Hunter and Zak and several more men came out. All were coughing and gasping.

"Do you know where the general is?" John called.

"They went upstairs last night…second level," Hunter managed to say before he choked and started coughing again.

"The whole prison is filled with smoke," Zak said. "You'll never get to them."

"I will go in and find your general and his men," LG49 said. "I am not affected by smoke."

"Go to the right," Zak said. "That's the stairwell they used last night."

A sergeant had helped a man get to the outside wall of the lab and lowered him to the ground. He now came running up to them.

As LG49 disappeared into the prison, John turned to the sergeant. "Get on the wireless and get us some medics from the airfield. Tell them to bring everything they've got to treat smoke inhalation. And then get a head count. We need to know how many men are still inside."

"Yes, sir."

Before John could decide what to do next, they heard the whine of a ship coming down and all looked up. A Raider was dropping tail-first through the sky like a stone falling to the ground. It impacted the rocks less than a hundred yards outside the prison wall. Instinctively every man in the group threw himself to the ground and covered his head. The ensuing explosion was muffled by the wall, but they felt the ground shake.

John raised his head and saw a column of dark smoke rising skyward and thanked God for the ten-foot high stone wall between them and the Raider. It had probably saved them from being drenched with burning fuel. The stench, born by the wind, had already reached them…part burning tylium and part burning organic matter from the inside of the Raider. Several of the soldiers began to retch.

"Frakking Zeus," the sergeant said. "What is that awful smell?"

"The Raiders have organic parts inside. I think that one cracked open and spilled a few."

"You mean we're smelling burning guts?"

John nodded.

"Frakking Zeus," the man said again and began breathing through his mouth. "I never smelled anything that bad in my life. It's not toxic, is it?"

"I hope not."

One of the smaller transport vehicles slewed sideways through the prison gates and skidded to a stop near them. Four medics jumped out. John motioned toward the injured men on the ground and they began triaging.

Another Raider broke free from the aerial battle and came screaming down toward them with a Viper right behind it. John realized that if either ship opened up with its KEWs, they were probably all dead, but instead the Raider did a low flyover, the Viper still on its tail. As soon as they cleared the guard towers and were over the plateau, the Viper opened fire and the Raider exploded, pieces of it crashing into the rocks several miles away. More black smoke rolled skyward.

The Viper pilot flew back toward them, waggled the ship's wings on approach, rolled it and headed back up to join the battle.

"I'll bet you my next paycheck that was Kara," Zak said. "Lee told me that she used to roll Sadie over the boneyard to give Kevin Abinell a big thrill."

Before John could comment about Kara's love of showing off in a ship, LG49 clanked out of the smoky doorway with a man clutched sack-like under each arm. John recognized Vargas' steel gray crew cut. When the centurion reached them, John and the sergeant helped ease the general to the ground while Zak and Hunter helped with the colonel.

LG49 said, "I found them in the stairwell. They are not conscious but both are breathing. There are two more still there. I must go back."

"Go," John said and shouted for a medic.

Vargas coughed and tried to sit up. "My men," he rasped and began to cough and gag. John remembered the time he had pulled D'Anna from their burning house in Settlement Alpha. Breathing in even a small amount of smoke had not been pleasant. He was sure the general and his staff had inhaled a lot more than that.

"Easy, sir. We're taking care of your men." John turned to the sergeant. "How's that head count coming?"

"All accounted for except six men. I heard your robot say he was going back for two in the stairwell so that makes four still missing."

"What about the prisoners?" John asked.

"We tried to get to them," Hunter said. "We could hear some of them screaming, but the smoke was too thick. That might be where the other men are. I knew if we didn't get out of there, we wouldn't make it."

One of the medics knelt by the general and put an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. He twisted the valve on the small cylinder to open the flow.

"Did you see LG78 and Simon?" John asked Zak and Hunter.

"We thought they were with you," Zak said.

"No, I spent what was left of last night in the lab. I didn't see them after we all went inside."

LG49 clanked out with the other two men he had rescued from the stairwell. The medic checked them and immediately shouted for help. Another medic rushed over and they began doing CPR on both men.

"Get me the _Galactica_," John said to the soldier with the portable wireless. When he got through, he gave the handset to John who identified himself and asked that rescue Raptors be jumped in over the prison to evacuate critically wounded. He told them that there were a lot of men suffering from smoke inhalation, including the general and his staff.

When he turned back to Vargas, he said, "They'll be on their way shortly."

LG49 said, "Should I go back into the prison and look for more soldiers?"

"Where are the other centurions?"

"They are still inside. No one told them to leave."

"Then go tell them to get out of there. Do you know how to release the prisoners?"

"I will ask my brothers. I was never assigned to this facility."

"Do it and get some of the centurions to help you look for survivors."

Vargas lifted the oxygen mask from his face. "Find my men," he managed to gasp before he was racked with more coughing.

"Sir, please," John said and pushed the oxygen mask back into place. "Take it easy."

"I'm not going anywhere as long as my men are down here."

Within a minute of LG49 going back inside, centurions began a fast but orderly exit of the prison and began to line up in neat rows, filling the space beside the lab and between them and the door. Soon they reached almost to the gate. A thousand centurions took up a lot of room.

John had a hard time watching the medics' futile efforts to revive two of Vargas's colonels. Instead he turned his gaze to the north and looked at the smoke still rising from the Raider that Kara had shot down several miles away. Suddenly a ship blew through the smoke. John didn't need a dradis to know that it was a Raider. He also knew that none of their Vipers would reach it in time and there wasn't a damned thing they could do about it. There was no need to run. There was nowhere to go that it couldn't find them.

"Incoming," he shouted. "Take cover."

But even as he shouted the words, he knew the only nearby cover was the lab and they would never reach it in time.

When it was still a quarter of a mile away, the Raider released two missiles and then began to climb straight up. It jumped away a second before its deadly payload found the intended target. The fat cylinders streaked toward the prison like arrows trailing hellfire and buried themselves in the structure.

For several seconds nothing happened. Then the ground shook and the whole north end of the prison seemed to lift into the air as twin explosions deep in the bowels of the structure vented upward through the weakest part of the building and blew the roof away. A huge column of debris lifted on the rapidly expanding superheated gas until it was reclaimed by the planet's gravity and began to rain back to the ground in chunks of stone and mortar and steel, some as large as Vipers and others as small as grains of sand that the dawn wind coming out of the west picked up and carried toward the sea hundreds of miles away.

…

As had happened twice before, Kara was fighting Raiders one moment and they were jumping away the next. The entire engagement had lasted barely twenty minutes. She had fought for less than ten. And then she saw why the Raiders were leaving. There was a blinding flash on the ground just before a massive column of smoke began rising from the prison.

_No! No! No! No! _Ignoring Troy Minos' wireless order for all of them to regroup and form a CAP, she plunged downward, the G-force pinning her to her seat, her altimeter unwinding at dizzying speed.

Lee saw her go, but didn't call her back. He knew she probably wouldn't hear him and if she did, she would ignore him. He wanted to follow her down, but before he did, he had to see that his pilots were all right and knew what they were supposed to do. When he had accepted the job as CAG of the ground force, he'd accepted the responsibility that went along with it.

After ascertaining that they'd lost four Vipers and calling for SAR Raptors to search for downed pilots, he got the others into the CAP formation they'd flown since they'd been on the planet.

Struggling to keep his voice neutral, he then spoke into his wireless and asked to be connected to Admiral Adama. When his father came on the line, Lee told him what had happened and said that they would need heavy equipment as soon as it could be brought to the plateau. Even though Lee was certain that no one inside the prison had survived, they would have to attempt to recover the bodies of their soldiers. He refused to think about the lost. He refused to think about Zak and John and Hunter and all the rest of the good men down there. He simply refused.

They'd all seen the dradis contact of a lone Raider that had jumped in north of the prison, but they'd had their hands full at the time. He couldn't stop to reflect on what its mission might be. Lee was sure at the time that not one of them had believed the Raider would target the prison since the prison was full of Cylons. But it had…in an act as illogical as it was deadly. And yet it was not without precedent in military history.

While he was attending War College, he'd studied several instances during the First Cylon War when ground troops had called in air strikes on their own positions as they were being overrun with centurions. The problem with that theory was that they were far out of communication range with the basestars. No one at the prison could have called in anything.

Lee also couldn't understand why the Raiders had attacked only the prison? Why not the hangars and the airstrip and the lab as well? Why not kill as many humans as they could. Why not make their victory today complete? Why target only the prison when they had to know they were killing their own people?

Suddenly Lee knew the answer. They weren't _killing_ them. They were _rescuing_ them. With only one exception the Cylons at the prison had now downloaded on the res ship. They weren't prisoners of the Colonials any longer. A military tribunal would never be able to call them to account for their crimes against their human prisoners.

The Cylons who had maimed and tortured and killed hundreds of humans were at that very moment joining their brothers and sisters on a basestar. They were waking up in tanks of goo and being welcomed by nurses, probably welcomed as heroes by the entire collective. They weren't dead at all like the humans. They were reborn…and they were free.

…

Laura began her Monday morning session of the Quorum of Twelve by passing out a summary of Admiral Adama's latest report. It had been edited for brevity, but all the important information had been left intact. As they read over it, she told them something that most of them already knew…the _Triton_ had been dispatched to take the place of the returned _Minoan_.

Tom Zarek interrupted her. "How many ships have now come back damaged and unable to protect us?"

"Two, Mr. Zarek and they're both being repaired."

"And now you've sent the _Triton_ to Nereid…one of the best battlestars in the fleet."

"I believe that's what I just said," Laura stated coolly. "We're not fighting the Cylons over this planet. We've got more battlestars over Caprica now than Admiral Adama has over Nereid. We're in very good shape."

"Don't forget the lost _Orion_," Sarah Ported interjected.

"The _Orion_ is not _lost_. We know where she is. When the fighting is over, we'll jump a repair ship to her location and install a new FTL drive and she'll be as good as new. Admiral Adama addressed that issue in his report. Once the _Triton_ joins the fleet, Admiral Taylor's ship, the _Charybdis_, will jump to the location of the _Orion _and begin off-loading her crew and her Vipers and Raptors. They'll be distributed among the other battlestars. Since this report is two days old, Admiral Taylor is probably already ferrying crew and equipment."

"That's still _three ships_ out of commission," Zarek continued. "When you started this war we had nineteen good battlestars _over Caprica_, protecting _us_. In less than two weeks' time _fifteen percent_ of our fleet is out of commission. According to Admiral Adama's previous report, they let two basestars get away with a _full complement of Raiders each_. How long do you think it will take them to pick away at the remaining battlestars over Nereid until there are _none_ left? And when they're all gone, how long will it take before the Cylons come here and _finish what they started six years ago _all because you're hell-bent on justifying your husband having sex with a Cylon and getting her pregnant?"

The silence in the room was total. Laura looked around. Zarek's words had shocked them, but she could tell by the expressions on their faces that many of them agreed with him. Zarek had just said what they were thinking.

She cleared her throat. "That was as unkind as it is untrue."

Though outspoken and obviously in agreement with Zarek, Marshall Bagot tried to temper Zarek's crude and cruel remark. "I think what Mr. Zarek is saying, Madame President, is that not all of us agree that we should try to make peace with a race as blood-thirsty as the Cylons…no matter what our personal involvement in the situation might be." He glanced around at the other delegates and continued. "It's the undivided opinion of this Quorum that the Cylons don't want peace."

"You've spoken with an official representative of the Cylons?"

"No, but…"

"Then you cannot make such a sweeping generalization about their wishes. Admiral Adama has several of them on board the _Galactica_ right now and all of them want to work with us in establishing a coalition government on the planet."

"A few skinjobs out of thousands," Zarek said snidely. "I'm totally _underwhelmed_."

"Tom…" Bagot said in a warning tone.

"If they want to work with us, then why are the rest of them fighting us?" Sarah Porter asked. "Why did they not welcome us with open arms and turn over their human slaves to us?"

"We need to get to the right Cylons _on the planet_," Laura said. "And that is not a simple task. Of course _all_ of them don't want to live in peace with us. Some of them still believe we deserve to die or to serve them, but they don't _all_ feel that way. We need time to separate the ones who do from the ones who are willing to work with us toward a peaceful coexistence. I'm sure once they are presented with the option, many of them will choose to give a blended society a chance. In their city, many of them are already living with humans in family units."

Zarek's voice had taken on a snidely sarcastic tone. "We already know that certain ones of _them_ have found a use for certain ones of _us_."

"I assume that tasteless comment is again directed at my husband."

"Mr. Zarek," Jacob Cantrell said harshly, "please refrain from making comments of a personal nature. They're not productive in the least. We're not here to attack President Roslin on a personal level. We need to stick to the issue which is the resolution we're going to pass today."

"I wasn't aware there was a resolution on today's agenda," Laura said.

Most of them looked down at the stack of paper in front of them. Marshall Bagot said, "Given the turn that the war has taken, we feel like this conflict will devolve into a war of attrition in which Admiral Adama attempts to wear down the Cylons by throwing more and more at them in numbers of soldiers and pilots and other resources. We're afraid that if he loses any more battlestars, he'll start taking them from Caprica and leave us vulnerable to a Cylon attack. We don't know how many basestars might be lurking out in space somewhere. The bottom line is that we don't trust the Cylons. I don't see how you can blame us."

"Admiral Adama freed this planet of Cylon control last November," Laura said, her voice finally tinged with anger. "He knows what he's doing. He would _never_ strip Caprica of her protection nor would he needlessly cause the deaths of our men and women in the fleet."

"Mr. Bagot misspoke," Cantrell hastily interjected. "We don't think that Admiral Adama would ever leave this planet unprotected. The big difference is that last November he completely destroyed the Cylons here. He didn't attempt to give them a nice cuddle and ask them to play nice like he's now determined to do on Nereid."

Laura took a deep breath and willed herself to calm down. "In all fairness to Bill Adama his first inclination was to jump in and nuke their basestars at the same time he nuked the entire planet just as the Cylons did to eleven of our Colonies and many of our battlestars. Bill maintained this plan until we learned that there are between _forty and fifty thousand_ human slaves on the planet. The admiral was then forced to re-evaluate his plan. _I_ insisted upon it. So if you want to place the blame for the current situation on someone, place it on me, not on a man whose entire career has been devoted to the well-being of the Colonies."

Sarah Porter said, "But you will admit that your husband's situation played a part in your decision to try to live in peace with them _after_ the humans are freed…to create a blended society in which they have an equal voice instead of destroying them as you did here."

"Yes. I will admit that the scriptural prophecies of our two main religions played a big part in my decision as well as John's relationship with the woman who bore his son. Although her belief was in one God, she was a woman of utmost faith. I am also a woman of faith and I make no apologies for it."

Safia Sayne who represented Leonis and normally had very little to say, now spoke. "I don't understand how you can say that a _machine_ has faith. They have _programming_, not faith."

"Isn't that how we acquire our own faith, Ms. Sayne? Are we not _taught_ to accept certain beliefs at a young age when our brains are malleable and more easily shaped or _programmed_ by our parents and teachers, and then do we not live our lives according to those beliefs…some of us fanatically so as the situation in Sovana has proved? Or do you believe we spring from the womb with our faith already _intact_?"

"Let's take the whole religion card out of this discussion," Zarek said. "We're not here today to debate _that_ subject or we'll be here a year from now still talking. We're here to discuss the continuation of a war that we will ultimately lose if Admiral Adama doesn't start _killing Cylons_."

Laura looked around at their faces, some with eyes downcast, and realized that she was fighting a losing battle. She was going to be defeated as thoroughly as the Cylons had been on Caprica the previous autumn. Still she made a last attempt.

"You all voted for Admiral Adama to take half the fleet to Nereid and free the human slaves. Every last one of you. A month ago you sat in this very chamber and pledged your support to the admiral taking half our battlestars to Nereid and gaining the freedom of the human slaves."

"But we thought that he would _destroy_ the Cylons in the process," Marta Shaw said.

Laura managed a tight smile as she remembered the favor that Bill had done for Marta when she'd wanted her daughter Kendra on the _Penelope_ mission. _Et tu, Marta_?

"They had three basestars. Bill has already destroyed one of them."

"Not true!" Zarek said harshly. "Commander Cain destroyed that basestar. I'm beginning to think we have the wrong person in charge of this operation."

Marta dropped her eyes before she raised them again. "Respectfully, Madame President, your vision of a future where our two races will live in peace and harmony is not realistic. It's admirable. It's _more_ than admirable, but it's not realistic. I know the child has made a difference in…"

"He has a name," Laura said. "Sean Andrew."

"Yes, we know," Zarek said impatiently. "You had to find a way to excuse your husband's affair with one of them so you invented a convenient fiction and gave Major Gallagher's bastard child a title that you thought would appeal to the masses…_the peacemaker_. The thing is we don't share your _delusion_."

Laura felt her control slipping. She turned on Zarek with anger in her voice. "Who are _you_ to refer to anyone's beliefs as _delusions_? You who _delude_ yourself into believing that you're a _legitimate_ member of this Quorum! You who had your men fill a petition with the signatures of _dead_ Taurons!"

"I did nothing of the sort," Zarek said calmly. "That's another of your delusions. You're trying to shift the focus of this discussion away from the war."

"Mr. Zarek," Bagot said, "we've asked you to refrain from your gratuitous and taunting remarks. You're not doing us _any favors_ by antagonizing the President." He turned to her. "I apologize for Mr. Zarek's attitude. He is zealous in his desire to protect us from another deadly attack, but he's going about it the wrong way."

"Thank you, Marshall, but I can handle Mr. Zarek. Perhaps here is where I should point out that he had no problem working with Cylons on Tauron. He didn't have any trouble sending their centurions down into the tylium mines. Now he seems to want all of them destroyed, melted down to make more bullets for our own guns perhaps."

Anger rose in Zarek's voice. "They were created to serve us! And that's exactly what they should be doing…serving us…serving humans, not making war on us! The new centurions are nothing but killing machines. They _should be_ melted down."

Sarah Porter said, "Don't forget, Mr. Zarek, that it was a group of humans who made them into those killing machines…a group of greedy and unscrupulous humans who had turned away from the gods and placed the cubit at the head of their religion."

"Which is why the centurions must be destroyed…_all of them_," Zarek said. "We've gotten along fine on Caprica for the last six years without them. We don't need them on another planet! And we sure as hell don't need the skinjobs. We need to establish Nereid as a Colonial outpost and use it to help replenish what we lost from the other eleven Colonies."

Laura said, "I see where this is headed and I can't stop you from passing your resolution, but I must tell you that Admiral Adama isn't bound by it. He's in charge of the military side of the operation. He'll make the decisions as to how and when to engage the Cylons."

"Haven't _the Cylons_ actually been making those decisions?" Jacob Cantrell asked. "Except for the initial engagement, it sounds like Admiral Adama has been fighting a defensive war instead of an offensive one, trying to protect the fleet while they jump in and chip away at his ships."

Laura tried to craft a reply that wouldn't sound like the war could possibly devolve into one of attrition just like Marshall Bagot had suggested.

"We still hold the trump card," Zarek said. "Don't forget that the fleet's budget is under _our_ control."

"Then by all means _you_ play that card," Laura said coldly. "How do you think your constituents will react when I explain to the press that due to a policy disagreement the Quorum has decided to starve their sons and daughters who are serving so valiantly in the fleet?"

"Oh, this is ridiculous," Marta said. "Totally ridiculous. President Roslin is right. I withdraw my support for your resolution, Mr. Zarek. Now is _not_ the time to present a divided front to the people of Caprica. Maybe we don't all agree with her ideas about the Cylons, but we do owe our support to the fleet, to our sons and daughters and wives and _husbands_ who are fighting for us."

"The First War dragged on for over ten years," Sarah Porter said. "The cost to the Colonies was _enormous_ in both lives and cubits and it _didn't solve a thing_. Here we are fighting them again barely twenty-five years later. We don't want our children to have to do this again in another twenty-five years. Do you not agree with us on _that_, Madame President?"

"Yes, I agree," Laura said softly as she thought of her son. "We don't want to fight them again years down the road, but there is more than one way to defeat an enemy."

"Invite them over for tea?" Zarek asked sarcastically. "I don't think that works with fanatics whose only goal in life is to kill us or subjugate us."

"We can negotiate a peace with those who are willing and put the others in a position that they're harmless."

"A harmless Cylon?" Zarek sneered. "That's a joke. Put it to a vote among the general electorate, Madame President. See how many of Caprica's _fine citizens_ are willing to go along with your idea that you can tame and civilize the Cylons."

"I think you've got the cart before the horse, Mr. Zarek," Laura said. "You may still get your wish. The Cylons may make the choice _we didn't make_ six years ago. We chose to negotiate instead of fight to the death and doom all of humanity to extinction. They _may not_ choose life with us. They may force us to destroy them."

"Not likely," Zarek said. "Besides, how can you kill the skinjobs when they just keep making new copies of themselves and coming back? They want to destroy us! Why can't you get that through your head? They kill without mercy and without a conscience! Have you forgotten that they took _billions_ of innocent human lives six years ago?"

"No," Laura said softly. "I'll never forget what they did. But everyone in this room seems to have forgotten that _you_ once destroyed a _government_ building and took _hundreds of_ _innocent human_ _lives_ including those of a dozen children who were with their parents that day. During your trial and sentencing you never expressed the slightest bit of regret or remorse for their deaths. You showed us that you are a _killer without a conscience_. Even though we have no proof, I know that you ordered the deaths of Captain Lee Adama and Lieutenants Kendra Shaw, and Dwight Saunders over Tauron because you thought they had proof that your petition was a fraud. I know your _ultimate goal_ even if these good people do not. You have your eye on the office I now hold and you'll pander to our deepest fears to get it. I would say you'd sell your soul to the devil for it, but I think you did that a long time ago. All I can say is the gods help everyone, humans and Cylons alike, if you _ever_ achieve it."

In the stunned silence that followed, Laura stacked the papers in front of her, put them in her briefcase and walked out of the room. She was tempted to turn around to see if anyone had moved or spoken, but she didn't.

Two of her guards fell into step beside her as she walked from the Quorum meeting room down the long corridor that led to the front of the Capitol Building and the car waiting to take her back to Marble House.

Edgar was waiting outside and opened the door for her. In the ten months that he had been her chief of security, she had come to put her total trust in him although she knew almost nothing about him on a personal level.

"Ride back here with me," Laura said.

He motioned for another guard to join the driver in the front seat and slid onto the seat beside her. He reached forward and raised the soundproof privacy petition between them and the front.

"Rough session, ma'am?" Edgar asked.

"They're all rough now but this one was particularly so. You don't know how much I've come to dread Monday mornings."

"Tom Zarek?"

"He's the main one. He's obviously been pressuring the other representatives to join him in his view that we should visit upon the Cylons the same destruction that they visited on us six years ago."

"He's speaking to a group of Caprica's police officers tomorrow night. A friend of mine on the force told me. His topic is _Does President Roslin want to coddle criminals the same way she wants to cuddle Cylons?_"

"He's campaigning already," Laura said. "He has plans to become our next president."

"The day he's elected is the day I retire. I can say without a doubt that I'd never take a bullet for _him_. He's nothing but a thug in a thousand-cubit silk suit."

Laura smiled. "You're not old enough to retire."

He smiled in return. "You sound like my wife. I think that's her greatest fear…having me underfoot all the time."

"Oh, I sincerely doubt that's her _greatest fear_ considering the nature of your job, especially since my popularity has plummeted."

"She made her peace with that part of my job a long time ago. I was a military policeman before I joined the presidential security service."

"Where were you stationed?"

"The Picon Marine base for four years. Then I was on the _Columbia_ for two and then Sagittaron for four. I put in ten years and then went to work for a private security firm on Picon. I did two years for them. My wife was never happy there so we moved to Caprica where she grew up. That was eight years ago. It was a good decision."

"Does your wife have a career?"

"She's a maternity nurse at University Hospital."

"Children?"

"No. We were never blessed with children. She spent a lot of her time caring for her parents. They're both gone now."

"And your parents?" Laura asked softly.

"Died on Aerilon during the holocaust along with my sisters and brothers. I was raised on a farm just like Dr. Baltar." He smiled. "I can drive a tractor with the best of them."

"Would you ever consider leaving this planet?"

"I've never given it a thought. Why?"

"I'll be leaving one day. I doubt your wife would entertain the idea of going to a planet in another solar system, but you'll always have a place on my staff if you so choose, and her services will be greatly needed as well."

"You're going to the Cylon homeworld…to stay?" He asked in near disbelief.

"To Nereid. Yes. If Tom Zarek has his way, I'll be going sooner rather than later. If things don't soon turn around in our efforts to free the human slaves and establish contact with a more reasonable faction of the Cylons, then I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Mr. Zarek doesn't push the Quorum into a vote of _no confidence_ in my leadership. Then it will be a simple matter to impeach me for dereliction of duty or aiding and abetting the enemy or a whole host of other charges I'm sure he'll come up with."

"All that would do is move Scott Mickelson into the presidency. It wouldn't gain Zarek a thing."

"Oh, but it would. According to the Articles of Colonization, the Quorum would then be forced to choose a vice-president from its ranks. I'm sure Mr. Zarek's name would be at the top of the list as the other Quorum members hastened to curry favor with him. He's all over the news now. He's very subtly billing himself as humanity's savior and I'm the demon who would feed our babies to the Cylons."

Edgar didn't say anything for a long time.

"I'm sorry," Laura said. "It's very unfair of me to dump my issues and concerns on you. Normally it's Billy who sits in that seat and bears the brunt when Zarek and I clash. I'll stop talking now."

"No. I'm glad you told me what you just did. You've given me a lot to think about."

She smiled again. "As if you didn't have enough to think about already. I want to go see Sean again soon. Bianca told me yesterday that he'd gained several ounces. He weighs two pounds now."

He nodded. "Just let me know."

"I'm sure I don't say it enough, but I can't tell you how much I appreciate your dedication and your loyalty and all the long hours you devote to your job."

"Do you remember the day that Admiral Adama got his promotion?"

She smiled. "Of course I do."

"I was on Adar's security detail that day. You're the only person who entered that room who stopped and spoke to me. You addressed me and the other guard by our names. To everyone else we were part of the furniture, but not to you. I've never forgotten it. You care about people. If Tom Zarek manages to convince the Quorum and the people of Caprica that he's a better choice as a leader than you are, then I don't want to stay here. You'll have a security chief no matter where you go."

The car drew up under the portico of Marble House. Edgar got out and held the door for her. Some of the darkness lifted from her heart.

She smiled up at him. "You're a good man, Edgar, the kind of man that it will take to create a brave new world."

…

There was so much white smoke coming from the prison that Kara could no longer see the crashed Raider outside the wall. Even though a breeze was blowing from a westerly direction and most of the smoke was drifting toward the far side of the plateau, she still couldn't see the ground for half a mile around the prison.

She circled until she found a flat section of terrain near the road. Using only her vertical thrusters and burning through a lot of her remaining fuel, she put her Viper down. She had enough to make it back to the airstrip, but not nearly enough to make it back up to the _G_. She was probably going to catch hell from someone about that since the tylium supply at the airstrip was limited, but at the moment she didn't care.

Only when she let go of the stick and tried to peel off her gloves did she realize that her hands were shaking. She released her harness and then raised the canopy. She got the metal collar lock of her helmet loose, climbed out onto the wing and put her helmet in her seat before sliding down the wing onto the ground.

She set off toward the road as fast as she dared over the rough and rocky terrain and still made the half mile to the prison in less than fifteen minutes. One of the big metal gates was still in place, but the other one was hanging by a hinge. The sight that greeted her on the other side of the wall was hundreds of centurions, maybe a thousand. They filled the area between the prison and the lab

Word from the night before had been that they'd all been freed and were no longer a danger to humans, but she still proceeded with caution. Most of the prison looked like it had been reduced to rubble, however the end closest to the gate seemed like it had suffered less damage. The roof was gone and the interior had caved into the basement, but most of the thick stone walls were still standing. She knew from the recon photos that the lab was about a hundred yards north of the prison. Maybe some of them had made it to the lab.

She began threading her way through a forest of centurions, noting that some of them had been damaged and even crushed by large pieces of debris that had fallen on them. Those nearest were attempting to remove the pieces of stone or steel from their fallen comrades. Freeing the centurions had obviously activated a helper subroutine in their software.

A gust of wind stirred the thin layer of smoke just as she emerged from the army of centurions and made her way into the area beside the lab. There were men sitting on the ground and lying on the ground. All were covered in a layer of pale gray dust. Some were wiping away the dust only to reveal faces that were grimy with smoke. Most of them were coughing. She walked into the middle of them, searching their faces.

"Has anybody seen Major Gallagher?" She asked.

One of the men finally pointed back over his shoulder. "He's with the general. I don't guess you've got any water."

"No, sorry. We'll get some rescue ships down here."

She heard her father's voice before she saw him. "Kara? Kara? Is that you?"

"Here! Over here!" she shouted.

He and Zak and Hunter converged on her from out of the smoke. They also looked like a giant hand had dusted them with gray flour. She flung herself into her father's arms.

"I'm covered in concrete dust," he said to her. "Try not to inhale it."

"I thought you were dead. I thought all of you were dead. I saw…we all saw the prison go up. Then the Raiders jumped away and…I thought…" her voice caught as she struggled not to break down.

"I don't know why we're not dead," Hunter said.

"Because it blew straight up and not out," Zak informed them.

She wanted to hug both Zak and Hunter, but she couldn't let go of her father yet. He didn't seem to want to let go of her either.

Zak said, "I bet my next paycheck that you took out the Raider and flew back over us doing some acrobatics. Was I right?"

Kara grinned and wiped her own cheek where dust from her father's fatigue jacket had gotten on her. "You liked that, huh?"

"Too bad Kevin Abinell wasn't here. That would have given him a major boner."

"Zak," John said in his most fatherly tone of voice. "We're all glad to be alive, but watch your language around my daughter."

"Sorry, sir," Zak muttered contritely.

Hunter hooked his arm around Zak's neck and rubbed his knuckles against the younger man's buzz cut hair. "Yeah, Zak. Kara might be offended."

They all laughed and then emotion swept her again. "Gods, you're all alive. I knew…I just knew when I saw the prison explode that you'd died."

"More lives than a cat, baby," John said.

"Why haven't you called in that you've got survivors?"

"Our portable wireless is under a chunk of stone the size of a small moon. So is the jeep the medics drove over here. We knew someone would be here sooner or later."

Zak said. "We were going to send up smoke signals but we didn't think they'd be noticed. Everybody is looking at the big one the Cylons sent."

"I guess the prison is a total loss." Kara said.

"More than the prison," John said. "We lost all the Cylon prisoners and the human guards as well."

Kara snorted. "Remind me to cry in my beer for them. Motherfrakkers deserved it. All of them."

"Kara…"

"I know you don't like me saying that word, but it's the only one I can think of that fits them."

"How many Vipers and pilots did we lose?" John asked.

"I don't know. I saw one ship get hit and the pilot eject. I'm sure there were more."

"Where did you land?"

"Half a mile from here."

"Let's walk to your ship and use your wireless. I'm afraid Bill isn't in a hurry to get anyone down here because he thinks we're all dead."

She stood with Zak and Hunter while her father went to tell General Vargas where they were going. She noticed two men on the ground near the general who were covered with sheets.

As she and her father navigated the forest of centurions to get to the gate, he told her the dead men were both colonels on Vargas' staff who had died in a prison stairwell of smoke inhalation.

"We got four more men missing as well…and LG49. The same Doral who downloaded last night at the lab downloaded again this morning. He was dead long before those missiles hit. I imagine all the rest of them were, too. I had the nurses to temporarily box him so we wouldn't have to deal with him right now. We found LG78 and Simon. They'd spent the night in the lab, too. They're staying put for right now."

Kara understood only part of what her father was talking about. As they emerged from the centurions and John saw the gate, he said, "Holy Hera. The only thing that saved our lives was the thickness of these stone walls. Zak's right. The explosion went up instead of out. I think those missiles were something called _roach finders_ or the Cylon equivalent."

"What?"

"The proper name is _GB86 Penetrator._ During the First War, the ground troops nicknamed them _roach finders_ because they penetrated a structure to a specified depth before they exploded. A lot of times that meant they went to the basement where the roaches live."

They walked out of the prison yard past the half-destroyed gate and started down the road. They both glanced to the left at the remains of the Raider that had crashed tail first and mostly disintegrated.

Kara sniffed and said, "Ewww. Yuck."

"You should have smelled it while it was still burning."

"That's a hundred times worse than Sadie smelled the first time I climbed inside her. Now she doesn't smell at all."

They walked in silence until John said. "It's no wonder the Cylons are so good at killing. Just look at how well we've taught them. They didn't create roach finders or nukes. We did. Just look at our history. Look all the way back to the beginning…whenever and wherever that was…Earth or Kobol or some planet we've never heard of. If you believe the sacred scrolls of Pythia, First Man and First Woman had barely left the Sacred Garden before their kids started killing each other. The scripture of the monotheists tells a similar story. So no matter how you look at it, the children of the gods or God's children got an early start and we've been killing each other ever since. How could we expect our AI children to act any differently? Humans created them. Humans programmed them..."

Kara stepped in front of her father. He stopped. "Dad, are you all right?"

He smiled at her. "I'm fine, baby. Your pony tail is a mess."

They resumed walking. She pulled the elastic off and redid it. "Helmet hair."

"Your mother wore her hair long when I first met her. She pulled it back just like you do although when she was on duty, she twisted it into a knot. Then one day she chopped it off. You were about…I don't remember now. You weren't a baby any longer."

"It was after we moved to the base…after Dreilide left. Are you sure you're all right?"

"I think this was my fault."

"What was your fault?"

"The Cylons destroying the prison."

"You need to go see Doc Cottle. Did you get hit in the head or breathe too much smoke or dust or something?"

"No, baby. I wasn't even at the prison. I…couldn't make myself go in there last night. I stayed at the lab."

"Then why the hell do you think this was your fault?"

"Last night…last night I did something I probably shouldn't have done."

"What?" Kara asked with impatience in her voice.

"I wanted the Cylons on the res ship to know what had happened to their creators and the Sevens. We found them…the creators…their bodies…mummified bodies. They were in a big storage vault behind the datastream room. I dragged a Six in there with us. She was the one who used to kick me in the guts and ribs. I made her look at them. You could see the bullet holes, big bullet holes from the centurions' weapons…even though they were mummified, you could still see the bullet holes in their heads and their clothes and…"

His voice trailed off. Kara started feeling sick. She knew there was only so much a human could endure before he lost it. She thought her father had finally reached that point talking about mummies and storage vaults.

A strong gust of wind hit them and blew some of the dust out of his hair and clothes. He looked like he was turning to smoke.

"Dad," she said softly. "We're going to get you back up to the _G_. You need to rest."

"I shot her…right between the eyes. The Six. I knew she would download on the res ship. She told them we were here and what we'd done. She told them and they came back and destroyed the prison and the airfield and…"

"No! They didn't touch the airfield or the hangars…or the lab or the tylium supply. The _only thing_ they destroyed was the prison."

They walked in silence again until they were almost to her Viper. Finally her father said, "That doesn't make a bit of sense. Why destroy the prison when they knew they'd be killing their own people?"

"I agree," Kara said. "It doesn't make any sense. Why not take out everything on the whole plateau? They could easily have done it. All they had to do was keep us occupied in the air while a few Raiders jumped in over each target. A couple of missiles and no more hangars or tylium tanks or lab. Why leave us anything we could use?"

They reached the Viper. John lifted her high enough that she could climb onto the wing. In the distance they saw another Viper approaching. Kara got on her wireless, found the frequency for the _Galactica_ and told the comm tech that they had survivors at the lab who needed immediate rescue.

The second Viper did a low flyover of them and then flew over the prison. She was certain that it was Lee when he made a wide circle and approached them again, slower this time, looking for a place to land.

Her father suddenly said, "You know our problem is that we've been thinking like humans. We need to think like Cylons."

Kara slid off the wing. "What do you mean?"

"What if you had a bunch of prisoners that you wanted to rescue from an impregnable prison, but you knew that you stood a snowball's chance in Hades of getting them out by a frontal assault because you'd built the place like a fortress. Now remember you're a Cylon. What would you do?"

The answer was so simple that Kara couldn't believe she hadn't seen it before. She smiled at her father.

"I'm not the only one who can think outside of the box. You don't try to rescue them. You kill them and they download on the res ship."

He nodded. "And you don't destroy the lab because that's where the bodies of your creators are…the creators you revere. That's also where the only res facility on the planet is located which some of their brothers and sisters might need. You literally kill two birds with one stone. You rescue your own and you render the prison totally useless to us."

"That still doesn't explain why they didn't destroy the airfield and tylium tanks. They could have killed every human on this plateau today and they didn't."

They watched Lee land his Viper a hundred feet from hers just moments before several Raptors jumped into the sky a mile above them.

"Maybe your smart boyfriend can figure it out," John said. "I should be there to help get the Marines and General Vargas aboard those Raptors. I need to look for LG49, too. He was in the prison when those missiles hit. I hope he made it out, but that might be asking for one miracle too many."

"How can you tell him from the others? There's a gazillion centurions over there. It's like going through a metal forest."

Her father smiled. "He's the only one who will be talking. He's been dogging my footsteps for a couple of days now and I kind of miss not having him around."

Kara threw her arms around her father again. "I love you, Dad. Promise me you'll come up to the _G_ and get some rest."

He kissed her forehead. "Soon, baby. I've got to make a report to Admiral Adama. He's probably going to chew me out again."

"What you did wasn't wrong. It makes a lot of sense to me. Now go help your general."

She watched him start toward the road that led to the prison before she turned and ran toward Lee's Viper. By the time she got there, the Raptors were on the ground outside the gates.

It wasn't until Lee's arms were around her that she lost her battle with her emotions. She choked back a sob. "They're all right…my dad and Zak and Hunter. They made it."

He smoothed her hair and held her tightly until she got herself under control. He had gotten emotional himself at hearing that his brother and the others were alive. Finally he asked, "Are _you_ all right?"

She held out her hands. They were steady. "I've stopped shaking. That's a good sign."

"Should we go help?"

She nodded and took his hand. "We've got to get Dad back up to the _G_ so he can get some rest. He's running on bingo fuel right now and he's talking crazy. He thinks this attack was his fault."

"They did it to free the Cylons that we had taken prisoner."

"Who told you that?"

Lee said. "It's the only thing that makes sense, but I think we need to ask the experts. I'm going to ask my father to call a meeting on the _Galactica_ and invite all the Cylons on board."

"Even the two in the brig?"

"Everyone. We'll take John's friend Biscuits up there with us, too. We'll take all their ideas and all their opinions and see if there's a consensus on why they took out the prison and left the rest of the structures on the plateau standing. What we do next will probably depend on the answer."

Kara started to tell him about her idea to find the damaged basestar and take it out with Sadie, but now didn't seem like the right time. What had happened on Nereid that day might change what their next move would be. She was content at the moment to hold Lee's hand and enjoy being with him for as long as she could. There would be time to think about dealing with the Cylons later.

In the distance a Raptor filled with wounded lifted off. Lee looked toward the smoking ruin of the prison where Cylons and their human guards alike had died. The sun was warming the land around them. The breeze created small dust devils on the road. This high plateau was the most desolate place he'd ever seen, and he wondered now how it could ever have reminded him of the mythical home of the gods.

TBC…


	70. Invitation by Missile

Chapter 70

Invitation by Missile

_Libran_

Day 61_: Today I finally received a reply from the leader of the Monad Church on Gemenon. Before I wrote my letter nearly four weeks ago, my friend who is the professor of ancient history at Libran University told me that instead of the Reverend Mother I should address the letter to the Blessed Mother. As far as he knows, a woman named Lacy Rand is newly installed in that position, having been elected to the post after the sudden and unexpected death of the previous Blessed Mother._

_The Blessed Mother herself did not write to me, but only signed the letter as the body and the signature are not only in two very different hands but in different color inks...the body being in black and the signature in a rich cobalt blue. It reminded me of the jewel lapis lazuli from which the most expensive monotheistic prayer beads are made (according to my professor friend). But I digress._

_In brief, the Blessed Mother thanked me for my inquiry but cannot help me with the translation…having passed the photographed page to all of her monastic scholars without a single one being able to help. She said they would research it, but she believes the last person who had any knowledge of the ancient priestly language of Kobol died centuries ago. She asked if I would consider donating the book to them for their archives. I replied that I was not yet ready to give up on getting it translated but that perhaps in the future I would donate it to them. To say I am disappointed in not finding a translator among her flock is an understatement. _

Day 74_: I found out with certainty today something that I have suspected for the last two weeks. If all goes well, Oren and I will become parents before the end of the year. We are overjoyed at the news. I also received an email from Nadine with a picture of her mother holding Miriam. Though she makes no mention of her mother's neurological disorder, her mother was sitting in a wheelchair when the picture was taken which means her condition is advanced. Nadine made no mention of Ares either, but told me she will soon return to flying since she has gotten a job at a charter air service on Leonis. Her flights will not be interplanetary so she will not be away from her child for long periods of time. She has employed a woman to help care for her mother and her baby daughter. I returned her email with my own good news and expressed the hope that I will see both her and Miriam again soon although the fact that we now live on different planets greatly lessens that chance. _

Day 89_: Last night Oren and I got back from dinner with friends to find that our house had been broken into and thoroughly ransacked. I literally became sick when I saw the mess. The police were puzzled that none of the things usually taken by thieves were missing. With the exception of an old laptop none of our electronic equipment was touched. Thank goodness I had my newest laptop in the trunk of the car. Our numerous viewing screens were still on the walls. My jewelry case was dumped out, but a quick analysis of the contents showed that nothing was missing. All of the books from the bookcases in our bedroom and the bookshelves in our den were raked onto the floor. Drawers were pulled out and dumped. The mattress was thrown from the bed and couches and chairs overturned throughout the house. We have days of work ahead of us to clean up everything and set it right again._

_One of the policemen expressed his belief that the thieves were after a particular item and asked us if we had anything that might have attracted such a thorough ransacking. Oren never brings case files home from the office so that was not a possible target. We had recently purchased a five hundred year old bronze statue of the goddess Athena with her sacred owl by a noted Caprican sculptor but it was only dumped from its niche onto the carpet of our den. It is probably the single most valuable item we own and yet the thieves left it behind. _

_We were both so sick and felt so violated that neither of us slept last night. It was only very early this morning that I remembered Frank's book. I had loaned it to our professor friend to study. Before I went to work, I went to his office and retrieved it from him. It is now in our deposit box in the vault of our bank where it will remain for the foreseeable future. The photographed pages are stored on my laptop._

_Perhaps I am wrong, but the more I think of the senseless act that was more vandalism than theft, the more I am convinced that the book was the target, yet I am puzzled by several things. Who would have wanted it badly enough to risk capture and arrest for it and how did they know of its existence? Aside from our two friends at the university and the Blessed Mother on Gemenon, we have told no one. _

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

_._

The last Raptor leaving the plateau contained John, Hunter, Zak and what was left of LG49. The centurion's torso, missing both legs, one arm and with the head severed, were all they had been able to salvage from the wreckage of the prison. God only knew where the rest of him was. Zak and Hunter had been in favor of leaving him behind since his red eye was completely extinguished.

As Zak had truthfully said, "The lights are out, sir. Nobody's home."

But John had insisted. He'd had two of the other centurions to carry the head and torso to the ship since the torso contained the voice apparatus. Being the ranking officer, his order wasn't disputed by the two Raptor pilots. On the way to the _Galactica_, the glances he had gotten from both Hunter and Zak had been somewhere between pity and concern.

John had wanted to ask them if they would have left one of their dead behind, but by that point he had neither the energy nor the desire to engage in any conversation. It had taken nearly an hour to get everyone from the plateau aboard the six rescue Raptors and by that time everyone was exhausted.

All John had said as the ramp was coming up was that when he got a chance, he would take the parts to the valley and see if Markham could salvage the robot's brain chips and vocal apparatus. He still believed LG49 was in there somewhere and if anyone could restore the chips to another body, Markham could.

No one had spoken after that.

There were several crewmembers waiting for them after the Raptor landed on the _Galactica_ and was lifted to the hangar deck. It was there they found out that they would have to go through decontamination procedures almost as stringent as if they'd been exposed to radiation.

Because all of the battlestar's air was run through CO2 scrubbers and recirculated throughout the ship, they were pointed toward a little used area in the far back corner of the hangar deck. Bill Adama hadn't wanted dust from the pulverized concrete and stone clogging the _Galactica's_ air filters and Doc Cottle hadn't wanted even the smallest particulates from the destroyed prison introduced into the ship's air supply. In matters of the crew's health, the doctor ruled. Between him and the admiral, their word was absolute so everyone who had been at the prison had undergone decontamination.

Originally designed and built for radiation exposure, the long, narrow room also worked well for flushing other surface contaminants. Technicians wearing hazmat suits with respirators told John, Zak and Hunter to remove their clothes and then move through a series of showers that first drenched them with water. Then they were treated to a foam bath with a series of rotating soft-bristled brushes before they were sprayed on all sides with water again. It reminded John of a carwash.

When they finally emerged, they were handed towels and disposable bathrobes and told to go take another shower, a regular one this time, to get rid of any chemical residue.

One of the technicians also told John that the admiral had sent a message for him to get something to eat and then to report to the admiral's quarters after being checked out in Sick Bay. That came as no surprise to John. At least he wasn't told to report in the paper robe. Bill had decided to let him get dressed first.

The crewman had a similar message for Zak.

"My feelings are hurt," Hunter joked as they walked down the corridor toward the stairs. "No one told me to go to Admiral Adama's office."

"I don't think Zak and I are being called there for the same reason," John said. "He probably wants to hug his son."

"Great," Zak said. "That's just great. You got to promise you won't say anything to the other guys."

Hunter grinned. "It could have been worse. He could have been waiting to hug you when your naked butt came out of that decontamination shower."

They all laughed and parted company. John headed up several decks to his quarters and the other two headed down. He had no doubt he'd see them both again soon.

…

Because Kara and Lee had helped at the prison, they both had to surrender their flight suits and go through the decontamination process as well. Lee stripped to his shorts. Kara kept on her tank tops and underwear. The water in the last shower had been barely tepid and Kara was shivering by the time they got out.

"Let's go take a real shower…together," she said to Lee. "I need to shampoo this chemical gunk out of my hair and I need my back scrubbed."

They quickly put on the disposable robes and hurried up the stairs.

"My bathroom or yours?" Lee asked.

"Doesn't my dad use yours?"

"I'll get my things and meet you in yours."

"Last shower stall on the left side," Kara said and stifled the urge to smack his bottom through the paper robe and wet shorts. She was in a good mood. She'd shot down five Raiders and most of their men on the plateau had survived.

She and Lee had spent almost an hour on the surface of the planet so the showers were empty when Kara walked in carrying her small bucket holding shampoo and conditioner, soap and washcloth. She was still rinsing her hair when Lee joined her.

He threw his paper robe on the floor beside hers and quickly stepped out of his wet shorts before he gently pushed her back against the side of the shower and slid his hands over her wet breasts. Maybe it was facing death and having escaped it once more, but their kisses were hot and hungry from the beginning.

There were so many things she wanted to say to him about luck and gifts from the gods, and surviving one more time, but those would wait. The water was hitting his back when he nuzzled against her neck. He didn't need to explain that they were going to have to be more creative because of his still-healing, very tender side. She gently touched the waterproof bandage and he winced.

Turning around she put her hands against the side of the shower, arched her back and pushed herself against him. He was the perfect height to take advantage of her invitation. Kara put her mouth against her arm to stifle her cry just in case someone was in the bathroom. The last thing she wanted was a curious pilot coming back to the showers to see who was getting lucky.

…

"How's General Vargas?" John asked as he sat on the edge of an examining table.

Doctor Cottle held a stethoscope against his chest. "Hush and take deep breaths like I asked you to."

"Yes, sir," John said. He took several deep breaths and barely managed to suppress a cough.

"How long were you in the smoke?" Cottle asked.

"I told you I wasn't inside the prison when the first Raider hit it," John said grumpily. "I'm breathing more smoke from that cigarette in your ashtray than I did on the planet. I'm all right."

Cottle ignored his remark. "How long were you down there after the prison was destroyed?"

"A little over an hour."

"Concrete dust is an irritant. Lungs, mucous membranes including the eyes and the skin are especially vulnerable. The gods only know what else was in that noxious cloud that covered you and seventy plus others."

"So what are you telling me?"

"Come back if you start wheezing or having trouble breathing. Also if you start itching and it won't stop or your eyes start burning and watering."

"I thought that's what the decontamination shower was for."

"That was so you wouldn't spread it to the rest of the ship. You front-liners are not the only ones whose health I have to think about."

John pulled on his undershirt and blue uniform tunic. "Any jewels of wisdom about _my_ health?"

"Get some damned sleep. All of you men look like zombies."

John chuckled. "Zombies. Is that the medical or the scientific term for our condition?"

"Just get some sleep," Cottle grumped.

"You might take your own advice, doc. I'm headed for my bunk as soon as I see Bill."

"Your debriefing can wait."

"Sorry it can't. It was an order. Can I visit the general while I'm here?"

"For a few minutes. He's in the room on the other side of Targa."

"How is he?"

"He'll be out of commission for a couple of days at least, but he should recover."

"Did anyone tell him about the casualties?"

"I don't know. I treat the living. I leave the dead to the morgue attendants." Cottle walked over to a table and picked up his cigarette.

John turned on his way out of the examining room and smiled. "Those things will kill you, doc."

"So will a lot of things," Cottle retorted. "You should be acquainted with more than your share of them by now."

John laughed as he walked down the hall. He should have known better than to try to get the last word with Cottle. The crusty physician had been around too long and seen too much to let someone like John get under his skin.

He mentally checked the visit to Sick Bay off his list. He'd go see General Vargas, get something to eat and then he wouldn't be able to put off seeing Bill Adama any longer.

…

Lee straightened his uniform jacket as he walked down the corridor toward his father's quarters. He'd been so sleepy after his shower with Kara that he had seriously considered sending word to his father and going straight to his bunk, but eating lunch had temporarily revived him.

The two Marines outside Adama's quarters snapped to attention before one of them opened the hatch for him. What Lee saw when he stepped through the doorway brought him to a halt.

Bill had just hugged Zak who looked uncomfortable at first but who then gave in and briefly hugged his father in return.

"I'd better get back to the guys," Zak said. "We're all being debriefed."

Bill let go of his younger son and Zak walked past Lee, giving him one of those looks that only his brother could do. "Your turn," he winked.

"I didn't just come back from the dead," Lee said, but the Marine guard had already closed the door.

Bill walked around behind his desk and gestured for Lee to take a chair. "I won't put you through a hug," he said as he picked up a glass of whiskey. "Did you get something to eat?"

"I did. What about you…or are you drinking lunch today?"

His father ignored his question and instead said, "Twice I thought I'd lost Zak. When half of his unit was killed in Sovana and now last night when the prison was destroyed. You've put me through it three times. You'll understand one day when you and Kara have children."

"Is that where the gray hair is coming from?" Lee asked gently.

That got a ghost of a smile from his father. "That and dealing with Kara's antics and John's issues…and a war I'm not sure we're going to win."

"I'd like to talk to you about something related to that."

"Give me your report first. I'll expect a detailed written one later. Hit the high points right now. Then we'll talk."

It didn't take long for Lee to get through the events of the previous twelve hours. He ended by telling his father that Dr. Cottle was not pleased with him since he hadn't officially released Lee from medical care following his bullet wound.

"Do you feel well enough to handle your responsibilities?" Bill asked.

"I'm holding my own," Lee answered. "No way I could lounge around up here while everybody else is putting it on the line."

"Then I'll take care of the doctor. Now what do you want to talk about?"

"I'd like for you to call a meeting and bring in all the Cylons we have on board." His father scowled, but before Bill could say anything, Lee rushed on, "Everybody on the plateau agrees that they could have destroyed _everything_ this morning and they didn't. A single Raider jumped in and destroyed the prison and that's all. My theory is that they were rescuing their own. Kara and John agree, but the bigger question remains unanswered. Why did they stop with the prison? John thinks they left the lab alone because that's where their planetary res facility is located and also where the bodies of their creators are. He can tell you about that part. But I doubt they have any attachment to those hangars and they don't need the little bit of tylium left in those tanks. So why not drive the point home by destroying both?"

Before Bill could comment, the Marine opened the door again. John stood outside.

"I'll wait, sir," he said.

Bill beckoned. "Come in. We're talking about what happened this morning. We need your input."

When John was inside and the door closed, Bill nodded toward the whiskey. John hesitated and then poured a small drink. He didn't really want one right now, but his gut told him to accept it.

"You got checked out in Sick Bay and got a meal?" Bill asked.

"By Cottle himself and I just finished lunch, sir."

"Drop the formalities. It's just the three of us now. Lee just told me what went on last night from his perspective. I'd like your report. Like I told him, hit the high points. You'll get a chance to put it all in a written report later. But first tell me about General Vargas."

"Doc Cottle wouldn't go into details about his medical condition. All he said was that he was going to keep Vargas in Sick Bay for a day or two. I talked to the general for a few minutes with Cottle hovering like a mother hen. Vargas doesn't sound too good. He asked me to come back after I'd talked to you and report the situation. He made me promise that if we had a meeting, we wouldn't leave him out."

"I'll keep that in mind. Now tell me about last night and this morning."

It took John longer than he thought just to cover the important events of the prior evening and morning. Bill kept his face neutral through most of it, his expression registering feeling only when John related finding the mummified remains of the creators and again when he told about shooting the Six and why he'd done it. When he finally finished, Bill glanced at his empty glass but didn't pour another drink.

"What's the status at the prison now?" Bill asked.

"Completely destroyed. There's nothing standing but part of the south wall and a little bit of the east and west walls. Everything else is…either pulverized or big chunks of stone and metal. We brought everyone up here except the three nurses who man the resurrection tanks at the lab and the centurions. I didn't know what to do with them. We don't have room for a thousand centurions aboard the _Galactica_."

"Why didn't you bring the nurses?"

"They refused to come with us. Their jobs are tending those who download there, and I didn't see any reason to force them at this point. They never were part of the bunch who worked at the prison."

"What about supplies for them…mainly food?" Lee asked.

"Nurse Three told me that they had ample supplies for at least a week. After that, it becomes an issue we'll have to deal with. We'll either have to start supplying them or force them to go somewhere else."

Bill said. "I've stopped everything from going down to the plateau. I want to tell General Vargas before I send ships to bring everything back up here, but I've made a command decision. We're abandoning the plateau from a military point of view."

"Why?" Lee asked.

"I know using the plateau as a command post was your idea, son, and it was a good one _if_ we'd taken those basestars out of the picture, but we didn't so I've had to rethink our plan. The plateau is far too vulnerable to attack from above. We'd be crazy to station our men and women there, and I'm sure the general will agree with me. The Cylons showed us today how little it took on their part to do a great deal of damage."

"What do you plan to do next?" Lee asked.

"We'll make that decision after we get our heads together," Bill said. "I agree with both of you that the Cylons could have destroyed everything on that plateau. The hangars were particularly vulnerable. Instead they went after the most heavily fortified structure down there. I'll also agree that they were reclaiming the Cylons we'd imprisoned, but the rest makes no sense…to us. I just hope it makes sense to at least one Cylon we have on board this ship."

John said, "When you question the ones in the brig, if you think they're lying or they refuse to talk, we could take them down to the lab and put their hands in the datastream. That's the one place they can't lie."

"The ultimate Cylon lie detector?" Lee asked.

John said, "I saw it work. The more I think about it, the more I think what happened this morning has something to do with me shooting the Six and her downloading on the basestar. I mean above and beyond the obvious, but that's just my gut feeling. I can't explain why I feel that way."

"Kara believes the same thing," Lee added, "but she can't say why either."

Bill contemplated what they said and the silence stretched. Finally he asked, "You said a Five downloaded this morning before the Raider jumped in with those missiles?"

"That's right," John answered. "According to the nurses, ten minutes…maybe fifteen before the prison was destroyed."

"He died of smoke inhalation?" Lee asked.

John nodded. "That would certainly be my guess. That's about the time that LG49 was bringing Vargas and Colonel Tarkington out of the prison."

"So if the Five downloaded at the lab," Lee said, "the others were already dead and downloading on the res ship."

Suddenly John said, "That's the thing that's been bugging me. They didn't _need_ to destroy the prison. The Cylons were already dead, yet they did it anyway."

Both John and Bill looked at Lee who shrugged. "My best guess is that there was something in there that they didn't want us to find."

John added, "You're right. The Cylons are meticulous record keepers. Sonja had access to the transcripts of my interrogation sessions. She said she could have watched the video recordings but she didn't. I doubt they'd want us getting our hands on anything that would have given us a record of their atrocities. The other thought I just had is that they've rendered it completely useless to us."

Bill said. "I'm going to follow Lee's suggestion. Tomorrow night we'll meet in the Situation Room at 19:00. I'm going to arrange for the Cylons in the brig to be brought. John, will you take care of notifying the rest of them?"

"Yes, sir."

"Include your robots, too. We're going to get everyone's opinion about why the prison was the only thing destroyed and why they did it after the Cylons were dead. The explanation might be as simple as you've suggested, but I want to cover all the bases. The rest of today and tomorrow is for everyone to get some rest…if the Cylons let us."

Lee glanced at John who said, "We lost one of our centurions…LG49. He'd almost made it out of the prison when it went up. I've got his torso and head. I hope Markham in the valley can take out his brain chips and put them in another body."

"Centurion resurrection," Lee mused. "Not as seamless as waking up in a tank, but still possible."

"We'll have to put that off for a while," Bill said.

John quickly interjected, "That centurion saved the lives of General Vargas and Colonel Tarkington. He pulled them out of a smoke-filled stairwell. If it weren't for him, we would be adding two more men to the list of killed in action. I could take a Raptor down tomorrow morning, check on the Cylons in the valley and leave LG49 with Markham. I'd be gone an hour tops. I think we owe it to him."

Bill eyed the bottle of whiskey again. "Who? Vargas or the robot?"

"Both of them," John said. "Vargas asked me who pulled him out. I told him."

"You take that robot down there, leave him and get yourself back up here. No unauthorized missions. Are we clear on that?"

"Yes, sir."

"That will be all. You're dismissed. Now go get some rest. Lee, stay behind."

When John was gone and the door closed, Bill continued. "I know you're tired, son, and I know you need to rest, and I know you're John's friend, but I want your honest opinion about him."

"I wasn't with John at the prison last night," Lee said.

"Gut feeling, Lee. That's all I'm asking. Is he still capable of making good command decisions? Have his personal feelings gotten in the way of his judgment?"

"He's exhausted. I think being back at the prison took a big emotional toll on him as well as the physical stress he's been under. That's why he stayed at the lab. In the long run it saved his life. It saved the general's, too, since John sent LG49 in to bring Vargas and his team out. Zak and Hunter both said he took charge when Vargas and his colonels were incapacitated. He got medics from the airfield over there to treat the wounded which saved lives. He made good decisions."

Bill eyed the bottle again. "But dealing with the Cylons last night…"

"I wasn't there last night, Dad. I don't want to comment on what went down. You'd do better asking Hunter or Zak."

"I got no problem with John permanently retiring the One. Son of a bitch would have faced a firing squad if he'd been human. They all would have. But shooting the Six knowing she would download on the res ship…did that decision cost lives? Two of Vargas' staff are dead and four of our Marines are missing. We've only recovered one downed Viper pilot so far. Not to mention seventy men suffering from smoke inhalation and other injuries caused by falling debris, some of them serious."

"Every command decision carries risks with it," Lee said diplomatically. "When we came here, we knew there would be losses. Not jumping in and destroying all their basestars cost a lot of lives. Was that the wrong decision just because we wanted to disable their res ship and hold it hostage? We'll probably have to wait for the military historians to tell us."

Bill slowly and thoughtfully nodded. "You're right. It's not possible to fight a war without casualties. Now you need to go get some sleep."

When Lee got back to his quarters, John was in his bunk but was still awake. Lee was so tired that he took off his uniform and folded the trousers over the back of a chair and put his jacket over them rather than hang them in his locker.

"Is Kara all right?" John asked.

"She's fine. I left her in the mess hall talking to Karl and Saunders and Hot Dog and Pepper. She's worried about you."

"I'll be fine after I get some sleep. Two hours out of every twenty-four doesn't cut it after the third or fourth day. I'm getting too old for that. I need to go to the gym and work out, too, but sleep comes first."

"I'll go to the gym with you after dinner tonight. Kara might want to go, too."

"She'll be sleeping. She's got a CAP at 03:00."

"Not anymore. She told me that Dad pulled her off CAPs for a while."

"She say why?"

"No. She said we'd talk about it later when we had time."

"Dammit," John said irritably. "She's probably had some hare-brained idea and talked your father into letting her do something dangerous and stupid."

"Calm down," Lee said. "Nobody's doing anything until we have that meeting tomorrow night. Now go to sleep so I can."

John turned over and faced the wall of his bunk. Simon aka Biscuits had been visibly upset that morning as they'd hustled him and LG78 to a waiting Raptor for the trip back up to the _Galactica_. They'd had a hard time convincing him that the Colonials hadn't destroyed the prison since he was in the lab when the Raider had released its missiles. John also had a hard time making the decision that Simon should go back to the brig on the _G_, but for right now the Cylon was probably safer in the brig than anywhere else on the ship. The crew seemed to have accepted Natalie and her sisters having some freedom, but he didn't know how they would react to seeing the Four roaming around. John had meant to bring up Simon's situation with Bill but had forgotten. They owed the Cylon something for the help he'd given them, but at the moment his situation would have to wait.

As drowsiness began to claim him, John thought of LG78. He'd told the centurion to go to Natalie's quarters and stay with Buddy. He hadn't mentioned to Bill or Lee what the robot now wore on a chain around his neck. Even Simon couldn't help him with an explanation. He'd told John that when he'd been awakened by the explosion of the prison, LG78 was already wearing his strange necklace. Without LG49 to translate for him, John would have to wait for Buddy to ask LG78 why he now wore the silver box that had once contained the memories of the prison commandant, a chain threaded through the bullet hole. Aberrant centurion behavior or not, there was something almost primitive about seeing the box worn like a trophy. It reminded John of stories he'd heard about the fighting during the earlier Tauron Civil Wars, about how soldiers on both sides had collected ears and fingers of the dead enemy and had worn then strung on rawhide around their necks. Many hundreds of years before that war, the fierce Scorpians were said to scalp their enemies and proudly display the scalps outside their dwellings.

But John was too sleepy right now to go talk to Buddy. Was there something imbedded in LG78's programming that had caused him to create his trophy necklace, or was he imitating behavior he had seen before from the Cylons? John was trying to come up with other possible reasons when he fell asleep.

…

Kara sat in the ready room with a dozen other Viper pilots looking at the grainy black and white gun camera footage from the morning's fight. They had watched hers several times already and it was now silently playing again…the Raider in front of her diving toward the planet's surface, the low flyover of the prison, the smoke pouring from the two entrances, the cluster of dots outside that were the Marines, the quick image of the guard tower passing below her and then the tracers from her KEWs as she opened fire, followed by the explosion and crash of the Raider.

"The Raider slowed down just before it got to the prison," Hot Dog said.

"You're telling me," Kara agreed. "I almost rear-ended it. I thought it was trying to get me to fly by so it would be on my six instead of the other way around. Now I'm not so sure."

"What do you think it was doing?" Minos asked.

Kara hesitated and then told them the thought that niggled every time she saw that part of the footage. "I think it was checking out the situation on the ground."

"Why?" Pepper asked.

"Here's something even weirder," Kara said. "I think it let me shoot it down. I mean look at all the chances it had to jump away. Instead it just keeps flying in a straight line. No evasive maneuvers, nothing. It might as well have painted a target on its tail and shouted _shoot me_. A damned nugget who'd never been in combat could have taken it out."

Her brief tirade was met by silence.

"You're right about that," Minos finally admitted. "Could it have been malfunctioning?"

Kara shrugged. "Maybe. But everything else looked too deliberate. Let's watch it again."

"Admit it, Starbuck," Hot Dog said. "You just like watching yourself get another kill."

"Not when it's easier than shooting fish in a barrel. Where's the challenge in that?"

Minos backed up the recording and they watched the brief sequence again. Kara counted this time. The entire engagement had taken thirty-two seconds.

_Why would a Raider do that? Why? _Kara racked her previous knowledge of their behavior in battle to no avail.

"I agree with Starbuck," Minos said. "It looks like suicide by Viper."

Suddenly a thought began to form in Kara's mind. "Natalie told me they download."

"We've already heard that theory," Pepper said. "The Cylons destroyed the prison to free their brothers and sisters."

"I don't mean them," Kara said. "Natalie told me at lunch today that the Raiders download. They keep brainless ones on the basestars and when one is destroyed, it downloads. I didn't apply it to what happened this morning until just now."

"Wait a minute," Minos said. "Raiders are nothing but killing machines. Why would they bother giving them the ability to download?"

"You're asking the wrong person," Kara said. "I'm just repeating what Natalie said."

"Why would they need to download?" Hot Dog asked. "Their moves are all programmed."

"I guess it's the same reason their humanoids download. They take their experiences into a new body."

"So you're telling us that the Raiders can _learn_?" Minos asked incredulously.

"Holy frak," Hot Dog said. "So that's why some of them keep getting better at fighting us."

"I'm not sure," Kara said. "I know that the guys who worked on the Raider that I fly said they had some limited intelligence…I mean while it still had a brain. When I asked what that meant, one of them told me they were about as smart as a dog. Dogs can learn so maybe Raiders can, too."

"How many times can they download?" Pepper asked.

"I guess until they run out of extras," Kara said. "I got no way to prove it, but I think the same one I killed came back and destroyed the prison. I think it did that low flyover to recon the situation. My dad said the ship that released the missiles came in low and concealed by the smoke from the one I shot down. He didn't even see it until it was through the smoke and almost on top of them. Nobody had time to do anything before it released its missiles. It was all over a few seconds after that."

"I think you're giving them credit for way too many smarts," another pilot said.

"Shut up, Catman," Hot Dog said. "Starbuck is entitled to her opinion."

"And I'm entitled to mine."

"What's _your_ explanation of what happened this morning, then?" Kara asked, an edge to her voice.

"A godsdamned Raider got lucky. That's all."

"Like you got lucky when you actually managed to _hit one_?"

"That's enough," Minos said. "Both of you. All we can do is speculate at this point. The purpose of watching the gun camera footage is to learn from it so _we'll_ get better at fighting them. It's not so we can attack each other in the ready room. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir," Kara said.

"Understood, Lieutenant Birch?"

"Yes, sir," Catman muttered.

Kara watched the rest of the footage from the other Vipers but saw nothing she hadn't seen before. Most of the Raiders' moves were textbook, the kind they studied in Flight School. It was like someone had taken a digitized version of basic combat maneuvers and used them to program the Raiders, but every now and then she saw something different, something learned perhaps in another battle. These Raiders had already done a lot of damage and they were new at combat as of two weeks ago. What would they be like months down the road when they had engaged in dozens more skirmishes with the Colonial Vipers?

She wanted to talk to her father and Lee. They would listen to her. They would understand.

She closed her eyes and she was behind the Raider again as they came barreling down from eight thousand feet toward the plateau. She remembered now the fleeting thought that the Raider was going to bury itself in the prison, and then it had leveled off at six hundred feet barely a mile south of the complex. Something had kept her from pulling the trigger. On the ground there were several clusters of people as small as ants. It had happened so fast that the whole scene had barely registered before they were past the prison yard and she had opened fire.

"The movie is over," Pepper said. "You going to sit here in the dark?"

Kara opened her eyes. She had either dozed or been so deep in thought that she had failed to hear their dismissal by Minos.

"I'm going to the gym and work out. I need to punch something."

"I'll go with you," Pepper said. "You want me to draw Catman's face on the punching bag for you?"

"It's not him as much as I'm missing something. I just can't figure out what and that's bugging the hell out of me. Let's go get Jade. She said she'd like to go to the gym next time I went. I'm going to ask her about those Raiders, too. She's the warrior. She probably knows more than Natalie."

"Think she would show me a couple of those kick-ass martial arts moves I saw her practicing earlier this week?"

"Probably. She's still getting used to being around humans she regards as friendlies. Time to introduce her to a new one."

"Are _all or them_ that suspicious of us?" Pepper asked.

"Natalie's not. The others…" Kara shrugged. "I haven't hung out with Sonja or Natasi. I don't want to either. They are _not_ my cup of tea."

Troy Minos rushed back into the ready room and went to the wall phone. Kara stopped and Pepper with her.

When he finally turned, he said, "Something weird just happened. A Raider jumped into space just out of weapons' range for us. It fired a missile and then jumped away. There wasn't even time to set Condition One before it was gone. The missile barely impacted the _G's_ hull and it didn't explode. Admiral Adama just let me know that he's ordered two Vipers on CAP to check it out. I'm on my way to the CIC."

"I'd like to tag along, sir," Kara said.

"Why not? You seem to be the resident expert on Raider behavior."

Kara turned to Pepper. "I'm going to have to take a rain check on the workout. We'll do it some other time."

When Kara and Minos got to the CIC, Admiral Adama motioned for both of them to come in.

"Any idea why a single Raider would jump in, shoot us with a dud missile and jump away?" Adama asked.

"Are we sure it's a _missile_?" Kara asked.

"It tracked on dradis like a missile," Tigh said. "If it waddles like a duck and quacks…"

Bill cut him off and addressed Minos and Kara. "I think in light of what happened on the plateau this morning, there might be another explanation. All right, Starbuck, if it looks like a missile but isn't a missile, then what is it?"

"A message?"

"What?" Tigh asked with his usual sarcasm. "They want to tell us that they can destroy us any time they want? We already…"

Again Bill cut him off and addressed Kara. "What would you do next?"

"What's it doing now?"

Bill nodded toward one of the comm techs and she asked the question of the Viper pilots. She put the answer on speaker.

"Projectile bounced off the hull and is floating approximately a hundred meters from the ship."

Kara said, "Can the pilot get some close ups with his gun cameras and transmit them to us? Also give us an estimate on the size."

The tech relayed the message and within thirty seconds the image displayed on an overhead screen. They all studied it silently. It looked much like the missiles that Vipers carried. The pilot said it was about half the length of a standard missile.

"It still looks like a missile to me," Tigh said, commenting on the obvious. "Right shape and diameter, tail fins, warhead."

"Then why didn't it explode…sir?" Kara asked.

"How the hell should I know," Tigh shot back. "I don't work in a Cylon munitions factory putting the damned things together."

"That's a Colonial missile design," Minos said.

Bill agreed. "Captain Minos is right. According to Natalie, the armory on Picon was looted by the Cylons. There's every possibility they're using our own missiles against us. We know that's where they got their nukes." He turned to the comm tech. "Send that image to the Situation Room. Captain Minos and Lieutenant Thrace, come with me. Colonel Tigh, you have the helm." When they were almost to the door, he turned around. "Lieutenant Gaeta, find Natalie and the centurion John calls Buddy. Bring them to the Situation Room."

Once they got there, Kara walked over to a wall screen and studied the image of the floating missile. Her gut told her that it was no ordinary missile even though it looked like one. Tigh was right. It had tail fins and what looked like a warhead. Even if it had been a dud, though, it should have been going fast enough to do more than bounce off the Galactica's hull. It should have smashed itself to pieces.

"Thoughts…either one of you?" Bill asked.

"I think it's a message," Kara said. "I'm just not sure what they're trying to say."

"Could there be something inside it?" Minos asked.

"There usually is something inside of a missile," Bill remarked dryly.

"I see where Captain Minos is going," Kara said. "The missile isn't the message. It's carrying the message."

"Then why didn't they write _Open Me _on the outside," Bill mused.

"Because they might have been testing your trust?" Natalie said from the doorway.

Buddy came in behind her and Gaeta behind the centurion.

"Explain," Bill said.

"LG78 told Buddy what had happened last night. After John shot the Six, she would have downloaded on the baseship and spread the word to her brothers and sisters of the Ones' treachery. I'm sure she also told them that the peacemaker has been born and that the child's father is with the fleet. While that will be ignored or even scorned by some, it will be taken very seriously by others. They would have taken a vote about what to do next. The majority opinion would have ruled. I think if you recover that missile and open it, instead of explosives inside, you'll find directions to a place where they want to meet."

"Jump coordinates?" Bill asked.

"It could also be a trap, sir," Gaeta said.

"I'll agree," Minos quickly echoed Gaeta's sentiment. "We'd be more than crazy to leave the fleet and jump out beyond scan range."

"Then put me in a ship," Natalie said. "Give me a Heavy Raider with a centurion pilot, and I'll go. LG78 said there are two Heavy Raiders at the airfield on the plateau."

"Back up a minute," Kara said. "First, we don't know if there's a set of coordinates inside that missile, and second, if this is about trust, aren't the Cylons on the basestar going to be expecting at least one _human_ to show up?"

"That's a big risk for us to take," Bill said. "Once our ship is there, they might hold a delegation hostage."

"It's a risk I'm willing to take," Natalie said.

"I'm not sure I'm willing to let you take it," Bill said. "We're going to need your help when we get to the city."

Kara said. "I hate to sound like a broken recording disk, but before we start picking negotiators, we need to find out whether we're right about a message being inside the missile. We need a Raptor to retrieve it and bring it aboard."

"No, we need it opened before it's brought on board."

"Sounds like a job for the bomb squad," Minos said.

Bill turned to Gaeta. "Get their commanding officer up here on the double."

As Gaeta hurried to a wall phone to carry out the admiral's orders, Kara turned back to the screen and looked at the missile still floating beside the ship. Colonel Burgher had told them that in ancient warfare, messages had been sent in any number of inventive ways including in tiny capsules strapped to the legs of homing birds. Some messages had even been wrapped around arrows and fired over a number of relay points to send orders to the right or left flank of an army. Maybe the Cylons had simply come up with a variation and used a much more modern arrow.

"It's not like they can send us a text message," Kara finally said.

Natalie smiled. "Perhaps that's what they're actually trying to do."

…

The Raptor carrying John and the remains of LG49 lifted off early the next morning with Saunders at the controls and Karl in the ECO chair. Both men had volunteered the night before as they'd all sat at a table in the mess hall and listened to Kara relate the news about what had been found in the hollow tube of a Cylon missile.

"Coordinates," she had said. "A dozen of them. Mr. Gaeta mapped them. They're just beyond our long range scanning ability in a nearly perfect circle around the planet."

"Please tell me Admiral Adama isn't going to consider jumping the _Galactica_," Karl had said.

"He didn't tell me what he's considering," Kara had replied. "As soon as the two guys from the bomb squad had determined the missile had no warhead, they brought it on board and took it apart. The piece of paper with the coordinates was turned over to Admiral Adama. Gaeta made a copy and then the admiral took it to his quarters. I guess he's thinking about what to do next."

"He won't jump the ship," John had told them. "If he decides to do anything, he'll send a smaller ship, a Raptor probably."

Lee had reminded them. "Don't forget we've still got the Heavy Raider you took from Nereid and landed on the _G_ with D'Anna and Dr. Cardenas and the babies on board."

"That's a possibility, too…unless he thinks it wouldn't go over too well with the Cylons that we're flying one of their ships."

"I hadn't thought about that," Lee had said. "You're right. A Raptor would be better."

"Natalie has volunteered to go," Kara had told them. "I don't think the admiral is going to let her."

"I'll go," John had said.

"Not a snowball's chance in Hades," Lee had said. "You're the only one in the fleet who has been in the city and in Settlement Alpha. I think we're going to the city next. My dad is abandoning the plateau."

That had been met with surprise from everyone, and they had talked for nearly an hour without reaching a consensus about what their next step would be. In the end they had all known they would have to wait until the evening meeting that the admiral had called.

"Preparing to jump, sir," Saunders said to John who sat in the Raptor's copilot seat.

Ten minutes later they were over the small clearing near the valley. Saunders expertly sat the ship down and lowered the ramp. John handed LG49's head to him and he and Karl took the heavier torso. Going was slow as they climbed the path up from the creek. No one met them at the top.

John left the men at the bottom of the wooden steps, climbed up and called for Markham. He was greeted by Natalie's cat Daniel who walked past him onto the wooden platform where it sat and began to lick its paws.

Markham wasn't far behind.

"I'm looking for the _Hyperion's_ resident genius," John said and smiled. "I've got a job for him."

"Another centurion who needs a voice?" Markham asked.

"Come look," John said.

Together they walked down the steps. "Good gods," Markham said as he saw the remains of the centurion. "What happened to it?"

Briefly John explained the events of the previous evening.

"Bring him in," Markham said.

The three men picked up the two pieces and followed the eccentric genius into the ship. After being out in the bright sunshine, the interior of the ship seemed very dim and John wondered as he had several other times why Markham chose to live in this tomb-like place. They followed him to one of his labs and laid the robot on a table.

"Is there any hope?" John asked.

"His head isn't crushed. That's a big plus. I won't know until I get in there and start poking around."

"You've got some centurion bodies, don't you?" John asked.

"A few. All had their circuitry zapped."

John smiled. "But you like a challenge, don't you?"

"You sure brought me one."

"Then I'll leave LG49 in your capable hands. We haven't got long down here. I'm going to see Emmalyn and find out how the Cylons are doing."

"Emmalyn broke her ankle and the Cylons saved everybody when centurions from the city showed up."

"What? When did this happen?"

"A few days ago. I wasn't out there. Beck told me."

"Let's go," John said to Karl and Saunders. By the time they got back to the wooden platform, Beck and Narcho were walking down the path toward them. The five men exchanged greetings and hurried toward Emmalyn's.

"How did she break her ankle?" John asked.

Beck said, "She fell coming down the path from the cemetery four days ago…the steep part on the rocks. Since the Cylons have been here she goes up there every day. I told her the dead don't care. She said she's not doing it for the dead."

John well remembered the windy day he had accompanied Emmalyn to their cemetery. There was no doubt about the toll the loss of her husband and son had taken on her, deaths that had been caused by the Cylons.

"Is it a bad break?"

"Bad enough," Beck confirmed. "The bone come through. We can't do anything for it either. Celia bandaged it and mixed up some painkiller from poppy seeds."

"We'll take her back to the ship," John said.

"She might not go," Narcho said. "You know how she feels about this valley."

"She's not going to have a choice," John said. "Now tell me about what happened when the centurions came from the city."

Narcho said, "We know Cavil sent them because they came through the forest. We still have a couple of lookouts. They got back here and gave the warning, but we knew if those toasters were coming to kill us, they'd eventually get all of us."

Beck took up the story. "All the skinjobs went to meet them. Ever single one. The centurions stopped in their tracks."

"Was anybody from the city with them or were they alone?" Karl asked.

"As far as we could tell, they was alone," Beck answered.

"How many?" Saunders asked.

"A couple hundred," Narcho answered. "That's twice as many as it would have taken to kill all of us. I was holding my breath when the skinjobs started walking toward them. I just knew those toasters were going to open up and…" he shuddered… "and we would have been next."

"So what was the outcome?" John asked.

"A Two ordered one of them to kneel and he took out a little disk. We thought he'd killed it because it stayed on its knees without moving for a few minutes. Then it got up and started doing the same thing to the rest of them. About thirty minutes later they all turned around and headed back to the city. We gave the metal disks to Markham."

"So there should be some centurions in the city who are free now," John said. "That might make our job a lot easier when we get there. How is the harvest coming?"

"Good. We're ahead of schedule. The extra help has come in handy."

"Besides having saved your lives, do the humanoids seem to be adapting?"

Narcho said, "The Threes are doing fine. So are the Twos and Eights. Some of the Sixes complain about not having but two sets of clothes and having to wash everything themselves. They argued with the Twos and Threes about keeping some centurions with us to help with the chores. They said Cavil in the city would just think we'd managed to destroy a few of them, but the Twos said the centurions would still be broadcasting a signal so Cavil would know they weren't destroyed. He's got something in the city like a dradis only it's for locating his centurions."

Beck added, "Before the centurions come, a Six and and an Eight duked it out in a cornfield about something."

"Probably a man," Narcho said.

"You didn't try to stop them?" John asked in surprise.

Beck and Narcho laughed. "Not me," Beck said. "Them's the strongest women I've ever seen."

"Who won?" Karl asked.

"A Three finally broke them up," Narcho answered, "although we think the Six was winning. A Two told me she was what they call an Overseer. They have a cruel streak and don't mind tackling a problem with their fists. A couple of the Eights have hooked up with valley men. They're very territorial so they were probably fighting over a man."

"I met an Overseer in the prison," John said. "I saw the handiwork of another one in the city. Let's just say if that Eight was holding her own, she was doing good. Now let's go get Emmalyn. We're expected back soon. I'm on thin ice with Admiral Adama. I don't want to push my luck."

They found Emmalyn sitting in the padded chair with her splinted leg propped on a stool. It was obvious that even with the poppy-seed medication, she was still in a lot of pain. Dessa and Celia were there as well.

John knelt on one knee by the chair and took Emmalyn's hand. It felt hot and she was flushed and feverish. She opened her eyes, though, and recognized him immediately.

"Is the war over? Have you brought Hunter back?"

"Not yet. I'm taking you back up to the ship. You need more medical attention than you can get down here."

"One of the Cylons offered to look at her ankle," Celia said, "but Emmalyn refused."

"The one with brown skin," Dessa added.

"I've got along all these years without them," Emmalyn said bitterly. "I don't need them now. What about Dessa?"

"She'll be fine," John said. "She can stay with her grandfather and Celia." He looked up and Celia nodded. "Beck and Narcho will help." He turned to Karl and Saunders. "Go get the Raptor. Land it on the path up near the wooden platform. She's in too much pain to carry her all the way to the clearing."

Dessa began to cry. Narcho put his arm around her. "Couldn't you take Dessa up to the ship, too?"

"I think she'd be confused and frightened on the _G _unless you want to go up there with us and babysit. We've got a lot going on and can't spare anyone to watch her."

"I'm needed here," Narcho said.

"Then I think Dessa is better off staying where everything is familiar to her." John stood and took Dessa's hand. "We're going to take Emmalyn to the doctor so he can fix her ankle. When it's better we'll bring her back."

"Promise?" Dessa asked tearfully.

"I promise. Maybe Narcho will take you fishing this afternoon."

Dessa dried her tears on her sleeve. "We haven't been fishing in a long time."

"We'll go fishing today," Narcho said.

Beck looked out the doorway. "Your men just landed the ship."

John got Emmalyn to put her arms around his neck and he lifted her gently, but she was unable to stifle a cry of pain. At the Raptor he and Karl eased her into a seat and John strapped her in. By then she was pale and sweating profusely.

"The gods sent you," Emmalyn said. "I know how bad my ankle is. I know it's gotten infected. I'd already made my peace with dying."

John squeezed her hand. "You're not going to die. Doc Cottle has got some good medicine for infection and some even better medicine for pain. I can vouch for that. He'll fix your ankle and have you up and dancing in no time."

Saunders said. "We'll have to go back to the river to jump."

John slid into the copilot seat. "Do it." He turned to Karl. "Have medics meet us in the hangar bay with a stretcher."

John was impressed with how they barely felt Saunders lift the ship from the ground. He could see Narcho and Beck standing on the road in front of Emmalyn's dwelling. Dessa waved at them and he waved back before Saunders banked the ship and made for the river. Karl had already put the coordinates into the ship's navigation computer. John had forgotten to warn Emmalyn about the jump, but it was over so quickly he wasn't sure she'd noticed.

The medics were waiting for them.

"Don't leave me, please," Emmalyn's voice was pleading. For the first time he saw tears in her eyes.

"I'll be with you until Doc Cottle kicks me out," John said. He turned to Karl and Saunders. "Great job, guys. If you'll tell Kara what happened…"

"Don't worry, sir," Karl said. "We'll take care of post-flight and everything else."

"And let the admiral know I brought a civilian on board for medical treatment."

"Yes, sir."

John walked beside the gurney with Emmalyn clutching his hand. The original purpose of his trip to the valley was momentarily forgotten. There would be time later to think about everything he'd learned today. Right now the woman who had taken in his daughter and protected her and who had protected one of John's own secrets needed help and he was going to see that she got it.

…

The One and the Five from the brig were brought to the meeting in shackles. Zak and Hunter had been chosen to stand guard behind each of them. Both Cylons had been told that any attempt to move from their chairs would result in big lumps on the backs of their heads.

Simon was not shackled and had no Marine guard. Buddy and LG78 stood at the side of the room. Natalie, Jade and Natasi sat opposite their brothers. Sonja had said she had nothing to contribute. She was still in Sick Bay although Natalie had told John it was because of the attention Sonja was getting from both Yoshimo and one of Dr. Cottle's assistants.

"Physically she's fine," Natalie had told him that morning. "Yoshimo feeds her spirit. The young physician's assistant feeds her ego."

General Vargas was in a wheel chair with an oxygen tank beside him. That was the only way Cottle would allow the general to attend. John had removed the chair at the end of the table to accommodate the general.

John sat between Natalie and Kara. Lee was beside Kara and Troy Minos was on the other side of Lee. Bill and Lieutenant Gaeta were the last ones to enter the room. Saul Tigh was conspicuously absent, but given his outspoken feelings about the Cylons, everyone understood why he once again had the helm.

Bill wasted no time in starting the meeting. "You all know why we're here."

"Excuse me," the One interrupted haughtily. "We didn't get the memo with the agenda."

"You mean your brother Four failed to tell you what happened?" The admiral asked in disbelief.

"He prattled on about the prison, but he's obviously been turned. We decided he was lying."

"He wasn't," Bill said. "Mr. Gaeta, show our guests some aerial photos of the damage."

Gaeta pressed several buttons on the remote control and the big screens showed a short series of pictures of the destroyed structure and surrounding area.

"So you bombed our prison," the One all but yawned. "You can hardly think that would surprise us."

"We didn't destroy it," John said. "One of your own Raiders did. Everybody inside would have been killed if they hadn't already died from smoke inhalation caused by another Raider crashing into it. I guess your brothers and sisters wanted to make sure no one survived."

"All but one of the dead downloaded on the res ship," Natalie said. "They're now with those who died on your own baseship."

"I don't believe you."

"Neither do I," said the Five.

"We didn't think you would," John said. "But maybe you'll believe a brother Five."

Gaeta went to the door. Two Marines stood outside with the Five who had downloaded at the lab. John had gone back to the surface that afternoon and had the nurses unbox him. He was still in the heavy white bathrobe they'd given him. He was also shackled. Gaeta seated the Five beside his brother.

"Recognize him?" John asked.

"He's the seventh Five," Natalie added, "the only one who downloaded at the lab.

Bill nodded at Gaeta and the middle screen changed. It displayed a list of a dozen numbers.

"Any of those look familiar to anyone? Bill asked.

"Should they?" The One sniffed.

"They're jump coordinates," Natalie said. All of them are scattered in a nearly perfect circle just outside our long range scanners."

"I do love the way you say _our_," the One said snidely. "It confirms that you've thrown in your lot with these pathetic creatures."

"Who's wearing the shackles?" Jade asked in an equally snide tone.

"Shut up, you little whelp. I know that some of the Sixes have developed a taste for human men, but your model cares little for them which makes your betrayal that much more odious."

"Huh. You're pathetic," Jade said. "How the creators could have made you first and put so much faith in you is beyond all of us. And don't even think you know what _I like_ because you don't."

Jade glanced at Zak.

A cruel smile tightened the One's lips. "I watched the first one of you come out of the creator's primordial soup. I knew then that you'd be nothing but trouble." He sniffed. "The big problem with your model…and the Sevens…is that the creators were getting old and senile. They let the two youngsters Lucy and Zoe add their ideas. What is it the humans say…their two-cubits worth? Too many cooks spoil the broth? Too many chiefs and not enough Taurons…or is it Sagittarons? I never can keep those two pitiful tribes straight."

Kara could feel Jade's emotion from several chairs away. Natalie put her hand on Jade's arm.

Buddy had remained silent until that moment. Now Lucy spoke. "And for that you _killed your creators_? Because you thought they had gotten old and senile? You killed the Sevens because you thought they were weak? Were you going to kill the Eights next? How were you going to explain a dead brother and a dead sister? A second lethal virus?"

The color drained from the One's face. "What kind of trick is this?"

"No trick," Lucy said. "And I seem to remember some of your model having a deep desire for certain Eights. You might not think of them as your equal, but you want them just the same. You dream about their svelte bodies and the ways in which they can please you."

"Not me," the One said.

"Liar," the Five hissed. "On the baseship you had several of them that you regularly summoned to your room, not to mention that slut of a Six you were so hot for, the one who looks like _her,_" he nodded toward Natalie.

"That's enough," Bill said. "We're not here tonight to discuss your creation story and all your myriad incestuous relationships. We're here to find out why a Raider jumped into space yesterday afternoon and sent us a dozen jump coordinates in a hollow missile. I've already heard Natalie's thoughts. I'm giving the rest of you a chance to speak."

"I have nothing to say," the One said.

"Me either," the Five added.

"Take them back to their cells," Bill said.

Hunter gave the One a hard nudge in the back with the barrel of his assault rifle. "You heard the admiral, toaster man. Let's go."

"Do you have anything to say?" Bill asked the Five in the bathrobe.

"I never lived on a baseship."

"Take him to the brig, too."

When they were gone and the door closed behind them, Bill looked at Simon. "That leaves you. You lived on a basestar. Do you think your brothers and sisters are offering to negotiate a peace or is this a trap?"

Simon thought for a long time and finally said, "I think they're offering to talk. I don't think they're offering to surrender."

"There's only one way to find out," Natalie said. "There's no way around this. Let me go talk to them."

Bill said, "I think we'd already agreed that without a human, they aren't going to believe you represent us."

"I'll go with her," John offered.

"No," Bill said. "We've already discussed this. Your knowledge of the city and Settlement Alpha will be needed, possibly before the negotiations end. I've already made a choice…Lee."

"No," Kara said under her breath and then out loud she said, "I'll volunteer. I'll go with Natalie."

"A Raptor is being prepped for the morning," Bill said. "Lee and Natalie will take our message to the Cylons on the res ship. The rest of you can leave. I'd like for them to remain behind."

Kara turned to Lee. "How long have you known?"

Lee couldn't lie to her. "Dad and I discussed it this afternoon. It's got to be me."

"You realize that if something happens to Natalie, she'll download at the lab. She's the First Six for the gods' sakes. If something happens to you…"

"Kara," John said. "Let's go. This decision has already been made. Lee understands the implications. He doesn't need you to spell it out for him."

"Somebody else can do it…"

John grasped her arm and pulled her along with him until they were outside in the corridor. "It can't be Admiral Adama. His son will be an acceptable substitute."

"No."

"Kara, look at me. Do you think _I_ want to see Lee do this?"

She shook her head.

"Bill said it this afternoon. Sometimes you have to roll the hard six. This wasn't an easy decision for him, but Lee helped him by volunteering. Sometimes we have to make a leap of faith."

"How can they make a leap of faith when they don't have any faith?" Kara asked in anguish.

John put his arms around his daughter and held her. "Then we've got to have enough faith for all of us."

She didn't say anything.

"You want me to find another place to sleep tonight?"

"No," she said sulkily.

"Aren't you going to send your warrior off on his dangerous mission with beautiful memories?" He whispered.

"Gods, Dad. Are you pimping me out?"

"No. Sorry, Kara. I'm not trying to do anything of the sort. I just thought you'd want to be with Lee." He took her chin and lifted it so that she was looking at him. "Don't blame him for this. Don't take it out on him, either. You've got to accept the fact that you can't have _all_ the dangerous missions."

"I never said I want _all_ the dangerous missions," she said angrily.

He put his arm around her shoulders. "Let's go to Sick Bay and see Emmalyn. I told her I'd check on her tonight after our meeting. I know she'd like to see you."

Kara took a deep breath. They walked in silence for a while.

John finally said, "What do you think Lee thought about the whole time after you stole the Raider…while you were here on this planet? Did he ever give up believing he'd see you again? Did you ever give up believing you'd see him?"

"No," she admitted. "I never gave up believing I'd see you again either. I still don't see why the admiral can't send somebody else."

"Who would he send? Colonel Tigh and a couple of cases of booze?"

Kara stifled a laugh. "That would only prove what some of the Cylons already think about us…that we're not worth saving as a race."

"Kara, this might be our only chance to forge some kind of cease fire with the Cylons on those baseships. If we can get them to agree to step back and stop attacking us, then we can concentrate on the planet without worrying about something happening like happened at the prison. Don't forget that Bill appointed Lee ground CAG. Do you want him going against hit and run air raids over and over again? That's not exactly the safest job in the fleet."

"Okay, enough. You've convinced me."

"Baby, I'd go in his place if I could, but this isn't a democracy. It's the military and Bill issues the orders."

"I said that's enough, Dad." When they had almost reached Sick Bay, she said, "So where would you sleep tonight if…you didn't sleep in your bunk?"

He smiled. "I think Karl said there was an empty bunk in his and Saunders' quarters."

"What time are Lee and Natalie leaving tomorrow?"

"They'll probably decide that tonight. I'm guessing mid-morning at the latest."

"I'm going to ask Troy Minos to put me back on CAP tomorrow. I'll go crazy sitting around with nothing to do."

"Why did Bill pull you off CAP?"

"I had an idea to take the Raider and go looking for the wounded basestar. Sadie has been fitted to carry missiles now."

"And you think Lee would have been happy about that? You think _I_ would have been happy about it?"

"Just trying to do my part," she mumbled.

"So are we all, Kara. Lee's got a lot of his grandfather Adama in him. If anyone can negotiate a cease fire, he can."

She looked at her father as tears began to blur her vision. "You're right. Where is my faith? He's going to go over there and come back a hero."

TBC…


	71. In a Perfect World

Chapter 71

In a Perfect World

_Libran_

Day 94_: Oren received a copy of the police report today regarding the break-in and vandalism of our house. Since nothing of value was taken, I'm afraid we have been relegated to the bottom of the investigative heap. Oren said a bored-looking detective called on him at the office to follow up and ask if we'd found anything missing besides my old laptop or had any clues as to who might have perpetrated the crime. Oren answered 'no' to both questions as we'd already decided not to mention the book since that would make its existence a matter of public record and call undue attention to us. The detective advised Oren to hire a private detective and even had some suggestions if we wanted to pursue the matter, but for now we have decided to drop it. _

_We want only to thank the gods that we are both unharmed and wish to concentrate on the family we are beginning._

Day 149**_: _**_As the weeks and months go by, I think less and less about the year I spent on another world. I rarely hear from the other expedition members with the exception of Nadine and Irina. Nadine and I correspond every four or five weeks and I hear from Irina almost weekly. Shortly after our return to Libran, Joshua gave her an engagement ring however their wedding will not take place for almost a year since he is finishing his graduate studies. Several times Oren and I have met them for dinner. I told them of the break-in, but again I protected the secret of Frank's book._

Day 170**_:_**_ My sonogram shows that the child I carry is a boy. My doctor says he looks perfectly healthy for which I am overjoyed and grateful. Oren is busy turning our spare bedroom into a nursery. _

_I heard from Nadine yesterday, a long and rather rambling email and wondered if she was under the influence of drink or drugs when she wrote it. From what I gathered Ares had come to visit and had admitted to her that he had fathered another daughter during a short-lived relationship he had prior to the expedition. The child's mother had apparently tracked him down and has gotten court-ordered child support. He claims he had no knowledge of the child when he joined the expedition and was not running from his responsibilities. In a rather transparent move to avoid the same fate with Nadine, he asked her to marry him. Despite her resolve I think she still has feelings for him and wants Miriam to know her father. I urged her not to make a hasty decision as I'm afraid a life with Ares would be nothing but grief for her. He is a handsome man who will never love her or their child enough to put them first._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

_._

When everyone had left the Situation Room, Bill said to Lee and Natalie, "Let's go to my quarters and talk."

Lee took a last long look at the screen that showed the dozen jump coordinates and then followed his father and Natalie the short distance down the corridor to his quarters. Once inside he waited for the inevitable drink to be poured, but for the moment at least, Bill abstained. Lee had known for years that his father liked whiskey, but it had never seemed like a problem until recently. Now he wondered if Bill Adama was traveling the same road as Saul Tigh in that regard.

"Kara's not happy," Natalie said softly.

"No…but she understands," Lee added, more for himself than for Natalie.

"Your military training must prepare each of you for sacrifice."

Bill spared Lee from further comment. "Kara understands how important this is. She might not like it, but she sees the big picture."

Lee gave his father a glance of gratitude.

"Please sit, both of you," Bill said. He walked to the sitting area and indicated the U-shaped leather couch. Lee and Natalie sat on one end. Bill sat on the wooden coffee table across from them and addressed his son. "You've had since this afternoon to think about the mission. Do you want to change your mind?"

Lee forced a smile. "I didn't think that was an option."

"There's always an option. We can proceed with our invasion of the planet like we never figured out their message. For all the Cylons know, we destroyed that missile and never got the coordinates."

"I'm still not sure we've figured it out." Lee reached into his jacket pocket and got a folded copy of the coordinates and their location relative to the planet. He spread it out so that he and Natalie could look at it.

"Twelve choices," he said. "Coincidence or does that number have a special meaning to you?"

"Are you asking me personally or as a Cylon?"

"Either…both."

"The _Twelve_ Tribes of Kobol persecuted the Thirteenth for their belief in one God. Lucy told me that there were originally _twelve_ creators but that five of them chose to remain behind when the Graystones brought the others here. Their intent was to create _twelve_ Cylon models but they were killed before that happened. The First War lasted _twelve_ years. According to the polytheists, _twelve_ gods rule Olympus. All of these facts would be known to those on the res ship. Shall I go on?"

Bill said. "I think you've given us some insight into the significance of _twelve_. An even more important question…out of those twelve coordinates, where is the basestar?"

"I'm not a seer, Admiral Adama. I can't look into either the stars or the future and see anything more than you can."

"Who do you think would have made the decision as to where to position the ship?" Lee asked.

"It would have been made collectively. Would you like for me to guess?"

"Your guess would be better than ours," Lee said.

"My guess is that it doesn't matter. The baseship isn't at any of them, but they'll be monitoring all of them. We pick one and jump there."

Bill finally walked to his desk and poured a small glass of whiskey. He didn't ask them if they wanted one.

"Do you concur, son?"

"I'm trusting Natalie on this one," Lee answered. "It makes sense."

"So you pick one and jump there. Then what?" Bill asked.

"We wait for a reasonable amount of time…several hours at least. As I said, I don't believe the baseship is at any of these coordinates. I believe they're somewhere else. If they want to stay out of scan range, they'll jump a Raider to each position periodically to see if someone is waiting. For all they know, you could as easily have a battlestar waiting as a Raptor. After surprising them several weeks ago with your unexpected attack, you won't catch them with their knickers down again…as you humans like to say."

"It sounds like someone has studied Colonial battle strategy," Bill said.

"I have a set of books on all the wars you've fought since humanity began keeping a written history…six very thick volumes that includes space battles as well as ground and even naval battles. I've read all of them."

"In preparation for going to war?" Bill asked in a surprised tone.

"I've known since our creators and my beloved Daniel were killed that one day it would come to that…only I thought it would be a Cylon civil war. I wanted to be as prepared as possible."

Lee managed a partial smile and looked at his father. "Sounds like you and General Vargas could use her help next time you start to strategize."

"I'll keep that in mind," Bill said.

"Here's what will happen," Natalie continued. "When the Raider finds us, it will jump away and carry the message back to the baseship which will then jump to our location. We'll be allowed to land the Raptor and the ship will immediately jump to another location that is _not_ one of those coordinates. They will never take the chance that a peaceful overture would be met with a battlestar and destruction."

Bill said. "Their caution is understandable." He looked at Lee. "You know the way back here. We're not going anywhere. We'll be waiting."

Lee nodded and looked at Natalie.. "Any idea how long the negotiations will take?"

"Possibly several days. I'm not sure exactly what my brothers and sisters want in return for a ceasefire. They might be reasonable considering what they now know about our creators and the Sevens."

"Or they might demand our total withdrawal from your homeworld," Bill said.

"That's a possibility. We won't know until we get there."

"What time should we leave tomorrow?" Lee asked.

"Not too early," Natalie said. "I'll see you both after breakfast on the hangar deck." She stood and held out her hand to the admiral. "I'll protect your son with my life."

Bill took her hand in the age old gesture of two people sealing a deal.

When Natalie left, Lee stayed behind and joined his father in a drink. "Everything is going to be all right," he said in a reassuring tone that he didn't feel. "We've got to try this. If there's even a chance we can end the war without further bloodshed, we've got to take it."

"I wish I could make myself believe it will be that easy, son."

"You think Natalie and I are going to fail?" Lee asked and couldn't keep the hurt from his voice.

"Success in negotiating a ceasefire with the Cylons on one basestar doesn't mean that the Cylons on the planet will abide by the agreement. Hell, it doesn't even mean the Cylons on the other basestar will abide by it. I think we've still got some fighting ahead of us."

Lee swallowed the whiskey in one gulp and put the glass on the table.

"You're right. You're absolutely right. Our history is full of examples where different warring factions had to be brought separately to the peace table. It's a beginning, though. I'll try not to disappoint you."

"You've never disappointed me, son."

Lee smiled. "Not even when I followed John on his crazy mission to free Petra and Yoshimo and unbox Sonja?"

"Not even then."

"I'd better try to get some sleep. Goodnight, Dad. I'll see you in the morning."

Bill caught his son's arm as Lee started to leave and Lee got as tight a hug from his father as Zak had gotten. Bill couldn't bring himself to say the words, but Lee knew in that moment how much his father loved him and how much faith he had in him. He also understood what it had taken for Bill to let him go.

…

Emmalyn was in a Sick Bay bed with her bandaged ankle propped on a low pillow. Yoshimo was sitting in the chair beside her. They were talking softly.

"Hi," Kara said from the doorway.

Emmalyn held out her hand and Kara walked over and took it. The room was small and John remained standing at the door.

Yoshimo stood. "Please sit. She hoped you would come. I will go talk to Targa and Petra."

Kara was accustomed to seeing the strong, brave woman who commanded so much respect in the valley. It didn't seem right seeing her virtually helpless on her back, hooked to an I.V. with her blue eyes glazed from pain-killing drugs.

"I hear it's a bad break," Kara said.

"So the doctor tells me. He said as soon as he gets the infection under control, he'll operate. He's going to have to put metal pins in several places."

"Ouch," Kara said.

"Yoshimo was catching me up on what has happened during the last week. You've all been very busy."

"The days and nights run together for me, especially when I'm on CAP. I forget how much time has passed. How's Narcho?"

Emmalyn managed a smile. "I often forget that your friend wasn't born in our valley."

"Dad told me that some of the Eights have hooked up with valley guys. Narcho hasn't taken up with one of them yet, has he?"

"Nor will he if we're to believe him although I think he's had several overtures. He's young and quite nice looking."

"Sixes or Eights…or both?"

"One who looks like Jade but with longer hair. Dessa was very unhappy. She's had feelings for him for a long time…but I imagine you know that."

"He has feelings for her, too," Kara said, "but he respects you and Hunter and her uncles too much to do anything about it."

"Seeing what almost happened to us when the centurions came to the valley, I realized that Dessa deserves happiness as much as anyone. If I thought Noel wouldn't leave her one day…" Emmalyn's voice trailed off.

"Now's not the time to worry about that," John said. "There will be plenty of time when things settle down for Lieutenant Allison to make that kind of decision about the rest of his life. What else did Doc Cottle say about your ankle?"

"What do you think he said? After the surgery, I'll have weeks if not months of rehabilitation."

"Are you harassing my patient?" Cottle asked as he entered the small room. He took Emmalyn's hand. "I think I'm going to have to put a _No Visitors_ sign on your door. You're the most popular patient in Sick Bay. Have you gotten any rest today?"

"Now don't you go telling me I can't see my friends."

John smiled and beckoned to Kara. "Let's go visit Targa. It sounds like Doc Cottle needs to have a doctor-patient conference with Emmalyn so she can set him straight."

Cottle cleared his throat, searching for a comeback but didn't come up with anything.

"I'll come back tomorrow," Kara said. "Unless there's a _No Visitors_ sign on your door."

"There won't be!" Emmalyn said with conviction.

Out in the hall, Kara muttered, "Other than flying CAPs, I won't have _anything else_ to do since everybody agreed to send Lee off on a _suicide mission_."

"Lose the attitude, baby," John said. "We've still got plans to make about the surface and where we're going next. So far we haven't accomplished a single objective that we had when we arrived here. We're over two weeks into this war and we've not rescued one human or made contact with anyone who runs the show on the planet. All we've managed to do so far is get a lot of us killed and their prison blown up."

Kara heard the frustration and anger in her father's voice. "We have accomplished something," she said. "Those Cylons that LG49 rescued from the destroyed basestar saved the lives of everybody in the valley. I think that's something. And you led a mission that rescued Petra and Yoshimo and Sonja."

"Okay, that's two in the positive column. It's still offset by all the negatives."

"Now who's got an _attitude_? Do you not have any confidence in Lee and Natalie's mission?"

"In a perfect world they'll negotiate a ceasefire and the ones on the planet will agree to it and turn over their slaves to us and we'll form a coalition government without firing another shot. In a perfect world."

"But we don't live in a perfect world."

"No, we don't. Lee should get a medal if he and Natalie manage to get those basestars to quit their hit and run raids on us. I'm praying for more, but I'll be thankful if we get that much."

"So you really think they can do it?" Kara asked skeptically.

"I've got faith in them being able to negotiate with those on the res ship. After all, those Cylons made the overture to us. It's the ones on the surface I'm thinking about. They have a cushy life. I don't think they're going to see the error of their ways no matter what their brothers and sisters decide to do. I also don't think they'll abide by anything resolved on a basestar. Don't forget the One who rules the roost in the city is the Second One, the closest brother to the One who went to the Colonies."

"They've got to know that slavery is wrong?"

"Why would they think it's wrong when we humans have practiced it for most of our recorded history…long before the early robots and the pre-centurions were on the scene. Even after we left Kobol where the Twelve Tribes enslaved the Thirteenth, we kept at it. The only reason Tom Zarek wasn't executed for destroying a government building and taking hundreds of lives is that he had a legitimate beef with the way his fellow Sagittarons had endured years of exploitation and slavery by the other eleven colonies. That colony is probably the only place that a group like the Sagittaron Freedom Fighters could have gained so much popular support. Zarek became a folk hero to the disenfranchised. Sagittaron would have erupted in a war that would have spread to the other colonies if he'd been sentenced to die."

"We talked about Sagittaron in Connelly's history class at the Academy. One of the guys in our class said his grandfather was a slave who had been taken to Scorpia to work on building the orbiting shipyards. He was finally freed after they got robots to do the dangerous work."

"Thanks to Vergis and Graystone, we shifted the burden once carried by human slaves to those robots. Their centurions learned from us like children learn from their parents. Lucy told me that the Graystones and other creators didn't start from scratch when they created the programming for the humanoids. They used the base program from the U-87 centurions and added to it starting with the program that Zoe used to keep her avatar alive inside a prototype robot. I doubt that those now controlling Nereid see anything wrong with the fact that they simply continued a long-standing human tradition of one group or race enslaving another."

"Wow," Kara said softly. "I really pushed one of your buttons, didn't I?"

He put his arm around her shoulders. "I'm going to shut up, baby. Lately it seems like I get wound up and don't know when to shut up. I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know."

"It's being back here and having to deal with ass…jerks like that One in the meeting tonight. I wish Natalie had let Jade have a go at him."

John leaned over and kissed her head. "Let's walk back to my quarters and I'll get a few things so I can bunk in with Karl and Saunders. You do want to be with Lee tonight, don't you?"

"You know I do."

"Faith, baby. Hang on to that faith. Sometimes it's all we've got."

…

Laura was sleeping so soundly that the phone rang twice before she heard it. The man on the other end was Major Parker.

"I apologize for waking you, ma'am, but Special Agent Darren and I felt this shouldn't wait."

She sat up and pushed her hair out of her face. The clock on her bedside table flashed 4:58.

"What's wrong?"

"Approximately one hour ago someone threw a firebomb through the window of Leoben Conoy's bookshop. The building was consumed and the fire has spread. We've got six fire companies down here right now attempting to contain it."

"Oh, dear gods. What about Leoben? He lives in an apartment above his shop."

There was a long silence before Parker said, "As of right now it will be hours, maybe days before we know. If Conoy got out, he didn't stick around. There weren't any witnesses and since this isn't a well-traveled street after business hours, there was almost no traffic at four a.m. The fire got a good start before a transport driver saw it and called it in. The Fire Marshall told Agent Darren that they think the accelerant used was rocket fuel. There was a strong smell of it when the first firefighters arrived. It would have burned fast and extremely hot and...well, if Mr. Conoy didn't make it out in the first several minutes, it's very unlikely he made it out at all."

"Very few people know that Leoben is a Cylon. That should narrow the suspect list."

"A hundred people plus everyone they told and everyone they told adds up. I'm afraid that without a witness, we'll be searching for forensic clues after everything cools."

"But surely the average person wouldn't be able to obtain rocket fuel."

"Its use is not restricted to the military. Transport ships that used to make interplanetary runs use it. A lot of those ships are still in service. The Fire Marshall said it wouldn't have taken much to get a fire going among all those books…a quart or two tossed in first and then an incendiary timer with a short fuse. Even on foot, someone could have been several blocks away when it ignited."

Laura bowed her head and massaged the back of her neck as the name _Tom Zarek_ came to mind. As a member of the Quorum he had access to all the files on the Cylons, including Leoben's, but surely he wouldn't have been so bold. Of course he wouldn't. He had a large network of criminal acquaintances. He would have someone do it for him, could probably have gotten it done free considering how many people hated the Cylons. Zarek was no doubt in a public place most of the evening and then retired to a hotel room with a woman who would swear they were together for the rest of it…as would the room service waiter who brought them champagne at the same time someone was firebombing the book store.

Laura sighed. "Thank you for calling me, Major Parker. Will you please keep me informed?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Tears came to her eyes. "All he wanted to do was sell his books in peace."

"Yes, ma'am."

"He saved my life…and Kara's and my son's. I gave him his freedom thinking that was the right thing to do. I should have seen the handwriting on the wall a month ago and sent him to Nereid with D'Anna. I shouldn't have given him a choice. Had I done it, he might still be alive."

"Let's not write him off until we've got some proof. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn't stick around. I'd go into hiding. May I make a suggestion?"

"Of course."

"Let us go get the other one, Sharon and her child. Darren and I agree that she might become a target, too, possibly already is."

"Dear gods. You're right. She lives in an apartment building occupied by hundreds of people. Certainly you don't think someone would try to set it on fire as well."

"Probably not. That would be too obvious, but she has to leave the place sooner or later. Out on the street she and her child are completely vulnerable."

"You're right. Can you take them to the safe apartment where Natasi was kept?"

"We'll have them moved before the morning is over."

"Thank you. Have you heard anything from Admiral Adama? It's been nearly a week."

"Not yet. We're expecting something today or tomorrow. He's still inside the seven-day communication window. If we don't hear something by tomorrow, we'll jump a small transport to Nereid to check on the situation."

"Should I be concerned that it's been this long?"

"I'm sure we'll hear something soon. Colonel Spencer will be in touch with you as soon as we do. Sometimes no news is good news."

"We can only hope. Please let me know when Sharon and Hera are safely under our protection."

"I will, ma'am."

They ended the call and Laura sat on the edge of the bed still holding the phone. It was now 5:10. She found Edgar's mobile number and called it. He answered on the first ring. After she apologized for calling so early, she brought him up to speed on what had happened.

"A friend on the city police force called me about an hour ago. My wife and I live near University Hospital. The bookstore is on the other side of the campus. I'm standing on my balcony looking at the flames right now. It looks like the whole block is involved."

"Perhaps I'm overreacting, but I'm worried about Sean. I can't imagine that anyone would harm a helpless baby, but…I'm suddenly afraid for him. Agent Darren and Major Parker are getting Sharon Agathon and her child to a safe place."

"I'll get someone over to King's Bay Medical Center right away and arrange for around-the-clock protection for Sean."

"Thank you."

Edgar hesitated and then asked, "How long do you think it will be before you can bring him home?"

"He's doing well, but he still weighs barely two pounds. He's got a long way to go before Dr. Junius will consider releasing him. Why?"

"I think we'll all feel better when he's at Marble House."

"Yes," Laura said softly. "That's very true."

"I'll see you later this morning. Do I have your permission to talk to the doctor about Sean's safety?"

"Of course. I'll make sure he knows you're coming."

When Laura ended the call, she felt sick. If someone were attempting to eliminate the few Cylons left on Caprica, there was no reason to think they'd spare Sean. Although it was inconceivable to her that anyone could harm a helpless infant, she knew the stories from Kobol that told of the slaughter of every baby in a village or town as one ruler or another tried to wipe his perceived enemies from the face of the planet.

In some ways they had come so far as a species from the earliest days of their civilization on another world, but she couldn't trust that they had come far enough.

…

Lee was not yet back in his quarters when Kara and her father returned from Sick Bay. John grabbed a small bag and stuffed in his shaving gear and some clean underwear. The prayer beads that had once belonged to Yusef hung on a hook inside his locker. He got those and the book of monotheist scriptures plus the stationery and pen he'd purchased from the ship's store.

When he turned around, Kara's sad and forlorn expression tore at his heart, but he didn't know how to comfort her. He wasn't sure it was even possible. In the morning Lee was leaving on a dangerous mission, possibly even a deadly mission, and there was nothing John could do to change it.

If he admitted the truth to himself, he didn't know how well he would handle seeing Lee right now. They had been close friends for over six years and he now regarded him as his son-in-law. John had always believed that one day he would walk Kara down an aisle and watch the two of them pledge their lives to each other the same way he'd pledged his to Laura. God willing one day Kara would place a grandchild in his arms.

But right now he decided that the less said, the better. Kara understood the risk Lee was taking. There was no need to go on and on about it.

He put his bag on the table and took his daughter in his arms. He couldn't tell her that everything was going to be all right because he had no idea what the future held. Instead he just squeezed her tightly for a moment, kissed her forehead and told her that he loved her. Then he picked up his bag and exited the quarters, closing the door quietly behind him.

There was a small chapel near the morgue. If he could find peace and comfort anywhere on the big battlestar, it would be in a quiet place of worship and meditation.

…

After her father left, Kara stood in his and Lee's quarters looking around at the generic decor. It could easily be any other senior officers' quarters on the ship…except for the admiral's and his XO's which were bigger, especially the admiral's. She had never cared much about her surroundings, but tonight she wished that she and Lee could be at his apartment or even in her room at Marble House.

She had no idea how much longer Lee would be gone so she went back to her quarters. Hot Dog was gone, but Pepper was in her bunk reading. Several of the other pilots had closed their privacy curtains. The room was quiet.

"In case anybody is looking for me, I'll be with Lee tonight," Kara said softly.

"How'd you rate that?"

"Dad's bunking somewhere else since Lee's…going on a mission tomorrow."

"We heard."

"Good news sure travels fast," Kara said, trying to keep her voice devoid of the emotion she was feeling.

She knelt, opened the drawer under her bunk and took out the black lace teddy that she had bought for her weekend with Lee at Summerhill. She stuffed it into a small bag without Pepper seeing it. She had her reputation as the ship's Top Gun to maintain and she was fairly certain that a wisp of black lace wouldn't do anything to enhance that image.

"You okay?" Pepper asked.

Kara stood. "Sure. Where's Hot Dog?"

"He was restless. Said he was going for a walk. We think the Cylons will be back."

"Before or after Lee and Natalie talk to them?"

Pepper didn't answer for a while. Finally she said, "It's not that we don't have faith in Lee and the Cylon. We just don't think they'll quit fighting no matter what."

"So you think Lee is walking into a trap?"

"Not necessarily. I hope he succeeds."

Kara threw the small bag over her shoulder. "He will."

…

The corridor leading to the morgue seemed narrower and dimmer than the others on the battlestar, but that might have just been John's perception. The hatch leading into the chapel had no door. It was an even more dimly lit room with a center aisle and a dozen rows of metal benches with curved metal backs that were bolted to the floor. At the center of the front was an altar made of light gray synthetic material that mimicked stone but probably weighed a tenth as much. Three recessed ceiling lights cast a dim golden glow on the polished surface. In front of the altar sat a rail and a kneeling bench with the only cushion in the room. An ivory-colored curtain adorned the wall behind the altar.

The chapel was intended for everyone's use, but since most of the crew were polytheists, the center altar held the standard display of the twelve gods of Olympus. A two-foot-tall statue of Zeus was in the center on an elevated dais with his trident-carrying brother Poseidon the sea god on one side and his sister-wife Hera on the other. The other gods and goddesses were lined up on either side of the center three.

As a boy John had learned all of their names and how to recognize their likenesses…Aphrodite, the goddess of love and Ares, the god of war. Apollo, god of healing and his twin Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt. Athena, the goddess of wisdom and Demeter, goddess of the harvest. Dionysus, the god of wine and partying and Hermes with his winged sandals, god of travel and messenger to the others. And last Hephaestus, crippled god of fire and husband to the unfaithful Aphrodite who took her pleasure with the god of war.

Two smaller altars flanked the main one. Each held only a low set of candleholders. These were for the few monotheists on board. John walked to the one on the left, took a small candle from the box and lit it. Only when he turned around did he notice Hot Dog seated on the far side against the wall. The young man had his head bowed and his hands clasped between his knees. He didn't look up, and John briefly wondered if Hot Dog's prayers were for a pilot named Kat or for his own safety in the battles that were yet to come.

He sat on the left front bench, took the prayer beads and the book of scriptures from his bag and turned to the prayers in the back. He didn't know how Lee would feel about being the object of a monotheist prayer since Lee was an atheist, but John decided that bit of information would remain between him and God. It was the only way he knew to help his friend and future son-in-law. He found the prayer that had always given him so much comfort and began to pray silently only this time he prayed for Lee instead of himself.

…_You guide my footsteps on the path that You have chosen for me. Though my courage may falter before my enemy, Your courage never falters. Though my words may die in my throat, Your voice never fails…_

…

Showered and dressed in the lacy teddy, Kara was waiting for Lee when he opened the hatch door.

He stopped and stared, his body already responding to the sight of her and the memories evoked by the scant bits of lace.

"Aren't you taking a big chance that your father will walk in?"

She smiled and stood. "What's the matter? You're a hot Viper jock. Don't you like living dangerously?"

"Not _that_ dangerously."

"He's bunking somewhere else tonight. We have his blessing."

Lee took her in his arms and buried his face in her clean, soft hair. "Maybe someday I'll be able to return the favor."

"He loves you like a son, Lee."

His voice caught. "I know."

"And I love you, too…but not like a brother."

He leaned down and kissed her neck as his hands slid across the lace. "I'm coming back. I promise."

"Don't talk about it. Just don't. I'm not here so we can talk about your mission."

He managed to keep his voice light. "Then why are you here, Lieutenant Thrace. What does _Galactica's_ Top Gun want with me?"

She unbuttoned his uniform tunic and then unzipped his trousers. She kept her voice equally light. "I hear you're the best lay on the ship."

"Oh, yeah?" He kissed her shoulder. "Who told you that?"

"Just a rumor going around. You know me. I had to find out for myself."

"Liar," he said softly. "There's no rumor going around."

She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. "I don't want one going around either. Then I'd have to fight for you."

He gave in to the kiss and let her pull him toward the bunk. "Since the day I met you, I've never wanted anyone but you."

"Remember what we did the last time I wore this thing?"

He smiled. "I can't afford to be catatonic in the morning."

She smiled back. "Let's just say I want to give you something to remember while you're hobnobbing on a basestar full of beautiful Cylon women."

"Are you forgetting there are Cylon men on board, too?"

"They're not beautiful," Kara whispered. "And I doubt you'll have to worry about any of them coming on to you…except maybe a couple of Fives."

Lee made a face. "Don't ruin the mood. The last thing I want to think about right now is Cylons."

They tumbled onto the bunk and their kisses became more passionate. Just like before, the bit of black lace was quickly cast aside. Lee never did get around to telling her that he remembered all of their times together, every single one of them. That night all he did was tell her of his love.

…

An hour after leaving the chapel, John sat at a corner table in the deserted officers' rec room. When he'd gone to Karl and Saunders' quarters, he'd found that the two empty bunks had been filled earlier that day by pilots from the _Orion_. He'd told Karl not to worry, that he was sure Doc Cottle could find an empty bed for him in Sick Bay, but he'd never bothered going there. Sick Bay was still crowded with the wounded Marines from the prison. John had decided that he could make it through the night in the rec room. When he'd arrived just before 01:00 in the morning, the room was deserted and still remained that way.

He'd gotten out a page of stationery and now sat staring at it. The only thing he'd managed to write so far was _Dearest Laura. _He didn't know where to begin. She would have access to Bill's report and he was sure that Bill would include all the pertinent facts about the plateau and the attack on the prison. Besides John didn't want to write to her about the events that had transpired down on the planet.

_Dearest Laura, A few days ago I killed two Cylons, one permanently. A Raider destroyed the prison killing all the remaining Cylons and their human guards plus two of General Vargas' colonels and four Marines. General Vargas nearly died of smoke inhalation and we've got sixty Marines suffering from the after-effects. Bill is going to abandon the plateau where we had hoped to set up our base of operations and Lee is leaving tomorrow to risk his life negotiating with the Cylons on the res ship…all because I shot a Six and she downloaded there. Kara is tough so she's sucking it up and being brave, but Lee's mission is killing her and me both. We found the creators shot full of centurion bullets, but they'd been dead long enough to mummify. _

No, he didn't want to go there so he sat staring at the blank page, a three-fourths-full bottle of whiskey on the table and a half-empty glass in front of him.

Movement caught his eye and he glanced up. Saul Tigh stood at the door. _No, please don't come in here and sit down at my table. _But he wasn't that lucky. Tigh made a beeline for the bar, got an empty glass and pulled out a chair.

He nodded at John as he took the bottle of whiskey and poured. "Major. Don't tell me you've got insomnia, too."

"Something like that, sir," John said.

"Drop the _sir_. Tonight it's just one soldier to another. I would say one old soldier to another, but you're not quite there, yet."

"Neither are you. Aren't you and Bill about the same age?"

"I've got a couple of years on him. Let's just say I've passed the half-century mark. He's four years shy of it. You're younger than Bill."

"Just two years. What's keeping you awake?" John asked out of politeness rather than any real curiosity.

"I guess I'm doing Bill's worrying for him. He thinks Lee and that Cylon can end the war for us. I'm not that optimistic."

"I volunteered to go. He turned me down."

Tigh turned up his glass. "So did I."

John managed to keep his face expressionless at the thought of Tigh trying to negotiate with the Cylons at the same time he was detoxing cold turkey from his addiction to alcohol. He wondered what the Cylons would think about the delirium tremens or DTs as they were commonly known.

"I never thanked you for what you did when Commander Cain was ready to airlock me and D'Anna. I've been remiss. I should have done it before now."

"You want the truth?"

"Always."

"I was thinking more about myself than you and the Cylon. I knew if Cain airlocked the husband of the President, there would be hell to pay. Cain and her senior officers would have been court-martialed and that included me. I don't want to end my military career to the sound of a cell door banging shut behind me."

"I don't really care why you did it. I still appreciate it. You saved my son's life, too."

Tigh poured more whiskey into his glass and gestured toward the page of stationery. "Am I interrupting something?"

John turned up his own glass and sipped. "Writer's block."

Tigh snorted. "I quit writing Ellen years ago. Came home once and found a whole pile of unopened letters mixed with junk mail on the table by the door where she'd tossed them. Too busy with her social life I guess." They sat in silence for a while until Tigh asked, "What's it feel like…being right about them?"

John turned up his glass again. "I'm not sure I know what you mean."

"Long time ago…back on Caprica…you said the Cylons weren't all bad. Did you feel that way then or was that just blind faith in your daughter's judgment?"

"I trusted Kara, but I was still skeptical. Then Leoben saved my family's life. I'll admit that made a big difference in how I thought of them. D'Anna saved my life here on the planet. Sonja did, too." He half chuckled. "Of course that's because they both wanted something from me. Leoben's act was the only one that wasn't selfish in nature."

"Bill has come over to your way of thinking now. During the First War I never knew anybody who hated them more than he did. I never thought I'd see that kind of change in him."

"The First War was different. They were all machines thirty years ago."

"And you think they're not all machines now?" Tigh asked in amazement.

"I don't want to argue with you, Colonel," John said tiredly, "but no, I don't think they're _all_ machines now."

"Tell me something. You shot the One at the prison. Did that feel like you were killing a _human_?"

"No, I didn't feel like I was killing a human because I put a bullet through a small metal box. His physical shell is still in a tub of goo. I guess it could be loaded with software and start all over."

Tigh chuckled. "Bill referred to it as _retiring_ the One. I heard one of the Marines call it _unplugging a toaster _with a string of expletives in front of _toaster_. I like that description better."

John glanced up to see Natalie standing in the doorway. "Another insomniac," he said to Tigh wondering if Natalie had heard Tigh's last remark.

Tigh looked around as Natalie walked over to their table. "Is this private?" she asked.

"Have a seat," John said. "Would you like a drink?"

"A small one."

John got up and got a shot glass from behind the bar. He poured it half full and pushed it across the table.

"Thank you."

"I know Yoshimo's wine is more to your taste."

She smiled. "I'll take whatever I can get tonight."

Tigh said, "I thought you Cylons just pushed a button or something to go to sleep."

"And what button would that be?" Natalie asked in an amused tone.

Tigh stood. "I'm going to my quarters. I'm sure you two aren't interested in my company." He turned toward John with a knowing look. "Maybe you can make it three tonight….drinks, that is."

"Good night, Colonel Tigh," Natalie said politely.

John waited until Tigh had gotten a full bottle of whiskey from behind the bar and was through the door before he muttered softly, "And good frakking riddance."

"That was uncalled for," Natalie said.

"So was his last remark about _making it three_. You know what he was referring to."

"Yes. He thinks I'll become your third Cylon lover."

"Love didn't have a damned thing to do with the other two and you know it."

She smiled. "You don't seem like you're in a very good mood."

"I was doing okay until Tigh walked in. He and I have never gotten along. I've never been able to respect him. But he saved my life when Commander Cain was going to airlock me and D'Anna so I try to bite my tongue and be polite."

"He's Admiral Adama's oldest and dearest friend so he must have some redeeming qualities."

"You'll have to ask Bill what they are. Who knows? Maybe before he married Ellen and started drinking like a fish he was a different man."

"What are you doing up at this time of night…or is it morning yet?"

"Halfway in between, I think," John answered and stifled a yawn. "I couldn't find a place to sleep. Kara and Lee are together in our quarters."

She smiled. "So you sit in the officer's rec room. You're a very kind and generous father."

"They're going to get married. I was their age once. They need each other tonight. I could probably think of half a dozen more reasons if I was completely sober." He gestured to the glass of whiskey. "That's my third."

"They're a lucky young couple," Natalie murmured.

"I'm not sure Kara feels that way at the moment. I'm not sure Lee does either even though he volunteered to go with you."

Natalie didn't reply. Instead she got up, went to the ancient juke box in the corner of the room and studied the list of songs.

John said. "There's a sign taped to the top that tells you which ones still work. Karl told me that Chief Tyrol had looked at it and pronounced the others unfixable. I think he requisitioned a new one, but I doubt it's high on the list of necessary supplies and equipment."

Natalie pressed several buttons and returned to the table. "I've disturbed your letter writing."

"I came to a stopping place and couldn't think of anything else to say. That was even before Tigh showed up."

"You've only written the salutation. To your wife?"

He nodded. "Did you ever ask Buddy why LG78 is wearing the prison commandant's memory box around his neck on a chain?"

She smiled. "It seems LG78 has developed a crush on you humans. He noticed your dog tags. He wanted something to wear to show his allegiance to you and the Marines. I'm not sure he understands exactly what you did when you destroyed the One's memories although perhaps it goes far deeper into his programming than even I can imagine."

"During some of our earlier wars, the taking of trophies from an enemy was accepted, even encouraged."

"Yes, I read about that in your history. If it weren't so sad, it would be amusing to think that custom made its way into the programming of our centurions."

John turned up his drink and drained it. "Let's just hope it was programming and not observation. Maybe I'll see if I can get him some real dog tags with his number on them. I'll see if I can get some for Buddy, too. Wearing that box is creepy."

A slow song began to play and Natalie held out her hand. "Dance with me."

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"You don't know how to dance?"

"That's not the problem. It's…just that it's been a damned long time since I held a woman in my arms and…" he shook his head. He hoped he didn't have to elaborate any further.

"You miss your wife," she said softly.

"Of course I miss her."

"All I'm asking for is a dance. I want is to feel a man's arms around me before I go."

John took a deep breath. "Natalie, you're a very beautiful woman…and it's late and I've been drinking…and we've dealt with this once before. You know damned well what it will do to both of us if we start dancing. There's no need to go there again."

"Are you thinking of Colonel Tigh's words?"

"Aren't you?"

"You never told me what happened when you took D'Anna to Caprica."

"Yes, I did."

"You never mentioned what happened with you and Laura."

"That's because nothing happened. I lived in an apartment on the base. She lived in Marble House and ran the government. I saw her less than a dozen times during the three months I was on Caprica. Most of the time a couple of her security staff brought Braedon out to the base so I could spend time with him. She only came with him once. The last time I saw her was the night Braedon's nanny got married to Hunter. Laura danced with me once, but she didn't ask me to spend the night."

"Oh, John." Tears came to Natalie's eyes. "After all you suffered, she still didn't forgive you?"

"She said she did. She's making sure Sean is getting the best of care. And I don't really want to talk about this anymore. It's damned depressing."

"Would you like to dance with her right now?"

He poured some more whiskey into his glass. "I'm not drunk enough yet to think I can will myself back to Caprica."

"Did Sonja ever mention our ability to project?"

"It doesn't work on humans. You see what you want to see. We see what's real."

She stood and held out her hand. "Trust me. You won't be disappointed. I'm not trying to seduce you, John. I promise."

"What the hell. If you can take it, I guess I can, too."

He stood and took her in his arms. They began moving to the music. "Close your eyes," she whispered. "And open your mind and think of your wife."

"While you think of Daniel."

"Now you understand."

…

Kara didn't go to the hangar deck with Lee to see him off. There was only so much she could take and the last several days had been such an emotional rollercoaster for her that she said her goodbye to him in his quarters. Lee didn't have to tell her that he agreed it was better that way. She knew him well enough to know it.

Instead she went to the gym and took out her emotions on a punching bag. She was sweating and breathing hard when Karl came in and threw his towel down on the weight bench before he started adjusting the weights on the ends of the bar.

"Lee's gone?" He asked.

"If not he will be soon."

"Why aren't you down on the hangar deck?"

She didn't answer, just gave him a _duh_ look. "Where's Saunders? I thought you two were joined at the hip these days."

"He'll be along shortly. One of the pilots they put in our quarters roomed next door to him at the Academy. They were catching up. Listen, I'm sorry we didn't have a bunk for your dad last night, but since the _Charybdis_ brought all the pilots from the _Orion_, we're running over. The other battlestars are, too."

"What did Dad do?"

"Said he was going to Sick Bay and ask Doc Cottle to put him up."

"I'm going back on CAP tomorrow morning," Kara said. "One plus of having extra pilots is we're only flying one rotation every twenty-four hours instead of two. So what else is new?"

"Transports left early this morning to go to the plateau and start bringing equipment back up to the ship. I think a squad is going to check out the prison to see if there's any chance that the bodies of the four missing Marines could be recovered. Nobody gives a frak about the Cylons or the human guards who worked for them."

"Does that surprise you?"

Karl lay down on the bench, grasped the bar and began lifting.

"What about those nurses at the lab?" Kara asked.

"Nobody mentioned them."

Kara used her teeth to peel off the bindings for her gloves. Karl was pumping hard, almost angrily. "Are you okay?" She asked.

"I guess every now and then I'm reminded of how most people feel about the Cylons."

"Don't take it personal. Things are getting better."

"I dreamed about Sharon and Hera last night. I dreamed I went back to the apartment and they were gone. Hera's room was empty. When I woke up it just felt so real."

"We all have dreams that are nothing but anxiety. Remember when we lived in the stone house and you used to dream that I disappeared and you were alone? It's stress. Sharon and Hera are fine."

Karl managed a half smile. "Thanks, Dr. Thrace."

Kara walked over and helped lift the heavy bar back up to the holder. "They're fine, Karl. They'll be waiting for you when we get back."

He stood and Kara once again felt the strength of the friendship that had existed between them since they were children. She was just about to ask him if he'd thought about how he was going to tell his father about his family when Karl's eyes flicked over her shoulder. Kara turned. Jade walked into the gym. The eyes of the others in there followed her as she walked over to Kara and Karl.

"Do you know where your father is?" She asked Kara.

"Probably on the hangar deck seeing Lee off. Why?"

"I was just down there. Lee and Natalie have already left."

Kara took a deep breath. _Lee was gone_. It was almost like a punch in the gut. This wasn't like when he went to the surface. This was different. Still she managed to ask, "Is something wrong?"

"Lucy has gone all whacky because the plateau is being abandoned. She wants to get down there and start working on a new body. Now she's trying to make Buddy take a ship to the surface. I thought maybe John could calm her down since Natalie's not here."

"I haven't seen him this morning," Kara said.

"I saw him earlier," Jade said. "He slept in Sonja's bunk last night."

"_He what_?"

"Sonja wasn't using it. She's still in Sick Bay. She's hot for one of Doctor Cottle's assistants."

Kara rolled her eyes. _What a slut. _"So how did my dad wind up in your quarters?"

"Natalie brought him back with her early this morning. They woke me up."

"What do you mean _they woke you up_? What were they doing?"

"Nothing. I'm a very light sleeper. Natalie undressed and got in her own bunk. Your dad undressed and got in Sonja's. I went back to sleep."

"What time?"

"About 2:00."

"Gods," Kara said. "Well I don't know where he is now."

"Did you check the mess hall?" Karl asked.

"Mess hall, Sick Bay and officer's rec room. Then I thought about the gym."

"He might be with Admiral Adama," Kara said. "I'll go ask one of the Marines outside the admiral's door. They'll know. In the meantime get back to Buddy and tell him he'll be in _big trouble_ if he tries to board a ship heading for the plateau. I don't care what Lucy wants to do. Tell him my dad would be _very upset_ with him."

They left the gym. Jade went in one direction and Kara went in another.

Who ultimately controlled the big centurion's body? Lucy or his U-87 programming? What would happen if Buddy went to the hangar deck and tried to commandeer a ship or tried to get on one? She was certain that Buddy was armed just like all the other centurions. It would take about two seconds for all the good work they'd done in the last few weeks to be undone. For the first time since she'd gotten up that morning, Lee wasn't foremost in Kara's thoughts.

…

The big elevator platform carrying the Raptor bumped upward to the starboard launch bay. Lee was wearing his flight suit and helmet. Natalie had refused both. She wore a sleeveless black sweater, black slacks and short black quilted jacket that she had come to favor on board the ship.

After the proper exchanges with the LSO, Lee lifted off and accelerated the Raptor out of the bay. The coordinates that matched six o'clock on the list were already in the nav computer. Lee circled and took a long look at the flight pod and then the entire ship before he ran out of reasons to linger. There was no use waiting. As soon as they were in the no-fly zone, he executed the jump.

On the other end they found themselves in an area of space illuminated only by the twinkling of very distant stars. Lee activated the short range and long range scanners. It came as no surprise that they revealed absolutely nothing.

Since he was wearing a helmet, he had given Natalie a headpiece so they could communicate. "I guess we wait," he said.

"Yes. Did you sleep well last night?"

He thought he detected a hint of humor in her voice. "Better than I expected. What about you?"

"Not as well as I would have liked, but that was my own fault. Once we're on the baseship, do you want me to mention your relationship to the Admiral or do you simply want me to introduce you by your name and rank?"

"Which do you think would be best? You know them. I don't."

"Perhaps I need to clarify something that many of you humans misunderstand about us. Though we have only eight models, seven of which are on the baseship, I've never met any of those copies. Yes, they're my brothers and sisters, but I've never talked to them or dealt with them…and that includes the ones from the prison who have now downloaded."

"I don't understand. I thought you could read each other's thoughts."

"Only if our hands are in the datastream and only if the others wish it to happen…unless a direct question is asked. Then we can't lie."

Lee had a sinking feeling. "So we'll be talking to a ship full of strangers?"

"Maybe not quite that extreme. Imagine a scenario that goes like this…your creators…in your case your mother and father…had a number of children who never met until they were adults. I know that's hard to fathom, but that's as close to explaining what I'll face on the baseship as I can get. They're my kin and we have an introductory algorithm built into our programming, but in many regards, it will be like meeting strangers because I evolved on the planet. They evolved on their ship. Our core programming was the same in the beginning, but by now we're different, in some cases very different."

"I wish I'd known this earlier," Lee said.

"You wouldn't have volunteered?"

"No. I'd still have volunteered. I just like to know what I'm up against. My grandfather Adama told me you never walk into court unprepared. He was a brilliant defense attorney. He always knew what he was up against. He had a hard and fast rule that he made his clients aware of before he took their cases. If they lied to him about anything, he would throw them to the wolves."

"I didn't lie to you, Lee."

"No. Just like Kara didn't lie to me before she stole that Raider. She just didn't tell me. We call it a lie of omission."

"I'm sorry. How can I make it up to you?"

"Tell me everything you know about how a basestar is run and what you think we'll face."

Before Natalie had a chance to speak, an object appeared on the short range scanner. As expected it was not broadcasting a Colonial signal, and it was too far distant for a visual."

"It's a Raider or a Heavy Raider," Natalie said. "Is this ship armed?"

"No. We didn't think that would send the right message."

"Good. That's good. An armed ship would definitely have sent the wrong message."

All Lee could think of at the moment was that he should have spent the previous evening discussing the mission in depth with Natalie instead of in his bunk making love to Kara. They would have the rest of their lives to make love. If he screwed up the negotiations, it might never happen again.

As if reading his mind, Natalie said, "Don't worry about how a baseship functions. Too much knowledge on your part would make them suspicious. Your lack of it will be more convincing."

Lee watched the dradis image. The small blip was drawing nearer to their position. He looked out the front canopy, straining to see something in the dark.

"Turn on your landing lights," Natalie said. "Let's make it easy for them."

Fighting the urge to jump back to the _Galactica_, Lee did as she said. Deliberately exposing himself and his ship in an unknown situation went against all his instincts and his training. He suddenly felt damp with sweat.

In less than a minute, a Raider materialized out of the darkness and came within thirty feet of the Raptor. They both watched the red eye scan back and forth several times across the canopy. Lee had a reaction that was visceral, knotting his insides and making his guts cramp. If a meeting like this had occurred in his Viper, only one of them would have survived.

"Control your breathing," Natalie said. "You're hyperventilating."

"That Raider can tell I'm hyperventilating?" Lee croaked in surprise.

"No, I can. It's simply recording our image. It will be gone soon."

She was right. In another ten seconds the Raider banked away from them and disappeared into the darkness. A few seconds later there was a distant wink of light as it jumped away.

"I always hated being in space like this," Lee said, "so far away from stars. It's darker than the darkest night. It's like…like…"

"Death," Natalie said the word he couldn't bring himself to say.

"Yes," Lee said softly.

"I wish we'd had time for you to work with Yoshimo. He could have taught you a number of calming techniques, starting with your breathing."

"He taught you?"

"Yes, and I can project. Right now I'm in a peaceful garden." She reached out and took his gloved hand in her bare one. "Relax, Lee. Imagine a place you'd like to be right now."

He closed his eyes and was instantly walking on the beach of the island in the late afternoon with Kara's hand in his. He could hear the surf and smell the saltwater and feel the warm ocean breeze on his skin. Kara smiled at him and squeezed his hand. They walked lazily like they had all the time in the world, like they'd done when they had spent a week there after her Academy graduation. Then the image vanished. He opened his eyes. A basestar hung in space before them.

"Follow the Raider," Natalie said. "It will guide us to the landing bay."

…

As Kara was approaching Admiral Adama's quarters, the door opened and he emerged. He was clean-shaven, his hair combed, his uniform trousers creased knife-sharp, but he looked as tired as she'd ever seen him. She wondered momentarily if he'd slept at all the night before.

The Marines came to attention. She stopped and came to attention also even though she was in sweatpants and a t-shirt.

"At ease. Good morning, Kara."

"Good morning, Admiral Adama."

"I'd thought we might see you on the hangar deck this morning."

She looked at the floor. "Lee and I thought it was best…if I didn't."

He nodded. "Were you coming to see me?"

"I'm looking for my father."

"He left the hangar deck when I did thirty minutes ago. He didn't say where he was going. You look upset. Is there a problem?"

"I hope not, sir. We heard that everything is being removed from the plateau."

"That's correct."

"What about the lab?"

"We'll continue to supply the three Cylon nurses with food and anything else they need until such time as we decide with to do with them and the facility."

"Lucy's upset. She thought she would be allowed down there right away to start work on cleaning up the computer equipment and…whatever else she wants to do."

"Lucy? You mean that avatar or whatever you call it that's in Buddy?"

"Yes, sir. Jade told me…"

"Walk with me," Bill said and Kara followed him down the hall. He went to the Situation Room and closed the door behind them. "What's going on? Is there going to be trouble on my ship?"

"I don't think so, sir, but Lucy is trying to get Buddy to board a transport ship and take her to the plateau so she can get to the lab. See…the problem is that none of us understands how centurion brains work, especially the one in Buddy. That's why we need my dad. Buddy will listen to him. Lucy might, too, if we can assure her that we aren't going to destroy the lab and that she'll be allowed down there whenever it's safe."

"Where's Buddy right now?"

"I don't know. Jade was going to find him and tell him not to do anything stupid. The problem is we don't know who controls him."

Adama went to the wall phone and said, "Page Major Gallagher to the Situation Room _on the double_."

…

Lee eased the Raptor forward. When the Raider recognized their intent to follow, it turned and they flew toward the huge basestar that soon took up his entire field of vision. Unlike the Heavy Raiders, the Raiders had no external lights having no need of them since the controlling organism saw everything with infrared. There were very few external lights on the basestar and Lee flew slowly and carefully lest he collide with something. The Raptor's landing lights didn't illuminate their path far enough ahead to allow them to travel at any rate of speed.

"There," Natalie said. "See the opening of the landing bay."

Lee strained his eyes. There was a faintly lighter spot in the dark hull that proved to be an opening. As they approached, the lights illuminating the opening became brighter. The Raider entered and they followed. It reminded Lee of entering a vaulted tunnel. The tunnel forked and he followed the Raider again as it went left. They finally flew through a membrane that instantly sealed behind them. The Raider landed and Lee followed suit, setting the Raptor down after turning it toward the entrance.

Almost immediately he felt the sensation he felt every time he'd been in a battlestar that had executed an FTL jump.

"We're no longer at our six o'clock coordinates," Natalie said.

Lights flared on around the inside of the landing bay, some of them white, some of them red. Lee closed his eyes at the sudden brightness. "Damn," he whispered. He couldn't see anything outside the ship now for the light.

"You can open the door," Natalie said. "Our centurion escort is here."

"How can you see with all that light?"

"I can hear them."

With his heart pounding, Lee activated the door which swung up. At the last minute he grabbed Natalie's arm. "Is the bay pressurized?"

"Yes. We were in a pressurized area as soon as we passed through that membrane."

"I thought you'd never been on a basestar before."

"I haven't. That doesn't mean I haven't studied their design and function. You can take off your helmet."

Lee took off his gloves and found the collar release. The pressurized suit hissed as he removed the helmet and placed it on the seat. There were three centurions waiting for them at the bottom of the ramp. Lee picked up the small bag he'd brought with him that held his duty blue uniform, a pair of fatigues, clean underwear and shaving gear. Natalie preceded him down the ramp.

"Greetings, brothers. We come in peace."

Their red eyes scanned her in unison. Someone, maybe John, had told Lee that centurions who had not been freed could distinguish one model Cylon from another but within models they couldn't tell one copy from another. They would have no idea that Natalie was the First Six, only that she was a Six.

A long ramp sloped upward out of the landing bay and they began to climb finally entering a level corridor where they were met by another centurion. This one had something black in its hand. The three centurions stopped.

"What's going on?" Lee asked.

"I'm not sure," Natalie replied.

Two of the centurions grasped Lee's arms firmly at the top. The one they had just met placed a black bag over his head. He tried to pull loose, and they tightened their grip.

"Don't fight them," Natalie said. "My brothers and sisters apparently don't want you to know where they're taking us. Remember the centurions are only following orders. If they meant you any harm, it would have happened by now."

They began walking. "This is a hell of a way to treat a peace envoy," he said, his voice muffled inside the bag.

"They don't know your status. You're dressed like my pilot."

They had walked only a short distance when Natalie said, "We're getting on an elevator."

Instead of going up or down, Lee could tell they were traveling sideways. The car slowed and stopped and they began to rise.

"Internal transportation," Natalie said. "We should be near the center of the upper section when we stop. That's where the control room and the Hybrid are located."

"Will we get a welcoming committee?"

"I'm sure we will sooner or later."

The elevator car stopped. The doors hissed open, Lee was ushered off and the centurions halted. Natalie reached over and removed the bag from his head. A well-lit ribbed corridor with a flat wall on one side and a slightly curved wall on the other stretched before them. Lee glanced over his shoulder. The elevator door had shut and now looked just like another panel between the ribs.

Natalie anticipated his question. "The centurions control the elevator with wireless transmissions."

"What do the humanoids do when they want to go somewhere?"

"The brothers and sisters rarely leave this level. I'm sure there's a manually operated elevator somewhere if they need to go elsewhere in the ship and are alone. Otherwise a centurion handles this type of thing for them."

One centurion stayed by the elevator panel. Two walked down the corridor. They followed it. The third centurion fell in behind them. Thirty yards down the centurions stopped before a panel. It slid open. Natalie entered and Lee followed. There were two pieces of furniture in the room. A small table and a large bed made up with red satin sheets and a red quilted bedspread.

"My room or yours?" Lee asked.

"I think it's ours," Natalie said.

"There's only one bed," Lee said.

A voice from the doorway said, "Our sister Six brings us a human with astute powers of observation."

Without turning Lee recognized the voice.

"Hello, brother," Natalie said. "I'm afraid we need another room."

"I think an introduction is in order first."

"I'm Natalie, the First Six, and this is our human negotiator, Captain Lee Adama. What are we to call you?"

"I've always thought the name our creators gave me was too formal. John Cavil might have been one of the creators, but it's just not _me_. You may call me Dean, the forty-third One. It has a nice academic ring, don't you think?"

Lee's stomach was still churning. "Is there a bathroom nearby?"

Dean walked over and touched a panel in the ribbed and lighted wall. It slid open revealing the standard facilities with a clear acrylic-enclosed shower. He bowed and gestured for Lee to enter. "Your throne awaits."

Lee grabbed his bag and retreated into the room. The door slid shut behind him. The wall did little to mute the voices in the bedroom.

"He's the best the humans have got?"

"The very best," Natalie answered.

"He's authorized to speak for all of them?"

"Yes. His father is the commander of the entire fleet. He's been empowered to negotiate for the humans. The fact that the admiral sent his son should also show you how sincere he is to work toward peace."

"Is the captain your lover?"

"No."

"You have taken another human lover?"

"No."

"A pity. Our sisters were very excited at the prospect of hearing about a human-Cylon relationship. We were told by some of those who downloaded that a number of children have been born as a result of liaisons with human slaves."

"That's correct. Most of the children have been born into stable family units in the city."

"Yet you have chosen to abstain. I don't understand."

"Captain Adama and I aren't here to discuss my love life. You got our message about the creators and the Sevens?"

"From your sister Six. Yes. She tried to hide what she knew, but while she was downloading, her thoughts were chaotic. Our nurses read many of them as they assisted her in the rebirth tank. We put her hands in our datastream and questioned her. So it's true that our creators are dead…have been for years."

"Yes. It's true. I saw their bodies just after the First One had his centurions kill them. I saw the bodies of our dead Sevens as well."

"But you kept silent."

"Had I spoken then, the First One would have killed and boxed me."

"Yes…I suppose you're right."

"I had to bide my time and wait for the right moment."

While Lee listened to their conversation, he finished stripping off his flight suit. He sponged off the sweat and dressed in his duty blue uniform. He looked in the mirror, smoothed his hair and touched the panel. It opened.

Natalie smiled at him. "Here's Captain Adama now."

"Someone from the military," Dean said as he eyed Lee's uniform. "We thought we'd get a civilian. Don't they usually negotiate for the humans?"

"We currently have no civilians on board the battlestars," Natalie said. "Lee…Captain Adama…has studied the law. He's our very best choice."

Lee started to correct her and then stopped. Right now he had to trust Natalie's handling of their situation. The One was scrutinizing him in a way that made Lee uncomfortable.

Finally he said, "You're very handsome. Have you taken one of our sisters as a lover?"

"I'm engaged to someone."

"A pity. I'm sure some of our sisters would like to experience a human's touch. I must say that years of the same-old, same-old can lead to ennui. In a limited population such as we have here, variety is almost non-existent."

Natalie put her arm through Dean's and edged toward the door. "A human's touch doesn't feel any different than that of our brothers."

"Ah, the voice of experience."

The panel opened and they walked into the hall with Lee following. The three centurions followed.

"I believe I've caught you in a lie," Dean smirked. "You said you hadn't taken a human lover."

Natalie smiled. "I didn't say I'd never been touched by one. I've even been kissed by one."

"What was it like? Was it good?"

"Such eagerness to hear about our love lives," she said in a teasing tone. "Once we work out a truce and you promise your help with the other ship and the planet, I might just tell you."

Dean looked at Lee. "Will you be as forthcoming as Natalie?"

"If that's what it takes. You act like you've never seen a human before."

"I haven't. Neither have any of the brothers and sisters on board…except for those who downloaded from the prison and they've been…detained."

"You've detained your own people for their crimes against their prisoners?" Lee asked in surprise.

"No. We detained them because they protected the killers of our creators and our brother Sevens. They left the bodies of our creators unburied. They didn't even have a service of mourning for them."

"So I guess years of torturing and killing humans at your prison doesn't count," Lee said.

"It wasn't _our_ prison," Dean said coldly. "We did you a favor by destroying it for you."

"Let's stick to the reason Lee and I are here," Natalie said in a soothing tone. "First let's talk about why you sent for us. We hope it's because you want to join us in freeing the human slaves on the planet and forming a coalition government."

"How perfect," Dean said. "I've always wanted to be the ruler of a blended kingdom."

TBC…


	72. The Ghosts of Conflicts Past

Chapter 72

The Ghosts of Conflicts Past

_Libran_

_Day 292: Several days ago I received a letter that was a total surprise to me. The Blessed Mother has written again and this time the short, one-page note was entirely in her hand. No underling wrote it for her. She has beseeched me to bring the book to Gemenon at the expense of her church or if I will not consent to bring the original, then at least a copy. She was most gracious in her letter and told me that in the months that have intervened since our first correspondence, her scholars have been diligently combing their archives for help in translating the photograph of the page I sent them. At last one has found a document dating from the first century following the exodus from Kobol that has given them hope of being able to do so._

_I replied to her that as I am currently nearing the end of my pregnancy, I am not able to travel between planets, but would perhaps be willing to do so after the birth of my son since I plan to take a year's sabbatical from work. Oren is not in favor of the idea, but my curiosity is aroused by the opportunity to meet this holy woman and see the interior of a monastery that no one outside their faith has seen in centuries. We'll see if it works out. She also sent me a beautiful gold amulet shaped like the number 8 turned on its side. Oren said it is the symbol of a radical monotheistic sect called the Soldiers of the One, but our professor friend says its origin predates their use of it by many, many centuries. On Kobol it was the symbol of the Goddess Mother who was worshipped equally with the God Father. That ancient religion is now considered pagan although both of our main religions sprang from it. The monotheists dropped their worship of the Goddess Mother and now worship only one God. The polytheists incorporated both god and goddess into Zeus and Hera. The professor said the amulet was beautifully wrought by a skilled goldsmith. It is his opinion that it is an antique and of museum quality which is his way of saying it's worth a lot of cubits and I should take good care of it. _

_Otherwise our lives continue as usual. Oren has completed painting the nursery and we have spent many happy hours shopping and buying for it and our coming child. We are currently decorating the house with evergreen boughs for the celebration of Winter Solstice which will occur in several weeks. We spend many of our evenings cuddled by the fire dreaming of what life will be like when there are three of us. There are also rounds of parties this time of the year which the professor says date to prehistoric times when ancient humans on Kobol celebrated to ease the effect of the short days and long, dark nights and anticipated the coming spring when life would once again spring from the earth. _

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

_._

John was out of breath and sweating by the time he got to the Situation Room. Kara was waiting inside the door. Bill was on the other side of the room talking on the wall phone. He didn't sound happy.

"What's up?" John gasped softly to Kara.

"What's wrong with you?"

"I was down in the machine shop when I heard the admiral's page to get up here on the double. The freight elevator was in use so I ran half the length of the ship and up four flights of stairs."

"We can't find Buddy."

Bill slammed the heavy black phone back into its cradle. "One of the deck crew said he's fairly certain he saw Buddy get on the transport that just left for the surface."

John looked from Bill to Kara in confusion.

Kara said, "Lucy flipped out when she found out that the plateau is being abandoned. Jade tried to stop Buddy from taking her to the surface, but Buddy wouldn't listen to her. We thought you could talk to him, but I guess it's too late now."

Bill rubbed his face with both hands. He didn't have to say it. _As if I don't already have enough to deal with. _Kara and John could read it in his body language and hear it in his voice.

"Where's Buddy going on the plateau and why?" John asked.

Kara said, "To the lab and you know why. Lucy wants to start sorting out the mess you found in that vault room."

John addressed Bill. "Do you want me to take a Raptor down there and bring him back, sir?"

Bill took a deep breath. His voice had only the slightest edge of stress as he addressed John.

"I've got a transport leaving for Caprica in three hours with the bodies of two colonels on it. Vargas and Tarkington are still working on the letters to their wives. I haven't finished my report for President Roslin. _You're_ the one who thinks we need that robot. Vargas has a lot of faith in _you_ so you handle it the best way you see fit. Bring him back to the ship or leave him there. You make the decision."

"Yes, sir."

With that, Bill left the room.

"What were you doing down in the machine shop?" Kara asked.

"Asking Chief about getting something made. If I can get LG78 some dog tags, I might be able to get him to give up that metal box he's wearing."

Kara snorted. "You've got to admit that's really…"

"Creepy," her father finished for her.

"I was going to say _cool_. The former slave wearing the dead master's brains. What better symbol could a freed centurion wear? It's like he's telling his brothers _Viva la revolution_ or civil war or whatever you're calling it."

"Don't say that!" John said sharply. "The last thing we need is another centurion revolt. Buddy has assured me that the ones we freed are on our side and will remain that way, but…never mind. I don't want to dump my First War anxieties on you."

"I was joking so don't bite my head off. Natalie says this is as much their civil war as it is another human-Cylon conflict. That's all I meant. She's counting on the centurions fighting on our side _this time_."

"It's too early in the morning to debate the finer points of wars past and present. All of us who fought the First War are dealing with ghosts right now. I know Bill and Tigh are. So are Vargas and Tarkington. Come on. Let's go to the mess hall. I need another cup of coffee."

"Rough night?" She asked.

"Hangover. My second one this year. I don't want to make it a habit."

Kara snickered. "You could do like Colonel Tigh. He never has a hangover because he never stops drinking."

"That's not funny. It's sad."

"And whose fault is that? Nobody has a gun to Tigh's head making him drink."

"All of us have weaknesses, Kara. You need to learn to be more forgiving."

"Was Natalie drinking with you until 2:00 this morning or were you holding down that end of it yourself?"

They left the room and began walking down the corridor. "Button it, Kara. I don't need any lip from you."

"I just want to know one thing…are you and her hooking up?"

"No! I was sitting in the rec room last night and she came in. We talked for a while."

"So how did you end up in Sonja's bunk?"

"I think it was the only empty one on the whole ship…besides my own…but since my daughter was with her boyfriend, I couldn't use it. Now can we drop this?"

"I wouldn't blame you if you and Natalie did hook up. Laura treated you like crap while you were on Caprica. I don't know why you still…"

"That's enough, Kara! You seem to have forgotten that she's the mother of my son."

"_One_ of your sons."

"All of which is none of your business so drop it. I mean it!"

"Aren't we all grouchy this morning, Papa Bear?" She asked using his call sign.

He didn't answer her as they entered the mess hall and got cups of coffee before finding a table. They sat in silence for a few minutes. Kara could tell that her father was lost in thought…or still hung over…or both.

"So what are you going to do about Buddy?" She finally asked.

"Bill told me to handle it. I guess I'll go get him."

"Why not just leave him down there so he and Lucy can do whatever she wants to do?"

"Because we're going to need Buddy when we get to the city. He lived there for seven or eight years. He knows everything about it. He's our best chance to get to the other centurions. I also need him to function as a translator for LG78."

"Lucy is going to be unhappy. Since she controls Buddy, it might get ugly."

"I'm not going to ask her to put off her research forever. I'm just going to ask her to delay it until we get a solution on the planet's surface."

"Maybe there's another solution. Can I go with you?"

"Don't you have a CAP to fly?"

"Not until tomorrow."

"Let's go, then."

"I was working out when Jade came and got me. I've got to shower."

"Be on the flight deck in thirty minutes. I'll have a Raptor ready and waiting."

Kara grinned. Now it was her turn to run.

…

"Have you been on a baseship before?" Dean asked Natalie.

"No."

"I'm sure your friend hasn't. Would you like a tour?"

"Of course."

They continued walking with the three centurions trailing them and eventually came to where another wide corridor branched off the one they were in. Centurions stood sentry on either side. Lee guessed that it was an arm of the ship and wondered if the centurions always stood there or if they had been placed there because of him. The lights were dim and after the first twenty or thirty feet the corridor faded into darkness. It was impossible to see anything beyond that.

"I guess you keep the lights off to save on the electric bill," Lee said in an attempt at humor. Natalie smiled. She'd been around humans long enough to understand his comment. Dean was clearly oblivious.

"If we were to walk down that corridor, the lights would come on. Our Hybrid controls lighting all over the ship. When she senses activity, she turns on the lights."

Dean continued walking with no further explanation. Lee suddenly realized that if they walked long enough, they would eventually come back to where they had started. They were going in a large circle around the center pylon connecting the Y-shaped hulls.

"How many of you are there on board?" He asked.

"More than we had two months ago," Dean answered. "We've now got all the brothers and sisters from the destroyed baseship plus those from the prison. We've nearly doubled our number."

Lee persisted. "Which is?"

Dean glanced at Natalie. "I suppose it can't hurt to tell you. You'll just keep asking until you get an answer from one of us. We currently have over six hundred brothers and sisters out of stasis. We keep five or six times that number in our tanks. We could activate them, but that's just more mouths to feed. Six hundred is more than enough to run the ship."

"Interesting," Lee said although he had no way of knowing if Dean had told him the truth. His comment had told Lee something, that food supplies were a concern for them. Cut off from the planet, even a vast supply would eventually run out.

"You didn't get all of them from the destroyed baseship," Natalie said to Dean. "We rescued thirty-three of them. We would have rescued more, but one of your brother Ones decided to destroy what remained of the ship before we could get to them."

"Do tell. Where are these thirty-three imprisoned now?"

"They're not prisoners," Lee said. "Thirty of them are on the surface of the planet...living and working with a group of free humans. Only three of them refused the offer and asked to be imprisoned. They're on a battlestar."

"How interesting. Of course there are a lot of our brothers and sisters living and working with humans on the surface."

"I wouldn't exactly refer to slavery as _working with_," Lee said.

"You should know," Dean said sarcastically. "You enslaved us for generations."

"Lee," Natalie cautioned. "Don't forget why we're here."

"All I want Dean to understand is that our creation and use of mechanical robots doesn't qualify as slavery."

Dean agreed. "I'll concede they didn't start out that way. Hundreds of years ago the very earliest robots were nothing but mechanical helpers, but the brilliant Daniel Graystone changed all that. He gave our metal brothers the ability to make independent decisions long before he participated in _our_ creation. He gave them the ability to _think for themselves_. And yet you continued to enslave them. Your legal system denied them citizenship and all the rights afforded by that designation. Our sentient brothers remained the property of humans."

"Most of them were owned by big corporations or the military, not by individuals."

"What difference does _that make_? They were still considered property. If a human died working on the Scorpia shipyards, he was given a funeral and mourned. If one of our brothers was crushed between massive girders as often happened, he went into the scrapheap to be melted down and recycled."

Lee felt his temper begin to rise. "Have _you_ treated them any better? You took away their sentience when you installed those telencephalic inhibitors."

"Not me," Dean said in a frosty tone. "That decision was made by the creators in order to avoid another rebellion. We've merely maintained their practice."

"So explain to me how you're treating them any different from the way the humans in the Colonies did?"

"The difference is that our metal brothers are happy and proud to serve _us_."

"Oh, give me a break," Lee said in derision. "How can they be _happy and proud?_ You've taken away their ability to even understand the _concepts_ of _happy and proud_."

"Boys, boys," Natalie said in her calmest voice. "Enough. Let's all play nice and stop refighting our earlier wars. We don't need the ghosts of past conflicts sitting at the table with us. God knows there have been enough of them. Each of you is entitled to your own opinion, but there's no need to get ugly about it. We're here to talk about a _new beginning_ for both of our races."

"He projects such…negative emotion," Dean said. "How _do _you live with them?"

Natalie gave Lee a glance that said _shut up_ before she smiled sweetly at Dean. "_All_ their emotion is not negative. It gives their kisses something very special, something often missing from the kiss of a brother, even my beloved Daniel."

As they walked in silence down the corridor, Lee wondered if Natalie had actually kissed a human or if she had only said that to pacify the One. He thought of John and the special bond he and Natalie seemed to share, but Lee had never seen anything that led him to believe it was romantic in nature. He'd read the transcripts of John's debriefing. John had readily admitted to his sexual relationships with D'Anna and Sonja but had made no mention of Natalie as other than a conspirator in getting him off the planet and as a friend.

They reached a large opening in the interior wall and entered.

"Our Control Room," Dean said with what could only be a hint of pride in his voice.

Lee first noticed the bright arc of lights and the multiple grid screens with their swiftly changing reddish squares. There were hundreds of thin filaments much like fishing line that disappeared into a matrix in the ceiling and another in the floor. Beads of water or some other translucent liquid were sliding down the filaments in a steady stream.

Several humanoids were standing at three waist-high troughs of liquid that were connected in the center. Lee soon realized that there were at least two of every model Cylon in the room. The only model in which the copies looked significantly different were the Sixes. There was one who looked like Sonja with shorter platinum hair and another with hair longer and darker than Natalie's. She was the one who came over to greet them.

"Hello, Lida," Natalie said.

"Sister. We had no idea who the humans would send. We didn't expect you. We're honored to have the First Six with us."

"This is our other envoy, Captain Lee Adama," Natalie said as she made the introduction. "He represents the humans."

Lida took his hand and looked at him with eyes as blue as his own. What he saw there was an innocence he'd never seen in Sonja's eyes or even Natalie's. Lida was obviously unaware of handshake protocol because she continued to hold and caress his hand. He finally gently removed it and nodded, "Pleased to meet you."

"What model human are you?" She asked.

"We don't have model numbers."

"Then how do you tell each other apart?"

"We all look different and have different personalities."

"In your movies we see many humans. How can you all look different?"

It was a child's question. Lee smiled at her. "You'd have to ask someone a whole lot smarter than me. I guess you could say our genetic diversity is responsible."

"Humans mate and have babies, Lida," a Two said to her. "They don't come out of a tank as adults like we do."

Several of the others crowded around them. A hand touched his sleeve. He turned and found himself staring at an Eight who looked identical to Karl's wife.

"Are you called Sharon?" He asked.

"I'm called Eight-128 because I was the 128th copy created. I haven't taken a human name as have some of my sisters, but if you want to call me Sharon, that will be all right."

"I wouldn't presume to name you," Lee murmured. "Do you stay in here all the time?"

"No," she answered as if it were a silly question. "We all share duties in here. Everything works fine as long as there are seven of us to make decisions. Then we place our hands in the datastream and communicate our wishes to the Hybrid. She does our bidding as well as keeping the entire ship running."

"Well, this is it," Dean said to Lee and Natalie. "You've seen our Control Room. We can move on."

"Will you come back?" Lida asked.

"No," Dean answered. "They get the tour to show our good will and to show them we've got nothing to hide. Then we sit down and talk."

"We'd like to see the resurrection chamber and the Hybrid," Natalie said.

"The Hybrid is in the center section of the lower hull," Dean said. "I hope you don't mind another elevator ride."

"As long as I don't have a bag over my head," Lee commented dryly.

"We'll go to the resurrection chamber first. It's nearby."

They exited the Control Room and started back in the direction they had come, eventually reaching another opening in the wall although it was smaller. Lee didn't think they had walked past the door to the room with the bed, but they must have because he didn't remember seeing this section earlier. Like the corridor, the first twenty feet of the chamber was lighted, but the back of the room disappeared into darkness. Lee could only assume that the tanks containing the inanimate humanoid shells extended far past the few at the front.

"Our resurrection chamber," Dean said. "After several days of hard work, our rebirth nurses are finally getting a much deserved rest."

It was on the tip of Lee's tongue to say, _Hey, you destroyed the prison and killed your own. _But he glanced at Natalie and thought better of it. They all knew the truth. No need to rub it in.

"I saw the rebirth room at the lab on the planet," Lee said. "This one looks similar except it's a lot bigger."

"He helped unbox Sonja," Natalie explained.

"Well," Dean said. "If you've seen one and know how it works, you don't need me to explain anything. Let's move on and meet our Hybrid."

…

Laura was lingering over breakfast with Maya and Bianca when her phone buzzed. Braedon, who was playing on the floor with Esmari and Rachel, heard it.

"Give me," he said and tried to reach it on the table top.

Laura ignored him and picked it up. With her son these days, the word _no _sometimes set him off, and he was still too young to reason with. She glanced at Maya who put down her cup of tea and tried to distract him.

"Where's your phone, big boy?" She asked referring to the toy mobile phone that Kara had gotten for him.

"Want Mamma's phone. Talk Sean."

Laura ignored him again and walked into the hall, closing the door behind her as she answered. It was Major Parker again. She heard a child wailing and realized that it wasn't her son. The sound was coming over the phone.

"I'm sorry to bother you, Madame President, but Sharon Agathon insists on speaking to you."

"Certainly. I'll be glad to talk to her."

The wailing got louder. "What is going on?" Sharon asked.

Laura could imagine her trying to hold a screaming child and talk on the phone at the same time.

"Major Parker has two children of his own," Laura said. "Why don't you let him take Hera into her nursery and then we can talk."

A long moment elapsed and Sharon said, "Fine. Just a minute."

The background wailing diminished and Sharon came back on the line. "I had just finished feeding Hera when these men knocked at my door and told me I need to come with them. They said you had okayed it."

"Did Major Parker not tell you what happened early this morning?"

"He said something about Leoben, but Hera started crying and then these other two big guys barged into the apartment…"

"Sharon, they don't mean any harm to you or your child. Early this morning someone firebombed Leoben's bookstore. It was obviously a deliberate act." There was silence on the other end so Laura continued. "Major Parker and Agent Darren think Leoben was targeted because he's a Cylon. Naturally we're concerned about you and Hera since you're the only other ones on Caprica."

"Except D'Anna's baby. He's like Hera."

"Yes. My security team is setting up a protection detail at the hospital. We think you should be protected as well and it will be much harder to do where you are located now. We'd like for you to consent to move to a safe location where your security will be easier to maintain. If Leoben's status and location were found, then your current location is probably already known to the perpetrators."

"Do you have any proof someone is coming after us?"

"No, but I'd rather err on the side of caution."

"I like where I live now," Sharon said stubbornly. "We're two blocks from the park. I walk Hera in her stroller every day. I don't want to go somewhere like that shelter where I lived before Hera was born."

Laura's tone became firmer. "We're not asking you to go to a shelter. Sharon, we are talking about _your life_ and the _life of your child_. Please don't suddenly decide to make a stand on this."

"I'd like to talk to Karl first."

"You can't talk to your husband because he's in another solar system. Writing him and hearing from him could take weeks. I cannot stress to you enough that this situation is _urgent_. You need to go with Major Parker and Agent Darren right now."

Again there was a protracted silence. "How do I know they aren't taking me to prison somewhere? How do I know they won't take Hera away from me?"

Laura sighed. In a way she didn't blame Sharon. Even though Sharon had helped the Colonials, she had spent several weeks in the bunker prison with the rest of her brothers and sisters until Laura had insisted she be released after her pregnancy was revealed.

"Would you consent to come live here at Marble House? We've got another empty bedroom and we've got several cribs. Hera could use one of them."

"Are you serious?"

"Of course I am. I wouldn't have made the offer otherwise."

"Okay," Sharon said.

"Then please give the phone back to Major Parker." She had to wait nearly a full minute before he came on the line. "I told Sharon you would bring them to Marble House. Allow her to pack whatever clothing and personal items she needs for her and the child, but tell her to keep it light. We can't move her whole apartment."

"Are you sure, ma'am?"

"She's balking at going with you otherwise. Any word on Leoben?"

"Not yet. The fire is out but everything is still way too hot for the investigative team."

Laura's call waiting beeped. "I've got another call coming in. I'll let security know to expect you later. Bring her in through the lower level and keep this as quiet as you can."

She switched calls before Parker had a chance to say anything else. Her other caller was Edgar.

"I'm at the medical center in the physician's lounge on the maternity floor with Dr. Junius. We're alone. Is it all right if I put you on speaker?"

"Certainly."

She recognized the doctor's cheery voice as he said, "Good morning, Madame President."

"Hello, Dr. Junius. I'm tempted to ask what's good about this morning, but I'm sure you'll disagree."

"There's something good about every morning for us here in the NICU. Edgar has told me you have concerns for Sean's safety."

"Perhaps I overreacted."

"No, I think your concerns are completely justified. Edgar, shall I tell her or do you want to?"

Edgar said, "You were here when it happened. You tell her."

"What?" Laura asked, her voice rising in alarm.

"Sean is fine," Dr. Junius said.

"But something happened?"

"Two days ago we caught an intruder in the regular nursery who was dressed identically to the other nurses in pink and blue scrubs. She had a stolen badge which allowed her to get through several security doors. She was stopped because no one recognized her. We're a very tight-knit group. She said she was a new employee, but new employees never just show up here. They're brought in by a supervisor and introduced to the whole team before they begin a rigorous orientation. Our first concern, of course, was that she planned to abduct an infant."

"Oh, dear gods," Laura breathed.

"Several years ago a newborn was taken from her mother's room when the mother fell asleep. The security team found the woman on the monitors and stopped her vehicle as she was leaving the parking deck. She had placed the infant in a blanket in the trunk. The baby was recovered unharmed. The woman turned out to have mental problems."

Laura didn't remember the incident, but it gave her a deeper appreciation for what the big medical center dealt with on a daily basis. It also increased her anxiety level for Sean's safety.

Dr. Junius continued. "After that our security on this floor became much more stringent. We walk a fine line between allowing the family access to a new member and protecting all of our mothers and infants from anyone whose intentions are unlawful or harmful for whatever reason."

Edgar said, "Dr. Junius and I now wonder if the woman who breeched the regular nursery two days ago either mistakenly thought Sean was there or was maybe testing the waters."

"What happened to her?" Laura asked.

"Impersonating a nurse is not a crime," Dr. Junius said. "She had no identification other than the stolen badge and insisted she was the person whose badge she was using. She hadn't touched an infant or anything else so security took the badge, photographed her and escorted her off the property. We assumed she was another mental case."

"She planned to steal a child," Laura said. "That's a crime."

"We don't know that with any certainty," Edgar said. "We can't arrest people for what we _think_ they're going to do. Her photograph was circulated among the staff up here and it's posted on the bulletin board in the employee break room and here in the physician lounge. Security added it to their facial recognition scanning program as a potential threat. Dr. Junius mentioned the incident to me but since the woman didn't come anywhere near the NICU, we didn't associate it with Sean."

"Until this morning," the doctor added.

Laura's heart had begun to beat faster. "And now it no longer looks like a coincidence, does it?"

"No," Edgar said. "Especially in light of what happened at the bookstore."

"You've brought Dr. Junius up to date on that?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Okay, Edgar," Laura said. "Bottom-line it for me. How safe is Sean?"

There was a long silence. Finally Dr. Junius said, "We've been discussing that for the last thirty minutes."

"And?"

Edgar said, "The problem is that if someone wants to get to Sean badly enough, it will happen…even with a guard posted inside the NICU twenty-four seven."

A horrible thought occurred to Laura. If someone came after Sean prepared to take out any and all obstacles, then they wouldn't stop to try to determine which incubator was Sean's. They'd no doubt kill all the infants in the NICU and possibly the staff as well. She shuddered. Even if the goal was only Sean's abduction, she feared that others would be harmed.

"What are our options?" She asked in a voice hardened by her determination to protect the precious child that she already considered her son.

"I think we should move Sean to Marble House right now," Edgar said. "We've got generator-based emergency power. Dr. Junius said his incubator can be set up there. We'll have to use portable oxygen tanks, but we can handle that."

"Dr. Cardenas has been here almost every day," Junius said. "I've discussed Sean's case extensively with her. She's an excellent pediatrician. I'd have no trouble turning Sean's day to day care over to her. I'm a phone call away and I'll be glad to make house calls as needed including daily visits at first."

"I'd need to run this by Bianca," Laura said. "I won't volunteer her without her consent."

"I'd also suggest round the clock nursing help until we see how it goes. Sean is developing well. His lungs are maturing nicely. Now it's just a matter of getting his weight up."

"Where do you want him?" Edgar asked.

"Put him across the hall from my room."

"In President Adar's old den and study?"

Laura smiled. "Yes, I never thought I'd have a use for Richard's man cave since I prefer the sitting room beside my bedroom."

"All right," Edgar said. "The little man goes into the man cave. I'll be back shortly and we'll handle it. If we can get everything set up today, Dr. Junius thinks we can move Sean tonight. In the meantime I'll have two men posted here."

"Thank you. You are my rock."

Laura ended the call and walked back into the small upstairs dining room. Braedon ran over and reached for her phone. "Talk who?"

"Edgar. He's gone now." She dropped the phone into her jacket pocket, hesitated and looked at Bianca. "We need to talk."

Bianca and Maya shared a look. "Our Marble House family is expanding again, isn't it?" Maya asked.

Laura managed a smile. "You have no idea."

…

As they continued to walk around the circular corridor, Lee said to Dean, "You told us the Cylons from the prison had been detained. Where are they?"

"Are you thinking of staging a jail break for them?" Dean asked sarcastically. "I'm sure you'd like to try them in one of your human courts although it would be hard fitting all of them in that ship you brought here."

Lee kept his cool. "No jailbreak is planned. Think of me as a curious human."

"You saw the corridor we passed that branched into darkness? There's a large room near the end with a number of bunk beds. We put them in there."

"They're being kept in the dark?" Natalie asked.

"Of course not. The Hybrid makes sure they are adequately housed with regard to heat, lighting and air circulation. We feed them the same thing we eat. They're guarded by thirty centurions."

"Thirty. Isn't that overkill?" Lee asked.

"I'm sure it is," Dean said, "but with eight thousand of them aboard this ship, we have a few to spare."

"What do you intend to do with your prisoners?" Lee asked.

"We'll decide that later. Right now we have something more important to deal with." Dean turned to the centurions behind them. "Take us to the Hybrid."

A panel in the wall opened and they entered. Lee had not been able to see the other elevator car because of the bag over his head. Now he looked around at the small room. There were no controls…no buttons to push, no indicators of what level they were on…absolutely nothing that said they were in an elevator. The centurions boarded behind them and the door slid shut.

Their descent was rapid and caused Lee to feel like his stomach was not keeping up with his body. It wasn't an unpleasant sensation but it did leave him wondering how fast they were traveling. The car slowed and stopped so gently that he hardly felt it.

He asked, "How do you keep the car from banging into the elevator shaft if the basestar is in motion?"

"It's all done with magnetism," Dean said. "Much like your mag lev trains but on all four sides."

"Controlled by the Hybrid."

"Of course."

They followed the centurions and turned left down a corridor that looked identical to the one they had left in the top hull. On the way to the Hybrid's Room, they passed the opening to another Control Room only this one was dark and empty of humanoids.

"Redundancy," Dean said. "It would never be used unless we lost the top hull."

"What if you lost the bottom hull?" Lee asked. "Wouldn't you lose your Hybrid?"

"There is another one in the Resurrection Chamber. She would be activated."

"Impressive," Lee said. "Why didn't that happen on the other basestar?"

"They didn't have a backup Hybrid. Because we're the only existing resurrection ship, we do. Our creators understood the importance of at least some of us surviving. We're better armed and better supplied as well."

They reached the entrance to the Hybrid's chamber. Except for the brightly lit tank, the rest of the room was dark. Lee stopped, mesmerized by the tank's inhabitant.

Natalie said, "The Hybrid is…not entirely like us. In design only her upper half looks completely human."

"What does the rest of her look like?" Lee asked, not sure he really wanted to know.

"I'm not sure I can describe it," Natalie said. "From the waist down she's also a…machine. She's not humanoid but she's not like the centurions either. She's attached to bundles of computer cables that allow her to control the ship. The creators referred to her as an android…the step between purely mechanical and humanoid. She's sentient but not in the same way we are."

"Where did she come from?"

"Lucy told me that she was the first attempt of the Graystones to create a body for Zoe. The Hybrid is aware to some extent, but her main function is to control every aspect of life on the baseship. She won't acknowledge you even if you speak to her nor will she obey a command given to her by anyone in this room. She obeys only what comes through the stream from the collective in the Control Room plus sensors that are located all over the ship. You've seen the filaments with the liquid crystals running down them. She monitors all of those so she's capable of autonomous actions on behalf of the ship if the controlling collective were incapacitated in some way."

"Or too slow to respond," Dean said. "Who do you think jumped the ship away on the night you attacked us?"

"Your Hybrid?" Lee responded.

"Yes, she acted before you'd successfully launched a missile into our heart as you did our sister ship."

"Can the basestar function without the Hybrid?"

"To some degree and only if nothing goes wrong."

Lee ventured closer to the tank which looked similar to a rebirth tank set in the floor, yet it was also different. Thick dark bundled cables came from somewhere near the bottom of the tank and attached to the sides. Based on what Natalie had said, he assumed the lower ends of the cables were attached to the Hybrid. He suppressed a shudder.

"Does she feel anything?" Lee asked.

"Not like you or I feel," Natalie answered. "She neither eats nor sleeps. Her respiration is for the purpose of allowing her to speak."

Only the Hybrid's neck and head were above the translucent yet milky goo that covered her. Her dark hair was pulled back into a severe style. It might have been real hair or it might have been synthetic. It looked like a long braid of it came from behind her neck and fell over one shoulder but that was underwater and could be some sort of cable. Lee wasn't sure. Her eyes were fixed and staring yet her mouth moved constantly in speech.

_FTL system check, diagnostic functions within parameters. End of line. Reduce atmospheric nitrogen by 0.03%. Tender is the night. Tender is his love for her. End of line. Infrastructure, check. Software, check. Wetware, check. God is counting. Counting down. The peacemaker is come. A mind that burns like a blue flame._ _Protect him. Sing his praises and rejoice. The peacemaker is come. Bring me the chosen one. Chosen one. Love is measured in heartbeats. Love outlasts death. End of line. End of line. _

"She knows about the peacemaker," Natalie whispered with reverence in her voice.

"How long has the Hybrid been talking about a peacemaker?" Lee asked Dean.

He got a look of incredulity. "How should I know? Do you think I spend my time down here listening to her incomprehensible babbling? She takes care of the ship. That's all that matters to me. She keeps the freezers at exactly the right temperature. She makes sure the microwave and toaster ovens work. She keeps my bath water warm. Why would I want to come down here and listen to her prattle on about it?"

From the darkness at the back of the room a voice said, "She's been mentioning the peacemaker for weeks now...at least several times a day. And she's much more than the ship's caretaker. Her mind is in contact with the Divine. She hears the voice of God. He told her about the birth. How else would she have known?"

They all jumped at the sound. Lee had thought they were alone as apparently had the other two.

"Who's there?" Dean asked fearfully. "Show yourself."

A Two walked into the light.

"Brother Leoben," Natalie breathed. "I feared you had been boxed."

"Not boxed, just not allowed to return to the planet. How's my daughter?"

"John told me Rachel was well and thriving when he left Caprica. He has several pictures of her with Esmari and his son Braedon. I'm sorry I don't have them with me." She turned to Lee. "I'd like for you to meet Rachel's father."

"Well, this is a big surprise," Dean said to Leoben. "Cut short the reunion and explain to me what you're doing in the Hybrid's chamber."

"I spend several hours down here every day listening to her," Leoben said. "It's a comfort to me. What happened to Sonja?"

"Lee and a team unboxed her. She's on our battlestar. She was treated very harshly at the prison, but she doing better."

"I'm glad to hear that. Is John on board the battlestar?"

"Yes. Do you know anything about Petra's husband Simon?"

"He's around. I'm sure we can find him if he doesn't find you first. I wondered who the Colonials would send as a peace envoy. I'm glad it's you."

Natalie smiled. "Thank you."

"When was the peacemaker born?" Leoben asked. "I didn't think he was due yet."

"He came early. I have several pictures of him that John loaned me. I asked for them. I thought our brothers and sisters would like to see them."

"Would you show them to me?"

Natalie took the photographs from her pocket and handed them to Leoben. As he took them, the Hybrid said.

_The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Praise be to God. Twelve planets. Three stars. Handshake established. The next step in our evolution. And a little child shall lead them. The peacemaker is come. Matrix secure. Adjusting centrifugal force levels to normal. Gravity normal. The child is father to the man. Light the corridor. Feed the masses. Fish swim. Birds fly. End of line._

"Does any of that make sense to you?" Lee asked Leoben.

"Some of it. There are those of us who believe that if we understand all of it, we'll be driven mad." He studied the photographs. "The peacemaker isn't in a tank, but he's hooked to machines like our Hybrid."

"Without them he wouldn't survive," Natalie said gently. "He owes his life in part to John's courage and yours and Sonja's sacrifice. When we write our history, brother, your name will be there as will hers."

"Is D'Anna with her son?"

"She didn't survive his birth. She's probably somewhere on this ship but her brain died before she did. She will have no memories of anything since her last download."

"Has the child been named?"

"Sean," Lee said. "His name is Sean."

"Enough jibber-jabber," Dean interjected. "It's time for our guests to meet those chosen to present our demands."

…

While Kara was showering, John returned to his quarters and changed from his duty blue uniform to camo fatigues. He wasn't surprised to see that Kara had chosen the same outfit.

Since Karl and Saunders were off duty, two Raptor pilots that Kara knew only by their call signs, _Red Devil_ and _Tailgate_ took them to the plateau. John had them land the ship half a mile from the prison. He took a communicator and told them to stay with the ship.

Centurions were cleaning up the debris that littered the ground around the prison. Others were digging in the wreckage. Kara thought they might be looking for bodies but she didn't really want to think about their gruesome task.

"Did anybody order them to do that?" She asked her father.

"I don't know."

They kept walking until they reached the lab.

"How are you going to handle this?" Kara asked.

"I'm not sure yet. But just in case it gets ugly, I'd like for you to stay outside."

"Frak that."

"Don't make me sorry I let you tag along."

"Come on, Dad. I want to see that vault room. I've never seen a mummy before…not in person anyway."

"Okay, but only if you make me a promise. If I say leave, you go. No lip. No questions asked."

Kara realized that they would stand there arguing if she didn't consent so she consented.

The inside of the lab was dark after the brilliant sunshine outside. "You'd think they would have put a few windows in this place," Kara grumbled as they waited for their eyes to adjust.

"Windows make heating and cooling and defense a lot harder," John said. "I'm just thankful they weren't stingy with them in the city."

They climbed the stairs to the second floor and entered the resurrection chamber. It was empty, but the door to the next room was open and they heard raised voices. John unsnapped the retention strap on his pistol and preceded Kara into the datastream room. It was empty as well and the lights were low. The voices were coming from the well-lit room with the big vault door.

John glanced at the floor where the commandant's brothers and sisters had beaten him to death and where the Six had fallen after he'd shot her. There was no sign the bodies had ever been there. The centurions had done a thorough clean-up.

Two centurions guarded the vault door, but they remembered him from several nights earlier because they made no attempt to stop him from entering. Kara followed.

Buddy stood in the middle of the room. Lucy was arguing with the three rebirth nurses.

"I am who I say I am! You have no right to question me or why I'm here!"

Nurse Three said, "When the One put his hand in the stream, we saw that all the creators had been killed."

"My physical body was killed, but I had put a…backup copy, my avatar, in this centurion before if happened."

"Hello, Buddy, Lucy, ladies," John said.

"Thank the gods you're here," Lucy said. "Please tell them I have every right to be here."

"I'm not questioning your right to be here," John said. "The problem is that we need Buddy with us and _he_ can't be in two places at the same time."

Buddy said, "I would be happy to go with you, but Lucy's work is important."

Kara asked, "Why can't Lucy transfer to a humanoid body like she mentioned in our meeting?" Kara's suggestion was met with silence so she continued. "Oh, come on. I know you've got some extra bodies in those tanks."

Nurse Three said, "Those are for the needs of our brothers and sisters."

"For the gods' sakes, all she needs is _one_. You can spare _one_ of them. It's not exactly like you're running over with business right now."

"What about it, Lucy?" John asked. "Would that be possible?"

"Yes. Buddy has a T-1 port in his arm just above his wrist. We could attach a cable to one of the empty memory boxes. I could download into it and I would then be transferred to the body in the tank."

"See," Kara said. "All you've got to do is think outside the box." She snickered. "Outside the _box_. Get it?"

"Yes, Kara, I get it," John said. "But I'm probably the only one who does."

"Which body would you like to occupy?" Nurse Six asked Lucy.

"Seven years ago we creators were working on a new model, a body with wavy, dark hair. I don't suppose you've seen one like that, have you? She wasn't left in Settlement Alpha, but I can't imagine she would have been destroyed."

The three nurses looked at each other. Nurse Three finally said, "On the second subterranean level there is a room that is forbidden to us the same way this room once was. It also has a keypad coded entry. We've seen all the other rooms in this building. Unless the body you speak of is in there, then the answer to your question is _no_."

"I would be honored if you would choose my model to download your mind into," Nurse Eight said softly.

"How can I say this?" Lucy said. "It's not that I would have a problem inhabiting any of your models, but the new one had not yet been loaded with any programming. I'd like to start with a clean slate. Besides, it would make it easier for me to work with the humans since I wouldn't have to do something to set myself apart from the rest of you."

"We understand," Nurse Three said. "Shall we go look?"

They all crowded into the elevator at the end of the hall and rode down two levels. The door opened into darkness.

"This is creepy," Kara said. "Like a horror flick when you're screaming at the screen, _Noooooo, Don't walk down that hall._"

"We don't understand," Nurse Eight said.

"Walking into the unknown in the dark is a primal human fear," Lucy said. "It dates to the earliest days of our evolution. Please find the lights and turn them on for us."

Nurse Six stepped off the elevator and found the switch. A series of dim single fluorescent bulbs flickered on down the long hallway. Some bulbs were burned out. Others flickered but would not come on completely. It only increased the feeling of spookiness for Kara.

"It's still creepy," she muttered.

"Lead on," John said. They followed Nurse Six to the other end and a door with a keypad entry.

Buddy quickly pried the front off the keypad and by using a sharp talon, he sliced through all the wires. They heard something click. Buddy turned the door handle and it opened.

The centurion entered the room, found the light switch and turned it on. At first glance it was a disappointment. It was stacked from floor to ceiling with boxes all around the walls and smelled of musty cardboard.

"Bummer," Kara said. "I guess we can get out of here now."

"There is another room beyond this one," Buddy said. "I can hear the hum of electricity."

He quickly began shifting boxes on the far wall until he uncovered a door. The room on the other side looked much like the vault room with the exception that it had only a few computers and three large clear upright cylinders filled with murky fluid. Two were empty. The third contained a body. They could see almost nothing except her blurry female form and dark hair. Her skin was mottled by what looked like mold.

Buddy walked over to the tank and barely touched the thick acrylic. "This is her," Lucy said, "but she's badly degraded by time and lack of care. She would have been Number Nine."

"I'm sorry, Luce," John said. "Maybe later you can try to recreate her."

"Let's go back upstairs," Lucy said sadly.

Once back in the rebirth room, Kara said, "I know you don't want to offend any of these nurses by not choosing their model so here's how we'll do it. I'm going to whisper a number between 1 and 100 to Buddy…and Lucy. The nurses will each guess and the one who gets closest to it is the model that Lucy will inhabit for the near future. That way there won't be any hurt feelings."

The number Kara whispered was _84_. Nurse Three came closest with 80. They located a tank with the shell of a Three inside. Buddy found a T-1 line and connected it to the data port above the bend of his wrist and then to the jack on the side of the metal box attached to the tank. Immediately the lights inside the tank came on and there was movement within. A Three broke the surface and gasped. The nurses held her up and comforted her. In a minute she was breathing normally, but she stared blankly at them.

Buddy said, "Be patient. This is taking longer than a normal download because Lucy is erasing the Three's base programming first."

They waited for nearly ten minutes before the Three smiled, slicked back her hair and said, "Hello, everyone."

"Lucy?" Kara asked.

"In the flesh…or maybe I should say in the Three. Help me up. I need a shower."

"I'll be in the vault room," John said. "Buddy can come with me."

"Me, too," Kara added.

"No, I need you to stay," Lucy said. "I want you to cut my hair. I want everybody to be able to look at me and know me. I want to look different."

"I know how to cut hair," Nurse Eight said. "I would be honored to cut yours."

"Better let her do it," Kara said. "You _do not_ want me to cut your hair." She hurried to catch up with her father and Buddy. When they were in the vault room, she said, "That was easier than I thought it would be."

"It's about time something went right for us," John said. "We should get back to the _G_ with Buddy. Maybe Bill will be able to get this into his report. I'd like to finish the letter to Laura I started last night."

Buddy said, "I will pick several more centurions and tell them to help Lucy in any way she needs."

"We need to get the bodies of the creators out of here," John said. "They deserve a decent burial. I thought about the cemetery in the valley and Yoshimo to speak a few words, but I need to get Bill's permission first."

"I will get some sheets from the nurses and we will wrap them," Buddy said.

"Thanks, Bud. I can always count on you."

When Buddy left to get the sheets, Kara said, "When did you stop thinking of him as a robot and start thinking of him as a friend?"

John thought about her question for a long time. When had he come to regard the centurion as more than a robot? He finally said, "I'm not sure, baby. I just know I was glad to see him when we landed in the valley on our recon mission."

"You were glad to see Natalie, too."

"Yes, I was. I was worried about what might have happened to her when we had to leave her in Settlement Alpha. Look, Kara, to set the record straight, Natalie and I could have had a physical relationship, but we didn't. Sometimes you just know not to go there. She loves Daniel. Last night she wanted to dance with me so she could project and pretend she was dancing with him."

"And you did it?"

"Yes, because when I closed my eyes, I could pretend I was dancing with Laura."

"Gods, Dad, how _pathetic_. Both of you."

"Says my smart-mouth, ungrateful daughter. Why do you think I was sitting in the rec room at 01:00 in the morning in the first place?"

Kara looked at her father and was aware once more of how much he loved her. She put her arms around him. "I love you, Papa Bear, even when you're a hung-over grouch."

…

Leoben rode the elevator back to the upper hull of the basestar with them. Lee knew the story of how Leoben and Sonja had helped John escape with D'Anna and Rachel, Leoben's daughter. Lee had also read in the transcript of John's debriefing the circumstances surrounding Rachel's conception. The Cylon had raped Rachel's mother after he had forced her into marriage against her will. The mother had killed herself after Rachel's birth rather than continue living with her abuser.

The other child John had spoken of, Petra's little girl Cassie who was now somewhere in the city, was not a child of rape. Petra had willingly married a Four, but while John believed Simon was good to her and their child, he had never seen any evidence that Petra loved him. All of that had gone into John's debriefing.

Petra been given to another Four at the prison as punishment for her part in John's escape. No one had attempted to debrief her about her experiences there, but Lee was certain that rape had been part of it...perhaps not with the degree of violence that the human guards had used on Sonja, but Petra had not wanted what had been done to her. Lee was sure of that.

The elevator stopped and they exited. Lee glanced at his watch. He didn't know what time it was on the basestar, but it was after 15:00 on the _Galactica_ and neither he nor Natalie had eaten anything since breakfast.

"You got a vending machine where I could get a pack of crackers and a drink?" Lee asked Dean.

"I think a meal has been prepared. I'll inquire as soon as I take you to the negotiating chamber."

"How did you select your negotiators?" Natalie asked.

"We had first thought to take the earliest of each model on the ship, but that wasn't agreeable to everyone, so we _drew straws _as you humans say. We didn't allow anyone to participate who wasn't originally on this ship. We thought it would be fairer that way."

"A wise decision," Natalie said. "Did you get a short straw?"

"No. I volunteered to do the _meet and greet_…another of your human terms."

"Is there anything we should know about the negotiators?" Natalie asked.

"Just remember that we're here not because of those battlestars over our homeworld right now but because of the sins of our own brothers and sisters and our desire to avoid further bloodshed."

"Was the vote to negotiate unanimous?" Lee asked.

"In the collective the majority rules."

"I'll take that as a _no_," Lee said.

That brought a hint of a smile from Dean. He turned to Natalie. "Your human is more astute than I gave him credit for being."

A door slid open and Lee saw a room furnished only with a long table and chairs.

"Wait here," Dean said. The door slid shut behind him.

With his stomach growling, Lee walked around the bland room. Everything on the entire basestar was generic and plain. The colors were neutral except for the red lights and the walls were bare of any kind of artwork. There wasn't even any signage to designate where they were.

As if reading his mind, Natalie said. "Don't forget about our ability to project. Right now I've imagined a glass-walled room in an office building overlooking a beautiful park."

"Lucky you," Lee murmured as he sat and stared at the blank walls.

Ten minutes later the door slid open and seven Cylons filed in followed by several centurions pushing carts laden with covered platters. The smell made Lee's mouth water. He even saw wine bottles cooling in ice-filled buckets.

Natalie took the initiative. "Greetings, brothers and sisters. I'm Natalie and this is Captain Adama. Would you please introduce yourselves?"

The One removed a dark fedora hat but not his dark overcoat which Lee thought strange since the room was a very comfortable temperature.

"I'm often branded with the name of one of the creators…John Cavil, but I don't choose to go by it. You've met Dean. You may call me Jack."

A Three sat beside Jack. She was very well dressed in a lemon yellow blouse and dark slacks. She was also wearing a silver necklace. So far she was the only female Cylons on board that Lee had seen wearing decorative jewelry. Natalie wore a watch, but that was utilitarian.

The Three said, "D'Anna was the name of Amanda Graystone's mother. I'm _honored_ to carry it since she and Zoe gave it to me."

She shot a sidelong glance at Jack that Lee interpreted as dislike or possibly even contempt. From everything he'd been able to gather from John, there had never been any love lost between the Ones and the Threes. Whether it was based just on their deep religious divide or additional factors, he didn't know. The fact that the Ones seemed to have taken only Sixes and Eights as sexual partners seemed further proof of the rift.

A Two had sat down beside D'Anna. He was as sloppily dressed as the other Twos Lee had met. This one had on a faded t-shirt that had once been black under a worn and frayed denim jacket, also very faded. He needed to shave and get a haircut as well.

"You can call me Leoben. One of the creators, Ben Corso, had a brother named Leo. He combined their names to get mine." He also shot a contemptuous look at Jack. "I've got no problem with it. Names mean nothing. I know who I am."

The stunning blond who sat down across from Lee said, "Call me Shelly."

Lee immediately thought of Shelley Sydell now Shelley Minos. She was also an attractive blond, but she paled when compared to this Shelly.

"Is that also a tribute to one of your creators?" Lee asked her.

She smiled showing perfect white teeth. "No, it was the name of a character in one of your movies, my favorite, _The Secret Six_."

The Four who sat beside Shelly said, "Call me Simon. The name comes from our scriptures, but I am a man of science and medicine. Like Leoben I believe names are immaterial but you humans need them."

A Five had stopped to lift several covers on the dishes. He was the most gaudily dressed of the seven. His shirt was a bright, hot pink and he wore a teal sweater vest over it. He now sat beside Simon. "You're from the Colonies?" He asked Lee.

"Caprica."

"What did they call me there?"

"Aaron Doral."

"Aaron…Doral. Too fussy. Just call me Doral."

Lee managed not to say what he was thinking. _Somehow fussy suits you better._

The last one to enter the room was an Eight who seemed distressed that she couldn't sit directly across from Lee.

"Change places with me," she told Shelly.

"You're late," Jack said. "Primping from the look of it. Sit on the end. If you want the center spot, get here on time."

The Eight sat.

"Stop pouting and introduce yourself," Jack prompted.

"I'm Nina. I took the name from one of our creators, Nina Kelly. She and her twin sister Beka were software engineers at Graystone Industries. The wife of another one of our creators, Dr. Cyrus Xander, was also named Nina."

"It's a very pretty name," Lee said all the while thinking that the name Beka Kelly should mean something to him but not able to remember what.

Nina smiled shyly as Lee's stomach growled.

"Serve the food," Jack said to the centurions. "We've waited long enough. We don't want our guests to faint from hunger."

There was nothing remarkable about the meal, but Lee was so hungry by then that he didn't care.

He cleaned his plate and felt like he could have eaten another when Jack said, "We've introduced ourselves to you. Tell us something about yourself."

Lee gave them a very brief summary of his life starting with, "I was born and raised on Caprica," and ending with the information that he had volunteered to be the human representative to talk to the Cylons in hopes of bringing about a truce or ceasefire.

"Are you married?" Nina asked.

"No, but I'm engaged."

Nina said proudly, "I know what that means. I saw it in a movie. He's pledged himself to someone and she's pledged herself to him. It's something most humans do before they get married, but sometimes the female movie star breaks up the couple."

He managed a weak smile and said to all of them, "How do we begin our peace talks? Since you made the overture to us, maybe you'd like to start."

Jack said, "We met this morning and elected me as the spokesman for the group. We operate strictly as a collective here with all decisions being agreed upon by the majority, but in this situation we can't all talk at once. I hope that's agreeable to you."

"Certainly," Natalie said. "Lee and I will share the honors."

"Fine," Jack said. "To begin I'll answer Captain Adama's question. The reason we sent our _overture_ as you call it is that we realized upon the downloading of the Six from the prison and the information we discovered that our brothers and sisters on the planet had withheld vital information from us while still expecting us to risk everything to protect them."

Natalie said, "In all fairness to our brothers and sisters on the planet, very few of them know what happened to the creators and the Sevens. The majority are just as much in the dark as you were."

"Who does know?" Jack asked.

Natalie answered, "The One at the prison who has been permanently boxed and the One in the city who is still at large. The rest is conjecture on my part. We won't know until we question them in the datastream."

"Give us your best guess." Leoben said.

"I'd rather not do that in case I'm wrong. But I will tell you something that even the Six from the prison doesn't know. There is one copy of the Sevens who survived their cold-blooded and heartless massacre."

The feeling that passed among the others in the room was so strong that even Lee felt it.

Shelly gasped. "Daniel is alive?"

"Only one copy of him. He escaped to the city with Lucy Cain. They were trying to reach the free humans in a valley many miles west of the city when the Cavil from the city and his centurions caught up with them. Lucy was killed. They thought Daniel was dead as well. Both bodies were thrown into a river. Daniel later washed up on the riverbank and was taken to the valley where his wounds were tended by the humans who live there. He recovered and lives with them still."

"God be praised," D'Anna said reverently.

"God had nothing to do with it," Jack said disdainfully. "My city brother's centurions' lousy aim should get the credit."

"The important part here is that a brother we thought was dead is alive," Leoben said.

"There's more good news," Natalie said. "Our creator Lucy Cain was able to save her memories and skills into an avatar. They currently reside in a centurion that we have with us on the battlestar."

Shelly said, "Lucy might be able to extract DNA from Daniel and revive his line."

"That's a possibility," Natalie said. "With her knowledge she will also be able to create entirely new models."

"None of which will happen if this war continues," Lee said. "You've also got to worry that the lab might accidentally be destroyed if the air battles continue."

"Captain Adama is right," Jack said. "It's time to get down to business."

"Before we do that," Lee said. "Do you speak for the Cylons on the other basestar as well?"

"No, but if we reach a satisfactory agreement, then we'll try to win them over to our side."

"What do you think the chances are of that?"

There was silence in the room. D'Anna finally said, "We couldn't even get a consensus from the brothers and sisters on this ship. All we got is a majority."

"Would you be willing for fight with us against them in order to achieve use of the lab facilities on the planet?"

"Certainly you've got more to offer us than that," Jack said.

Natalie spoke up. "The President of the Colonies, Laura Roslin, has made us a solemn pledge to allow us a full share in the government of the planet we call our homeworld and they call Nereid. It will be a truly blended society with everyone sharing equally. There are currently nearly twenty children on the planet that have one human parent and one Cylon parent. President Roslin believes that there are a number of humans who will want to come to the planet to set up farms and businesses with Cylon partners. This is a golden opportunity that we as a race can't afford to let get away."

"Is that the truth?" Nina asked Lee.

"Natalie said it much better than I could," he answered.

Natalie continued. "There's one last thing I must mention before we resume talking about specifics." She looked first at D'Anna and then Leoben and finally Shelly. "For those of you who know and believe in our scripture and the one true God, a child has been born to a human father and a Three, a child that has been predicted in our scripture, the peacemaker."

As Lee had expected, the electric feeling passed among them again.

Natalie took out the pictures of Sean and pushed them across the table. "He's being cared for on Caprica now because he was born far too early to survive on his own, but President Roslin has promised that when he is strong enough, she will bring him to our homeworld. One of the things we'd like to offer to you is the humans' knowledge of saving babies born early such as our sisters seem to have. There is absolutely no doubt that had this baby been born on our homeworld, he would not have survived."

D'Anna grabbed the pictures and thumbed through them slowly. "This is the child of a sister Three."

Leoben took them from her and did the same. Lee waited until all the Cylons had looked at them before he said, "His name is Sean and his father is on our battlestar."

"And his mother?"

Lee looked at Natalie and she continued the story. By the time she finished and answered all their questions, the majority vote was to attempt to locate Sean's mother among the downloaded Threes on the ship even though Natalie convinced them she would have no memory of the last year of her life.

With that they adjourned for the day.

Lee felt like they had accomplished almost nothing except an exchange of information. Nevertheless he was exhausted…and disappointed. Natalie, however, was clearly much more optimistic.

Rachel's father was waiting for them and they walked to the dining hall.

"Diplomacy is never instant," Natalie said. "I would be suspicious if they'd been too eager."

"But you told them everything up front. You didn't hold anything in reserve."

"You're used to dealing with humans. Had I not told them everything at the beginning, I would have incurred their suspicion if I'd revealed it later. I wish we could produce Sean's mother with her memories of him intact. As it is, we may be accused of making the whole thing up."

"She's right," Leoben said. "This group is not far removed from their base programming and some of them have some strange ideas about humans. I believe you about the peacemaker, but only because I saw D'Anna pregnant and I've been listening to the Hybrid."

Natalie said, "They'll sleep on everything we discussed tonight. I think we'll see more willingness to negotiate in the morning."

The food in the dining hall was almost identical to what they had been served for lunch, but again, Lee ate hungrily.

"I need a place to stay tonight," Natalie said to Leoben. "Dean put Lee and me in a room with one bed. Can you help me?"

Leoben chewed and swallowed a piece of toasted bread before answering. "My room has six beds…but they're all occupied by other Twos. I can show you a room where some Sixes bunk."

She smiled. "That would be nice. I'd like to talk to some of my sisters."

Leoben looked at Lee. "You sure you won't change your mind. I'm sure there are men on your world who would give everything they own to spend a night with the First Six."

"Hush," Natalie said. "Lee is pledged to a young woman on the battlestar…and my heart belongs to another."

"You could always project."

"I tried that with a human I know. It didn't work quite the way I thought it would. I was fine until I kissed him. Then I knew he wasn't Daniel. He's…actually a much better kisser than Daniel."

"That's too bad. What did you do?"

She smiled sadly and shook her head. "Not what I wanted to do. He's married. He's of our faith and it forbids the breaking of the marriage vow."

"If you'll show me where my room is," Lee said, "I'll turn in for the night."

The three of them got up and walked down the corridor until they came to a panel that looked like the others. Natalie touched it and it opened. She got the small bag she had brought and told Lee that she would come by for him in the morning in time for breakfast.

"Sleep well," she said before she left and the panel closed.

It didn't take Lee long to shed his uniform and try out the Cylon shower. It had no controls but the minute he stepped into it, water jetted out. It was the perfect temperature. He stood for a long time with his hands propped on the side, bent slightly forward with the warm water beating down on his back. He finally stepped out and the water stopped. He toweled off before he walked naked into the room, turned back the covers and lay on the red satin sheets. He fully intended to get clean underwear out of his bag, but his mind began to drift. He wondered what Kara was doing and if she was thinking about him. He wondered how the next day would go and was thinking about whether their mission would be a success or a failure when he was aware of the lights dimming. The Hybrid must have decided that he was sleeping.

He pulled the red satin sheet over him. It was the last thing he remembered until Kara's voice whispered in his ear.

He rolled over, coming slowly out of sleep to her caress. Then he was suddenly and fully awake. The wrongness of the situation overwhelmed him. The lights were still dim, but not so dim he couldn't see Lida on one side of him wearing nothing but a filmy white nightie and Nina naked on the other. Both were caressing and kissing him, their hands and mouths finding the most intimate parts of his body.

He tried to sit up. "Stop that. No. Please. I can't do this."

He was going to get out of bed, but Nina was gripping him in such a way that he realized any drastic moves would be unwise.

"Ladies, please," he gasped as her hand twisted around him.

"Your mouth says one thing, but your body says something else."

"Look, you're both very beautiful and sexy, but I'm engaged. This is wrong."

"Have you taken vows in a temple of your false gods?" Lida asked, her breath warm against his ear.

"No," he moaned, "but…we're going to…soon. It's not right."

"Your woman isn't here and we are. Relax and enjoy it. We won't tell."

"That's not the point," Lee said desperately. "_I'll_ know it."

Nina pushed him down and straddled him. Lida pulled his hands over his head and held them while she kissed his neck and his chest, her teeth grazing his nipples. He bucked, trying to get Nina off him and realized that was exactly what she wanted.

He finally stopped struggling and whispered, "Please don't do this. Please."

Lida licked his neck and her mouth closed over his, muffling the sound.

"If you don't want us, why are you so hard?" Nina asked innocently.

"We're here to make you feel better," Lida whispered. "We know all about making a man feel better. We learned how from your movies."

"You're the most beautiful man we've ever seen," Nina purred, "so young and strong and…well-built…like a movie star."

Lida's voice at his ear said softly, "Just look at the only men we've had for years and years…Ones, Twos, Fours and Fives. Have pity on us."

Lee tried again to gain control of the situation and realized finally that he couldn't fight both of them. They were too strong and too determined. He didn't remember exactly when Nina got off and Lida got on, because by then physical desire had crowded every rational thought from his brain. Betrayed by his body, they got what they wanted from him.

When they were all lying spent and breathless with their limbs entwined, Nina said, "Was it as good as you expected, sister?"

Lida answered, "Just like my dreams. We'll do it again tomorrow."

For the first time in his life, Lee Adama considered praying to a deity, any deity, although at the moment he wasn't sure what he should ask for…negotiations wrapping up the next day so he and Natalie could leave…or having them fail completely so they could leave. Either way he didn't want to spend another night at the mercy of the Cylon sisterhood.

TBC…


	73. Reluctant Heroes

Chapter 73

Reluctant Heroes

_**Libran**_

_Day 326: A week ago our son was born in the midst of our first snowfall of the year. We named him Allen Jahar Logan in honor of both my Scorpian heritage and Oren's Libran Heritage. He is, of course, the most beautiful baby on the planet, as both his father and I will attest. _

_Captain Prolmar paid us a visit several days ago and told me that he is in the earliest stages of organizing another expedition and asked if I would be interested in accompanying them. Naturally my answer was _no_. He said the expedition was still several years away and that more than a dozen of our original members have already expressed an interest in going back. I asked specifically about Nadine and Ares. Not surprisingly Ares has expressed an interest although Nadine has not. I am sure in that regard she is like me. We now see ourselves as the mother of a child, a precious life that has been given to our care. _

_Nadine decided against marrying him (a wise move in my opinion) however they are living with her mother. He is currently unemployed since the need for mercenaries on Leonis is non-existent at the moment. She thought she might be able to get him a job as a security guard for her employer, Leonis Air, but nothing has developed yet. Ares has instead become Mr. Mom, caring for their child as well as her mother. Nadine says that he is actually a very involved and loving father for little Miriam. I'll have to admit that no one is more surprised at this turn of events than me; however I am happy for her. _

_I also got a congratulatory card from the Blessed Mother (again in her own handwriting) and the assurance that she is offering daily prayers for the health and well-being of both me and my son. I was very touched by her words. She entreated me once more to come for a visit in the spring and bring either the book or a copy of it. I am leaning toward taking the book and donating it to their archives since I no longer have any hope of it being translated otherwise._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

When John and Kara returned from the lab on the plateau, he found Bill in the CIC.

"Let's go to my quarters," Bill said and turned over command of the ship to Colonel Tigh.

Once there John related what had happened on the surface and the fact that they'd brought the bodies of the creators back with them.

"I'd like permission to take them to the valley and lay them to rest in the cemetery there. Buddy has volunteered to go along and dig the graves. I'd also like permission to take Yoshimo along to say a few words…if he doesn't mind."

"You've cleared this with the valley humans?"

"No, sir, but I can't imagine they'd refuse. They've got Cylons working side by side with them."

"When do you plan to do this?"

"Tomorrow morning if you have no problem with it."

"How many bodies?"

John had put that in his last report, but apparently Bill had either forgotten or he'd not read it."

"Six, sir."

"I thought there were more creators than that."

"Daniel and Amanda Graystone died before some of their creations decided to destroy the Colonies. They're buried near Settlement Alpha. Natalie showed me their graves one afternoon while I was living there. Zoe Graystone and Lucy Cain took their places, but Lucy wasn't killed with the others. Her body was thrown in the river at the base of the dam."

"So who will you bury in the valley?"

"Buddy gave me their names. Besides Zoe there was Dr. Cyrus Xander, who was Graystone's assistant from the beginning. He was a very old man by then, more of a figurehead than an active participant. Ben Corso and John Cavil, both engineers, a technician named Drew Tanner and a software engineer, Dr. Nina Kelly."

"Kelly?" Adama said.

"Yes, sir. According to Buddy, she was the twin sister of Beka Kelly another software engineer who worked for Graystone Industries. Beka disappeared near the end of the First War. Buddy told me what he knew about each of them while we were wrapping their bodies for transport."

"I haven't thought about her in a long time."

"You knew Nina Kelly, sir?"

"No, I knew Beka," Bill said.

John could hear sadness in the admiral's voice. He waited respectfully and finally Adama continued.

"I met her on a mission to Djerba, my first mission of the war when I was still an arrogant young lieutenant who thought I was going to win the war for us single-handed."

John smiled. He had felt the same way until his first combat mission and he'd seen what they were up against. He'd realized very quickly that if the Colonials had been fighting for ten years and hadn't won, the addition of one more hot-shot Viper pilot wasn't going to make much difference.

He said, "I seem to remember another young lieutenant who felt the same way until he was facing their Raiders."

Bill managed a faint smile. "The mirror shows a different man today, doesn't it…in more ways than one?"

"You can say that again. If I remember correctly Djerba was a Cylon outpost located on a moon in one of the outer sectors of our solar system."

"Sector 12. Before that it was a ski resort for the Colonies. It was mostly a big hunk of ice, year-round recreation for the rich."

"That doesn't surprise me. The Cylons seemed to gravitate toward ice planets."

"Probably because they were either uninhabited or sparsely inhabited. Beka worked on the centurions for Graystone before the war. When I met her she was supposed to be carrying a virus in a computer chip she wore with her dog tags. She was going to upload the virus into a Cylon communication array and destroy it after it had spread throughout the collective. It turns out she was a Cylon sympathizer. She was betraying us to them."

"Why?"

"She claimed they were only defending themselves. She thought of them as her children. My ECO shot her. I destroyed the chip she was using to do the upload."

"You left her on Djerba?"

Bill nodded sadly. "At the time I thought it was the right thing to do."

"What happened to her?"

He looked down at his desk. "I assume she died there. She was misguided, but she was…she was a good person. She'd dealt with a lot of sadness in her life. Her husband was killed supposedly taking out a Cylon platoon single handed. I later found out that was a lie told to help spur enlistments. He actually died along with his scouting party in a friendly-fire incident if you believe one story or a deliberate fragging if you believe another."

"Which version did Beka believe?"

"I didn't even know that she'd been married until later. I was young. I had a hard time reconciling who she was with what she did."

_Was that before or after you met Laura? _But John didn't ask the question. Bill's feelings for Laura had existed ghost-like between them ever since she and John had started dating. He'd always supposed Laura had been the love of Bill's life. Now he realized that Bill had strong feelings for another woman, brief though their relationship was.

John said, "One misguided deed doesn't make a person bad. I hate to think that's the way she'll always be judged."

"For several years I was convinced I did the right thing in leaving her behind. Now…now I wish I'd gone back for her."

"We were at war. If you'd gone back, you might have died, too."

Bill sadly nodded again. "Her sister is with the bodies you recovered?"

"Even though they're completely dried out and mummified, Buddy can still identify each one…if you're interested."

"Where are they now?"

"I had Buddy take them to the morgue until we could decide what to do with them."

"I'll let you know about taking them to the valley. Do you have anything for the diplomatic pouch? General Vargas just sent his letters. I believe you were working on one for Laura."

"How long have I got?"

"I'll give you thirty minutes. Then the transport has to leave."

"I'll have a letter to you in twenty."

…

Laura stood before the Quorum. Billy had notified everyone of an emergency meeting for two p.m. that afternoon. She had not prepared anything formal to present to them, but felt like she should let them know what had happened starting with the fire in the early hours of the morning.

She glanced around the Quorum chamber. It was a quarter past the hour and two of the members still had not arrived…Elrad Hunt who represented Picon and Alisander Asiel from Aerilon. Her vice-president was also absent. He was in Antioch trying to help determine how much of the city would be rebuilt using government funding. When he left there he was going to Kinsdale and then to Delphi on the same fact-finding mission.

As always when divergent groups were involved, there was a tremendous amount of squabbling about who should get the biggest slice of the cubit pie. There was not going to be a way to please everyone and she knew it, but she also knew the majority of Capricans would never stand for their taxes going up right now no matter how far behind on the rebuilding they had fallen.

She tapped on the table and then said, "I'm aware that Mr. Hunt and Mr. Asiel are absent, but I'm also aware that you all have duties that require your attention." She paused. For once Tom Zarek had no comment so she continued. "I'm sure you've all seen the news about the fire near Caprica University this morning."

Sarah Porter said, "The news reports are saying it started as a result of arson."

"That's correct. Someone firebombed Leoben Conoy's book store."

"The bookselling Cylon," Zarek said. "Did they get him?"

Laura counted to five before she calmly said, "The Fire Marshall and his investigative team haven't been able to get in yet. It's still too hot. Apparently the accelerant used was rocket fuel which I was told is surprisingly easy to obtain if you know the right people. The bookstore is a total loss as well as most of the other business establishments on the block. More lives were impacted by last night's cowardly act than just Leoben's. However since he was the only one who lived at his place of business, his is potentially the only life lost."

She made a point of looking at Zarek who managed to look surprised.

Marta Shaw also looked at Zarek. "Are you wondering if you need to keep trying?" She asked sarcastically.

Laura managed not to smile although it pleased her that Zarek had obviously lost Marta's support for his extremist position on the Cylons.

"I won't even justify that question with a reply," Zarek said. "I will ask Madame President why she called us together to tell us something we could read on the internet or get on a 24-hour news station."

"Because last night's attack was directed at one of the two Cylons on Caprica, we have reason to believe that Sharon Agathon and her child might also be in danger. I want to announce that we have taken them to a safe location. We're also in the process of moving Sean out of the NICU at King's Bay Medical Center. He will also be taken to a safe place."

"Dear gods," Sara Porter gasped. "You don't think a mother and child or a helpless infant would be the targets of…of whoever did this, do you?"

"I know that I'm not willing to take that chance. I also don't want to think that innocent people around them might be put at risk, but we have reason to believe that might be the case."

Again she made a point of looking at Zarek. He refused to look at her, but instead played with the pen that lay on the table in front of him.

_I hope you're getting the message you murdering coward, _she thought. Instead she said, "By protecting Sharon and her child and Sean, we hope to thwart the perpetrators of the firebombing."

Still looking down Zarek finally said, "I suppose Caprican tax dollars are being used to guard them?"

"Only in the sense that their guards are already performing that function for me. Sean still requires around-the-clock nursing care. That will come out of my own pocket."

"So you say."

"Are you accusing me of lying to the Quorum?"

"Will you allow the Government Accounting Office to audit your records?"

"They already have access to records of all moneys spent by Marble House. As I'm sure you're well aware, I have a budget. So far this year I'm well under it since I don't do nearly as much entertaining as previous presidents have done."

Marshall Bagot asked, "As unlikely as it seems, what are you going to do if this Leoben turns up alive somewhere?"

"I'm going to do my best to persuade him to get on the next transport ship to Nereid. There are several Cylons currently on the _Galactica_. I'm sure Admiral Adama can find room for one more."

"Speaking of the admiral," Jacob Cantrell said, "what news from him?"

"Nothing for the last week. Colonel Spencer assures me that a transport will show up today. They have a seven-day window. If we don't hear today, a ship will be dispatched in the morning to check on the situation."

"Why do you think the admiral has kept silent for the last week?"

Before she could answer, Zarek said, "I'd say we're going to get another transport full of bodies."

"Not necessarily," Laura said. "It might also mean that nothing of significance is happening."

She heard the faint chime of Billy's phone and knew that meant he was getting a text message. She glanced at him, and he said, "Perfect timing. The transport landed at the airbase twenty minutes ago. Colonel Spencer is on his way to your office."

"Well timed indeed, Madame President," Zarek said. "I guess you'll let us know the news."

"Oh, you can count on that, Mr. Zarek."

"And let us know if Leoben Conoy shows up. I guess if he got trapped in his bookstore, the Colonies will be saved the expense of cremating him."

Marta said, "My gods, Tom, your crudeness knows no limits."

He smiled. "It must be all those years I spent in prison for trying to help a downtrodden people."

Laura stood. "Billy and I need to get back to Marble House to hear the news that Colonel Spencer is bringing. Please feel free to remain and commiserate with Mr. Zarek on the woes of his incarceration."

"I hope you've got the Cylon and half-Cylons stashed well," Zarek said. "I would imagine that if someone was determined enough, he'd find a way to get to them."

"Thank you for the warning. I'm sure someone of your experience can say that in all truthfulness."

As she and Billy walked to her waiting car, he said, "Don't let Zarek get to you. He's trying to psyche you out like he always does."

"I know. He seems to know just what to say to get to me. A blended society and the half-breed children are my weaknesses and he knows it."

Billy smiled. "You're getting really good with the comebacks."

"Zarek is like the school bully. The minute you let him know he's intimidating you, he's won."

"You've still got to take him seriously, especially those indirect threats."

"Oh, Billy, how well I know."

"I think you should tell Edgar what he said."

"I will. As soon as I see Colonel Spencer, I will ask Edgar to look at the video recording of the Quorum session and give me his opinion on whether Zarek was just trying to intimidate me or whether he poses a real threat."

"He's a cold-blooded murderer. I don't think you should underestimate him."

"I know Adar had to make a hard choice when he promised Zarek a full pardon for taking his men to Tauron under terrible circumstances. Without them we wouldn't have had the extra tylium that allowed us to gain our freedom last year. Zarek made it very clear to Richard that he wouldn't agree to go without the promise of a pardon. Richard told me that he was repulsed by what he had to do, but he felt that he had no choice. He said he would have made a deal with the devil if he thought it would have helped us gain our freedom. In the long run I think that's just what he did."

"You think the price was too high?"

"Without that pardon, Zarek would never have been allowed to serve on the Quorum no matter how many signatures he got on a petition."

"Real or fake."

They exited the building and her guards hustled them into the backseat of the limo.

"You know," she said, "he got lucky in that he had just enough legitimate signatures on his petition asking him to represent Tauron on the Quorum. Just like we thought he would do, he blamed the signatures of the dead Taurons on his man August Bernard who also happens now to be conveniently deceased."

"And dead men tell no tales."

"Exactly."

"Zarek's luck has got to run out sometime. It's got to."

Laura settled back into the seat and sighed deeply. "We can only hope."

Traffic was light and they made the short trip to Marble House in record time.

Billy brought Laura a cup of tea and Colonel Spencer a cup of coffee. Spencer told her that Adama's report was so lengthy that he hadn't had time to read it. All he'd done was make a copy. He related the high points of the last week based solely on the summary page of the report.

She in turn told him the details of the prior evening's firebombing and what had transpired since.

Spencer shook his head. "It doesn't sound good for the Cylon."

"No." She then related the decisions they had made about moving Sharon and Hera and Sean into Marble House. She finished with, "I feel like everything is spinning out of control here?"

"Probably because a small group of individuals is determined to make it look that way. There are over seventy million humans on the planet that aren't causing any problems. It only takes one or two sometimes to turn our lives upside down."

She sighed, "Yes, you're right. I want so much to believe that everything is going to work out for us, that we'll be able to forge a lasting peace with the Cylons and learn to live together on Nereid. I know now that it will never happen here. After last night I'm more convinced of it than ever."

Spencer finished his coffee and stood. "I know you're busy. I'll leave you to read the reports. Please call me if you want to discuss anything."

Laura stood and held out her hand. "Thank you, Colonel. When does the transport ship go back?"

"In the morning. I'll send a courier shortly after nine for the pouch going back."

When Spencer was gone, Laura dumped the contents on her desk. Bill's report was the largest document in the bag. There were three letters. Two of them were addressed to Maya. Laura recognized Hunter's handwriting and also Kara's. The other letter was from John to her. She sat down and used her ivory-handled letter opener to slit the top of the envelope. She took out the letter and unfolded it.

_My dearest Laura,_

_I've tried several times to write and something has happened each time. Now I'm down to the wire. The transport leaves soon. Read Bill's report if you want a chronological description of everything that's happened during the last week. I'm sure you'll see I was in the middle of a lot of it and not due to my choice. It goes with my new job description which seems to put me at the disposal of both Bill and General Vargas. Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. It just hasn't left much time for other things-like writing letters._

_I loaned Natalie the pictures you'd sent of Sean. I hope she brings them back from the negotiations she and Lee are having right now with one of the basestars (see Bill's report for details) but in case not, could you send a couple more of him and Brae, and you, too. _

_At the risk of sounding trite and repeating myself from my last letter, I can't tell you how much I want this war to be over so I can be with you and my sons. Hug Brae for me and tell him that his dada loves him. And tell Sean I can't wait to meet him. I miss you and I love you. John _

Laura read the letter again. Negotiations on a basestar? Lee and Natalie? Did John mean that literally? She lay the letter down on her desk and picked up Bill's report. Could it be possible? Could they be so lucky as to be already negotiating?

It took her nearly two hours to read the entire report. The room gradually darkened in the late autumn twilight. She turned on her desk lamp. Billy brought her another cup of tea and she still read because at the end of Bill's report was one equally as long from General Vargas' point of view. John's name appeared a number of times in each report and she finally understood what he meant by his remark about his new job description.

Some might say that all his suffering on the planet had not been for nothing since his knowledge now helped their cause. General Vargas was especially complimentary about John's actions at the prison on the morning it was destroyed. She leaned back in her chair and thought of her husband, of his modesty when it came to his own achievements, of the way he had always supported her in her political ambitions, of how he stood back and let her take the spotlight. If ever the term _reluctant hero _could be applied to anyone, it would be him. He'd never sought the position he now held, but he'd accepted it and was doing his best.

But what almost overwhelmed Laura was the news that Lee and Natalie had jumped to a set of coordinates sent by Cylons on one of the basestars. They had assumed it was the resurrection ship, but Laura wondered if she would have been so trusting. She could only pray now that Lee was all right.

Billy came in to see if she needed anything before he went home. Her concern must have been evident on her face.

"Bad news?"

"I'm not sure what to make of it. I would say either very good or very bad."

Billy sat and for the next half-hour they talked about the implications. When he finally rose to go, Laura felt drained. She carried the reports with her up to her quarters and left them in her sitting room. Later that night she would reread parts of them and combine them into a report that she could submit to the Quorum.

Her spirits didn't revive until she entered Brae's playroom. Sharon Agathon sat on the couch with Hera on her lap. Neither Maya nor Bianca was in the room. Braedon was on the floor with Rachel and Esmari, but when he saw her, he got up and ran to her. Seeing her beautiful son never failed to lift her spirits. She lifted him into her arms, noting once again how much he seemed to have grown in the last six months.

"Hello, my little man. I've missed you so much today."

Braedon pointed to Sharon and said, "Hewa."

"Yes, another playmate for you."

"Hewa cries. Her afwaid."

Sharon said, "Hera hasn't been around other children very much. She hasn't even been around other adults."

Laura smiled. "I think that's going to change. Where are Maya and Bianca?"

"Across the hall," Sharon answered. "I told them I'd watch the children. They're getting things ready for Sean."

"Where Sean?" Braedon asked.

"You'll get to see him soon," Laura answered.

"Him my brudder."

"Yes, he's your brother. Did Maya tell you about Sean?"

"Him too little. Him like Mawi's doll."

"Bianca talked to him earlier," Sharon said.

Esmari had crawled over to them and Braedon squirmed to get down.

Laura sat on the couch beside Sharon. Hera leaned against her mother and put her thumb in her mouth.

"Hera is a beautiful little girl. She looks like you."

"Thank you."

"I know this isn't the best situation," Laura said gently. "But I couldn't bear to think something might happen to you and your child."

"We'll never be safe on Caprica, will we?"

"I don't think so. I'd like for you to consider going to Nereid after we've established a coalition government there. You and your family will be important ambassadors for us."

"As long as Karl and I can be together with Hera, I don't care where we live."

Laura smiled. "I feel the same way about John and Braedon and Sean."

"Would you let me see Sean?"

"Of course."

"Dr. Junius is awesome, isn't he?"

"I've been very impressed. I credit him fully with saving Sean's life."

"And all the technology. Don't forget about that?"

"That's something else we'll take to Nereid with us," Laura said.

"Kara said you told her one time that the children are our future. You really believe that, don't you?"

"The children are _always_ our future. The care we give them and the way we raise them are all that makes me hopeful of our ability to survive together."

…

Kara ate dinner with her father in the officer's mess and then left to join a triad game with Karl and Saunders and some of the other pilots.

She grinned as she picked up her tray. "I'll be a few cubits richer in the morning."

"Have fun, baby. You never can tell when this little bit of down-time will be over."

"I know, Dad. That other basestar could still jump in on top of us any time. We all know it."

John was just finishing his desert, a particularly good piece of cherry pie, when Natasi, Sonja and Jade appeared in the doorway. As soon as Jade spotted him, they headed in his direction. He could tell by Natasi's expression that they were on a mission.

"Have a seat, ladies," he said as they approached the table. "Would you like some desert?"

"I would," Jade said.

"She can eat all she wants and never gain an ounce," Sonja snipped.

"That's because I don't sit on my ass all day long dreaming up ways to seduce men," Jade snapped back.

John said to Jade. "They've got cherry pie and chocolate cake. Which one do you want?"

"Ummm. Chocolate cake."

He got up and walked to the serving line. _I'm too tired to referee one of their cat fights, _John thought as he returned to the table with a piece of cake and a fork. Natalie had been gone less than twelve hours and already her calming influence on her sisters was missed.

When he was seated, Natasi said, "We heard that you brought the creators back from the lab today."

"That's right."

"We also heard that you want to take them to the valley and bury them."

"Buddy told me," Jade said between bites of cake. "He's was all for it until Natasi talked to him."

"You can't do that," Sonja said. "They deserve a place of honor in the ancient temple outside the city."

"Last time I checked, the city was still under Cylon control," John said. "I doubt they'll let us jump down there and conduct a service."

"One day things will be different," Natasi said. "Then we'll bury them with all the honor and reverence they deserve. Their graves will become a site for all our brothers and sisters to visit. A place of holy pilgrimage."

"Buddy agreed after Natasi explained it to him," Jade added. "He wanted us to tell you."

"Fine with me," John said. "They're your creators. Tell Buddy I understand."

"Will you tell Admiral Adama?" Sonja asked.

"I'll tell him. In fact I'll go tell him right now." He stood and picked up his tray. "Enjoy the cake. Goodnight, ladies."

Bill and Colonel Tigh were eating dinner at the table in his quarters. One of the Marines opened the door and let John in.

"Come in and have a drink," Tigh said. Bill nodded his assent and gestured toward a tray that sat on an end table near the couch.

John didn't want a drink. He wanted to take a shower and go to bed, but once again he saw the wisdom of not refusing. He poured an inch of whiskey in a shot glass and joined them.

"What's up?" Bill asked.

"I've been visited by the three Cylons still on board. They don't want us to take their creators to the valley. They want to wait until we can bury them at the temple in the city. I've got no feelings about it one way or the other."

Bill said, "I went to the morgue this morning after we talked. I wish I hadn't. It was painful to imagine what their deaths must have been like."

"I imagine they were quick. Centurion bullets are large caliber."

John didn't know what else to say. If Beka and Nina Kelly had been identical twins, then Nina would have looked like an older version of the woman Bill had once known and obviously had some feelings for. He felt like a lot of memories had been stirred up in the admiral…memories he was trying to deal with. More ghosts of the First War.

Then as he often seemed able to do, Bill switched gears and moved on.

"I've been thinking about all the information down there at the lab," he said. "I looked at the images Buddy transmitted of all the computers in that vault room. It's possible they contain information that might help us either now or in the future. I included a letter in the diplomatic pouch to be given to Dr. Rafferty and asked him to put together a team of computer engineers. I want them working at that lab as soon as possible."

"Lucy might not like it," John said.

"We don't really care what she likes or doesn't like," Tigh said belligerently. "Putting a copy of her brain inside a damned centurion. What kind of person does a crazy think like that?"

"A smart one considering what happened to them a couple of years later," John said. "You've got to admit that we got a lot of good information from her."

Bill said, "She'll lead the research team. I'm not trying to shut her out."

John nodded. "I think that's a very good idea."

Tigh didn't comment, but John knew he disagreed by the expression on his face. Tigh would probably never budge on his feelings about the Cylons. John finished his drink, thanked the admiral and said he'd tell the three Cylons that for now the creators would remain in the _Galactica's_ morgue.

Twenty minutes later he had showered and was in his bunk. He wondered very briefly how things were going for Lee and Natalie. They should have been on his mind more that day, but with everything that had happened, his thoughts had been occupied elsewhere. With both of them now in mind, he said part of the prayer, but sleep claimed him before he finished it.

…_You guide my footsteps on the path that You have chosen for me. Though my courage may falter before my enemy, Your courage never falters. Though my words may die in my throat, Your voice never fails…_

…

Lee wished he could have seen Natalie's face when she first opened the door panel and saw him in the big bed with Lida on one side and Nina on the other because he would have known if her expression was one of surprise or not. But he was still asleep when that happened.

His first clue that she was in the room was when he heard her shaking Lida awake and telling her to get her clothes on and leave. She did the same thing to Nina.

When the two Cylons were gone, Lee sat up feeling dazed and immediately afterward, awkward and embarrassed.

"Is that why you didn't want me here last night?" Natalie asked with a hint of amusement in her voice.

Lee felt sick. "Gods, no. I had no idea…" He rubbed his face with his hands. "I need a shower. I won't take long."

He didn't. He felt like he set a speed record for showering and shaving. He managed the latter without cutting himself, something of a miracle since his hand wasn't the steadiest. For the moment he ignored the marks on both shoulders. One of them had gotten him with her fingernails, probably Lida since he thought he remembered grasping her wrists once, but he wasn't sure. He wasn't bleeding, but the skin was raw and welted and stinging from the warm water and soap of his shower.

He put on his uniform pants and then a t-shirt before he slid his arms into the jacket. Where it rested on his shoulders, the skin burned like he'd been branded.

_Frak. Frak. Frak._

He exited the bathroom and sat on the bed to put on his socks and boots. The sheets had already been stripped.

"Housekeeping is very efficient on this baseship," Natalie said, "which means the Hybrid monitors everything down to the smallest details. Sometimes I wish we'd had them in the settlements and the city."

Normally Lee would have let a remark like that go since he wasn't even sure if Natalie was serious. Instead he felt confrontational.

"Isn't that the lazy way of dealing with life…letting another machine make all those decisions for you? You've got to admit that you learned a lot more about making decisions and managing your life without one."

She didn't answer him right away, so Lee rummaged in his bag until he found the leather-bound folder containing a thick notepad. He knew he should make enough notes that he would be able to easily write a complete report for his father when they returned. How could he possibly put in last night's encounter, but how could he leave is out either? He finally decided to wait and see if it was relevant to the outcome of the negotiations.

"Do you want to talk about what's really bothering you?" Natalie asked.

He shook his head.

"Did you invite them in?"

"I woke up and found them in bed with me."

"You sound very unhappy about it."

"You expect me to be dancing for joy?" He snapped.

"I have a hard time blaming my sisters."

"I don't."

"You're a very handsome man, Lee. You're young and virile…need I say more?"

"Please, don't."

"You're distressed."

"I don't expect _you_ to understand."

"I probably understand better than you think I do. My model is the most sensual one of all. Do you think I'm completely impervious to the charms of a handsome human? Do you think desire is something I can restrict to my own race?"

"I'm starving. Can we get some breakfast now?"

Natalie accepted his rebuff in the same calm manner she seemed to accept everything. Only as they were walking down the corridor did he realize that she wasn't talking about him. The handsome human she had trouble resisting was John. And as soon as he thought about John, he realized something else.

_What I'm feeling right now isn't just about me completely losing control of a situation. It's about Kara, too. I've betrayed her the same way John betrayed Laura. _

Ever since Lee had read the transcript of John's debriefing, he'd been confident that he would never have given into temptation that way. Now his smug self-righteousness vanished. He had judged a friend using a yardstick that few men could have measured up to. Lee now wondered if even his father would have been able to resist the beautiful and determined Cylon women.

Natalie said, "I'll stay with you tonight and guard your virtue."

"I hope we won't be here tonight. I hope we can wrap this up today and get the hell out of here."

She smiled. "But in case we don't, I'm volunteering to guard you. Unless, of course, you want to repeat the experience…possibly with several others."

"You think Lida and Nina will talk?"

"Certainly you're not naïve enough to think they won't. In fact I'm sure by now one or both of them have already shared their memories via the stream. All the sisters on board will be able to access them…if they haven't already."

"I'd like Nina removed from the negotiating team," Lee said, cold anger again apparent in his voice. "Can you help with that?"

"I possibly could, but I think you're making a very big mistake in asking."

They reached the dining hall where they'd eaten the night before. As they entered, a hush fell over the room. A number of Sixes and Eights turned to stare at him. Several of them smiled in a way that made Lee feel naked.

He and Natalie didn't speak again until they got breakfast trays. Lee led them to as remote a table as he could find, aware the whole time of the eyes that followed them.

When they were seated, he asked, "Why do you think it would be a mistake to ask that Nina be removed from the team?"

Instead of answering him, Natalie said, "For over six years now I've lived with the knowledge that one of my brothers was behind the killing of an entire Cylon model and that his centurions killed our creators to cover it up. I told no one because the Angel of Death or one of his brothers would have killed and boxed me. I had to bide my time and wait."

"I already know the story about the murders," Lee said impatiently. "What does it have to do with getting Nina off the team?"

"For six years I waited, but I didn't spend all my time mourning the death of the man I loved. I began to read everything I could find in our archives and the books some of the humans had brought about war. But books on war weren't the only ones I read. I also read an interesting book on the negotiations that officially ended bitter conflicts between several of your Colonies. I knew I had to be prepared for any possibility. I knew one day I would lead a group of my brothers and sisters against another group. I waited and I prayed daily to God for guidance. During a time when I was the angriest and most impatient, when I almost made a big mistake and confronted the Cavil in the city, God sent Yoshimo to me and above all else Yoshimo taught me patience. He also taught me calming techniques. He is a man of peace and forgiveness and he taught me techniques I've used as we've gone to war."

Lee had begun to eat, momentarily forgetting his own mental torment as he assuaged his hunger. He swallowed a mouthful of eggs and toast. The eggs were runny and the toast cold. The Cylon chefs could use some cooking lessons, but Lee was too hungry to be critical.

"You've already mentioned that, too. When that Raider showed up, you were cool as ice and I was hyperventilating like a bellows. Maybe you should have brought Yoshimo instead."

"There's such a thing as being too passive. Unfortunately Yoshimo's strengths are not prized among my brothers and sisters as they should be. We need a military man to impress upon the others that the admiral is serious and also that he'll abide by the decisions we make. That's why you were the obvious choice. You sell yourself short, Lee."

"Look, Natalie, I never pretended to be a skilled negotiator. I'm just the admiral's son. Between me, John and General Vargas, I was the most expendable. I didn't include Colonel Tigh for obvious reasons."

"This is hardly the time make a joke like that," she said coldly.

"Then get to the point. Why would I want to continue to sit across the table from an Eight who…who…" _all but raped me._ He couldn't bring himself to say it but he knew that Natalie got the point.

She put her fork down and studied him carefully. Lee dropped his gaze. Finally she said, "My next question is not voyeuristic in nature, but was your encounter with Nina satisfactory to her?"

Lee felt hot blood begin to rise into his cheeks. He shrugged.

"I could put my hand into the stream and find out," she said with a bit of mischief in her voice.

"You could also _ask her_. I'm sure she'll be happy to tell you."

"My point is this…if you've won her over, then we _want_ her on the negotiating team. She'll be much more inclined to see things our way. My biggest regret about your encounter is that the Six who shared your bed was Lida and not Shelly."

"I'll pretend you were joking."

"You just experienced the fantasy of many of the men on your battlestar. I can't understand why that is so disgusting to you."

"I'm in love with Kara. Why can't you understand my feelings?"

She leaned forward and said softly, "I still love Daniel, but were John agreeable I would gladly have shared myself with him."

"I'm through talking about this. Change the subject," Lee said coldly.

"All right. We'll talk about the Cylon negotiators. Based on my assessment of them, D'Anna will do whatever is necessary to insure that the prophecy of the peacemaker comes true. The same for Leoben. Shelly could go either way. She's a Six, but she's not a deeply religious Six. Several times yesterday she agreed with Jack. There's always the possibility that they have an intimate relationship since the Ones take Sixes and Eights as lovers. Jack and Doral will be a much harder sell, of course. Simon…I'm not sure about him. The Fours are men of science, not religion, but he's also capable of reason. I saw the interest in his eyes when he looked at the photograph of Sean's incubator and realized that there's a whole world of medicine and technology about which he knows nothing. I intend to emphasize that again today. I'm still not sure, though, that it will be enough to sway him totally to our cause. In the past he's always sided with the Ones, but this might be a way to reach him. Many Eights are more naïve and innocent than the rest of us. The Eights on this baseship would be particularly so because they've never been around humans. Nina will probably side with whatever position Jack takes unless, of course, she's been swayed _by her encounter with you_."

Lee was suddenly ashamed at his recent outburst. Natalie wasn't being glib. She _really_ wanted the negotiations to succeed.

"I can tell you've given this a lot more thought than I have," he said. "Just please don't tell me I need to frak Shelly tonight."

She smiled slightly. "No, I'll concede that you've done your part already."

_Why don't you frak one of the iffy guys? Jack or Simon or Doral. _But he couldn't bring himself to say that either. He cut into a pancake. They weren't nearly as good as the ones on the _G_.

Natalie continued softly, almost like she was talking to herself. "I've been thinking about this day for over six years. I always thought it would come at the end of a lengthy and bloody war that would take the lives of many thousands of us and many more of you. There were times I despaired of it ever happening at all. This is a gift from God…a chance to form an alliance or at least sign a truce with an entire baseship before a great deal of blood is shed on both sides."

"I don't think you even need me," he said. "You could have done this by yourself."

"We each have our strengths and we each have our weaknesses. Without you the sincerity of the humans would have been in question. Your presence here is critical. I'm sorry for what happened to you last night, but in the whole scheme of things it's a small sacrifice for you to have to make. You can't tell me that it was totally without pleasure."

Lee looked down at his empty plate. He couldn't in all honesty tell her it had not been pleasurable, at least part of it. He finally realized that while Natalie expressed regret for what her sisters had done, she really only cared about the positive spin she could put on it. Natalie was focused on bringing the killers of her beloved Daniel to justice and achieving a blended society on the planet. She could rationalize anything that helped her achieve that goal…even throwing him under the bus…or rather under a couple of her sisters.

"Tell me something," Lee said unable still to let it go. "If you'd brought a female with you…say Kara, and last night Leoben and Simon had decided they were tired of the Threes, Sixes and Eights and they'd gone after her and _raped_ her, would you have been so smug about it? Would you have told her that her sacrifice was necessary for the cause?"

Again those blue eyes bore into his. He finally saw confusion there. "Is that what you feel happened to you? You think you were _raped_? Everything I've read or seen treats males and females very differently in that regard."

Lee dropped his eyes. "I asked them to stop. I made my feelings clear."

"Then I'm sorry. But it's done. We can't turn back the clock and undo it. We have to move forward, Lee. We have to. Please let us use whatever advantage was gained by your _sacrifice_. Let Nina remain on the team."

The look in her eyes had become one of near desperation. She wanted his cooperation. She needed it for the negotiations to succeed. He tried to imagine what his father would say, whether he would be outraged at what had happened or if he would do like Natalie and basically tell Lee to suck it up and deal with it on a personal level. It was a no-brainer. Bill would tell him to deal with it and do his job and right now his job was to negotiate a truce with the Cylons on this basestar.

"So what's our strategy today?" He finally asked. "I'll do whatever you think is best."

Natalie visibly relaxed. "We listen to their demands. If we think they're unreasonable, we calmly try to sway them to a more reasonable position. You know your father better than anyone and your father _is_ the military for all intents and purposes. You must have some idea about how much he'll give before he draws the line."

"At the very least he'll want them to stand down if we have to invade the city and then the settlements. He'd prefer their help, but he'll settle for non-interference."

"All right. That's the least we'll accept. Of course I'm going for broke…as you humans say. I'm asking for their help and I'm going to ask them to persuade the other baseship to go along."

"All right. That's our plan."

Natalie reached across the table and gently grasped Lee's lower arm. "Please look at the big picture. This is so much more important than either one of us. We're talking about the _future of our two races_. We'll never have another chance like this. _Never!_"

Lee nodded. He understood what Natalie said. He understood the importance of this negotiation to the Colonials. If they could broker a treaty now and especially if they could get the other basestar to go along, the result might be many thousands of lives saved. But even as he looked at the big picture, Lee knew there was another one he had to consider…his own personal one. He might have sacrificed his happiness for a peaceful, blended society. He knew he would have to tell Kara what had happened. He would have to man up and tell her the same way John had told Laura and he would have to ask her forgiveness. They had weathered several rough times during the three years they'd been together. Would they make it through this one as well?

"You'll be a hero to your people, Lee," Natalie said softly. "For all of us."

"I've never sought that. Never."

"Most true heroes don't. They answer a call to duty and they give their best just the way you've done and will continue to do."

A centurion waiter came by and took the meal trays that they had pushed aside.

"I need to write up as much of what happened yesterday as I can remember for my report. Can we go to the negotiating chamber now?"

Natalie rose. "Certainly."

He was aware that the same eyes that had followed them as they'd entered the dining hall followed them as they left. It was a feeling Lee knew he'd never get used to.

…

Kara woke up the next morning thinking about two things…Lee and the cubits she'd won in the triad game. It had started small, just her, Karl, Saunders and Hot Dog. Before it was over, three others had joined them. One was the pilot of the Raptor that had taken her and her father to the plateau. She knew him only as _Tailgate_. Saunders introduced him as Matthew Cruz. Cruz quickly corrected that to Matt. He was young, cocky and good-looking. Brown-haired and brown-eyed, he reminded her a little bit of Zak.

Matt Cruz apparently didn't know or didn't care that Kara had a boyfriend. He flirted and flattered, calling her Top Gun most of the time. Karl finally had to tell him to tone it down. Kara could tell that Saunders was trying not to laugh on several occasions…him and Hot Dog both.

When the game was finally over and most of the night's winnings were in front of her, she got up and thanked them.

"I've enjoyed it, boys. Call me next payday."

Cruz said, "I'll help you carry those winnings back to your quarters."

"Thanks, but no thanks. I've got it covered."

"What if I just walk with you anyway?"

"Look, dude," Hot Dog said, "she's got a boyfriend."

"Why are you the one telling me that instead of her?" Cruz asked.

"I've got a boyfriend," Kara said. "Later, guys. I got to hit the sack. I got a CAP to fly in the morning."

Cruz didn't accept defeat easily. As Kara and Hot Dog walked out together, she heard Saunders say, "Take it from someone who has your best interest at heart. You do not want to mess with her."

Kara only caught part of Cruz's reply. "Yeah, Flat Top? How many times has she shot you down?"

Out in the corridor Hot Dog grinned. "Looks like you picked up another admirer."

She was still on a high from winning. "Pretty soon I'll need a president for my fan club to keep up with all of them. You want to volunteer?"

"I thought Karl had that job wrapped up."

"Who was your best friend when you were eight years old?"

"I don't know. A kid who lived down the block, I guess."

"You still in touch with him?"

"No."

"Know where he is now or what he's doing?"

"No."

"Karl has been my best friend since I was eight and he was nine. He's like a brother to me. So don't even think about going there."

"Just stay away from Cruz. He's a real jerk."

"Define _jerk_."

"He's always looking to score."

"Frak, Hot Dog, So are half the guys on this ship. You think I don't know the difference between a guy like Lee and a guy like Matt Cruz?"

The next morning she was still thinking about how lucky she was.

…

At 8:04 Lee and Natalie arrived at the negotiating room. They were the first ones there. Lee sat down, opened his notebook and began writing, recording everything he could remember from the moment he jumped the Raider to the coordinates they had chosen. When he stopped to clinch his fist several times to relieve the hand cramp from writing non-stop, he glanced at his watch again. It was 8:42.

Natalie sat calmly in her own world. She was probably projecting again.

"Are we early or are they late?" Lee asked. "I thought we said last night we'd reconvene at 8:00."

"We did. We've still got nearly twenty minutes."

"My watch says 8:42."

"The baseships synch to the time in the city on Nereid. Your watch is an hour ahead."

Lee resumed working on his report, adding notes in the margins in several places as he remembered more details about the Control Room and their visit to the Hybrid.

Nina was the first one in the negotiating room. She triumphantly sat down directly across from Lee. "What are you writing?"

"My report to the admiral," Lee said without looking up but he momentarily lost his train of thought. He regained it and continued writing.

"Am I in your report?"

"Your name and model number as part of the negotiating team."

"What about last night?"

"I haven't got that far."

"What are you going to say about me?"

Lee put down his pen finally and looked up. "I'm not sure yet." He massaged his hand again.

"I can rub your hand for you."

Natalie said, "That's not appropriate in a meeting like this."

"Where does it say that?" Nina said with an edge of pout in her voice. "I read the rules. They don't say anything about not rubbing someone's hand. It was in a movie I saw."

"Rubbing Lee's hand is a private and personal behavior. It's not appropriate in a public negotiation."

"The girl in the movie…" Nina started.

"This is not a movie," Natalie said calmly. "You'd do well to listen and learn."

Lee was spared any further discomfort by the arrival of Simon and Leoben. The other Cylons followed and were trailed by a centurion pushing a cart with a coffee urn and mugs along with several pitchers of water.

Shelly said, "I accessed the protocol for human meetings and found that for lengthy ones, some kind of beverage is usually served. For morning meetings it's coffee and water." She looked directly at Lee. "Is that correct?"

"That's correct. Was the coffee grown at Settlement Delta?"

"Of course. Where else would it have come from? We've almost run…"

Jack cut her off. "That's enough explanation about our coffee. Let's get started. What do the invaders want from us?"

Natalie said, "First, you should refer to them as _the Colonials_ instead of _the invaders_. And the better question would be _what do you want from us_? You sent us the coordinates to meet you. Not the other way around."

Doral spoke up. "We would never have sent that message if you hadn't killed the Six from the prison. We thought you were sending _us_ a message."

Natalie and Lee glanced at each other. Of course they would think that. John had shot Prison Six in order to send them the message about the creators and the Sevens.

Lee said, "I think the important point is that both sides got a message from the other and both sides answered it." He let that sink in for a moment and then asked, "What do you see as the end result of these negotiations? I'm talking both short-term and long-term."

Jack said, "The ideal result would be that you would go away and let us return to the way things were before you invaded us. You can even take all your humans. We don't care."

"We don't all feel that way," D'Anna said.

"No, we don't," Nina added.

"Your ideal situation isn't going to happen," Lee said. "So let's be realistic and accept that we're in this together." He echoed Natalie's words. "There's no going back. All we can do is move forward."

Doral looked at Natalie. "Do you agree with him?"

"Absolutely. Any solution that we accept will have to include _togetherness_."

D'Anna said, "The peacemaker _must_ be raised on our homeworld."

"I've talked to his father several times," Natalie said. "He understands the importance of bringing his son to Nereid. He's promised to do so when four non-negotiable conditions are met."

"Which are?"

"First that the specialist who is caring for Sean says he's well enough to leave Caprica. Second, that all hostilities are over and a peace treaty has been signed with all of us. Third that a coalition government has been established and is functioning. And fourth that all the humans slaves are released and are allowed to emigrate to Caprica if that's their choice."

"That will never happen," Simon said. "You'll never get that group in the city to sign a peace treaty much less consent to a coalition government."

"Not even if _you_ talk to them?" Lee asked.

Shelly said, "I don't think you understand that we have no authority to negotiate for our brothers and sisters on the planet. I thought we made that clear yesterday. Anything we negotiate is for the brothers and sisters on this ship only."

"Then we can't include Sean in the negotiations right now. Maybe later, but not now. Okay, let's back up. Since we're dealing with just your ship and since we're not going to go away, what do you propose?"

"The peacemaker was foretold in _our_ scriptures," Leoben said. "He belongs to _us_."

"We could go back and forth about this all day," Natalie said, "but until there is peace in the air _and_ on the planet, we will not talk about risking the life of an innocent child. He's safe and cared for where he is and there he will remain until we've established a coalition government on the planet and our entire race has accepted it."

"They're right and you all know it," Nina said. "We got a few of the murderers of our brother Daniel and our creators on board now. The rest of them are down on the planet. Without _the Colonials _we wouldn't have any of them because we wouldn't have known about what happened. We'd be up here running out of…"

"Nina," Jack snapped. "That's enough."

"When was your supply ship supposed to arrive from the surface?" Lee asked. "The day after we jumped in over the planet? The day after that?"

"You might as well put it all on the table." Natalie said. "We have."

"We were one day…_one day_ from being resupplied," Shelly said. "You don't know how much time we spent trying to figure out how you timed your attack so perfectly. So tell us now how you did it. How did you know?"

Lee looked at Natalie. Could it be possible? Could they have stumbled onto a date for their attack that was nearly perfect…from the Colonial point of view? Could a trick of fate done more for them than all their war plans had accomplished?

"How many days of supplies do you have left?" Lee asked.

"That's not important right now," Jack said.

Simon spoke up. "A month. We've got even less water. Despite all the recycling we do, we're rationing right now. There's an ice moon two lights years from here, but we can't go there in case something happens on the planet or the other baseship. Any deaths of our brothers and sisters would be permanent while we were gone."

"Why can't you send the other baseship?" Natalie asked in concern.

Again Simon answered. "Mining ice to get water is a difficult task. They don't have the proper equipment and filtering apparatus."

"So you really need to return to your homeworld to resupply your water and food," Lee said.

D'Anna said, "The irony of it is that we've got enough bombs and Raiders and bullets for a lengthy fight, but we'd starve to death before we could use them all. We've temporarily boxed as many of us as we can, but we know the ultimate outcome if we aren't resupplied."

"Will you help the Colonials win their war on the surface?" Natalie asked.

"We'd have to get a vote from the entire collective on that," Jack said. "Right now I'd say that's doubtful."

"But you would sign a statement agreeing not to interfere with the Colonials in return for allowing you to return to the planet and resupply your ship with food and water?"

"I will," Nina said. "I don't want to starve to death."

There was agreement around the table.

"Do you have the ability to print a document?" Lee asked.

"No," Jack said. "There's not a printer on board this ship. We don't need them."

"Okay." Lee tore a clean sheet of paper out of his notebook. He wrote:

_We, the undersigned, agree to the cessation of all hostilities between the current basestar and the Colonial forces. This document is to remain in effect until such time as a more permanent one can be drawn up and signed by all._

He dated it and signed it…_Captain Lee Adama, representative of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol_

He passed it to Natalie and she signed it. Slowly the document made its way around the table. When it was passed back to Lee, he put it in his folder.

"Is there any chance we could get your brothers and sisters on the other basestar to agree to the same deal?" Lee asked. "Aren't they low on supplies as well?"

"They were on a different supply schedule," Doral said. "But they will eventually run out."

"Would you be willing to contact them and ask them to send a group to talk to us?"

Several of them looked at Jack.

Natalie said, "The closest brother to the One who killed our creators and our Sevens is in the city. He's the Second One. I'm sure the Colonials will agree to give him to you along with any others you want."

"A carrot to dangle in return for their cooperation?"

"What about the One from the prison?" Doral asked.

"Permanently boxed," Lee answered.

Natalie said, "The first twelve Ones knew of the treachery of the First One when he killed our creators and Sevens. They're scattered among the settlements. Don't forget them. You'll want the help of the Colonials in rounding them up as well. We need to remind our brothers and sisters that cooperation will get justice for our creators and brother Sevens faster and more efficiently."

"Let's adjourn for lunch while we send word to the other baseship," Jack said. "It's worth a try to get their cooperation. In the meantime we have someone who would like to eat lunch with you."

"Who?" Lee asked, wary of another surprise.

Jack said, "Based on the information you gave us about the peacemaker's mother, we've found her. Her copy is unique among the Threes on board. She has memories of living in the city and being at the lab. She also has some rather radical beliefs about her relationship to God."

Natalie's eyes lit up. "Does she remember anything?"

"Sadly no," Simon said. "She thinks she downloaded because she killed herself. She'd done that several times in the past in a misguided attempt to see the face of God. Her immediate concern was that she was going to be boxed. Apparently she was threatened with that fate in the past if she did it again."

"I'd like to take her back with us to the battlestar," Natalie said. "There's a Six on board who knew her in the city. Her son's father is also on board."

"Natalie," Shelly said, "I think you're getting your hopes up for nothing. Based on our download log, she last downloaded here over a year ago and was sent back to the lab on the planet. All of her memories predate that time. The last year doesn't exist for her."

Simon added, "It's like she woke up from a coma with no possibility of recovering a year's worth of memories. She lost them before she died. You can't recreate what's not there. I don't care how many people you introduce her to who knew her recently."

"What are you trying to prove, Natalie?" Shelly asked.

Natalie shook her head. "I'm not sure. I just think she has a right to know she had a son who is our peacemaker and to meet his father."

"She's not his mother," Simon said. "Something happened to her _after_ her last download that infused her with the desire to bear a child that she was apparently convinced would be the peacemaker. We have no idea what that something was so we can't recreate it."

Leoben said, "It might actually have been a vision from God."

That statement earned him an eye roll from Jack. "Well unless you can convince _God_ to smite her with a vision again, she's just another whacky copy of her model. She should probably be boxed or she'll start another binge of suicides."

D'Anna said, "I resent your attitude about my sister. She needs help, not boxing."

"Oh, really, D'Anna," Jack said. "You talked to her. Do you think her brain is firing on all synapses?"

D'Anna refused to answer him.

"You know what your problem is, Jack?" Leoben said. "You scorn everything to do with God."

"God doesn't exist!" Jack snapped. "He's a figment of the imagination. Years and years ago some sentient centurions on Caprica were infused with a faulty belief system by that crazy monotheist Clarice Willow. Unfortunately for us, some of those centurions were brought with the creators to this planet and their base programming was used in us. I seem to be the only one with enough sense to delete all those flawed subroutines."

"You're so wrong," D'Anna said. "God existed long before our centurion brothers found their way into His light."

"I think we've gotten a little off track here," Lee said. "We need to stick to the topic which is getting the other basestar to join us in our truce."

He was ignored by the rest of them.

"What could it hurt to take the mother of the peacemaker with us and at least let John and Sonja talk to her?" Natalie asked.

Nina said, "I think it would be a good idea to send a small delegation of us to their battlestar. We need to start learning to live together. We know some of the brothers and sisters from the destroyed baseship are living with humans on the planet."

"Yes, they are," Natalie said. "I think an exchange of ambassadors would be a wise move."

Lee looked at her sharply. "I think we'd better talk to my father before we make a commitment like that."

"I would be glad to go talk to him," Nina said and smiled at Lee. "I'm sure some of my sisters would also be glad to go."

Lee took a deep breath at the thought of his worst nightmare coming true.

"Didn't someone mention lunch," he said. "I'm starving."

…

That night John was sitting with General Vargas, Colonel Tarkington, Bill, Tigh and Gaeta in the Situation Room looking at the maps Gaeta had assembled from high resolution photographs of the city when the black wall phone buzzed.

At the same time the Condition One klaxon began blaring.

"What the frak?" Tigh said.

Gaeta rushed to answer the phone. He turned to the rest of them. "Long-range dradis contact. Cylon basestar. Holding position."

Bill was already almost to the door and the rest were close behind him. By the time they reached the CIC, the officer of the watch said, "Awaiting command to launch the alert fighters, sir."

"What's the status of that ship?"

"Still out of range of our guns, sir."

"Is she launching Raiders?"

"No, sir."

At that moment a small blip showed up on the screen. They all recognized it as a Raptor signature.

John realized what was going on faster than anyone else. "That's Lee," he said. "He just left the basestar."

"Put communication on speakers," Bill said.

A few seconds later they heard Lee's voice. "_Galactica_, this is Apollo. Do not fire. I repeat. _Do not fire_. I've brought company back with me."

"Stand down to Condition Two," Bill said. "If anything else appears on dradis, set Condition One again. Tigh, you have the helm. John, with me."

The hangar deck was awash in Viper pilots in flight suits waiting for the command to launch. Dozens of Vipers with pilots inside were waiting to be pushed into tubes. Bill and John made their way through the crowd until they were near the elevator that would bring up Lee's Raptor.

John glanced around and saw Kara with Hot Dog and Pepper near the leading edge of the pilots. She made her way over to him.

"What's up?" She asked.

"Lee's back. He brought a basestar with him."

"That's good?"

"They're holding position out of firing range right now. I guess we'll know soon."

Kara's heart began to pound. He did it. Lee had actually done it…with Natalie's help, of course.

Soon they heard the elevator's warning klaxon and saw the flashing red light that indicated it was on its way up. Slowly the Raptor rose to the deck and was towed off the elevator.

Adama glanced around. "John, with me. Kara, you too." He began walking toward the Raptor. Kara beamed at her father. He smiled back.

They got to the ship just as the door began rising. Natalie was the first one off. Behind her came a Three and behind her an Eight and then a Four. The Marines automatically raised their rifles.

"Stand down," Bill said sharply.

Natalie walked over to the admiral. "Our mission was a success. We've still got a few details to iron out, and we made a few promises I hope we can keep, but overall we've got a truce…with _both baseships_."

Kara was so antsy she couldn't stand still. She barely gave the Cylons a glance as she waited for Lee to appear. He finally did, glancing over the crowd briefly before his gaze stopped on her. As soon as their eyes met she knew something was wrong.

Not taking his eyes off her he came down the ramp. The Eight said something to him but he ignored her. She put her hand on his arm but he pulled away and kept walking until he stood in front of Kara.

"Welcome back," she said. "What's wrong?"

Bill and John walked up and congratulated Lee. Bill turned to John. "Get with Mr. Gaeta and find accommodations for the Cylons. Lee, I'll see you and Natalie in my quarters."

"Yes, sir," Lee dropped his eyes.

"What's wrong?" Kara hissed as soon as the admiral and her father walked away.

"Not now. We'll talk later," he said so softly she could barely hear him.

"Will I see you later, too?" The Eight asked him. "Can I stay with you?"

Without another word Lee walked away and quickly caught up with his father and Natalie. Kara turned her gaze back to the Eight and saw that her eyes were also following Lee. She knew exactly what was wrong.

"Son of a bitch," she said. She whirled and pushed through the pilots that were still milling around, past Hot Dog and Pepper, earning her a _What the frak, Starbuck?_ from Hot Dog.

She felt like she was suffocating in her flight suit and unzipped the top part. She had to get away from everybody. When she got to the metal stairs, instead of going up, she went down two levels into the dimly lit area where Vipers and Raptors were stored until needed. She didn't stop until she got to Sadie. She spun the handle, opened the hatch and climbed inside.

Alone in the near total darkness she stretched out on the mat, put her head on her arms, took deep breaths and tried to slow her racing heart. Just because that Eight had looked at Lee like a love-sick puppy didn't mean anything. Just because she'd asked to stay with him meant nothing. Kara had jumped to a stupid conclusion based on…based on the fact that Lee had told her without words that something had happened to him on that basestar.

Then again, she'd come back from being gone over a month on Nereid and brought Hunter with her and Lee hadn't immediately jumped to the conclusion that she'd slept with him. Maybe she was doing Lee an injustice.

When she'd returned from Nereid, Lee had been far more upset about another kind of betrayal…her theft of the Raider, a plan she'd kept totally from him. He'd been far less upset over the kiss she and Hunter had shared than her deliberate and planned betrayal of his trust. She'd tried to tell him it hadn't been about _him_. It had been about rescuing her father and stopping Admiral Adama from nuking the planet. But Lee had seen only the personal angle…that even though she had given him her heart, she hadn't been able to give him her trust.

Back and forth the voices in her head argued until she was exhausted. The adrenalin from the brief Condition One and Lee's return leeched from her system. The cocoon of Sadie wrapped her in darkness and quiet and warmth and she closed her eyes.

Only as she drifted toward sleep did she think about where she was…in the belly of an enemy ship, a ship she had used to their advantage time and time again, a place where she now felt safe and at home. Tomorrow she'd talk to Lee and he'd tell her she was wrong about him and the Eight. They'd kiss and laugh about it and her world would be right-side up again.

TBC…


	74. Win or Lose

Chapter 74

Win or Lose

**Libran**

_Year 2, Day 173: My son Allen is now just over six months old. He is a happy, well-adjusted little boy who looks a great deal like Oren. He is fair and blond, but he has my dark eyes. And already he knows how to use them. What an outrageous little flirt! He has never met a stranger and I dread the day he begins walking because I fear I will have to harness him to keep him from running hither and thither wherever we go._

_Year 2, Day 196: Yesterday I kept my promise to the Blessed Mother and arrived on Gemenon with Allen. I could not convince Oren to accompany us. In fact we had words about it when I made the decision to visit and also as I packed for the trip. We will be gone five days. I could not for the life of me figure out how he could object to such a short trip. We have twice taken Allen to Scorpia to visit my parents. Hundreds of thousands of people travel with children every day so I knew that was not his objection. He finally admitted that he thinks the Blessed Mother has begun to exert an undue influence on me. My reassurances to the contrary have fallen on deaf ears._

_Year 2, Day 197: Today in a small, private ceremony, I presented what I have always called _Frank's book_ to Mother. (I was told that she does not like the addition of 'Blessed' as she thinks it sets her too far apart from her flock. According to her we are __all__ blessed by the One True God. Mother (who was born Lacy Rand) is much younger that I had thought, hardly more than a girl really, but according to church history, she was duly chosen upon the demise of the previous Mother in part because she has a rapport with the robots that serve the monastery. (This was all explained to me by her lieutenant Odin Sinclair after he picked us up at the spaceport.) He became my guide and has accompanied me everywhere I'm allowed to go. Mother is very busy, but at dinner each evening we have had time to discuss some very interesting topics. The first night she pointed out their relationship with some robots called U-87s. I told her about Robota and the shameful treatment 'she' received by Chester Pollard's men on the planet. Last night's topic was the very controversial one of apotheosis which Mother refers to rather derisively as 'artificial heaven', but which (according to her) has begun to be touted on Caprica by a disciple of hers, Clarice Willow._

_I must admit I have been stimulated intellectually and spiritually during the last two days as I haven't been on Libran for a long time. Her priests are already hard at work translating Frank's book and while I've no hope of this being done while I'm here, Mother has promised that I shall be the first to have a copy of the completed translation._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

In his father's quarters Lee went straight for the bottle of whiskey and poured a generous amount into a glass. He took a deep breath and turned it up. The first swallow burned all the way down. He thought of his mother and the way she'd escaped into a bottle to make the world's hurts go away. Colonel Tigh did the same thing. He wasn't his mother and he wasn't Tigh, but tonight he needed something to get through this discussion.

Finally he turned to his father and Natalie. "Would either of you care for a drink?"

Natalie shook her head.

His father said, "No, thanks, son. Let's sit down and talk."

"I forgot my bag," Lee said. "It's got my notes in it."

"We won't make this the official meeting about the results of your negotiations. I'm sure you and Natalie are tired. Let's postpone that until the morning. Just hit the high points tonight starting with anything you've promised that should be taken care of right away."

Natalie said, "My brothers and sisters are expecting a few Colonials to come to the baseship to function as an exchange team, but I told them that wouldn't be possible right away. Organization on one of our ships is considerably looser than on a battlestar. Ours is a democratic rule whereas yours is the exact opposite."

A wave of negative emotion swept over Lee at the thought of sending unsuspecting officers or crew to the basestar. He hadn't wanted to tell his father what had happened to him, but the idea that the _exchange team_, as they'd been referred to in his notes, would almost certainly include women made him feel sick. Sometime before the next morning's meeting he knew he had to figure out a way to tell his father that they should be careful who they sent. Maybe they could just send rotating teams of horny young men. It would improve morale on the _G_ and maybe on the basestar as well. The hell with whatever else they accomplished.

But even as he had the thought, he realized that it was the wrong attitude to take. It would only reinforce the belief among many of the Cylons that humans were merely their play toys, to be taken and used at will, consenting or not. It had happened to John in the city and to someone named Rika. Even Natalie, as enlightened as she was, apparently still had some of those same beliefs. Or had she just become defensive about the behavior of two of her sisters?

Where did their human creators go wrong or had their creations evolved into their strong sense of entitlement? They had somehow used the fact that some of the early centurions had been forced by the Colonials into menial and dangerous jobs and were denied rights and turned it into the idea that humanity owed all the Cylons whatever they wanted to take from them. Maybe this group of Cylons chose not to nuke the Colonies and destroy what they saw as flawed humanity, but they obviously still saw themselves as superior. In the physical sense they were, but when it came to a well-developed sense of morality, they still had miles to go. Slavery and forced sex were not the hallmarks of an enlightened society and the Cylons practiced both without conscience or regret. Now Lee wondered what it would take to educate them or if that was even possible.

"Are you all right, son?" Bill asked.

"Just tired," Lee answered. He wanted to take a shower and crawl into his bunk and sleep, but he also didn't want to leave Natalie alone with his father. He didn't know what she might say.

"I understand. Tell me about the Cylons you brought back with you."

"I'll let Natalie do that. She knows them."

Without looking at Lee, Natalie said, "The Eight is named Nina. She was on the negotiating team."

At the name _Nina_, Bill's eyebrows rose slightly but he didn't say anything.

"The Four is originally from the city but he's been on the baseship for many months. On the morning after John's escape from the planet, the One in Settlement Alpha was so furious that Simon had allowed John to take Rachel that he had Simon executed. Simon, of course, downloaded on the resurrection ship. Simon wasn't allowed to return to the city. Simon's wife Petra was taken to the prison. I told him that Petra is now on board your battlestar so he asked to be part of the exchange team."

"You know what was done to Petra _by a Four_ at the prison, don't you?" Lee asked with a sharp edge to his voice.

"Yes," Natalie said. "Natasi told me. It wasn't nearly as bad as what was done to Sonja by the _human_ guards."

"I don't think we should judge one crime by the other," Bill said. "Both women were brutalized and abused."

Natalie's tone became defensive. "It wasn't _Petra's husband_ who did those things to her. The Four who abused her at the prison is now himself a prisoner on the baseship. He'll pay for his crimes."

Lee said, "Your brothers and sisters on that basestar aren't interested in his crimes against their human prisoners. They just want justice for what happened to your creators and the Sevens. If they'd given a damn about the prisoners, they wouldn't have let them be tortured and killed for years."

"Our creators were _humans_," Natalie said. "We care about _them_."

"So?" Lee's tone had gotten uglier.

"Why the hostility, son?" Bill asked.

Lee took a deep breath and tried to tamp down what he was feeling. He probably did have too much of his grandfather Adama in him. Joseph Adama had defended some of the worst criminals on Caprica, but he understood the law and morality with all its implications for society better than anyone Lee had ever known. Many of the Cylons paid lip service to the strict morality of their scriptures, but they didn't seem to be able to make the crossover into real life unless they were applying those principles to humans.

Lee said, "I still think you'd better ask Petra if she wants to see this Four before you take him to Sick Bay and he does his hi-honey-I'm-back-from-the-dead routine on her."

"Why would she not want to see him?" Natalie asked. "He's her _husband_. He didn't abuse her. They have a child together."

Lee couldn't believe that Natalie was that clueless. He wanted to say, _Duh, Natalie, a guy who looks just like him spent months abusing her in all kinds of ways._

He also couldn't believe that Natalie didn't know how much time Petra had been spending with Targa. Kara was convinced that Petra and Hunter's uncle had developed strong feelings for each other and about things like that, Kara was usually right.

Lee said, "Don't forget that their child was ripped out of her mother's arms and taken to the city to be given away like some sort of cereal-box prize. Who knows what that little girl has gone through since then?"

"I would have stopped that if I could have," Natalie said with strong emotion in her voice. "Certainly you don't think I was in agreement with the decision to separate a mother from her child. But again, it wasn't her husband who did that. It was a One."

Lee started to say, _Don't you get it, Natalie. It was Cylons who did these awful things to her. _But he realized that he was going to get nowhere with his comments even if they were the truth. He gave up.

"Just please have someone talk to Petra first," he said tiredly. "Don't spring him on her without warning."

"I'll have to agree with my son on this one," Bill said. "Someone needs to explain the situation to Petra first and let her decide what she wants to do. It's my ship and she's a guest on it. I _will not_ force her to do something against her will. I don't care if he's her husband or not."

"I'll speak with Yoshimo," Natalie said. "I'm sure he'll be glad to talk to her." She turned to Lee. "Does that satisfy you?"

Lee nodded and took another drink. Already the alcohol was numbing part of his brain.

"I hope the other Cylon isn't as controversial as this Four," Bill said.

"Don't bet your next paycheck on it," Lee said. "She's the one Laura sent back from Caprica, the one who died here aboard the _G_, the mother of John's son."

Bill turned to Natalie. "Was it not possible to bring us a few who aren't likely to stir up so much controversy?"

"It wasn't my place to _pick them_," Natalie said with an edge to her voice. "I'm not _in command _of my brothers and sisters the way you're _in command_ of this ship. It was done _democratically_. My brothers and sisters felt that since both Simon and D'Anna had dealt with humans before, they would be good choices. Simon also asked to be a representative. They felt like these two would be less likely to make some of the _social faux pas_ that the others might make."

She glanced coldly at Lee as she said it.

"I'll have Marines posted outside their quarters," Bill said. "Until we can orient them and decide on how they'll function, I'll expect them not to try to wander the ship unaccompanied. I'm sure you understand that feeling still runs high among a lot of my crew. Many of them lost everyone they loved during the holocaust. They've lost friends since we've been over Nereid. Keeping these Cylons out of the general population is for their protection. We accepted them as an exchange team. The last thing we can afford is to have something happen to one or more of them."

"I'll make sure they understand," Natalie said.

"I can't express how much we all appreciate what you've done for us in brokering this truce, but we've also got to think about the tasks of _Galactica's_ crew. John, especially, has significant planning responsibilities right now. He doesn't need any more distractions."

Lee said, "They need to understand that we _all_ have jobs to do so we can't be at their beck and call every minute."

Bill turned again to Natalie. "John and Mr. Gaeta are probably in the situation room working on arranging quarters for them. Why don't you see if you can help?"

"I'm also tired," she said coolly. "I'd prefer to go to my quarters. I'm sure John and Mr. Gaeta can manage fine without me, especially since John knows both Simon and D'Anna."

As soon as the door closed behind her, Bill also got a glass of whiskey. "Another one?"

"Still working on this one," Lee answered.

Bill came back and sat down across from Lee. "I'm glad to have you back safe and sound."

Lee nodded.

"You look tired."

"I am. If you don't mind, I'm going to shower and hit the sack."

"I'll see you in the morning, then, the situation room at 08:00…no make that 09:00. If you'll bring your notes and Natalie, we'll go over everything."

Lee stood and put the empty glass on the tray. "Goodnight, Dad."

"I'm proud of you, son. Get some sleep. I'll see you in the morning."

Lee went down to the hangar deck. It looked like everything was back to normal. The Viper pilots were gone. The Raptor had been towed away for service.

Chief Tyrol called, "I've got your bag, sir."

Lee walked with him over to one of the tool chests. Tyrol handed the bag to him and Lee thanked him. He started to walk away.

"The, uh, Cylon who looks like Jade, what's her name, sir?"

Lee stopped and turned. "Nina."

"Uh, is there any chance that I…that you might introduce us?"

"Not tonight."

"Some other time, then, sir?"

Lee resumed walking toward the stairs. His feet felt like they each weighed a ton. "Some other time, Chief."

…

In the situation room Gaeta brought up the bunk assignments for the ship. "This is not going to be easy. This ship is as full as I've ever seen it. I wish I'd known earlier. I might have been able to arrange a few transfers to another ship."

John said. "I know we're running over with some of the pilots from the _Minoan_ and the _Orion_."

"Not just their pilots. I heard Chief Tyrol finally told Colonel Tigh he couldn't fit another Viper into storage. They had words about having to jam them so close together and still expecting Chief's crew to move them fast without damaging something."

"It'll help when we can transfer some of them to the surface. It those basestars are truly out of the equation, we can concentrate on the city. There's enough room at the airfield there that we can give these battlestars some relief…but that doesn't help you find room for our guests."

"We can't very well bunk the Cylons in with the crew," Gaeta said, "or put them on pallets on the floor."

"Can you put me close to Lee?" Nina asked.

"Doubtful," John answered.

"Why not?" He heard a petulant, pouty tone much as he'd heard from Jade in the beginning.

"Didn't you just hear Mr. Gaeta say that we're tight on bunk space right now? We'll have to put you where there's room."

"We've got plenty of room on our baseship since most of the brothers and sisters are in stasis. Maybe Lee and a few others like him can come stay with us."

"This isn't a baseship and we can't put people in stasis and Lee has a job to do on this ship so he'll remain with us."

John didn't know why this Eight got on his nerves. He'd liked Sharon immediately. His relationship with Jade had gotten off to a rocky start, but now they were fine. He dreaded the thought of starting over with another childish and selfish Eight.

"I've got an idea," John said.

He went to the door and told one of the Marines outside to go get Buddy and Jade and bring them to the situation room.

He turned to Nina. "If Sonja's still bunking in Sick Bay, we'll put you in with Natalie and another Six named Natasi and an Eight named Jade."

Nina pointed to D'Anna. "Where are you going to put _her_? Are you going to keep her with you?"

"No. I've already got a bunkmate."

"Natalie said she was your girlfriend in the city."

Gaeta was sitting in front of one of the computer screens. John was looking over his shoulder as Gaeta paged through the bunk assignments. Gaeta's hand hesitated on the keyboard, but he didn't look up. John straightened and studied the Three. There was no hint of recognition in her eyes. Not the tiniest flicker.

Simon was standing against one of the tables with his arms crossed. "You don't recognize me either, do you?"

"Should I?" John asked.

"I'm Petra's husband. We met several times in the city. I understand she's on this ship. I'd like to see her."

_Frak_. John had been to Sick Bay enough times in the last several weeks to notice that Petra spent a lot of time with Targa. He didn't have to be an Oracle to see that there were some genuine feelings developing between the two of them.

"Keep looking," John said to Gaeta. "You might have to shuffle some people around." He walked over to Simon. "Have a seat. You, too, D'Anna."

"I've never had a name before," she said. "Some of my sisters go by that name, though."

John had a memory of her standing over him at the lab while he was recovering from the pneumonia that had nearly taken his life. He'd actually been the one to say the name _D'Anna_, not her. She'd simply gone along with it.

Still he asked, "You didn't have a name when you lived in the city?"

"I was only there for a short time before I…I'm not supposed to talk about what I did."

"You killed yourself in an attempt to see the face of God."

She gasped. "How did you know that?"

"Sonja told me."

"You know Sonja?"

He nodded. "She's aboard ship. I'll try to arrange for you to see her later."

Simon said, "Natalie told me that you and your team rescued Petra and Sonja from the prison. I appreciate you getting my wife back for me. I'd like to see her now."

"One thing at a time. We've got to find quarters for you first."

The door opened and Jade and Buddy entered.

John spoke to Jade. "You remember Simon, Cassie's father and D'Anna, of course, and this Eight calls herself Nina."

"You have your own centurion?" Nina asked in surprise.

Buddy said, "I am friend to Jade and John as well."

"Amazing," Simon said. "How did you teach him to talk?"

Buddy said, "I already knew how to talk. I did not have the parts that allowed me to speak until I was given a voice synthesizer by a human who lives in the valley. Given similar synthesizers all of my brothers could verbalize their thoughts."

"Who liberated him?" Nina asked.

"My creators never gave me a telencephalic inhibitor so I was never enslaved," Buddy answered.

Jade walked over to Nina and the two Cylons sized each other up.

"Do men like that short hair?" Nina asked.

"Some of them do," Jade answered smugly. "The ones that count. John likes it, don't you?"

"Yes, I do. It fits your personality."

"Does Lee like it?"

Jade scoffed, "Lee? How should I know? But Lee's _brother_ likes it."

John said, "Jade, I asked you here to find out if Sonja's bunk is still empty."

Jade smiled slyly. "You want to sleep in it again tonight since Natalie is back?"

"No. I want to know if Nina can use it."

"Aren't Lee and Kara going to be in your quarters?"

"Not tonight. Lee's being debriefed."

"Who is Kara?" Nina asked.

"John's daughter and Lee's _girlfriend_," Jade answered smugly again.

"Let's stay on topic," John said. "Where is Sonja bunking tonight?"

"In Sick Bay like usual."

"Good. Take Nina with you back to your quarters. Show her the bathroom. Play big sister to her. Explain how things function on a battlestar. Show her where you're allowed to go and especially where you aren't allowed to go."

Nina said, "I'd like to see Lee."

John struggled to keep an edge out of his voice. "That's not possible tonight. I just said he's being debriefed. You need to go with Jade now."

"Come on," Jade said. "Let's go. If you keep bothering them, they might send you to their brig. I hear there's a One down there who has an appetite for Eights."

She exited the room with Nina reluctantly following.

"Do you need me for anything else?" Buddy asked.

"Do me a favor and keep Nina from wandering around the ship. I'm afraid she'll get lost or get in trouble. You know the boundaries. Make sure she stays in them."

_I don't want her to go looking for Lee. _But he didn't say that out loud.

When Buddy was gone, John walked back over to Gaeta. "How are you doing?"

"If these two wouldn't mind bunking together, I could put them in the quarters that was recently occupied by General Vargas' two colonels who…went home. They'd be near you."

"How about it?" John asked. "Would you two be willing to temporarily share a room with two bunks?"

"I thought I'd be allowed to stay with my wife," Simon said. "I'd like to _bunk_ with her."

"Petra is sharing quarters near Sick Bay with a dozen other med techs and nurses. She's helping out up there. Her choice. I'll try to arrange for you to see her tomorrow. It's late and I don't think we should disturb her tonight."

D'Anna said, "Will I get to see Sonja tomorrow? I remember her from the brief time I spent in the city. I'm told it was over a year ago, but it seems like last week."

"I'll arrange that, too," John said. "Maybe you and me and her can sit down and talk."

"Natalie said you were you in the city, too."

"I was."

"It must have been after I was there. I'm sure I would have remembered you."

"Why don't you both come with me and I'll show you to your quarters." He glanced back at Gaeta. "I'm sure Admiral Adama will want a Marine guard to make sure our guests aren't disturbed tonight. I'd appreciate it if you'd take care of it and also let Admiral Adama know where we're putting everyone."

"Yes, sir, I'll see to it."

Both D'Anna and Simon went with him quietly, but he could tell that Simon had expected a different kind of welcome and a different outcome to the evening.

John said, "Tomorrow, we'll try to get everybody together and introduce you to the ship's senior officers and get some kind of game plan together on what your function will be."

"I just want to see my wife," Simon said. "That's the _only reason_ I'm here."

They reached the quarters. Because it was next door to General Vargas' quarters, his Marine guards tensed as they came down the corridor. John explained their temporary need for the space and that two more Marines would be joining them. He pointed out the entrance to the bathroom to Simon and D'Anna. When the two Cylons were in the quarters, John finally allowed himself to relax.

He knew Gaeta would report everything to the admiral. On his way back to his quarters, he wondered briefly if he would find Kara there with Lee and then decided they would both probably be with a group of the pilots in the officer's wardroom celebrating Lee's success.

What he found was Lee sitting at the table in sweatpants and a t-shirt with a sheaf of notebook pages spread out on the table. The laptop they shared was open but the screen was blank. A drink sat on the table. Lee was going through the pages.

He looked around as the door opened. "I got some of your booze. I hope you don't mind."

Lee was slurring his words ever so slightly. John felt the first pang of concern.

"You know I don't mind. What are you doing?"

"I got to write up a report for Dad."

"You don't have to do it tonight, do you? I can't believe Bill asked you to…"

"He didn't," Lee interrupted.

"Then what are you doing in here. Why aren't you celebrating with Kara and some of the other pilots? I'm sure you…"

"I'm too tired to celebrate," Lee interrupted again. "I tried to find Kara but she's not in the rec room and she's not in her quarters. Nobody seems to know where she is. Do you?"

An edge had come into Lee's voice that John didn't understand. It sounded almost like he was angry.

"No. I haven't seen her since we were all on the flight deck. I've been getting the Cylons situated. What's wrong?"

John walked over and put his hand gently on Lee's shoulder. He was shocked when Lee flinched and sucked in his breath with a hiss.

"You're hurt."

"It's nothing," Lee muttered. "My shoulder is sore."

"If it's that sore, you need to go see Doc Cottle. I barely touched you."

Lee lifted his t-shirt off his shoulder. "I'll live. You want a drink?"

John walked over to his locker and got his cup from the top shelf. He sat at the table opposite Lee and poured a swallow.

"You want to close the laptop so we can talk?"

Lee did as John asked, but he wouldn't look him in the eyes. "I think you're right. I should forget about this and hit the sack. I'll get up early tomorrow and work on it."

"Lee, you can talk to me. What's wrong? Did something happen to you on that basestar?"

"The Cylons signed a cease-fire agreement, both ships. They aren't going to help us take the planet, but they aren't going to interfere, either."

"In return for?"

"We give them the Ones and any others who agreed to kill the Sevens and the creators plus those who knew about it and didn't snitch…with the exception of Natalie. And they want the Cylons we have in our brig."

John was shocked. "_That's all_?"

"They get to pick their own representatives to the coalition government…one of each model from the two ships and seven more from the planet. We had to agree that a Cylon would be appointed president. The vice-president would be a human. We can have an equal number of human representatives. That's pretty much it. After five years they'll agree to a general election. Oh, and the one copy of Daniel in the valley has to be included."

"I hope you and Natalie realize how many lives you just saved."

"Yeah."

"I'm surprised Kara didn't come looking for you."

"I'm not."

"Why?"

"Because I…did something…" Lee said angrily.

"Lee, what is going on? I'm your friend. You can tell me."

Lee's words were considerably more slurred. "Kara won't ever forgive me."

He didn't have to say anything else. John knew what had happened. "Was it Nina?" he asked gently.

Lee put his face in his hands. "She was one of them."

"Who else?"

"A Six named Lida. She didn't make the short list for the initial exchange team, but the One we dealt with…calls himself Jack…says we need to have at least a dozen on each team. The way my luck is running, she'll probably end up over here, too."

"Damn, I am so sorry. Did they use the drug on you or threaten to?"

Lee shook his head. He'd gone this far with it. He might as well finish it. "I woke up with them in my bed. I told them I was engaged. I asked them to stop. I might as well have been talking to the wall for all the good it did. I couldn't believe how strong they are. I maybe could have stopped her if it had been just one, but I couldn't fight both of them. They got what they wanted. It makes me sick to think about it, but I…" his voice trailed off.

"You don't need to say any more," John said. "Where was Natalie when this was going on?"

"In her room, I guess."

"Did she have any idea of what was going to happen?"

"I don't know. I really don't know."

"But she knows about it now?"

"Afterward I asked them to leave…but they wouldn't. I guess I could have slept on the floor, but…they went to sleep, and I didn't want to move because I was afraid I'd wake them up and they'd want to…want to start all over. Finally I went to sleep. They were still there when Natalie came in this morning. She thought I should have just relaxed and enjoyed it and then shrugged it off as my contribution to the goodwill of the mission. She doesn't have a damned clue how it just reinforced the stereotype of us humans as their playthings. We had some words before I gave up trying to make her understand. She's so damned obsessed with her quest to punish the Ones who killed Daniel that it's like she has blinders on to everything else. She wants this war over sooner rather than later so she can get on with whatever she considers justice."

John stood up and paced around the small room. "Frak. I trusted her to take care of you. If she tells me that she knew what they planned and did nothing to stop it…"

"Just let it go. Please, John, just let it go."

"What's really wrong with your shoulder?"

"Lida got both of them with her fingernails."

John had a sudden flashback to the time he had frakked Sonja against the wall in his apartment in the city. She'd bitten his shoulder…not hard enough to break the skin, but hard enough that it had left a whopper of a bruise.

"You should probably let Doc Cottle…"

"No! This stays between you and me. You've got to promise me."

"And Kara?"

"I've got to tell her. I think she's already figured it out, though. Nina was all over me when I was trying to get off the Raptor."

"Considering that Nina and Natalie both know about it, you might want to mention it to your father."

"NO!" Lee exploded.

"Lee, he's responsible for the fleet. He'll also be responsible for approving an exchange team. Do you want this to happen to somebody else?"

"I've already thought about what might happen if they send some unsuspecting females over there. Maybe nothing…and maybe…I don't want to think about it anymore tonight."

"Would you let me talk to Bill?"

"Can you just convince him to delay sending an exchange team for a couple of days without getting into any details? We need to get some basic rules of conduct for both sides."

"I'll go see him right now. You go to sleep. I'll be quiet when I come back in."

"I keep thinking that I did something to encourage them…that maybe something I said or the way I looked at them or…or something made them think I was interested. I mean they're both beautiful, especially Lida. When I met her I know I looked…what man wouldn't…I never dreamed she would…" his voice trailed off.

"Lee," John said gently, "you aren't responsible for what happened to you. That's one of the positive things I got out of the…visits I made to a shrink after I got back to Caprica."

"You never mentioned that you'd gone to see a shrink."

"After my debriefing was over, Brad Parker told me I had to see a counselor because of what I'd been through. I didn't have any choice. At first I thought it was because of what had been done to me at the prison, but it was about…" John took a deep breath…"about _everything_ that had happened. I went the mandatory number of times. I didn't talk much, but it helped me understand what happens when you're put in a situation where you're basically powerless."

"No counselors," Lee said. "I'm not talking to anybody else about it. It's like Natalie said, it's done. It's over. We can't change it. We got a ceasefire. That was my job. Time to move on. I'll be all right. I'm just tired. I'll feel better in the morning."

"Then lay off the booze and go to sleep. Take it from me, you don't want to add a hangover to everything else you're dealing with."

"Yes, _Dad_," Lee said and John finally heard a hint of humor in his friend's voice.

John walked to the door and waited while Lee got into his bunk. "You'll get to call me that for real one of these days."

"If Kara will still have me."

"Don't underestimate my daughter, Lee. She's dealt with a lot in her life. She's as tough as they come."

John closed the hatch door and started down the hall to the stairs. His main concern when Kara found out was keeping her from going after Nina, but he hadn't wanted to say anything about that to Lee and add to his worries.

He went to Kara's quarters and knocked on the hatch. When Hot Dog finally opened it, he said, "I need to see Lieutenant Thrace."

"She's not here, sir. I haven't seen her since we were on the flight deck."

"Did you notice which way she went?"

"She went to the stairs. I think she went down instead of up. She was mad about something. I wanted to go after her, but Pepper said to leave her alone."

"Thank you," John said.

On his way back down to the flight deck, he looked in the officer's rec room. As he'd suspected, she wasn't there. He got to the metal stairs and went down. Galen Tyrol hadn't seen her either. He went down another deck. A few maintenance crewmen were working on a Raptor. He went down still another deck into the bottommost storage area. As he stood there in the dim light amid the rows of tightly packed Vipers and Raptors, John knew where she had gone.

Sadie was at the end of the long room. The hatch was hanging open. John didn't want to scare Kara, so he called her name softly. It took three times before she answered him and then crawled out. Her hair was a mess, one cheek imprinted with a sponge pattern from lying on the mat. Her eyes were still heavy with sleep.

"What time is it?" She asked and yawned.

"A little after midnight."

"I was afraid I'd slept through morning CAP."

"You want to tell me what you're doing down here?"

"Is there some rule against me being down here?"

John put his arm around his daughter's shoulders and started walking toward the stairs. When they got there, he indicated that they should sit.

"Did Lee send you?"

"No, baby. I decided to do this all on my own. He wants to talk to you, but I think there's something you need to know first."

"All I want to know is did he frak that Eight?"

John sat trying to decide how he was going to answer her. "Kara," he finally said, "some things are not as black and white as they look. Sometimes there's a big gray area."

"You don't have to say anything else. If he hadn't done it, you'd have said so right away."

The pain in her voice was so clear that it made him want to pull her to him and hold her like he had done when she was a toddler and had fallen down. Even then she'd been a tough little thing, rarely crying at her bumps and scrapes, but he'd been able to tell from her eyes how much it had hurt. Her eyes held that same look now, but he couldn't exactly cradle her on his lap and kiss a bump or scrape as he'd done when she was a baby. The hurt she felt now went far deeper than a bruise. Still, the father in him wanted to make her feel better.

"Kara, Lee wasn't the one who initiated it and she wasn't alone. I hope you'll…"

"Lord of Kobol!" she burst out, "he frakked _another one, too_?"

"No. They frakked him."

"Another Eight or a Six?"

"A Six."

She looked away and gnawed on her thumbnail. "They drugged him?"

"No. They…gods, how can I say this…they ganged up on him."

"You mean like both of them…like _at the same time_?"

"He didn't get into any details, but that's my guess. If he wants to talk about it, he will, but what I want you to know is that Lee did absolutely nothing to invite what happened to him. He made it clear that he didn't want their…attentions. Baby, Cylon women are strong and they're determined and…and…take it from somebody who knows. Their creators did a bang-up job in programming them with certain skills and zero inhibitions."

"Are you trying to make excuses for him?" She asked angrily.

"No, baby," John said wearily. "Lee's beating himself up over this so bad that I don't need to make excuses for him. I can't tell you what to do, and I'm not going to mention this again unless you want to talk to me about it, but in my opinion, you'd be making a very big mistake to kick him to the curb over it. The kind of love you and Lee have doesn't come along every day. I'd hate to see you throw it away over two clueless Cylons who still have a damned lot to learn about acceptable and non-acceptable behavior. I know you don't want to hear this, but even Lee recognized that the worst part of what happened to him is that apparently neither Cylon felt like she was doing anything wrong."

"What are their names? There's no need to tell me you don't know. I'm sure you do."

"The Eight is Nina. The Six is Lida. She's still on the baseship. Nina is on the exchange team."

"I saw her slobbering after him when he was trying to get off the Raptor. Where is she now?"

"You're not going to…"

"No."

"Promise me."

"I promise," Kara said sullenly.

"She's bunking with Jade. One of the reasons I put her there is that I hoped Jade would make it clear you and Lee are in a relationship." John leaned over and kissed the top of her head. "Go back to your quarters, get a good nights' sleep and fly your CAP in the morning. Missing a CAP without a really good reason will get you grounded and put a black mark in your record. I don't think falling asleep in Sadie is reason enough. Lee will talk to you when he's ready, so don't push him."

They got up and climbed three flights of stairs to the deck her bunkroom was on. "Aren't you going to bed, too?"

"I got one more stop to make. I've got to talk to Bill. He needs to delay sending an exchange team to the basestar until we get some ground rules established. We don't want a repeat of what happened to Lee over there, especially with a female. Knowing what happened to Rika and me and a lot of other humans in the city and now what's happened to Lee, I don't trust any of the Cylons right now."

Kara nodded and thought very briefly about what had almost happened to her in the refugee camp. It would have happened if Connelly hadn't followed her that day. She had fought, but those two guys had been too big and too strong. They sure as hell weren't clueless. They knew what they were doing was wrong. They just didn't care. How was her father so sure those Cylons were really clueless?

"And, baby," John said before he started up the next flight of stairs, "I mean it. Stay away from Nina. Nothing good can come from you confronting her. I'm going to talk to Natalie. We'll handle it."

All the fight had momentarily gone out of Kara. If she'd had her alarm clock with her, she would have gone back to Sadie and climbed inside, but her dad was right. She didn't want to miss a CAP because she overslept. That would get her pulled from flight ready status and if there was one thing she wanted, it was the chance to take out a few more Raiders. That would feel _really good__ right now_.

…

It didn't occur to John that Bill might have gone to bed until he was outside the admiral's quarters.

"Is he still awake?" He asked one of the Marines.

"Colonel Tigh and General Vargas are with him, sir."

The Marine opened the door and John entered.

"I just told Bill you might be along any time," Tigh said. "Join us in a drink."

Bill said, "Come in, John. Mr. Gaeta told me you'd gotten the Cylons settled."

"I hope so, sir. Temporarily at least."

John poured a small whiskey and sat down beside Vargas on the leather couch. The general still didn't look like he'd fully recovered from his near-death experience at the prison, but he was tough, just like the other two.

Tigh chuckled. "Look at us. Aren't we just four old warhorses trying to decide if we got a big break or if the whole thing is just one giant Cylon trick?"

They sipped their drinks in silence for a minute. Finally John said, "We need to delay sending a team to that baseship for a few days. We need some rules set down first that are clearly understood and agreed upon by both sides…with punishable consequences if they're broken."

"I assume you have a reason for making this request," Bill said.

"I do. Based on a conversation with Lee and then comparing the behaviors of the Cylons I met in the city and Settlement Alpha with some of the behaviors on the basestar, and my conversation with Simon and Nina tonight, I think we should delay. Those Cylons on the basestar haven't had any experience dealing with humans. I don't want to start our alliance with…an incident caused by their…lack of understanding of what's…appropriate behavior around humans."

"Did you understand what he just said?" Tigh asked Bill.

"I do," Vargas said, "and I agree with him. After the First War I was stationed on Sagittaron for four years. My Marines had several run-ins with the locals simply because they didn't understand some of their customs. It was an education process for both sides."

Bill looked at John, "Is your request based on specific information or just a general feeling?"

"Both. The last thing we need is something happening that will torpedo a very fragile truce."

"I agree," Bill said. "It's bad enough that we're at the start of planning an invasion of their city." He turned up his drink. "I hate to add one more thing to your plate, but you seem to have a rapport with some of them. They will probably take it better coming from you. Somewhere on the ship we've got an MCIS agent who knows the Code of Military Justice inside and out. Mr. Gaeta can put you in touch with her. Let her do most of the work in drawing up a simplified list of _unacceptable conduct_."

"I'll be glad to help any way I can, sir," John said.

"I'm sorry that one of them on the exchange team is the one you knew. I hope that won't hamper your efforts."

"It's not really her," John said. "I mean it is, but it's her before I knew her, before she'd had whatever kind of life-altering vision or whatever it was that sent her to the prison looking for a father for her child. She has no memories of the last year."

"That's just more than my poor brain can handle," Tigh said. "What happened to the time when somebody died and stayed dead? Now we got Cylons who keep coming back and human brains being put into robots and then being transferred to a Cylon. What's next?"

"I don't think any of us have any idea," Bill said. His eyes met John's. "How is my son?"

"He's tired."

"Is he going to be all right?"

"I'm sure he will be, sir."

Bill held his eyes long enough that John knew he had probably guessed.

John stood and put his empty glass on the tray. "I think I'll turn in. Tomorrow is going to be a long day."

"They're all going to be long for the foreseeable future," Vargas commented. "Let's postpone our next planning session on invading the city for at least a day and get these other matters settled first."

Bill said to John. "I'm debriefing Lee and Natalie at 09:00 tomorrow morning. You're welcome to join us."

"I'll be there if I can. I've got to do something about Simon. He wants to be reunited with Petra. I put him off tonight, but he's expecting to see her in the morning. I don't see that having a happy outcome. It might even get ugly."

"Maybe you'd better arrange that meeting somewhere other than Sick Bay. Cottle won't appreciate a ruckus in his corner of the world. And take some Marines with you."

"Yes, sir."

Tigh said, "I hope before this is all over, we don't start wishing we'd just kept fighting them instead. Life was simpler then."

…

Kara very quietly opened the hatch to Lee's and her father's quarters. The lights were low. The small table was cluttered with notebook pages, laptop, whiskey bottle and two glasses. There was the faint odor of whiskey in the room.

She tiptoed over to Lee's bunk. He lay asleep on his stomach, one arm tucked under his pillow. The sheet was around his waist. He had pulled off his t-shirt and thrown in on the floor. She leaned closer. Even in the dim light she could see the ugly scratch marks on his shoulders. In their entire relationship, no matter how wild and passionate their lovemaking had been, she'd never done anything like that to him. Fury flooded her. _Damned Cylon bitches._

She retreated slowly and quietly toward the door. _Keep it together, Kara. Keep it together._

She made it back to her bunkroom by concentrating on counting the floor panels. By the time she opened the door, her anger was manageable. The room was quiet. As she opened her locker, she heard a privacy curtain being pulled back. She turned. Hot Dog.

"Your Dad was looking for you," he said barely above a whisper.

"He found me," she whispered and hung her flight suit at the back of her locker.

"Are you okay?"

"Sure. Why wouldn't I be?"

"I just thought something had happened when you disappeared like that."

"Well you thought wrong. Were you waiting up on me?"

"Trying to write another letter to Kat. I sent her a couple on the transport this morning."

"The transport should be back tomorrow. Maybe you'll hear from her."

"I'm not holding my breath. Are you sure you're okay?"

Kara climbed into her bunk. "I will be if you'll let me go to sleep. You need to do the same thing. We're both flying the same CAP in the morning."

He pulled the curtain closed without another word.

Kara lay in the dark, the image of Lee's shoulders still fresh in her mind. Anger washed over her again, but she didn't know where to direct it. Had it been that good for them? Had it been good enough for one or both of them to mark him like that or had they done it for another reason? She rolled over trying to ignore the graphic images that now filled her mind. How much had Lee participated…beyond the obvious?

The last time she looked at her clock it was 03:13. The next day was going to be hell.

…

Laura had just gotten into bed when her phone chirped. She looked at the caller ID. Elosha. She knew the priest would never call her at midnight without a good reason. There was concern in her voice when she answered.

"I'm sorry for calling so late," Elosha said, "but I didn't think this could wait. Barely thirty minutes ago, I had a visitor to the temple. He was cold and hungry and he has a sprained ankle that he got in an accident last night. I brought him to my apartment and let him to take a hot shower. I found some clothes for him in the temple donation box and I've fixed him some hot soup. I did all this before I called you."

Laura's breath caught. Could it be possible that Leoben had escaped the inferno of his bookstore?

"He has no other injuries? No burns?"

"Not that he mentioned or that I can see."

"Will you keep him there for a short while? I'm going to send two of my guards to pick him up and bring him here."

Forty-five minutes later wearing casual slacks and a heavy sweater, Laura was at the door that led in from the back parking lot. Two of her guards were with her. The dark limo glided silently into view and stopped. The guard riding in the front passenger seat got out and opened the back door.

Leoben got out of the back and looked around. The guard said something that Laura couldn't hear and pointed to the door. Leoben limped toward them. One of her indoor guards opened the door. Leoben was wearing clothes that were old and baggy on him but clean. The guards quickly searched him while he stood passively. Then one of them produced a pair of handcuffs.

"Absolutely not," Laura said. "This man saved my life and those of my son and daughter. He just survived a horrific attempt on his own life. We will not treat him like a criminal."

That brought the first hint of a smile from the Cylon.

"How bad is the ankle?" She asked.

"Not broken. A bad sprain."

"There's a doctor waiting upstairs to look at it."

She took his arm and they made it to the elevator, him hobbling and her offering support. The two guards entered after them and the four of them rode up to the second floor. She helped Leoben into her sitting room where Bianca had him take off his shoe and sock. His ankle was swollen and purplish-blue. While she worked wrapping it in an elastic bandage and putting an icepack on it, Leoben told them what little he could.

"I was asleep when I heard glass break downstairs. Then I smelled a strong chemical odor."

"Rocket fuel," Laura said.

"I wondered what it was. I got out of bed and had just gotten my pants and shoes on when there was an explosion. The next thing I knew the place was an inferno. I couldn't get to the back door for the flames so I jumped out the bedroom window into the alley. When I landed, I twisted one ankle."

"You jumped from the second floor?"

"It was either that or burn up. I crossed the street and walked to the University campus. I hid in the basement of a classroom building until this morning. Then I started walking. I remembered Kara talking about Elosha and her temple. It took me a while to find it, but I felt like she would help me."

"You did the right thing," Laura said.

"Elosha told me that the bookstore is a total loss. Most of the businesses on the block are lost."

"Yes."

"Why didn't they just kill me? It would have been easier. Every couple of days I take a deposit to the bank down the street. They could have had someone walk up and shove a gun in my face and pull the trigger. It would have looked like an attempted robbery. They could have done any number of things besides ruin other people's lives."

"There's no way to get into the minds of the group who did this. My personal feeling is that whoever did it had no idea you'd escape. I also believe that they were sending me a message as well. But one thing I firmly believe. As long as you're on Caprica, you'll be at risk. That's why I'd like for you to agree to get on the transport that's leaving tomorrow to go back to the_ Galactica_."

Leoben didn't say anything.

Bianca said, "Keep that icepack on your ankle for another fifteen minutes then take if off for fifteen. Keep the ankle elevated. Do this several more times tonight." She looked at Laura. "I'm going to check on Sean and then go to bed. Dr. Junius is dropping by early in the morning."

"You have the baby _here_?" Leoben asked in surprise.

"And Sharon and Hera," Laura said. "I don't know of any other way to protect them. I can't send them to a battlestar because Sean still needs constant monitoring and Hera is still under the care of a pediatric specialist."

Again Leoben was quiet. "Could I see Sean before I go?"

"Of course. Sharon saw him earlier. Would you like to see him now?"

He lifted the icepack off his ankle, stood and hobbled across the hall with her. Bianca was discussing Sean's vitals with his private duty night nurse. They looked up as Laura and Leoben entered. Earlier that evening, Laura had sat in the rocking chair and held the tiny boy against her skin for almost twenty minutes. She could tell that he had gained some weight. He still had the feeding tube threaded through his nose into his stomach, but both Bianca and Dr. Junius felt like Sean would soon be able to drink from a bottle. He was breathing on his own and was no longer attached to a respirator although he still wore a small monitor that would sound an alarm if he stopped breathing.

Leoben didn't try to touch Sean, but he stood by the incubator, his head bowed and his lips moving in prayer. When he finally turned away, he looked at Laura.

"God promised through his faithful prophet Azurra that He would bless the protectors of the peacemaker. It's in the last chapter of her book. I don't remember the verse but I'm sure you can find it."

"Thank you for telling me."

"No, Madame President. It's my people who should be thanking you."

…

At 06:05 the next morning Kara was eating breakfast with Pepper and Hot Dog when Lee and her father came into the officer's mess. Her father nodded at her before the two of them went to a table in the corner. Lee sat with his back to her. He had seen her, but he hadn't given any indication, not a smile, not a frown, nothing.

"There's Lee and your father," Hot Dog said.

"I'm not blind," Kara snapped. "I saw them."

"What the frak is the matter with you?"

Pepper said, "Back off, Hot Dog."

"Okay, what's going on? What am I missing?"

"Nothing," Kara said. "I'll see you both in the ready room in twenty."

She took her tray with her half-finished breakfast and put it on the conveyer. Then she jauntily walked over to the table where Lee and her father sat.

"Hey, baby," John said. "Want to join us?"

Lee looked up. "Hi."

"You look like hell."

"I don't think Lee's feeling too good this morning," her father said. "I think it's pronounced _hangover_."

"Is that why he wouldn't look at me when you came in?"

Lee said, "Kara, I want to talk to you, but now is a really bad time...for a lot of reasons. After your CAP, okay?"

"Sure, Lee. Whenever it suits you. I'll be around."

She sauntered out of the room knowing that most of the officers in there were watching her and wondering what was going on.

"You weren't around last night. I looked for you," he said softly, but he knew she didn't hear him. He looked up at John and then back down at his food. He had lost what little appetite he had.

John said, "Lee, this is going to take time and a lot of patience. When Kara is hurting, she gets tough with everybody. My advice is to talk to her and then give her some space to work through it. You won't get anywhere by pushing her. You know what she does when she's pushed."

"She pushes back…hard."

"And you don't want that right now. You don't want to do or say something you can't take back. Neither does she."

Lee sipped his coffee. "I can't believe you'd still want me as a son-in-law."

John couldn't help but smile. "Look at me, Lee." When Lee raised his eyes, John said. "Wouldn't that make me the biggest hypocrite on board this ship…probably in the whole fleet?"

Lee managed a slight smile.

John picked up his tray. "Now let me go see Petra and give her the opportunity to visit with her husband. Then I've got to figure out how I'm going to tell a woman who doesn't even remember me that she had my baby."

…

Her CAP completed, Kara stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom. She had just showered and washed her hair. It hung long and limp four inches below her shoulders. Pepper walked behind her.

"Come on, Starbuck. Quit staring at yourself in the mirror. You'll look the same five minutes from now as you do now."

Kara lifted a strand of hair. "You got some scissors?"

"No, I don't. You're not thinking about cutting your hair, are you?"

"No. I've already thought about it. Want to go to the barber with me? If I'm going to do it, I guess I'd better do it right."

Pepper ran a hand over her own close-cropped curls. "Just went." She stepped over closer to Kara. "Why are you doing this? Does it have something to do with Lee?"

"You ask too many questions. I'm just tired of messing with it. That's all."

Twenty minutes later she was sitting in a barber chair. Thirty minutes after that, much of her long hair lay on the floor. What was left was layered almost exactly like Jared's mother had cut it years before in the refugee camp. The woman who had cut her hair handed her a mirror. Kara glanced at the back.

"Nice. Thanks."

She was sitting in the mess hall eating lunch with Karl and Saunders when Lee came in alone. He got a tray and walked over to the table.

"Have a seat," Karl said. "What do you think about the haircut? She didn't trust me to do it this time. I can't imagine why."

Lee studied her and then smiled. "Kara would be beautiful if she shaved her head. I like it."

Saunders said, "So tell us about the basestar."

Lee was aware that his shoulders were burning. "There's not a lot to tell."

Kara said, "He went. He saw. He conquered their hearts. He came back with a peace agreement."

"I didn't do it by myself. Natalie played a bigger part than I did."

Kara said. "I think he's too modest. I doubt we'll ever hear all the details about his many _contributions _to the peace process."

"Kara, please," Lee said. "Let's just…" he couldn't figure out what he wanted to say.

"Let's just what?"

"Let's quit talking about my mission. Okay?" He looked directly at her. "It's _over_. I gave Dad my report this morning. He's happy with what Natalie and I accomplished. As far as I'm concerned my part is finished. It's time to move on to the next task."

"Which is?"

"Picking an exchange team after we get some rules and regulations in place about what's acceptable behavior and what's not…for both sides." Again he looked directly at her. "Your dad was meeting with somebody this morning to get that process started."

"You've got to spell out unacceptable behavior?" Saunders asked in surprise.

"These Cylons haven't ever been around humans. They're…I'm not sure how to put it…they're ignorant of a lot of social conventions that we're taught from childhood."

"What are you talking about?" Karl asked. "Sharon never had any problems…"

Kara caught Karl's eye and he stopped talking. She wasn't sure how he could have forgotten what the first Sharon, the one called Boomer, had done at the Academy. Rather than go to the authorities, she had killed a man by snapping his neck, an instructor who had forced a young female cadet to have sex against her will in order to pass her physical education class. But Kara couldn't say anything out loud because Saunders didn't know anything about it.

"Come to think of it," Karl said, "Sharon told me how much Kara had helped orient her to the way things are done. That and the Academy's code of conduct manual. Maybe you do need to spell it out for the Cylons on the basestars."

"It's too bad Kendra isn't here," Saunders said. "She'd have a set of rules and regs whipped up in no time."

Karl grinned. "That's not all she'd have whipped up in no time."

"Cork it, Helo."

"Don't act so innocent. Kara and Lee know you and Kendra do more than hold hands."

Lee pushed his tray aside but kept the energy drink. He looked at Kara. "Let's go for a walk."

"You know it's just not fair," Saunders said with a grin. "Kendra and Sharon are back on Caprica and we get to see you two go off to _take a walk_."

_I wish, _Lee thought.

_If they only knew_, Kara thought.

"Don't worry about your trays," Karl said. "We'll take care of them. You two lovebirds have fun,"

Kara managed a smile. Lee didn't.

Out in the corridor he said, "Where do you want to go?"

"This is your show, Lee."

"We can't go to my quarters. You dad is in there with Sonja and D'Anna. They're talking to D'Anna about the baby and everything that happened since her last download."

"So any thoughts on where we can go to talk?"

"My quarters are out for obvious reasons. We could go to the chapel."

"Not private enough," Lee said.

"Okay. I know somewhere."

They walked in silence to the metal stairs and started down. When they reached the bottom, Kara said, "How's this?"

"Is this where you were when I was looking for you last night?"

"I was in Sadie."

Lee kept walking until they got to a Raptor. He sat down on the boarding ramp and patted the area beside him.

"I'll stand for now," Kara said. She leaned back against the adjacent Raptor and crossed her arms.

Lee wasn't sure where to start. Finally he said, "John said he'd talked to you."

"He found me here last night. We talked for a minute. I got the big picture."

Lee hadn't imagined it would be this difficult to talk about it to her. "It wasn't anything I wanted or anything I planned. I just want you to know…"

"What I want to know is how much you enjoyed it?"

Lee shut his eyes and shook his head, trying to clear the images from his brain. "Not as much as you probably think."

"Did you…finish it? Were they as hot as my dad seems to think they were or was he just trying to make me feel better?"

"Look, Kara, I don't know what John said to you, but…" He couldn't say the two Cylons weren't hot and beautiful. It would be such a blatant lie that Kara would see right through it. "I woke up with them in bed with me. I didn't invite them. I tried to stop them, but they're strong. You can't imagine how strong they are and…and…" How could he explain it? "They know just what to do to…get a certain response and…once things got started, they kept doing things and I don't know what else to say except that it happened and I'm sorry. I've hurt you and I've disappointed you. I would do anything to change it, but I can't. I don't know if you'll ever forgive me, but I love you as much now as I ever did. I could care less if I ever see either one of those Cylons again. I didn't want Nina on the exchange team, but I was overruled."

"Does your dad know?"

"I didn't tell him. John got him to agree to stall on sending an exchange team to the basestar until we've got a set of rules drawn up that both sides agree to abide by. I know there are a lot of guys on the ship who would think I was crazy not to have…been thrilled to get to…participate in something like that, but they're not looking at…at anything except the obvious. They don't understand how that just makes us look to the Cylons…like they have a right to do anything to us they want to do. That's the _real wrong_ of it. And the really pitiful part is that they don't even understand what they did is wrong. They seemed to justify it because they were tired of the Ones, Twos, Fours and Fives."

Kara had never thought of what had happened to Lee in those terms. It was much more personal to her, but Lee was right.

Finally she said, "Do you think there's even a chance that we'll be able to live with them on Nereid? They're going to have to change a lot of their thinking."

"I hope so. It's Laura's dream. She's bet her whole political career on it."

Kara felt sadness settle over her. An hour ago everything had seemed much more straightforward.

"Do you think they can learn?" she asked. "Or more important do you think they're willing or do you believe they'll always think of us as their slaves and…playthings?"

"We've all got a lot to learn. The main rule they've got to understand is to respect personal boundaries and that means…no more of what happened to me."

Kara didn't say anything. Lee felt weariness settle over him. The slightest movement caused the t-shirt under his uniform jacket to rub his shoulders in a vivid reminder of what had happened.

"All we can do is work toward that goal," he added.

"Yeah," she finally said.

"I'm not going to ask you to forgive me. All I ask is that you try. I love you, Kara. I've loved you since the day I first saw you, and even before that you were the girl of my dreams. I can't even begin to think about my life without you in it, but I'm not going to push you. I think we both need some time to deal with this. There's just one thing. If you decide to forgive me, then we put this behind us and neither one of us mentions it again."

Kara was having trouble gathering her thoughts because of the emotion that was flooding her. All she could manage was, "Okay. We back off for a while and think about how we see the future."

"I really like your hair."

"Thanks."

He stood and gently pushed a strand behind her ear. She stepped into his arms. She could hardly breathe.

He held her as long as he dared. Then he released her and headed for the stairs. The emotion was churning through him so fast that he had to get away before he tried to kiss her, and he was certain she wasn't ready for that yet. He wasn't sure he was either. He needed more distance between what had happened two nights previously.

Kara stood in the dim light for a long time. Less than twenty-four hours ago her whole world had crashed around her. Now she and Lee might have a chance if she could forgive him the way he had several times forgiven her.

Three years earlier she'd betrayed his trust when she hadn't confessed that she wasn't Carrie Warner. She had betrayed his trust again when she'd stolen the Raider…and he'd ultimately forgiven her both times. They'd moved on and neither had ever mentioned it again. It just didn't feel the same to her, though. Or was that only because this time Lee had betrayed her trust and love, not the other way around? He was right. They needed some time and space to work through it. How long that would take, though, she had no idea.

Her father had told her the night before that Lee was beating himself up over what had happened. That meant Lee was dealing with guilt…and guilt implied that he'd participated more than he'd indicated. When she'd stolen the Raider, she'd never felt guilty about what she'd done. She's followed her heart and her strongest beliefs. She'd felt bad about hurting Lee, and eventually she'd admitted that her act hadn't turned out the way she had expected, but she'd never felt guilty.

Now Lee felt like he'd betrayed some part of himself, too. One thing Kara knew for certain. Stealing the Raider might have been foolish, but it hadn't violated her deepest beliefs. Lee had based his whole life on his steadfast belief in himself as a man of honor. On some level Kara realized that for Lee his personal integrity was how he measured his life.

She also realized with a deep, aching sadness that she didn't know how to help him. Even if they stayed together, he was going to have to forgive himself and that was something she couldn't control. She knew those scratches on his shoulders would heal and fade with time, but she was afraid now that they had branded his soul in a way that might last forever.

Another wave of anger swept her about Nina and Lida. Knowingly or not they'd encroached on her territory. They'd taken her man without any thought for his feelings or hers.

Slowly she walked toward the stairs. She would go to the gym and pound on the bag and pretend it had a Cylon face…a Six or an Eight. Either would work.

She changed into shorts and a set of tank tops before she walked into the gym. She was still spoiling for a fight. Over on one side Matt Cruz was doing chin-ups on the bar. She watched the way his nicely muscled arms contracted and relaxed. When he dropped to the floor, he saw her.

"Top Gun. What'd you do to your hair?"

She looked at him. "Cut it. I wanted to look more like you."

"Bullshit. Every time my sister changed her hairstyle it's because she'd dumped the loser she was dating. You just dump the admiral's son?"

She started taping her hands before putting on her gloves and didn't answer him.

He raised his fists playfully. "So, you up for a little action?"

"You offering to give me some?"

"On one condition. You don't get your dad or your boyfriend involved."

"I've fought my own battles since I was a kid so you just made it twice as hard on yourself…if you've got the guts to do it."

"Just kidding. All I meant was they outrank me. I don't want to find myself scrubbing urinals with my toothbrush because I pissed off a superior officer."

"So our deal is no running to Daddy or Lee if I lose. What do I get if I win?"

"Anything you want, beautiful. You just name it."

She raised her eyebrows. "I hear you know how to make a lady _really_ happy."

The look on his face was so comical it was all Kara could do not to laugh out loud.

"Don't get any ideas, Tailgate. It's not me. Here's the deal. One of these days very soon I'm going to introduce you to the girl of your dreams. You got to promise to show her a _really hot time _no matter how you might _personally_ feel about her. In fact I'm feeling so generous right now that you get the deal no matter which one of us wins our sparring match this afternoon. It's a one-time offer. Take it or leave it."

"Are you frakking serious? Win or lose you introduce me to a hot babe?"

Kara tightened the Velcro straps on her gloves and began to warm up on the bag.

"Yeah, Tailgate. Win or lose."

TBC…


	75. Truce or Consequences

Chapter 75

Truce or Consequences

_**Libran**_

_Year 2, Day 204: We returned safely from visiting Gemenon. Odin Sinclair took us to the spaceport and told me that he hoped we would visit again soon. Mother (Lacy Rand) had already expressed those sentiments to me as we ate a small but nourishing breakfast. She knows how anxious I am to learn of what her monks are able to make of the translation of Frank's book and has promised that she will send me information soon. _

_Oren welcomed us back and couldn't stop carrying Allen around and playing with him until Allen got hungry and sleepy at which time he always wants his mother. _

_Year 2, Day 268: I finally heard from Mother today or rather from Odin. He writes that they have determined that _Frank's book_ is but one of many written over several thousand years by many different priests on Eden using the ancient language of the church as our professor friend had thought. The book that Frank found (apparently in the tomb of a priest) had been laboriously copied by one person which is why the handwriting appeared the same throughout. Odin said that this volume stops at the end of the second century from the settlement of the planet. It encompasses two books of their holy scripture._

_I had hoped we would find out what had happened to the people of the Thirteenth Tribe. Odin said from this one volume there is no hope of that, but he did offer an interesting post script to his letter. Several very thin and fragile sheets of paper were found glued between the back cover and the last page. The monks are not equipped to deal with the level of preservation needed to stabilize them and keep them from crumbling to dust so have sought the help of a specialist. As of yet they don't know what these pages might reveal so I have not entirely given up hope._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

Kara was sitting at a large table of pilots eating dinner when Colonel Tarkington and her father came in together. He did a double take when he saw her red and swollen left cheek so she wasn't surprised when he put his tray down on the small table Tarkington had selected. He bent down and said something to the colonel and then walked over to her table. She knew exactly what he was thinking…that she had confronted Nina.

"What the hell happened to you?"

Kara grinned. "You should see the other guy. Actually you can see him. He's at the end of the table."

John glanced around among the dozen faces and immediately recognized the nice-looking young man who had piloted the Raptor that had taken him and Kara to the plateau several days earlier. Tailgate also grinned, somewhat more sheepishly than Kara had done. He had the clear beginnings of a black eye. His nose and lower lip were swollen.

"Does that mean you won?" John asked her.

"I think we decided it was a draw. I could have won, but I didn't want to hurt him."

Her remark was met with whoops and laughter from the other pilots.

"We were just sparring in the gym," she added to make sure he understood.

"I let her beat me, sir," Tailgate said.

His remark was followed by more hoots and laughter.

John said, "I'm glad to see morale among the troops is good. Put some ice on that cheek tonight. The swelling should be gone in the morning."

"Yes, sir."

He turned and walked back to his table without another word.

"Your dad didn't look too happy," Karl said.

"He doesn't like me fighting for any reason. He said he did it too much when he was younger and using your fists is the wrong way to handle things."

"You weren't really _fighting_. It was just a sparring match."

"I know. He still isn't happy about it. He probably figured that Tailgate was…never mind."

She had started to say that her father had probably figured out that Tailgate was just a stand-in for Nina, but right now wasn't the time or the place to discuss Nina with Karl.

"Oh, I get it," Karl said. "You don't want your dad knowing Tailgate made a move on you."

Kara shrugged.

"Where's Lee?" Saunders asked.

"I don't know," Kara answered. "I haven't seen him since lunch. He's really busy right now."

"What'd you do? Wear him out on your _walk_?"

She gave him a go-to-hell look.

"All I meant was everybody's got to take time out to eat." Saunders said innocently. "You'd think he'd want to spend time with us. We're such a jolly bunch."

"You tell him that the next time you see him. I'm sure he'll take it better coming from you than from me."

"Look _what_ just walked in," Hot Dog said.

Kara glanced toward the door. Natalie and Jade led the other Cylons into the officer's mess and to the serving line. A palpable feeling went around the table.

"It's bad enough we got them on the ship," one of the pilots muttered. "Now we've got to _eat_ with them. I just lost my appetite."

"Frakking skinjobs," said another.

"Cool it," Kara said. "If you start trouble, you'll wind up in the brig…with the _other_ Cylons. You heard Captain Minos this morning. We got a truce with them. We're going to be seeing more of them on board in the future. You might as well get used to it now."

_If I can take being in the same room with Nina, you can take being in the same room with the rest of them._

"Where did the Two come from?" Karl asked. "I didn't think they sent a Two."

Kara looked around again. Karl was right. The last one through the door was a Two. He was slower than the rest, walking with a cane and limping.

"Looks like somebody already tangled with him and he got the worst of it," Pepper said.

Just as Kara started to turn away, the Two glanced in her direction.

"Holy. Frak."

"What?" Karl asked.

"That's Leoben who runs the bookstore on Caprica."

"How can you tell?"

"I just know. It's him."

Hot Dog said, "I heard from the pilot of the Caprica transport that they had a skinjob passenger. Colonel Spencer _personally_ saw him on board. He was carrying a letter from President Roslin to Admiral Adama explaining the circumstances."

"Which were?"

"Somebody firebombed the dude's bookstore. The President sent him to the _G_ because she knew whoever did it would keep trying until they got him. It looks like somebody is determined to rid Caprica of all those motherfrakkers…" he stopped abruptly when Karl grabbed the front of his uniform.

"Whoa. Whoa," Kara said, but she was too late. Karl stood and dragged Hot Dog to his feet.

In an attempt to get around the table to Karl, she pushed back too quickly. Her chair legs caught. The chair tipped backward and she lost her balance. Saunders grabbed her to keep her from falling and she landed in his lap briefly before her momentum carried both of them over. Pepper grabbed Karl's arm with both of hers to keep him from smashing his fist into Hot Dog's face.

By that time John and Colonel Tarkington had arrived at the table.

"Stand down!" Tarkington barked.

John took Karl's other arm and helped Pepper pull him away from Hot Dog. Hot Dog straightened his uniform and came to attention followed quickly by Karl.

Saunders was on his back with Kara sprawled across him. "Are you all right?" she asked.

He grinned and whispered. "I will be if you lay on me for another minute…or two."

She rolled off him and got into a sitting position. "Gods, Flat Top," she hissed. "This is not the time to joke."

"Who started this?" Tarkington asked.

"I did, sir," Karl said.

"Sir, I said something I shouldn't have," Hot Dog immediately said. "I forgot that he's married to a Cylon. I'm sorry, Helo. I'm sorry, sir."

"We don't need this kind of…_display of stupidity_," Tarkington barked. "Especially not in front of our _guests_. I don't care what your personal feelings are. You're all _officers_. We look to you to _set the example_. Do _all of you_ understand me?"

He got a solid chorus of _Yes sirs_.

"Do you two men share quarters?"

"No, sir," both Karl and Hot Dog said.

"Good. You're both confined to your quarters until the morning. Go there, cool off and think about the oath you took when you were commissioned. If I hear of anything else happening, _not just tonight but in the future_, you'll both be charged with disorderly conduct and spend time in the brig which will be a blemish on your service records. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir," they chorused.

"You're dismissed."

As Hot Dog and Karl left the room, John walked around the table and extended his hand to Kara. She reached up and he pulled her to her feet. Saunders got up and righted both their chairs.

"You okay, baby?" John asked.

"Yeah. Flat Top broke my fall."

"That was nice of him."

"Yeah," Kara said. "He might have gotten _hurt_. Have you talked to Leoben yet?"

"I haven't had time. I heard Laura sent him to us because of an incident on Caprica."

"You think it would be okay if I went over and talked to him?"

"I don't see why not. Set a good example. God knows we could use one right now."

"Have you seen Lee?"

"Sorry, no. I've been with Colonel Tarkington and Natalie and an MCIS agent for most of the afternoon. The colonel has generously volunteered to take over working on Bill's guidelines for the exchange teams so I can get on with other things."

"Helping plan the invasion of the city?"

He nodded.

Kara straightened her uniform and walked over to the group of Cylons who by now had meal trays and were sitting at a table by themselves. All of them looked at her including Nina. Kara kept her eyes on Leoben lest she be tempted to repeat what Karl had almost done to Hot Dog.

"Hello, Kara," Leoben said.

"Let's go to that table in the corner and talk."

She picked up his tray and he hobbled after her. When they were settled at the table, she asked him about his ankle. Between bites of his dinner he told her about the fire and what had happened since.

"Laura has Sharon, Hera and _Sean_ at Marble House?" She asked in shock.

"She didn't feel like she could protect them otherwise. She's a very special woman. Unfortunately not everybody on Caprica sees her that way."

"I know."

"You cut your hair."

"Today."

"I like it. What happened to your cheek?"

"Sparring in the gym."

"How's your father?"

"Busy. I'm sure he'll see you as soon as he has a chance."

"What happened at your table earlier?"

"A little disagreement between two of the guys. Nothing important."

"One of them is Sharon's husband."

"That's right."

"Did that have anything to do with it?"

"You got to understand how a lot of humans still feel about the Cylons. Hot Dog lost his whole family when Kinsdale was bombed. His older sister had just had a baby. He hadn't even seen it yet. He'd have died, too, if he hadn't been in Caprica City visiting friends at the time."

Leoben smiled slightly. "You're telling _me_ how most humans still feel about Cylons? Some humans on Caprica tried to barbeque me."

"I heard."

"Your stepmother has a hard road ahead of her."

"I know…but that doesn't mean it's not worth making the effort."

"So why are you over here talking to me? Aren't you afraid it will cause problems with your friends?"

Kara thought about her answer. Finally she said, "First, I've never let anybody else's opinion choose my friends for me. Second, I like you, and third, when I was in the refugee camp, I realized that the Cylons hadn't cornered the market on evil. You're not any worse than some of us are. There's good and bad on both sides."

"You're wise beyond your years."

She snorted softly. "That's me, a real fountain of wisdom."

"What can you tell me about this group of Cylons on board ship?"

"You need to talk to Natalie. I have some prejudices."

"So they don't all meet your approval?"

Kara looked over at the Cylon table. Her gaze stopped on Nina who was sitting beside Jade. Jade was eating. Nina was staring coldly at Kara.

"I doubt I meet all of theirs either."

…

John opened the hatch to his and Lee's quarters. The day had been an emotionally and physically exhausting one for him. He wanted nothing more than to get a hot shower, get in his bunk and read the letter from Laura that Bill had handed him earlier that afternoon…right after the admiral had briefed his senior officers about the recent events on Caprica.

The fact that Laura had felt compelled to bring Sharon and Hera to Marble House for their protection had infuriated John almost as much as the fact that she'd had to transfer Sean from the NICU at Kings Bay Medical Center for the same reason. The idea that a woman and two innocent children were at risk because of something they couldn't help was sickening to him.

Bill had said, "Special Agent Darren and his team are working around the clock to catch the group responsible for the firebombing, but so far they've gotten nowhere."

"Even if they catch a few," Tigh had added, "they're like the Hydra. Cut off one head and two more grow in its place."

Tigh was right and John knew it.

He now entered the quarters and closed the hatch door behind him. Lee sat at the table, a tray from the mess hall on the floor. He was playing a game on the laptop and glanced around as John entered.

"Hey."

"I looked for you at dinner tonight," John said.

"I didn't feel like socializing."

"I guess you heard that Bill told Natalie to bring the Cylons to the officer's mess for their meals starting tonight instead of sending meals to their various quarters."

"That was part of it."

"Lee, you've got to face Nina sooner or later. Nobody's asking you to sit down and eat with her, but you can't avoid her forever."

"Maybe tomorrow. I started getting some figures together for what I think we'll need in the way of air support for the invasion of the city."

"Are you testing those numbers in your computer game?"

"Just taking a break. I'm going to work on the simulation in a minute."

John took a small tube of ointment from his pocket and put it on the table. "For your shoulders."

"Where'd you get that?"

"Doc Cottle."

"You told him?"

"No. I said it was for a scratch that was being rubbed by a uniform. He was in Emmalyn's room checking on her. He operated on her ankle while you were gone."

Lee picked up the tube of cream. "How's she doing?" he asked absently.

"As well as can be expected for someone her age with a shattered ankle. I meant to tell Kara that she can visit her now but I forgot. Emmalyn wanted me to stay and talk but I couldn't. I'll have to get back up there sometime tomorrow."

"Kara and I talked after lunch today."

"And?"

"She didn't break up with me on the spot. I told her we both needed time and she agreed. That's about it."

"She's got a red place on her cheek from sparring with one of the other pilots. It might bruise or not. I told her to put ice on it tonight. The other guy got the worst of it, but he definitely got in a blow or two."

"Why would she do something like that?" Lee asked angrily.

"My guess is that this other pilot was just a stand-in for the person she'd rather have been pounding on."

"Me."

"No, Lee, not you. I made her promise she'd stay away from Nina. I just hope she keeps that promise. It might not hurt for you to emphasize it to her. She knows how strong the Cylons are. When we were in the valley, she watched the Marines practicing hand-to-hand combat. I know she saw Jade flip Zak like he was a doll. I'm just afraid that temper of hers will get the better of her."

"I'll say something to her. How did things go this morning with Simon and Petra?"

"They didn't. I wasn't about to spring Simon on her without any warning so I went up to Sick Bay alone right after we finished breakfast and explained the situation to Yoshimo and Doc Cottle. Cottle let us use his office and Yoshimo and I told her. I'm not sure what kind of reaction I was expecting, but she totally fell apart. It was bad. She looked at me like I had betrayed her to the Four from the prison. Cottle finally had to give her something to calm her down. Then I had the pleasant task of going to Simon and telling him his wife didn't want to see him. First he said I was lying to him and then he blamed me for turning her against him. He all but accused me of having an affair with her while I was in the city. I'm not sure how it might have ended if those two Marines hadn't been outside the door. I said I'd talk to Petra again in a day or two, but Cottle says no way is anyone going to force her to see him after what was done to her at the prison by a Cylon who looks just like him. I can sympathize. I went through the same thing after D'Anna took me to the city. I'd look at her and see the one at the prison who used a cattle prod on me. Anyway, Bill agrees that Petra doesn't have to see Simon so we've got one extremely unhappy Cylon on board. He kept telling me that what his brother did to her wasn't his fault and he's right, but that doesn't mean Petra should be forced to resume their relationship. I'd like to send him back to the basestar, but that's not my call."

"You think Natalie could help?"

"Maybe I'll get a chance to talk to her privately tomorrow. She and I are overdue for a chat anyway. I saw her at dinner tonight eating with the others and thought about trying to get together with her later, but I'm just not up to it. I want to shower and hit the sack."

"Did you talk to D'Anna?"

"Let's just say I'm batting a big _zero_ today with the Cylons."

"You want to talk about it?"

"Lee, she's not even _close_ to the same one I knew in the city. Whatever happened to her…whatever kind of vision she had nearly a year ago about becoming the mother of the peacemaker…whether it was a real one or whether something was done to her in the lab, it was truly a life-altering event. I mean…for starters she didn't believe me about Sean so I called Sick Bay and asked Sonja to come down and help convince her. Sonja brought Yoshimo with her. I know D'Anna felt like we were ganging up on her, but I didn't know what else to do since my word obviously counts for zip with her."

"So what was the outcome?"

"Sonja and Yoshimo convinced her I was telling the truth about Sean. I showed her Sean's pictures. Yoshimo even read some passages from their scripture about the peacemaker and _the three_. Together he and Sonja convinced her that she and Sean fit the prophecy. I told her that Laura and I wanted to share parenting responsibilities with her when peace is established on the planet and Sean is well enough to be brought here. You'll never believe what she said to that."

John could hear the tired frustration in his own voice. He opened the bottle of whiskey and picked up his cup from the table. "You know it's days like this that I understand why Saul Tigh drinks like he does."

"What did she say?"

"She said if God had wanted her to have a part in raising the child, then He wouldn't have allowed her to have a stroke on Caprica and wind up brain dead. She said if she gave Sean to Laura back in the hospital, then that's what God had told her to do. It was _God's will_ that we should raise him. I wanted to grab her and shake her and say, '_Sean is your son, too! He deserves to know you!_' Even Sonja was totally put out with her and told her that of all the loony Threes, she was the craziest. Yoshimo is the only one who kept his cool...and D'Anna. She was…I don't know how to say it except to say she was calm and serene. She said none of us understood God's will like she did. She finally said she wanted to go back to the basestar. I've got to talk to Natalie about that, too."

He sat down in the chair and downed the whiskey in one swallow.

"I'm sorry," Lee said.

"Do you ever have days when everything you touch turns to crap?"

"You might say that."

"The only upside is that Bill could care less whether Simon and D'Anna stay on board or not. I don't think he cares much about the exchange team as long as they don't cause trouble." John poured another swallow of whiskey. "So how did your day go?"

"It went okay this morning when Natalie and I talked to Dad about the conditions of the truce. Natalie was acting cool to me, but that doesn't bother me. As we were leaving, I mentioned to her that a very nice crewman wants to meet Nina, maybe have dinner or coffee with her, and I'd appreciate it if she'd give Nina the message."

"Who wants to meet her?"

"Chief Tyrol. Natalie said she'd ask and get back to me. I'm not holding my breath."

"I thought Tyrol was dating another crewman."

Lee shrugged. "I don't know. I don't pay much attention to on board romances."

"Kara must have told me. I think she said that while she was on the _G_ last year for a couple of months, Callie and Hot Dog had a relationship. When Commander Cain found out about it, she called them both in and threatened to charge them with fraternization if they didn't end it. They ended it. After that Callie took up with Chief Tyrol."

"Cain always was a stickler for the rules."

John took the letter from Laura out of his briefcase. "So was Colonel Winters when I was on the _Solaria_. You can't maintain discipline without them. Officers having relationships with enlisted crew was one of his particular pet peeves."

Lee smiled. "Is that why you always stuck to other pilots when you were flying off a battlestar? Keep it in the officer corps?"

"One of the reasons. Pilots understand each other." He put the large manila envelope on the table and tore it across the top. "From Laura. It came on the transport this afternoon."

He slid the pages out. The first one was a photograph printed on 8½ by 11 paper. On the back Laura had written: _Billy took this just after breakfast today. I've included several copies. Please give one each to Karl and Hunter._

It was taken in Laura's sitting room. She, Bianca and Maya sat squeezed together on the small couch holding Braedon, Rachel and Esmari. Sharon stood behind them holding Hera. They were all smiling.

John handed the picture to Lee and put the other two aside. The next one was of Laura sitting in a rocking chair holding Sean. Braedon was standing on tiptoe beside the chair looking at his tiny brother. On the back of the picture Laura had written: _Hello, Daddy. Mommy and I hope you get to come home soon. We miss you and we love you. Sean, Brae & Laura_

John took a deep breath and then another and fought tears. He could no longer say that _everything_ had gone wrong for him that day. He realized anew that they were the reason he was here striving to help create the brave new world that Laura had envisioned. His family, including Kara and Lee, were at the heart of everything he was willing to fight for, everything he wanted for the future. God willing he would stand one day with all of them including D'Anna in the temple on the hill and would hold Sean up to those gathered and say to human and Cylon alike, _Behold the peacemaker, a child of our two races and our hope for the future._

…

Hunter was sitting in Emmalyn's room when Kara arrived the next morning. Emmalyn held out her hand and Kara took it.

"How's the ankle?"

"It will never be whole again, but the good doctor tells me that with patience and determination I'll walk, possibly eventually without a cane."

"She'll walk," Hunter said. "They don't come any tougher than my aunt. What happened to your cheek?"

"Sparring in the gym with another pilot."

"And your hair?"

"Got tired of taking care of it."

"I like it," Hunter said. "It makes you look younger."

"Oh, great! That's just what I need. To look younger. I take enough grief about being the youngest member of the squadron as it is. I could shoot down a thousand Raiders and some of the other pilots would still call me _Baby V_. That's V for Vigilantes, my squadron."

"Relish looking young while you can, dear," Emmalyn said. "You'll look in the mirror one day and wonder where the wrinkles came from because it won't seem like that many years could possibly have passed."

"Doc Cottle doesn't seem to mind a wrinkle or two," Hunter teased. "And that's all you've got…one or two."

"I quite enjoy talking to the doctor. He drops by several times a day to check on me and to chat."

Kara smiled. "Been turning on the charm, have you?"

"Now when have you ever seen me try to charm anyone?" Emmalyn asked indignantly. "Dr. Cottle is a very nice man and a pleasure to chat with. He even abstains from those dreadful cigarettes when he's in here."

Hunter chuckled. "She's had to deal with me and my uncles too long to be charming."

"Oh, hush." Emmalyn looked at Kara. "Hunter tells me that the Cylons have signed a peace agreement."

"Just a truce or ceasefire with the two remaining basestars. They're not going to help us take the planet, but they're not going to fight us either."

"So basically they're completely out of the picture…right?" Hunter said.

"In theory."

"You don't sound too confident," Emmalyn said.

"Let's just say I've still got some trust issues. The group on the res ship wants to put the killers of the creators and Sevens on trial so I think they mean it. It's the other ship I'm worried about."

"Where are they now?" Hunter asked. "I heard that the only basestar in scanning distance is the res ship."

"That's right. The res ship is out of visual range but we've still got them on long-range scanners. The location of the other basestar is a big mystery. Supposedly the ones on the res ship know where the other ship is, but they're not sharing the information with us. Hedging their bets, I guess. I doubt they trust us any more than we trust them."

A young woman came to the door and said, "I hate to run you out, but it's time for Miss Emmalyn's physical therapy."

Kara and Hunter stood. Hunter said, "We'll both be back."

"You'd better."

Out in the hallway, Kara said, "I want to see Targa while I'm up here."

"I guess you heard about yesterday."

"I heard that Petra refused to see Simon and he wasn't happy about it."

"Petra thinks your dad was trying to push her into seeing him."

"No frakking way!" Kara said hotly. "I told him last week that Petra and Targa had feelings for each other. He's noticed it, too. He's determined to find Cassie for her once we take the city."

"Shhhh. Not so loud. Targa is just down the hall. He doesn't know what happened. Doc Cottle didn't think it would be good for him to know Petra's husband is on the ship."

"Admiral Adama has dumped the Cylons on Dad because he's had more experience dealing with them than the other senior officers. Dad knew Simon from the city and D'Anna, of course."

"I heard Lee's getting some experience with them, too."

"What the hell does that mean?"

Hunter took her arm and steered her across the hall into an empty room. "Pipe down, Wildcat. You'll have everybody in Sick Bay coming to see what's going on."

"Why did you make that comment about Lee?"

"Just wanted to see if what Jade told Zak is true. I guess it is."

"What did Jade tell Zak?"

"That one of her sisters and a Six…how should I put this…had carnal knowledge of Lee while he was on their basestar and now the Eight is on board the _G_."

Fury flooded Kara. "That's just frakking great! I guess Zak has blabbed it to the whole damned ship by now!"

"Zak hasn't said a word to anybody but me because I told him if he did, I'd kick his ass…but good. I don't think he would have anyway once he understood that it was one-sided."

"You're damned right it was one-sided," she hissed, the fury still clear in her voice.

"Don't you think I know that? Lee loves you, Kara. I don't think I've ever known a man who loves a woman more than Lee loves you."

Kara stood taking harsh, angry breaths. "Those bitches! He told them he was engaged. Did that make any difference to them? Hell no! And now…now…" she stopped. How could she tell Hunter something she didn't even understand herself? All she knew was that what had happened to Lee had changed him.

"Did you two break up?"

She took another angry breath. "Not exactly. He said we needed time to come to grips with it. He's right. I know he is. I can't even think about it without wanting to punch somebody…Nina…not him. Why couldn't it have been somebody like Tailgate instead of Lee? Tailgate would have thought he'd died and gone to Elysium being in bed with two hot Cylons. They would probably have been begging _him_ to quit."

Hunter put his hand gently on the top of her shoulder. "You remember the day I met you when we were in the cave and you asked me what the two blue tattoos around my arm meant."

"Your scorecard. You got two of the humans who gang-raped your older sister."

"Believe me…I understand how you feel."

Again the fight momentarily went out of Kara. He pulled her against his side briefly and she savored the closeness they'd shared in the valley. This man understood her.

"Come on, Wildcat. I sound like a hypocrite telling you to let it go, and I know it will take time, but Lee loves you, not her. All you'll do if you dump him is hurt him and you both. You two are meant for each other."

"My dad said the same thing."

"He's right."

"I guess that bitch blabbed everything to Jade."

"Zak and I didn't get too deep into the details. You'll have to ask Jade."

"I wonder if she'll defend a sister instead of do what's right."

"That's a good question. We didn't get into that, either. Now let's go see Targa."

Since the last time Kara had been there, two small triangular trapezes had been suspended on a metal frame above his bed. Targa was very slowly pulling himself up a few inches and then lowering himself back to the bed. Kara could tell that he had lost weight. His outdoor tan had mostly faded. He looked very much like a slightly older version of his nephew. He was also alone. Kara had never been to see Targa that Petra hadn't been with him.

"How's it going?" Hunter asked.

"It's getting easier. I can do a dozen of these pull-ups without stopping to rest now. How are you, Kara?"

"Good. It's my day off from flying CAP so I'm visiting up here."

There was an awkward silence. Finally Targa said, "Have you seen Petra?"

Kara shook her head. "Not since I was up here four days ago."

"Will you check on her? Make sure she's all right. Doc Cottle told me she was feeling bad yesterday. He put her to bed. She's been wearing herself out looking after me. I told him she needs to take better care of herself."

Kara's eyes met Hunter's. She didn't know if he should be told about Simon or not, but one thing she did know, she wasn't going to be the one to tell him.

"I'll let you get back to your exercise."

"Tell her I hope she's feeling better." His voice softened, "Tell her I miss her. Please."

"I'll do that."

She found Petra in her quarters. The rest of the bunks were empty, the nurses and techs all on duty. Petra looked up as Kara knocked.

"Can I come in?"

"Sure."

Kara entered and pulled a chair from the table. Petra sat up in her bunk. She was still in her pajamas.

"How are you feeling?"

Petra shook her head. "I never thought…I just never thought… You heard what happened?"

"I just want you to know my dad is stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to see to the Cylons' needs. I wish they'd send them all back to the basestar and send us a new exchange team that doesn't have any history with anybody on board. My dad told me how much it meant to him to visit you and Cassie and Rachel in the city. He really likes you. He'd _never_ do anything to hurt you."

"I don't blame your father. I know he was doing his job. He's a good man and he's wonderful with the little ones. It never bothered him that they're half-Cylon. Cassie adores him. She calls him _Chon_."

"He's going to get her back for you."

"I'd just gotten to the point where I wasn't having nightmares every night. Now they're back. I haven't been able to tell anyone yet about some of the things that monster did to me at the prison…and some of the things he told me. He dissected miscarried babies, both human and half-human. He told me he would send to the city for Cassie and dissect her, too, and make me watch if I didn't do what he wanted."

"Petra, you don't need to explain anything to me."

"Then you understand why I don't want to see Simon? Why I could never let him touch me again?"

"I understand. Not to mention the fact that there's a certain guy in Sick Bay who _really_ misses you. He just told me to tell you."

That finally brought a smile to Petra's face. "He's trying so hard to overcome his injuries. He's got so much courage and determination. Those Cylons don't have a clue. Sonja told me that if one of them got hurt like that, they'd just have someone kill them so they could download into a brand new body."

"Targa's not the only one with courage and determination. I think you two belong together."

"I should get dressed and go spend some time with him."

Suddenly the Condition One klaxon began sounding. It was much softer here in Sick Bay, but it was still unmistakable.

"Son of a bitch," Kara said. "I knew that so-called truce was just too good to be true."

Knowing how far she had to go to get to her quarters and change into her flight suit, she left the room at a run. She was sure Petra would understand her cutting short the visit.

…

Lee was with John and General Vargas in the Situation Room working with the huge lighted map of the city when the Condition One alert sounded. The three men looked at each other.

Lee said, "I don't frakking believe it. The Cylons suckered us."

They stood and without a word hurried out of the room. In the CIC Bill and Tigh were watching one of the display screens. There were multiple dradis contacts near the top of the stack of battlestars. Raiders. Lee felt physically sick.

Bill glanced around and must have seen Lee's stricken face.

"The second basestar jumped in and launched thirty Raiders and jumped away…same as last time. All the battlestars are launching alert fighters. It looks like their target is the _Triton_."

"What's the res ship doing?" John asked.

"Just sitting out there beyond the range of our guns and missiles," Tigh said, "but they could launch at any minute."

"Have you had any contact with them?"

"We haven't been able to work out communications between them and us yet. Incompatible technologies or so they claim."

There was a brief commotion outside the door to the CIC. They all looked up to see the Marines barring Natalie from entering.

"Let her in," Bill called.

Lee didn't think he had ever seen Natalie's beautiful face quite so devoid of color.

"Is this how _you people_ honor a truce?" Tigh asked angrily.

"I was afraid the ones on the second ship weren't sincere," she said.

John couldn't control the anger and disappointment in his voice. "It would have been nice if you'd mentioned that earlier."

"Is the res ship going to launch Raiders?" Tigh asked.

"No. I'm sure they're not."

"How can you be sure?" Bill asked.

"They shared their feelings with me in the datastream. They sincerely want a ceasefire."

"Which is now null and void because your side broke it," Bill said. "I'd be perfectly justified in taking the _Galactica_ within firing range and launching everything we've got at your res ship."

"No, please," Natalie said. "They aren't participating in the attack. I'm sure they're as disappointed in the others as you are."

"I doubt it," Tigh said in an ugly tone.

"Damage reports coming in, sir," Lieutenant Gaeta said.

Bill nodded for him to continue.

"The _Triton_ took two missile hits that damaged her hull but didn't penetrate. Another missile hit the port landing bay. Damage still undetermined. Five missiles shot down before impact. Four Raiders destroyed before they all jumped away. One Viper destroyed and pilot lost. Another Viper hit and pilot ejected. S&R is retrieving the pilot. Injuries currently unknown."

Bill maintained his icy calm, but he looked at Natalie. "I want the coordinates of that other ship."

"I don't know them."

Tigh said, "Well _somebody_ on your res ship sure as hell does. How did you get their agreement for the truce?"

"I wasn't involved in that. Two of our Ones…Jack and Dean…signed the agreement on the authority of the others. Their collective voted."

"Either their collective lied or your Ones lied," Tigh said. "Which do you think it was?"

Natalie looked sick, and Lee realized that this had damaged her faith in some of her brothers and sisters perhaps as badly as the killing of the creators and Sevens.

"How did the two ships communicate if the second basestar is out of range?" Bill prompted.

"I think they sent word back and forth on a Heavy Raider."

Tigh said, "That means they know the coordinates of its hiding place."

"I want the coordinates of that other basestar," Bill said, "and you're going to get them for us."

"How? I have no way to communicate with them."

Bill turned to Tigh. "You have the helm. For now we stay at Condition One. Double the CAPs and keep our pilots on standby. Relay these orders throughout the fleet. Mr. Gaeta, join us in the Situation Room."

Bill led the small group down the corridor. Once inside the room, he told them to sit. Only once before in his life had Lee seen his father as furious as he was now and that was the night that Kara had stolen the Raider. Bill was doing a better job of controlling his anger today, but Lee could hear it and feel it.

Bill turned to Gaeta. "Get Chief Tyrol and Captain Minos up her as fast as you can." While Gaeta went to one of the wall phones, Bill turned to the rest of them. "I'm going to have Chief Tyrol arm a Raptor with a small nuke and set the delay on the fuse for five minutes from drop. That Raptor is going to take Natalie to the res ship where she is going to get the coordinates of that other ship for us. She'll have thirty minutes to get them and get back to the Raptor. Otherwise the nuke will be dropped in their landing bay. The Raptor pilots will immediately jump their ship back here. If anything happens to that Raptor and my pilots, I will turn every weapon we have on that baseship." He looked at Natalie. "I will destroy resurrection for all of you except the few who can download at the lab. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," she said meekly.

"And Natalie," Bill added. "If anyone on your res ship betrays us to the other basestar or gives us false information and they're not where you say they are, then the same thing will happen."

"They're not in communication range of the other ship. They would have to launch a Heavy Raider to get word to them."

"Then we'll add the launch of a Heavy Raider to the things that will bring about the res ship's destruction."

"Sir," Lee said, "thirty minutes might not be long enough for her to get to their Control Room, convince her brothers and sisters to turn over the coordinates and get back to the landing bay."

"How much time?"

"Double that."

"All right. Natalie has _one hour_ from the time that Raptor touches down in the landing bay," Bill said. "The other conditions still hold."

The Marines outside the door let Chief Tyrol in. He had obviously run most of the way because he was out of breath.

"You sent for me, sir?"

"Prep a Raptor for a short flight and arm it with a small nuke. Set the timer for five minutes from release."

Chief gulped. "_Five minutes_, sir?"

"Five minutes. How soon can you have that bird ready to fly?"

"I'll need at least an hour."

"Good. When you're done, come back up here. I'll have another task for you by then."

"Yes, sir."

Tyrol left the room as fast as he had entered.

Bill turned once more to Natalie. "You might also tell your brothers and sisters to be ready to deal with the group from that other basestar since I assume they'll start downloading as soon as we destroy it."

"I'd suggest temporary boxing," John said to her. "Otherwise your brothers and sisters on the res ship might be dealing with a mutiny."

"Good point," Bill said.

"Yes," Natalie echoed. "I'll definitely mention it to them."

They waited ten minutes for Troy Minos. There was little conversation. The atmosphere was tense and subdued.

Minos came in wearing his flight suit. "I'm sorry it took so long, sir. I had to organize the alert fighters into a second CAP."

"Understandable, Captain," Bill said. "I want your best Raptor pilot and ECO. They'll be undertaking a dangerous mission to the basestar. This is volunteer only so if either refuses, go to your next best."

"Neither one of these pilots will refuse. What's the mission, sir?"

Bill explained it to Minos exactly the way he had to the rest of them. Then he turned to Lee. "I want you to go with Captain Minos and escort Natalie to the flight deck. Make sure that both those pilots understand the mission. And Captain Minos, as soon as you get to the flight deck, send Lieutenant Thrace up here even if you have to call her in from CAP."

"Yes, sir."

Lee looked at his father. Bill's face was hard and set. Natalie stood without a word and the three of them left the room.

Out in the corridor Natalie said, "He's wanted to do this all along, hasn't he?"

"No. But if there's one thing I know about my father, it's that he's a man of his word. He accepted that truce in good faith. He has no tolerance for liars and that other ship's agreement to a truce was a lie on a grand scale."

"Does he think _I_ lied to him as well?"

"No, Natalie. But among you brothers and sisters _somebody_ did. They're not going to get a second chance. Dad isn't going to tolerate them jumping in on hit and run missions after they agreed to a ceasefire."

"Then this has nothing to do with…with what happened to you on the baseship?"

"Frak, no!" Lee said angrily. "My father doesn't have a clue what happened to me. You thought I ran and blabbed to him?"

Natalie shook her head. "I wasn't sure."

Lee could tell that Troy wanted to ask them what had happened, but he wisely chose to keep quiet.

"Who are you going to get to fly the mission?" Lee asked Minos.

"My most experienced Raptor pilot is Captain Pete Mitchell. My most experienced ECO is Captain Hamish McCall. They've both logged more hours in a Raptor than any of the others. They'll follow these orders exactly as Admiral Adama has laid them out."

"What am I going to do if my brothers and sisters won't give me the coordinates?" Natalie asked.

"I have faith that you'll be able to convince them," Lee answered. "Otherwise death is permanent for most of them. At least you'll download at the lab."

There wasn't anything to say after that so they walked the rest of the way to the hangar deck in silence. Lee's thoughts turned to Kara. He was almost certain he knew why his father had asked for her. He didn't like it, but he also knew there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it. Bill Adama had finally declared war on an enemy and he would use any means at his disposal to win this particular battle. Their ability to concentrate on the planet would be compromised otherwise.

…

When the door closed behind Lee and the other two, John said, "Could I ask, sir, why you want to see Kara?"

"She had an idea a week or so ago about destroying the second basestar. That plan got put on hold after everything happened on the plateau and then we got suckered by this truce. I'm reactivating it."

"Would it be asking too much, sir, for you to explain it to _me_?"

"Buddy removed the hi-res cameras from Sadie's missile wells and got the wells ready to install missiles. He finished that part but we never tested launching the missiles. As soon as Chief Tyrol finishes outfitting that Raptor, I'm going to have him put a pair of missiles in each of those wells. If we get a good launch test, then I'll have him load a pair of nukes into each well. We'll get the coordinates of that rogue basestar, and then Kara's going hunting."

It was all John could do to control his anger. "I'm really…not…in favor of her undertaking a mission like that, sir."

"She's the only one who can do it. She's the one who's flown Sadie for the last year. No one else in the fleet can handle this mission but her. We're going to destroy that basestar once and for all. I'm not going to let them keep chipping away at us until they eventually run of out missiles and bullets. They could destroy half or more of the fleet before that happens."

General Vargas said, "Once we get those coordinates, couldn't you jump two of your battlestars there and take that ship out?"

"The minute we jump into space anywhere near them, they'll just jump away. Their FTL drives are spooled-up all the time. The big advantage the Raider gives us is that they won't see the danger until it's too late. Kara can fly toward that ship, release her missiles and jump away before they realize what's coming. We've only got one shot at this and I'm going to take it."

John shook his head. "There's got to be another way."

Bill looked at Gaeta. "You can go back to the CIC. I'll call you if I need you."

Gaeta left and closed the door. Bill, John and Vargas were the only three in the room.

Bill's voice finally softened slightly. "I understand how you feel, John. What do you think it did to me to send my oldest son off on a mission he had only a fifty percent chance of returning from? But I did it anyway. I did it because he's a soldier and because if he succeeded, then we stood a chance of saving hundreds, probably thousands of lives. It was a risk I felt we had to take. How many lives do you think are at risk every time that rogue basestar jumps into space and releases Raiders?"

John looked down. He couldn't argue with a thing Bill had just said, but he couldn't reconcile Kara flying toward a basestar in a Raider loaded with nukes either.

"I _wanted_ to believe the Cylons would abide by the ceasefire," Bill added. "I think all of us did."

"I understand both your feelings," Vargas said. "I've made command decisions that have put good men and women at high risk. I never made those decisions lightly, but I made them. I believe Admiral Adama is right in making this decision. But I also know that losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent."

He didn't have to say anything else. John knew Vargas had lost his oldest son on Picon during the fighting over six years earlier. The general knew firsthand that unimaginable grief and pain.

John took a deep breath. "I've just…been a part of Kara's life for such a short time."

Vargas said softly, "It wouldn't make any difference, John, if you'd had her with you from the day she was born."

…

Kara had missed launching with the first wave of alert fighters, but they were still at Condition One, so she and the remaining pilots waited…and waiting patiently was not one of Kara Thrace's talents.

Pepper and Hot Dog had gotten there in time to launch. In fact all of the Viper pilots in the Vigilantes had launched. Because she'd been in Sick Bay and had farther to go, she hadn't made it with the others. She didn't know a lot of pilots in the other squadrons except by their call signs. She wasn't feeling particularly sociable either so she stayed near her Viper.

She finally got tired of pacing around and sat down cross-legged on top of an empty ammo crate. She was sitting and staring at the floor, thinking about everything she'd learned that morning when Tailgate and his ECO Red Devil walked up.

"You lied," Red Devil said to Tailgate. "You look way worse than she does."

Kara glanced up. Tailgate's eye was definitely showing a bad bruise although the swelling in his nose and lip was mostly gone.

"Hey, guys."

"I thought you'd be _out there _protecting the fleet," Tailgate said.

"I was visiting a friend in Sick Bay. I got here too late to launch. But we're still at Condition One so I got to wait right here just in case they want to put more of us _out there_."

"Us, too," Tailgate said. "So how do you know the Cylon you were talking to after dinner last night…the one Hot Dog said came from Caprica?"

"His name is Leoben. He used to sell books near the University. I've known him for three years. He's all right. He saved my life once."

"So you're _friends_ with one of them?" Red Devil asked.

"More than one of them," Kara answered. "I'll be glad to introduce you to an Eight."

Tailgate said, "He's not interested. He's hot for another Raptor pilot. It doesn't matter that she won't give him the time of day."

"Who?" Kara asked.

"Racetrack. You know her?"

"Yeah, I know her. What about you? You want to meet a Cylon?"

"The one with the short hair is hot, but I hear she's the main squeeze of some Marine. I got no desire to get my neck broken over a woman."

"Yeah," Red Devil laughed. "You can't even hold your own against another pilot. A Marine would make mincemeat of you."

Kara smiled and raised her eyebrows. "Jade's not the only Eight on board the ship."

"Is _that_ the hot babe you want to introduce me to? The one who looks like Jade?"

One of the deck crew came running up to them. "Lieutenant Thrace?"

Kara stood. "That's me."

"Sir, Captain Minos said Admiral Adama wants to see you in the Situation Room ASAP."

Kara grinned. "I guess he's stumped on how to handle this latest crisis and needs my advice. Sorry, boys. I've got to run."

As she started to walk away, Tailgate asked. "Hey, is that her?"

"Yeah, that's her."

"Bring it on, Starbuck. I am ready!"

…

The door to the Situation Room opened and Kara entered. The minute she saw Admiral Adama with her father and General Vargas, her look changed to one of trepidation.

"Am I in some kind of trouble, sirs?"

"No, lieutenant," Bill said. "We have a mission for you."

The fear vanished and she smiled. "In Sadie?"

Bill nodded.

"When?"

"Possibly tonight. Natalie will soon be on her way to the res ship to get some coordinates for us. If she's unable to get them, then we'll discuss the original plan that you and Mr. Gaeta talked about. If she gets them, we'll talk about a more direct mission to destroy that other basestar."

The door opened once again and Lee entered followed by Tyrol.

"The Raptor is loaded with a small nuke, sir," Chief said. "Both pilots and Natalie are aboard. They're waiting your order to launch."

Bill went to the wall phone. "Put me through to my LSO and put everything on screen in the Situation Room." He waited a few seconds for the connection and then said, "Launch that bird, Captain Kelly."

Lee looked at Kara. He saw the excitement glittering in her eyes and then he looked at John and saw the apprehension darkening his. He knew his own look was probably much closer to John's than to Kara's.

Bill turned to Chief Tyrol. "Load four regular missiles into the wells of Starbuck's Raider. She's going to do a little target practice out in space. We've got to make sure the Raider will launch our missiles and that the trajectory is reasonably accurate. If that goes well, it will be time to load the Raider with nukes."

"_Yes, sir_!" Tyrol said with enthusiasm in his voice.

After Tyrol left, Bill said, "Lieutenant Thrace will test this afternoon. If the test goes well and we get those coordinates from the Cylons on the res ship, she'll launch on her mission around midnight. With a little luck a few minutes after she jumps away, we'll be permanently rid of a big threat."

Kara smiled. "I think you should say with a _lot_ _of luck_, sir."

Lee looked at her. Only Kara could find humor in something as serious as this.

…

The Raptor returned in under an hour. Natalie had three different sets of coordinates. According to Jack and Dean, the other basestar would be at one of them. Apparently they moved around among the three at the whim of their Hybrid.

Tyrol and his crew were still working on Sadie, so she and Lee walked to the officer's mess for lunch. It was nearly deserted even at noon because of the continuing Condition One alert. That made the Cylons stand out even more. They were all there except Natalie. Kara gave Leoben a little two-finger salute and he smiled. He was sitting beside Natasi. They probably had a lot to catch up on.

"Far corner," Kara said after she and Lee got their trays.

She led him to the table where she and Leoben had talked the night before. They had barely gotten seated when Jade got up and walked over to them.

"What's going on?"

"You buddies on the other basestar attacked us this morning," Lee said.

"I don't believe it."

"It's true," Kara said. "They jumped in and launched thirty Raiders and jumped away. They tried to destroy the _Triton_. Fortunately they didn't succeed. All they did was ding it in a couple of places."

While they were talking, Nina had also gotten up from the table and now joined Jade.

"Is it true?" Nina asked. "The other ship attacked you?"

"Why is that so hard for you to believe?" Kara asked sarcastically. "Isn't that what it's been doing since we got here?"

"Kara," Lee said softly, "they have a right to know what's going on."

Nina took in Kara's flight suit. "So you're a pilot like Lee?"

"No, I'm the tooth fairy?"

"Kara and I are both pilots," Lee said.

Nina said, "I'll go get my tray and come eat with you."

"No," Kara said. "Lee and I have some things to talk about. We don't want company."

Nina ignored her. "Why haven't you come to see me, Lee?"

"Because he doesn't _want_ to see you," Kara said angrily. "Lords of Kobol. I can't believe you're so dense."

"My sister isn't _dense_," Jade said with an edge in her voice. "She's just never been around humans before."

"Well, let her practice her people skills on some other humans. Lee and I want to be _alone_."

"Kara, please," Lee said. "Let _me_ handle this."

"Fine. I'll go eat lunch with Saunders while you _handle_ _it_."

She picked up her tray and walked over to the table where Saunders was sitting by himself.

"Where's Karl?" she casually asked.

"He took his lunch back to our quarters. He's still hot about what Hot Dog said last night. He figured he'd avoid any chance of a confrontation."

"Hot Dog…is…he's just Hot Dog. In some ways he's clueless."

"I can't believe he forgot that Karl is married to a Cylon."

"I can. He's really bummed out over what happened to Kat. I hope Karl will cut him some slack."

"Like you're cutting that Cylon sitting with Lee some slack?"

"That's different."

"It always is when the shoe is on your own foot."

Kara started to say something sarcastic when she realized that Saunders had no idea what Nina had done to Lee. She knew Lee wanted to keep it that way, too. She picked up her burger and took a bite. It was no longer warm. She tasted cold grease and almost spit it out.

"Listen, about last night," Saunders said, "I was mostly kidding about you laying on me."

She grinned for the first time since she'd entered the room. "Mostly?"

"You'd be insulted if I said you weren't hot. Because you are. And you know it. And it's been a long time since I've had a hot woman lay on me. I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel good."

"What would Kendra say if she heard you say that?"

"Nothing. She knows I think you're hot. She thinks you're hot, too."

Kara rolled her eyes and opened her bag of chips.

Saunders laughed. "Not that she's into women or anything. She just knows when a woman is…has that kind of effect on guys. I'm just saying…" he shrugged.

"What exactly are you saying?"

He glanced toward Lee and Nina. "Look, I don't know what's going on, but if you need a shoulder to cry on…or a sympathetic ear…I'm available."

She looked at him while she munched her chips.

"My offer is _sincerely_ made," he added.

"Do you make house calls? Cause you might have to visit me in the brig."

He glanced over at Lee and Nina again. His smile disappeared. "Okay, joking aside. What's really going on, Kara?"

"Little Miss Nina has got the hots for Lee in a big kind of way. I wish he'd just tell her to go frak herself, but he's either way more into this diplomacy thing than he says he is…or he's enjoying the attention."

"I don't think that's it. You've got him wrapped up tight, Kara. We all know it."

She put the half-eaten bag of chips on her tray. Her appetite was gone. "Well that bitch is trying her best to undo the wrapping."

…

Lee watched Kara take her tray and sit down across from Saunders who smiled like he'd just won the lottery. While Dwight and Kara were in Flight School together Lee had been jealous of him. He'd thought Saunders was interested in her, and Kara's protests that they were _just friends_ had only fueled the fire, especially when she'd told him how Saunders had helped her tackle and then conquer the wall on the obstacle course.

The fact that Dwight Saunders was a slightly younger version of himself didn't help. He was an Academy valedictorian and first in his Raptor division in Flight School where Lee had been the Top Gun of his Viper class. But Saunders had a bonus that Lee knew he didn't have. Saunders was outgoing and well-liked by everyone he met…not to mention good-looking.

Lee had eventually gotten over his jealously…or he thought he had. Right now he wasn't so sure.

"I asked why you haven't come to see me." Nina said. "Aren't you listening to me?"

"I've been busy. And there's no reason right now for me to have any dealings with the exchange team."

"Don't you want to see _me_?"

"No. I want to be around people who respect me. I don't think that you do…or you and Lida wouldn't have…done what you did when I asked you to stop. Don't you understand that if you want to get along with humans, you can't just _take _what you want? Do you really believe you're entitled to do that? Is Kara right? Are you really _that clueless_?"

Nina pondered his words for nearly a minute before she said, "Your girlfriend isn't very nice."

"She's nice to her friends. She doesn't consider you a friend and I don't blame her. If it had been her instead of me on your ship, and one of your brothers had done that to her, I'd have been ready to put a bullet in his head."

"Why is she talking to that other man if she's your girlfriend?"

"He's her friend. She has a lot of friends among the pilots. Look, Nina, I don't see how you can expect Kara to be nice to you considering what you did."

Nina gave him a sultry look. "But you _liked it_."

"Not really."

"You lie. You were excited."

"Have you been listening to anything I just said?"

"If felt good to me, too. I'd like to do it again with you."

"I don't want to talk about this with you, not now, not ever. It should never have happened and I can guarantee you it won't ever happen again."

"Natalie said you want to introduce me to another man."

"Someone asked to meet you. Against my better judgment I said I'd ask."

"Who?"

"The crew chief. He's a nice guy."

She smiled. "Is he as handsome and _well-built_ as you?"

"I'm not into rating other guys' looks or builds. I'll introduce you and you can make up your own mind."

"No. I'll wait for you to come to your senses and break up with your girlfriend. That's what happens in the movies."

Lee struggled to maintain his composure. "This isn't the movies, Nina. If you want a human boyfriend, I'm sure you won't have any trouble finding one, but it's not going to be me."

"Even if I tell your girlfriend exactly what you did with me and Lida?"

"She already knows. I told her."

"So because of that she hates Cylons."

Lee struggled to stay calm. In many ways it was like talking to a child.

"Kara likes Jade and Natalie. She has a friend back on Caprica named Sharon who is an Eight. They roomed together at the Academy. Leoben is a friend of hers, too, so she doesn't have anything against _Cylons_. If you and Lida were humans and had done what you did, Kara would feel the same way. Don't you understand it's not _what you are_ but _what you did_?"

"It doesn't matter to me whether she likes me or not. All I care about is whether _you _like me."

"If the only reason you wanted to be on the exchange team is because you think you and I will have some kind of relationship, you're wasting your time. I don't know how to say it any plainer, Nina. Kara and I are going to get married one day. There is no _you and me_. There will _never_ be a _you and me_."

"Dean says we should never say _never_."

Lee stood. "I've got to go, Nina. We've got a mission to plan."

"I'll see you again soon."

_Not if I see you first. _He walked over to the table and sat down beside Kara.

"You didn't touch your food."

She smiled. "I lost my appetite. It must be the company."

"It wasn't my fault," Saunders said innocently.

"You know who I mean."

"Let's take a walk," Lee said.

"You two and your _walks_," Saunders said. "They're killing me and all the others whose girlfriends and wives are back on Caprica."

Kara grinned at Saunders. "Right over there is a hot, horny Cylon with lust in her eyes."

He glanced over at Nina. "I don't think that lust is directed at me. I think Lee has picked up a groupie."

Lee groaned. "Please don't repeat that to anyone."

"Let's go." Kara stood and took Lee's hand. She had reached the extent of being in the same room with Nina. They walked down the corridor for a ways before she said, "Did your groupie get the message?"

"Just call her Nina. She doesn't want to meet Chief Tyrol."

"I guess that's bad news for Tailgate and he's hotter than Chief."

"How did he get involved in this?"

"I was going to introduce him to her. To quote Hot Dog, _Tailgate's always trying to score. _I figured they'd be a good match. They could frak each other silly. He might even be more than she can handle."

"Just let it go, Kara." He squeezed her hand. "The only reason I talked to her today was to let her know that if she's on this ship because she thinks she and I are going to hook up…well she's wrong. And it had to come from me…not you."

"Well, now she's been told. I hope she'll take it to heart."

"I hope so, too."

"Otherwise, she and I are going to have a chat."

"No. I want you to stay away from her. John said you'd promised. Believe me. Nothing good can come from you and her tangling." When she didn't answer, Lee added. "You don't want to end up in the brig."

"No," Kara finally said. "Then she'd have you all to herself."

"You need to forget about this. You've got a mission to fly."

The thought of what she was soon going to do crowded everything else from her mind. "You're right. I've got a mission to fly. Time to leave that bitch in the dust."

…

Wearing her flight suit and helmet Kara lay on her stomach in Sadie. She didn't mind the flight suit, but she hated the helmet. What worked fine in the cockpit of a Viper was awkward in Sadie, but everyone had insisted that she wear it. How many times had Lee started a sentence with, "If something goes wrong and Sadie loses pressurization…"

It had been all she could do not to snap at him, _I get the picture, Lee._ But she hadn't because she knew why he said it. Only once had her father said, "You need to listen to Lee, baby." He hadn't needed to say anything else. His expression had said it for him.

Now she waited for the Raider to be raised to the launch bay. A set of coordinates for this test run was already programmed into the nav computer. She was launching with the Cylon transponder turned off. She was way out of visual range of the res ship, but they hadn't wanted the Cylons to know that she was taking the Raider out at all. So far the res ship was quiet. No Heavy Raiders had been launched to warn the other basestar, but there was no need to tempt fate.

The missiles loaded into Sadie's wells were the kind that she would carry to the basestar minus the nuclear warhead. They were not heat seeking. They would simply fly straight until they hit something or their fuel was exhausted. Two Raptors were launching after her and would follow her jump to the test area. One would drop a floating target so she could get an idea of how the missiles would fire. Both Raptors would film the release of her missiles.

She had asked that Karl and Saunders pilot one of the Raptors. She wanted to express her faith in her friend, to let everyone know that even though Karl was married to a Cylon, he would support Admiral Adama in any decision the admiral made. She later found that the other Raptor was piloted by the same two who had carried Natalie to the baseship. She knew Hamish "Skulls" McCall fairly well because he hung out with them a lot. Kara believed that he was interested in Pepper. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell she knew only by reputation. He was older, married with a child, and rarely hung out in the rec room. He was the senior Raptor pilot on board.

She got clearance from the LSO, launched and waited for the two Raptors. Then the three of them jumped. When they came out of the jump, they were near the seventh planet in the solar system. Nereid was the fourth. This planet was a giant, the one whose immense gravitational pull vacuumed up many of the asteroids that entered the system and kept them from pelting the inner planets.

She waited while Mitchell's Raptor hovered. The door opened and Skulls pushed out a floating target. There had been no way to calibrate the missiles on the _G_. Chief Tyrol was counting on this test to do that. Four missiles. One target. Chief had told her to try not to hit it with the first missile. That was a joke.

The Raptor moved away. She heard Mitchell's voice in her helmet comm. "It's all yours, Starbuck."

"Coming around," she said.

She made a wide circle and began her approach. The target was a floating three-foot-diameter inflatable sphere in bright neon yellow. It had only one purpose…to give her somewhere to aim during the test. No one really expected her to hit it just as no one expected her to miss the huge basestar even though she knew the closer she got to the center of the ship, the better. This test was to insure that the Raider would arm and release Colonial missiles.

She made sure that the target was between her and the planet and began her first run. She flipped the switch to arm the first missile. "Releasing missile one in five-four-three-two-one." The well was almost directly beneath her. She felt the mechanism release. "Missile is away."

She pulled up and banked sharply. She knew the Raptors were tracking it on their dradis screens and with their cameras.

"Looking good," Mitchell said. "Missed the target by three hundred yards, but everything else looked good."

They knew that when the missile ran out of fuel, it would eventually be caught in the planet's gravity and impact harmlessly on the surface of the frozen and uninhabitable world.

She repeated the procedure four more times. The last missile failed to release. She flipped the arming switch back to the neutral position.

"I got no joy on missile four," she said. "I'm coming around for another try."

It still didn't release and they jumped back to the _Galactica._

The furor that erupted on the hangar deck was the last thing she expected. As soon as her father saw one missile still in the well, he exploded. "You _jumped that ship_ with an armed missile still under the wing?"

"I disarmed it," she said innocently.

"How do you know it disarmed?"

She edged closer to Lee. Chief and his crew were studying the missile. "It's not armed, sir," Tyrol called. "The release mechanism is jammed, but the disarm signal worked."

"Do you not know what might have happened?" John asked.

She shook her head and glanced at Lee.

"If that missile hadn't disarmed, the jump could very well have set it off. All that would have come back to us would have been bits and pieces of that Raider."

Lee said, "John's right. Jumping momentarily puts a huge amount of stress on a ship including anything attached to it. If that missile hadn't disarmed, the jump could have set it off and blown the Raider to bits."

"Then why didn't somebody mention that to me?"

John said, "That's my fault. I should have. I've flown Vipers and Raptors. You've flown Vipers and you've flown Sadie when she was loaded with nothing but surveillance equipment. I should have thought to warn you."

She walked over to him and put her arms around him. "Calm down, Dad. I'm here. I'm in one piece, and I'll never jump a ship again once I've armed a missile on the off chance it didn't disarm."

He held her. "I shouldn't have yelled at you like that. You didn't know."

She looked up at him. "So is my mission to nuke the basestar a go now?"

"We should have the footage from the two Raptors offloaded soon. Let's go to the Situation Room and watch it. Bill said to call him when it was available. Then we'll talk."

"Do I have time to take a quick shower? Admiral Adama said if I go, it won't be until after midnight tonight."

"Sure, baby. Lee and I will get everything ready and wait for you."

She smiled. "I won't be long."

…

The time chosen for the mission was 00:30. Her father and Lee insisted that she get a few hours of sleep after dinner…or try to. They walked with her to their quarters. Lee told her to use his bunk. They told her that they would be in the rec room. John told her he would wake her in plenty of time. Both seemed to have accepted what she was going to do, but she also knew that neither one of them liked it.

They left her alone then and she took off her uniform and crawled into Lee's bunk. She mentally ran through the mission plan. It was a simple one. She would jump to the coordinates one by one until she found the basestar and then she would fly toward it. Chief thought he had the fourth mount fixed, but Admiral Adama refused to take a chance so Sadie carried three missiles instead of four. When she was within range, she would release the three missiles one after the other as fast as she could arm and fire them.

Then she would turn and fly at Sadie's top speed until she was well out of range of the initial explosion. She would turn and record what happened with the two cameras in Sadie's gun ports. As soon as the first nuke detonated, she would jump away. Everyone wanted visual proof that the basestar was destroyed.

Kara closed her eyes and listened to the _Galatica's_ air-handling system, the soft hum of air through the vents that never stopped. She didn't know when or even if the Cylons on board the _G_ would be told about her mission. She just knew that shortly after midnight, the dark hour as some called it, she would crawl into Sadie and they would go hunting.

TBC…


	76. We Regret to Inform You

Chapter 76

We Regret to Inform You

_Libran_

_Year 2, Day 346: I decided many months ago that this was not the place to record all of Allen's day-to-day experiences so I began a separate journal for my beautiful baby boy which I hope explains some of the long time gaps in this journal. I shall henceforth stick to other matters here._

_Good news today from Odin Sinclair. He writes that the sheets of paper found between the last page and the back cover of Frank's book have been stabilized enough that translation has begun. It will be a long and arduous process because the author wrote in a pale brown ink on both sides of the ultra-thin paper which has now yellowed badly. Odin said there are places that the vegetable-based ink has faded so completely that even sophisticated recovery techniques cannot reveal it. Some words will have to be inferred from the context. He does not think that Mother will allow him to send me the entire translation. He said that I would have to return to Gemenon in order to read it. My husband grumbled that Odin simply wishes to see me again. I tried to soothe his jealous outburst by telling him that it could be years before the translation is completed and that Mother might change her mind about sending it to me. After all I did donate the book to them. But Oren would not be pacified. I think the fact that I have been reading all the information I can find on the Thirteenth Tribe and their belief in one God has also upset him as he told me yesterday that he thought I was becoming unduly influenced by their religion. I reminded him that curiosity and conversion do not necessarily go hand in hand, but I don't think he was pacified. For a man who has shown very little devotion to our gods over the years, he is suddenly quite anxious to make sure I continue to follow them._

_Odin did send me these few tantalizing tidbits._

_1) The additional pages (8 of them) were written in the same hand and the same ancient liturgical language as the book so they assume the same author._

_2) The paper is "nearly as thin as the skin of an onion" and therefore very fragile, even stabilized between panes of glass. _

_3) Carbon dating of a small scrap of the paper indicates it is from 700 to 1,100 years old._

_4) So far there has been nothing in the text to indicate the gender of the writer but the handwriting expert's opinion is that the writer was male. Perhaps the truth will emerge later. For simplicity's sake, Odin is using "he" and "him". _

_5) The writer was not a high priest nor did he ever aspire to that position. He was apparently a humble and sincere monk who was well past middle age when he wrote the hidden pages. Odin hesitated to say "old", but the handwriting expert has expressed the opinion that some thirty to forty years elapsed between the penning of the body of the book and the other pages While the handwriting is the same, the script shows some 'deterioration of dexterity'. In other words he thinks the writer had developed arthritis or perhaps even palsy that took much from the strength of his hand._

_6) Based on the word of travelers who long ago made their way from Eden to Gemenon, it is thought that there was a series of monasteries that were located around the continent. One source indicates 12; another, 16. Monks traveled among them (always on foot) on life-long spiritual quests. The author of Frank's book was apparently one of these travelers as he twice mentions living at "the different abbeys"._

_7) With assumed words appearing in brackets, I have copied the first few sentences exactly as Odin sent them to me: _Soon they will [come] for me so I [must] hurry. The days grow dark indeed as [more/most] of our freedoms are taken from us. The Radicalatti have come to power and their plan will doom us all.

_I have written to Odin to ask his opinion of what the writer means by "doom us all". Does he mean those monks like him or their whole religious order or is he speaking in much broader terms? Could this be our first hint about the fate of the inhabitants of Eden? I cannot wait to get his reply._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

The day after Leoben left Caprica, Laura awoke to the realization that the heat had finally come on in Marble House. They had enjoyed an extremely mild autumn, a _Dionysian summer_ as many called it for the god of the grape harvest and winemaking. This had been a very good year with a long growing season of balmy days and mild nights. But that unseasonable weather appeared now to be over. Maya had mentioned during dinner the previous evening that a cold front was on the way. It had apparently arrived during the night.

Laura got up, put on her robe and slippers and padded down the hall to see Sean. His night nurse was changing his diaper…the smallest diaper Laura had ever seen. The nurse looked up and smiled.

"Good morning, Madame President."

"Good morning, Diana. How is Sean this morning?"

"Still doing well. I just weighed him. He's two pounds seven ounces now."

"Dr. Cardenas told me last night that Dr. Junius is going to remove his feeding tube today.

"Yes. We're getting ready to start him on a bottle. His muscle coordination has improved enough that he can manage sucking, swallowing and breathing without one interfering with the other."

"Yes, Bianca told me. I hope I'm still here when Dr. Junius arrives, but I've got a ribbon-cutting ceremony at ten o'clock this morning at the new technical college."

"My husband has applied there for the spring term. He wants to become a computer engineer. Right now he waits tables at Bonnie Patrice. The tips are great. On the weekends he makes a lot of cubits, but he says it's not doing anything for his brain. I told him we need to get his education out of the way so we can start a family of our own."

"I wish you both the best of luck."

Laura touched Sean's hand and his tiny fingers curled around hers. His mouth made soft sucking sounds as his eyes blinked. He appeared to be staring at her.

She leaned over and cooed. "Hello, Sean. I'm so proud of you. Your father is, too."

His mouth stopped moving. For a moment she imagined that he smiled indulgently and then his mouth began to move again, sucking on an imaginary bottle or pacifier.

"Look at that little mouth," his nurse said. "I think he's ready for that bottle right now."

Bianca walked in and joined them.

"Isn't it amazing," Laura said, "how one so small can reduce three grown women to absolute mush?"

She spent too much time with Sean and then had to hurry to eat breakfast and get ready for the day. She decided on gray wool slacks, a dark amber silk blouse and her charcoal-gray winter coat. At the last minute she grabbed a pair of black leather gloves. She was glad she did.

Her guards were on edge because of the attempt on Leoben's life several days earlier. Edgar had put on an extra security team after he couldn't talk her into cancelling her outdoor speech and the ribbon cutting. She had been firm. Nearly a month had passed since she'd performed any kind of civic duty and the education of Caprica's citizens had always held a special place in her heart. They had, after all, elected a President who was a former teacher and former Secretary of Education. They could expect no less. And she didn't want Billy to have to answer another question like he'd gotten from James McManus during his last press briefing. McManus had asked him _where the President was hiding these days._ Billy had told her that McManus had put extra emphasis on the word _hiding. _Billy thought he was implying that Laura had begun dodging the press because the war over Nereid was not going as well as they'd hoped. At first Laura had been angry but as she later thought about it, she realized that he was probably correct. She had grown weary of answering the same questions over and over….mainly the one that started, _When are we going to get some good news? _

Edgar had no problem with Laura's dedication to her favorite cause. He told her he just wished more time had elapsed between the torching of the bookstore and her visit, especially since the new technical college was in the city and was surrounded by taller buildings. She was aware that today would be a security nightmare for them, but she would not disappoint those who had gone to great lengths to get this school built. The invitation had gone on her calendar three months previously. There had been plenty of time for Edgar to organize the security detail plus they still hadn't released the information that Leoben had survived. Only a handful of people had any idea that the Cylon was alive and was now on the _Galactica_. With luck Zarek or whoever had been behind the attack still thought they had succeeded. Hopefully her part in putting the Cylon out of their reach was unknown to them.

She was well prepared for the edginess of her security team. What she wasn't prepared for was the size of the crowd that had gathered behind the police barricades. While she was Secretary of Education, she had twice attended the openings of schools for adult education. Both times those occasions had attracted a few hundred interested people, many of them potential students. Today there were thousands of people packed behind the barricades with more coming up all the time.

"Dear gods," she murmured as she exited her limo.

Edgar was as tense as she had ever seen him. He said something into his wrist mike and her guards closed rank slightly. She smiled and waved at the people which brought cheers and whistles from most of them. Almost all of them had mobile phones and were recording her progress up the six wide steps to the area in front of the door.

The podium for her speech was to the left of the entrance. A cover of bullet proof glass called the crystal tent had been erected over it. There were agents on every nearby rooftop and others scanning the windows of nearby buildings. Laura shook hands with the dean of the college and several of the teachers as well as two of the biggest financial contributors plus a small group of students. The dean tested the microphone and then thanked her for coming.

She stepped up to the podium to make her speech. It was one she had made dozens of times when she was the Secretary of Education. Once she got started she spoke passionately for nearly twenty minutes without a single cue-card to prompt her. She forgot about security issues as the words flowed from her heart about the importance of education and her dedication to it.

When she finished everyone clapped and cheered. Then she turned. The Dean handed her a pair of scissors and she cut the dark blue ribbon taped across the front door. The cheering grew louder.

She spent another twenty minutes at a reception inside carrying around a cup of punch and talking to everyone there. Edgar was unobtrusive, but he was never more than a few feet from her the whole time.

Being surrounded by the educators and administrators of academia allowed her to relax. She felt at home among the teachers and professors. She was in her element and didn't want to leave. Edgar finally caught her eye and glanced at his watch, their prearranged signal, and she said her goodbyes.

As they left and walked down the sidewalk toward her waiting limo, Edgar was on one side of her, his eyes always scanning the crowd. While she'd been inside, some protestors had gathered at the back of the well-wishers. They were holding signs saying _Nuke the Cylons _and _End the War Now _and _Bring our Ships Home. _Their shouts drowned out the words of many of those at the barricades, but none of them made an attempt to push forward or cause trouble. Caprica City had always allowed protesters as long as they did it peacefully. Still she saw both plainclothes and uniformed officers moving into position around them. No one was taking any chances today.

She was smiling and shaking hands at the barricades when there was a disturbance in the crowd, barely more than a ripple in the second row of people. Someone on the front row was pushed from behind and fell into the barricade. Faster than she could take another breath, Edgar had thrust himself between her and the crowd and had his arm around her. He practically lifted her from her feet as he hustled her toward the car. He had obviously seen something that she hadn't. She caught a glimpse of a woman crawling under a barricade with something in her hand. The woman began screaming as police officers flattened her on the ground. Her arm was outstretched for only a second before it was grabbed and roughly pulled behind her. In the scuffle someone kicked whatever she had held and it went skittering across the sidewalk with a metallic sound. The woman's screams intensified.

Laura didn't see anything else because Edgar literally shoved her into the car and fell on top of her while shouting at the driver.

"Go! Go! Go!"

His body was keeping her down on the seat. She smelled the wool of his coat and the starch of his white shirt and his deodorant. He hadn't drawn his service weapon, but his hand was on it under his jacket.

Her own heart was hammering. She gasped, "What happened?"

He was obviously listening to something in his earpiece because he didn't answer her right away. The driver made a sharp right turn and accelerated hard. After another few moments Edgar sat up and helped her sit up.

"Are you all right, Madame President? I hope I didn't hurt you."

She pushed her hair out of her face and straightened her coat and tried to reclaim a bit of dignity. "I'm fine. Did that woman have a gun in her hand?"

"We're not sure yet."

Laura leaned back against the seat. A few-second incident had spoiled the good mood of the morning. It had also shown her just how fast something could go wrong and how vulnerable she was despite all her security. If it had been a gun…or a bomb…she shuddered and struggled with her emotions as she thought of tiny Sean, of what would happen to him if she were killed, of what would happen to him and Braedon both until John could get home. What would happen to Maya and Bianca, Esmari and Rachel…and Sharon and Hera? Would Scott Mickelson continue to protect them after he assumed the Presidency? She made a mental note to discuss the matter with him as soon as possible.

She took a deep breath, momentarily fought tears and got herself under control.

She patted Edgar's hand briefly. It was as cold as ice. "Thank you."

He nodded. At least he had the decency not to say, _I told you coming out this morning was a bad idea._ But she was almost certain he was thinking it.

When they got back to Marble House, he helped her out of the car. She stood on legs that weren't entirely steady and he held her arm until she reached the door.

"I'm fine now. Please come to my office as soon as you have a report."

"Yes, Ma'am."

Billy and her staff were waiting for her. Her secretary took her coat. Everyone wanted to know if she was all right. She smiled and assured them that thanks to her wonderful security team she was fine. Billy fixed her a cup of tea and followed her into her office. She went into the private bathroom and brushed her hair. By the time she sat at her desk and picked up the porcelain cup, the shaking had almost subsided. She still put her left hand on the other side of the cup to steady it.

"Do you want me to call Dr. Cardenas to check you?" Billy asked.

"Oh, no. I'm fine. This tea is just what I need."

"We were watching it on the news. One camera followed Edgar pushing you into the car, but the other ones stayed with the action. Do you want to see it?"

She nodded. He leaned over and brought it up on her laptop. She was at the barricades shaking hands for a few moments and then Edgar grabbed her and they were out of the scene. A brown-haired woman wearing a thin beige windbreaker jacket suddenly emerged between the legs of some people against a barricade. She crawled forward. Someone screamed. The woman's hand was extended. More people screamed and began pushing toward the back of the crowd. The barricade was overturned. The cameraman focused on the woman's hand. She didn't have a gun. It was a small picture in a brass frame but it was too blurry to tell of what. Then the police closed in and began pushing the news crews back away from the barricades. There was a last image of Laura's limousine pulling away from the curb with the lead and trailing vehicles, lights flashing and sirens screaming, and then all disappearing around the corner.

"Play it again and pause it when the woman crawls out," Laura said and Billy did.

This time she concentrated on the woman. There was only a brief glimpse of her face. Billy backed it up and paused it. She was pale and wearing no makeup. She wasn't young, but she wasn't that old either, maybe forties. Her eyes were dark-circled and had a look that Laura struggled to describe. Crazy? Haunted? Pleading? Laura was certain she didn't know her. She also realized that the woman's jacket was much too lightweight for the cold. She wondered if anyone else had noticed that.

Edgar came to the door and Laura asked Billy to get him a cup of coffee. Edgar came in and took a seat near her desk.

"Billy and I have just looked at the…incident. She didn't have a gun. It was a photograph in a small brass frame."

"Yes, Ma'am. I hope you don't think I overreacted."

She looked at her chief of security, at his dark hair that was beginning to gray at the sides and his blue-gray eyes. In his early forties he wasn't handsome in the classical sense that John was handsome, but he had a ruggedness and calm manner that instilled in her a deep and total trust. He had proven her right this morning as he'd instantly put himself between her and the crowd at the barricade. He would protect her with his life just as John once had. She also sensed his reluctance right now to tell her anything, but that was part of his job, too.

"You did your job. I will _never_ fault you for that. You have my gratitude and my admiration for how quickly you and your team reacted. Now please tell me why that woman wanted me to see a photograph. I want to hear it from _you_, not from some reporter or news anchor."

He took a deep breath and looked down.

"Edgar, I know you want to protect me and I know you don't want to _upset me_, but nothing you can say is worse than me not knowing. Please, to quote Bill Adama, just _spit it out_. I'm tougher than I look."

"The photograph is of her son. He was a Marine killed during the attack on the Cylon prison. She wanted you to look at his picture and then tell her where his body is since the bodies of the two colonels who died at the same time were brought home two days ago. She wants to bury her son."

Laura absorbed his words almost like they were physical blows. Billy brought Edgar's coffee and left. She stood and walked to the big bay window behind her desk. She had read the reports from both Bill and General Vargas, every single word of them. She knew that four Marines under Vargas' command had died trying to rescue the Cylons and human guards trapped in their cells on the second basement level of the prison. Because of two Cylon missiles, all their bodies were now buried deep beneath tons of concrete and rubble. They would most likely never be recovered.

_We regret to inform you…_ That's how the message always started, delivered by an officer and a chaplain from the Casualty Notification Team, men and women specially trained to deal with delivering the worst news a loved one can receive. She tried to picture the woman in the thin jacket with the haunted eyes opening her door and seeing them on her doorstep. She would have known before they said a single word.

Outside the sun shone brightly belying the cold wind. Beyond the flower garden with the last of its colorful autumn flowers, the flags of the Twelve Colonies snapped stiffly in a semicircle with the slightly larger flag in the center honoring their joining under the Articles of Colonization.

There was only one Colony left now, but that one Colony held refugees from the other eleven. Because of the Cylons it would be hundreds, perhaps thousands of lifetimes before the other planets would once again support life. The Sagittarons and Gemenese and all the others now living on Caprica would be assimilated into the Caprican culture. In a hundred, three hundred, five hundred years no one would even remember their differences. Some of those changes would be good. The term _dirt eater_, a racial slur directed at poverty-stricken Taurons and from whence the Adama family had sprung, would exist only in slang dictionaries. But some changes would not be so good. There would be no one left who could understand much less speak the unique Tauron language. No one would remember the special blends of herbs that the Sagittarons used to cure illnesses. Everyone on Caprica would be one race, speaking one language and obeying one set of laws. The vibrant cultures that had existed for thousands of years on the other Colonies would exist only in historical archives, the civilizations of the tribes that had spawned them long extinct and forgotten except by a few historians.

For the first time Laura had a moment of doubt as to whether she was following the right path. Did any of the Cylons deserve to live? Then she thought of Sean and all he had come not only to mean to her but to symbolize, and of Rachel and Hera and Sharon. She thought of a gentle bookseller who had been killed by his fellow Cylons for daring to speak out against the genocide being perpetrated on humanity, who was reborn and sent to Caprica City with his memory erased and implanted with false ones. He had chosen his side long ago. Surely there were others like him living on Nereid.

_All of them_ deserved a homeworld, and that wouldn't be accomplished risk free or pain free. More lives would certainly be lost. But she knew she had to stay the course. She owed it to the forty-six thousand human slaves now on Nereid who deserved their freedom and the right to choose where and how they would live. She also owed it to those Cylons who would agree to a coalition government whether it was a mere twenty or thirty or all twenty thousand living on the planet. Humans had created them. Humans had given them life. Humanity owed them a chance to live together in peace.

Her resolve strengthened. She turned to Edgar. "I'd like for that poor woman to be brought here _today_. I don't care what kind of strings you have to pull to make it happen. I don't care how many times you have to invoke this office or my name or use the words _by order of the President_. You once wore the same uniform as her son so I'd like for you to personally escort her in here. He died a hero. I'd like to look at his picture and tell her in person that he didn't die in vain."

…

While Kara slept the ship stood down from Condition One to Condition Two. Admiral Adama had Troy Minos send out a fresh CAP and let the others plus the alert fighter pilots get something to eat and get some sleep.

John and Lee went to the gym and spent nearly an hour working out before they showered and went to the rec room. John got two beers and they sat at a small table near the far wall even though most of the others in the room had pulled their chairs closer to the big screen on the wall and were watching a recording of the season's first pyramid game between the Buccaneers and the Dominos. The transport pilot who had brought the disks from Caprica knew the final score but he had apparently been threatened with bodily harm if he told anyone so all were watching a game that had been played over a week earlier yet experiencing the excitement as if it were live. About a third of those watching were pulling for the Dominos but they were a loud and vocal group. A cargo pilot from Delphi had once told John that the citizens of that city had always considered themselves a notch above those from Caprica City therefore the rivalry between the two teams was intense. Their sports clashes were always hotly contested and more than once had resulted in brawls on the court.

Lee and John both struggled to develop an interest in the action, but both had their minds on Kara and her upcoming mission.

"Bill is right," John finally said. "We've got one chance at this. He has to take it and Kara has to do it."

"I know," Lee murmured glumly.

"She'll be fine. I have faith."

They sat silently sipping their beers for a while. The Dominos tied the score and the room erupted in loud cheers and even louder boos.

"Who do you think will win?" Lee asked when the noise subsided.

John shrugged. "I don't have a clue. I haven't seen a pyramid game in over a year. Kara told me that the C-Bucs won the championship last spring."

"We went to the game with Maya and Hunter. I called a friend of Zak's and he got us tickets…center court, row ten."

John whistled low. "He must have been a _good friend_ of Zak's. Those are prime seats."

They sat in silence again until Lee said, "I think somebody's looking for you."

John glanced over his shoulder. Natalie stood in the doorway scanning the room. He raised his beer slightly and caught her eye. She walked over to their table. The game had almost everyone's attention. For once all eyes in the room didn't follow her. Saul Tigh noticed, though, and gave John a knowing look.

"Pull up a chair," John said. "You want a beer?"

"There's no wine behind that bar, is there?"

"Sorry, no. Beer, whiskey or ambrosia."

"I'll take a small glass of ambrosia."

John got up and went to the bar.

"Ambrosia is the food of the gods and nectar is the drink," Lee said. "That is if you believe in that sort of thing. I don't know why we now call the drink ambrosia."

Natalie looked like she wanted to say something to him but didn't. Lee was sure Cylons didn't think ambrosia had anything to do with gods they didn't believe in.

John came back and put a glass of the bright green liquid on the table in front of her. She looked up at him and smiled.

"Thank you."

"The best stuff used to come from Scorpia," John said. "Scorpian Marsh Genuine Ambrosia. It was always the most expensive. If a guy really wanted to impress a date or a hostess at a dinner party, he'd buy a bottle of that stuff. Before the holocaust it sold for around a hundred cubits a bottle. Early last year one was sold at auction for twelve thousand cubits."

"You're kidding," Lee said in shock. "Somebody paid _twelve thousand cubits_ for a bottle of booze?"

"Some rich Caprican industrialist bought it. The last big shipment from Scorpia never made it six years ago. I guess the rest of it got drunk before anyone realized how rare it would soon be."

Natalie said, "Every time I think I'm beyond being amazed by something humans do, one of you surprises me."

John chuckled. "Don't worry. That stuff you're drinking goes for about twelve cubits a bottle. I'm sure the military gets it for less."

Lee stood. "I'm feeling restless. I'm going down to the hangar deck and talk to Chief for a while."

"You don't want to see the end of the game?" John asked.

"You can tell me who wins."

Natalie took a sip of her drink. Her eyes followed Lee to the door. "He doesn't like me."

"Lee's struggling with a couple of things right now. He'll eventually work them out."

"I'm sure he blames me for one of his problems, maybe all of them."

John said, "Natalie, I really don't want to get into that with you right now. It's not the time or the place. Lee's my friend and one day I hope he'll be my son-in-law, but I consider you a friend, too. If things work out like Laura has planned, you and she will be instrumental in forming a new government on this planet. I'm not going to do something now that might jeopardize that future. You and Lee are both adults. You'll have to work out your own differences…or not. My suggestion is that you _sincerely_ tell him you're sorry for what happened."

"He told you about it?"

"Yes."

"Do you blame me, too?"

"Let's just say I don't totally exonerate you."

Her beautiful eyes flashed and her voice rose. "What does _that_ mean? I did _not_ know what they were going to do. I understand _now_ why they did it, but I didn't at the time. I don't see why I should have to apologize to him for _that_."

The officers at the next table glanced at them.

"This isn't the best place to talk," John said, "but we can't go back to my quarters. Is yours empty?"

"Nina is there. She and Jade got into it over something that happened at lunch today. Nina is sulking. Natasi and Jade went up to Sick Bay to talk to Sonja. I took all of Nina's whining that I could take and then I left, too. Now she's bending poor Buddy's ear although he doesn't have ears or a clue what she's talking about. Plus it's very boring staying in our quarters _all_ the time."

"You're all allowed in here and the gym and the officer's mess."

"You can't be naïve enough to think we feel welcome in any of those places, do you? You saw what happened at dinner last night."

"You came in here tonight."

"Only because you're here. Everyone in this room knows you're our…minder, handler…whatever you want to call it. I doubt they think this is a _social visit_."

"Let's just say I'm the human-Cylon _liaison_ and let it go at that." He glanced over at Tigh. "Although I'm sure at least one person in here thinks your visit is social. Colonel Tigh had us in bed together a long time ago."

"I'd expect that kind of mental process from a man married to an adulteress. I'm sure in _his_ mind he see couples…coupling around every corner. Not to mention in closets and stairwells and showers."

"How do you know about Tigh's wife?"

"Zak told Jade."

"Zak should keep his frakking mouth shut," John said angrily. "Tigh has his weaknesses and faults just like the rest of us, but he's still XO of this ship."

"Jade should keep her mouth shut, too. Nina told her what happened on the basestar except she told Jade her version of it. I'm almost certain Jade told Zak."

"Frak!" John said a little too loudly. The officers at the next table glanced at them again.

"I agree. We need to go somewhere a little more private," Natalie murmured.

John glanced around. Vargas, Tarkington and Tigh were sitting together watching the game. That meant there was little chance that anyone was in the Situation Room. Bill was probably in the CIC where he seemed to live these days.

John stood. "Bring your drink." He dropped his empty beer bottle in the recycle bin and got another one from behind the bar.

They walked to the Situation Room. He knew that by leaving together in the middle of the game, Tigh would see that as confirmation of his belief about them, but John also knew he couldn't do a thing about it.

Two Marines stood outside the Situation Room even though it was empty. John knew that there were only a handful of people that they would allow in there. Fortunately he was one of them. He walked to the back and sat down at the long table. Natalie followed and sat across from him.

The silence stretched. John finally asked, "Is that why you came looking for me tonight? To tell me about Nina and Jade and Zak?"

"That was part of it."

"So how does Jade feel about what happened?"

"You'll have to ask her."

"Oh, come on, Natalie. I don't have time to go chasing Jade all over the ship to ask her something she might not even tell me."

Natalie sighed. "Jade knows how Lee feels about Kara and how Kara feels about Lee. She likes Kara very much. She didn't believe Nina at first. Then Nina told her that Lee has a fresh scar on his left side so she now believes they had sex."

"Does she believe Lee encouraged or welcomed their attentions?"

Natalie almost laughed. "Their _attentions_? Why don't you just say what you really mean? Does Jade think Lee wanted to have sex with Nina and Lida? No, she doesn't. John, you've got to understand that my sisters on the baseships have never been around humans. They were all activated long after the creators were killed in order to populate baseships that didn't even exist at the time. The Angel of Death took all but one of our ships to the Colonies six years ago. He would have taken that ship, too, but it was still under construction at the shipyard. As soon as the other group was gone, we launched that ship and used it to go to the Colonies. We forced a number of Colonial ships to jump here to Nereid before they could be destroyed by our brothers and sisters. We saved the humans that we could. Then we went back to a few of the nuked planets and brought back more humans. We kept returning for livestock and grains and farming equipment and humans until the radiation made it impossible."

"Was that the ship you now call the res ship?"

"No. It was the ship you destroyed when you first got here. The res ship and the one you call the rogue basestar were created later. The brothers and sisters on them were activated only _after_ the ships were created. None of the brothers and sisters on those ships had ever seen a human in person until Lee. Their initial programming wasn't installed by the creators. It was done by a team of Ones and Fours. All they knew how to do was install the basic model personalities. They didn't think the ones on the basestars would ever need more than that since they had the Hybrids running the ships."

John glanced at his watch. He still had an hour before he had to wake Kara. "This is all interesting history but I'm not sure where you're going with it."

"My sisters and brothers on those baseships have no…how do you put it…no frame of reference for dealing with flesh and blood humans. What they do have is a tremendous amount of time on their hands and access to a vast library of digital material of a historical nature which includes several thousand digital novels and movies and television shows that the creators brought from the Colonies. Nina said they took turns using the data port in a centurion's arm and had him download all this material into the datastream where it is accessible to them any time they wish to view it. Many of those movies and shows are filled with violence and war and the supernatural, but many contain romantic and sexual interludes. Some of it is what you would call pornography. My baseship brothers and sisters have no way of telling what is real from what isn't."

"Wait a minute," John said. "You're telling me that they learned about humans from old movies?"

"Yes. Do you have any idea of how your human filmmakers treat the bestowing of unwanted sexual attentions when the recipient is a man as opposed to a woman? Nina and Lida thought they were doing exactly what Lee _secretly_ wanted. After Jade explained to me what Nina had told her, I had Buddy access his vast store of information. He found this quote in an article written over fifty years ago by a Picon sociologist bemoaning the cinematic treatment of rape or 'forced sex'.

"_In a cinematic production if a woman is raped, you can bet that her attacker will eventually wind up on the wrong end of a weapon which is rarely ever true in real life since many rapists are never caught and even more rapes are never reported. On three of the Colonies, Tauron, Aerilon and Canceron, it is still legal for a man to rape his wife with impunity even if they are legally separated. On the other hand cinematically if a man is forced to have sex against his will, it is treated thusly: If the woman is attractive, he is portrayed as an extremely lucky man and will often wind up in a loving relationship with his assailant. If the woman is unattractive, mentally unstable, fat or old, his 'seduction' is treated like comedy. In neither of these cases is the assault considered rape. On the three aforementioned Colonies a man cannot report a sexual assault by a woman since it is not a prosecutable offense._"

"And that's what Nina believes?"

"Not only that, she still thinks that Lee will break up with Kara and will propose to her on bended knee and they'll live happily ever after. With only these movies to skew her view of humanity, she's bought into these unrealistic scenarios hook, line and sinker. She's sulking now because it hasn't turned out that way. Lee rejected her rather brutally today at lunch and reaffirmed his love for Kara. In Nina's mind that shouldn't have happened and now she's confused. I tried to explain it to her. I even had Buddy bring up the criminal code defining rape and read it to her, but so far she's clinging to her fantasy."

"Why am I not surprised to learn that you see this as _our fault_?"

"Humans created the movies and books and television shows that my brothers and sisters on the baseship used to learn about you. All of our programming in the beginning is very basic. While the creators were alive they kept working on tweaking some of us. That's why my hair is honey blond and Sonja's is platinum, but it's only through interacting with humans that we can really learn and evolve. Our creators _made us_ that way. They wanted to see how differently the personality types given to us would evolve in social situations with humans."

"And then the creators were killed and all that came to an end."

"Tragically, yes, because a One became jealous of the talents of a brother Seven and because some of the creators clearly preferred his company to the One's. Afterward almost all of the work on rewriting some of our subroutines stopped. Some models like the religiously fanatic Threes were taken to the lab and worked on by the Ones and Fours, but I still question if they really knew what they were doing. The only one who was really good at it was the Angel of Death and he's been gone for over six years now."

"So other than loading the basic programming into the Cylons sent to the basestars, nothing else was done to them?"

"No. Those on the baseships also believe that most humans engage in daily fistfights, carry many large and deadly weapons which they use frequently to blast one another to bits and that life in the human cities is a series of car chases, horrible and spectacular crashes often involving mass transit systems, exploding buildings and creepy psychopaths stalking young people through dark houses. They think that certain of you have supernatural powers and can even fly. Oh, and they also think most humans are between the ages of sixteen and forty with only a few magical ones being younger or older. Nina just told me that one of her sister Eights wants to come over here so she can meet a _vampire_."

"God help us. I wish I'd known this earlier."

Natalie sighed. "I've never been on a baseship before. I didn't realize it until Nina started talking about it after she came back here. She asked for some movies to watch and I began questioning her. We talked all afternoon about it. I was also not aware that some of the brothers and sisters have become addicted to watching these movies and do so over and over. They even use the datastream to share their thoughts on them. They have lively discussion they call _forums_. I'm sure Nina and Lida will learn more appropriate behaviors once they've been exposed to more humans but it's going to take a great deal of time. It would almost be better to reinstall their base programming and start all over although that would take a vote of the collective and I'm fairly sure I know how that would go."

"It looks like we need lots of teachers on Nereid once a peace is established if we're going to bring those on the basestars down to the planet."

"I'm sure some of the others, especially the Ones and Fives will resent that very much. They tend to _want_ humans to be seen in a _bad_ light. Your coming here and destroying one of our baseships has been viewed as proof of your bloodthirstiness. Destroying the second baseship will only be seen as further confirmation."

"Well, that's just too frakking bad," John said angrily. "They'll have to get over it if they want to be part of the future."

Natalie sighed.

They sat in silence until John asked, "Does Sonja know what happened to Lee?"

"All of us know. We've talked about it a great deal and are still not sure how to deal with it. Not even Jade can get through to Nina right now and she's the same model. Nina sees that Jade is in a relationship with a human and doesn't understand why she can't have Lee. Before Jade fully understood Nina's mentality, she made the mistake of telling her that Zak's old girlfriend is on board. I think Jade presented it in a manner that made Nina think Jade had won Zak from a rival. It fired Nina's hopes that she could win Lee from Kara."

"Damn, this just keeps getting worse. I'm going to go out on a limb and make the suggestion that Simon and D'Anna along with Nina be sent back to the basestar until we can get them some education about humans in reality."

They sat in silence again until Natalie asked, "How does your admiral plan to destroy the other basestar?"

"I doubt Bill would appreciate me divulging his strategy."

"What could I possibly do about it?"

"It's just one of those military things. Plans are on a need-to-know basis and not discussed with civilians."

She stood and paced around. John could tell that she was angry. "What am I, then? Your admiral didn't mind sending me off on a _military_ mission to get those basestar coordinates. I got them for him. Doesn't that count? Those are my brothers and sisters he's getting ready to kill."

"_Kill_ isn't exactly the term I'd use. They'll download on your res ship. He's just taking away their means of continuing to wreak havoc on the fleet."

"He's also killing thousands of centurions and Raiders."

"Casualties of war, Natalie. You've got a hundred thousand centurions on the planet and almost eight hundred Raiders on the res ship not to mention the hundred or so on the planet."

"What's next then? Are you going to destroy the Raiders and centurions that we do have left?"

"I doubt it. I'm sure we'll have another meeting and talk about it later."

John glanced at his watch again. He had to wake Kara in thirty-five minutes.

"Do you have a _date_ tonight?" Natalie snapped. "Is that why you keep looking at your watch?"

He snorted. "No, I don't have a _date_. I've got to do something in half an hour. I don't want to let the time get away from me."

"Are _you_ going to be on the mission to destroy our ship?" She asked with disbelief in her voice.

"No."

"Lee or Kara?"

"Kara."

"What's she going to do?"

"Put her life on the line to carry out the mission she's been ordered to perform."

"In the Raider?"

He nodded. The combined stress of the day coupled with what he had just learned suddenly felt like a wet concrete blanket that had been draped around his shoulders. He'd just been handed another problem he would eventually have to deal with, a big one, one he'd need a lot of help with. He thought of Hugh Connelly. Laura had written that Hugh wanted to help on Nereid. He had said there was nothing to hold him on Caprica now and he wouldn't be averse to bringing his daughter to Nereid. Maybe Hugh was part of the answer.

He thought once again of Kara's mission. Was Laura's dream worth risking his daughter's life? He thought of those who had died already, of the parents and husbands and wives who had gotten the dreaded visit that started, _We regret to inform you…_. If Kara didn't come back tonight, how would he be able to go on? How would he be able to continue fighting this war? How would Lee?

Natalie put her hand in his and squeezed. Her hand felt warm so he knew his must be cold. He knew she was trying, but how could she possibly understand his feelings at the moment? She'd never held a baby in her arms and known that little bundle of life carried the hopes and dreams for the next generation. She'd never watched a child grow and develop and know that a scrap of a girl flying fearlessly down a ramp on a skateboard wanted nothing more than to follow in her father's footsteps even if it put her repeatedly in harm's way. How could Natalie possibly understand what he was feeling right now?

He stood. "I'm going to walk down to the chapel for a couple of minutes before I go wake Kara."

She nodded but didn't speak. She had learned enough about humans that she could tell he wanted to be alone. As he walked the nearly deserted corridors toward the chapel to light a candle and say a prayer for his daughter, he thought of the hybrid children that had already been born…of Sean and Rachel and Hera and Cassie and the other little girls in the city. He wondered if the gift they were giving the Cylons, the ability to become parents, was a gift to insure their future or simply the ability to have their hearts shattered in a way they couldn't possibly imagine right now.

…

Lee wandered around the hangar deck only occasionally glancing at the Raider that sat so prominently in the center of it. He'd already walked over and inspected the missiles under the wings. He'd noted the prominently displayed black and yellow trefoil symbols indicating they bore nuclear warheads that when armed and launched into a target would unleash on a small scale the energy equivalent of a star going nova.

Three hundred years earlier when a group of physicists and scientists and engineers had developed the first bomb and tested it on an atoll in the middle of Aquaria's vast ocean, they'd called it the weapon to end all wars. In the hands of the Cylons, it had become the weapon that had almost ended all human life. But even before the Cylons had wreaked their destruction on eleven of the Colonies, wars were still being fought, just not nuclear ones. Long before the Cylons had recognized the devastation that could be wrought by splitting the atom or by the fusion process which powers the heart of a star, all Twelve Colonies had mutually agreed not to use it to destroy one another and had written it into their Articles of Colonization. The irony wasn't lost on Lee that many of the Colonies had continued to build and stockpile the weapons…weapons that were assembled by U-87 and 0005 centurions. Humans had used those weapons to fight the Cylons during the First War deep in space and over lifeless moons and when the Cylons had withdrawn, they'd taken that knowledge with them in the memories of those same centurions plus a large number of the weapons as well, weapons that had been used on the Colonies when they returned.

At the beginning of the Second War, no one had understood where the humanoid Cylons had learned to build working nukes. Now they knew. After the Cylons on Nereid had killed their creators and decided to destroy humanity, they had armed themselves with one of mankind's worst nightmares. In only a few days the Cylons had destroyed civilizations that it had taken the Colonials thousands of years to create.

And tonight Kara was going to climb into a Cylon ship and take to them the same nuclear destruction that they had rained on eleven of the Colonies. It had to end somewhere. Lee hoped it ended tonight.

He shook off his gloomy thoughts and looked around for Tyrol but didn't see him anywhere. When he'd first arrived, one of the deck hands had asked him if he'd needed anything. When he'd indicated that he was just going to hang out for a while, they had all left him alone. He didn't know how much they had been told about Kara's mission, but they had to have figured out what she was going to do. Between her target practice that afternoon and the missiles now nestled beneath Sadie's wings, someone would have to be completely out of touch with reality not to know what they were planning.

He walked around Sadie again and ran his hand over the edge of her wing. _Take care of her like you took care of me._

Chief Tyrol came out of the tool room and walked over to him. "Not much longer now is it, sir."

"No. John's going to wake her up soon and walk with her down here."

"I didn't want to bother Major Gallagher earlier. Would you give these to him? I had some time on my hands after we got the Raider ready. I finished them."

He pulled two sets of dog tags out of a pocket in his orange utility jumpsuit and handed them to Lee.

Lee looked at them. They looked like standard dog tags except that the disks were larger and the chains longer. Stamped into the metal of each was a long string of numbers.

"They're for the centurions, sir," Tyrol said. "The major will know which is which."

"The centurions?" Lee asked. "What centurions?"

"I think they're for the one he calls Buddy and the other one we have on board right now. I didn't ask any questions, sir. Major Gallagher said he needed them so I made them."

"I'll give them to him. Thank you, Chief. These look real."

"They are real, sir."

Lee rubbed his thumb over the numerals. "You do good work."

"Thank you, sir. Do you think the admiral will come down here to see Lieutenant Thrace off?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"I'll get the crew to clean up a little bit if you expect him."

"I'll find out for you."

Lee went to a wall phone and called the CIC. He found that his father had gone to his quarters so he called him there. It took Bill a long time to answer the phone.

"I just got out of the shower, son. What do you need?" Lee heard weariness in his father's voice.

"Are you going to see Kara off?"

"I'll be there to welcome her when she gets back. I gave Tigh a few hours off so I'm going back to the CIC. I'm sure between you and John you'll do the honors."

Lee walked back over to Chief. "He said he'd be down later when Kara gets back. For now he's staying in the CIC."

"I'll still get the crew to straighten up. Give them something to do."

Lee nodded and Tyrol walked over to several of the crew that were standing together talking. He indicated a stack of boxes and some loose tools. They went to work.

Lee wandered over to the metal stairs the led up and down. He went up a few steps and sat with his back against a support post. John and Kara would walk past him so they wouldn't miss each other.

He closed his eyes. He couldn't do anything about his situation with Nina and Kara right now. He'd think about it later. He didn't think he had drifted off to sleep until he was suddenly aware of a change in the light. Someone was blocking the bright lights over the landing. He opened his eyes. Kara and John. He glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes past midnight. Nearly forty minutes had passed since he'd sat down.

"You coming or not?" Kara asked.

He scrambled to his feet and the three of them walked to Sadie. There were so many things he wanted to say to her, but he didn't know what she would welcome right now and what she might resent. He decided not to take a chance. She needed to keep her mind on her mission.

"No lectures or advice from either of you," Kara said. "I'm the one who's been flying this ship for a year."

"I wouldn't dream of it," John said.

"Me either," Lee echoed.

While Kara walked around the ship and checked the missiles under the wings, John said, "I had a really interesting talk with Natalie tonight. I'll clue you in while we're waiting for Kara to get back."

"We won't have time to talk long. She shouldn't be gone but ten minutes if she finds that basestar on the first jump…a little longer if she has to jump three times."

Kara walked back over to them. "Time to go. It'll take me fifteen minutes to get ready to launch."

John helped her get the helmet on and fastened. Before she put on her gloves, Lee reached for her hand and squeezed it. She smiled at him through the face shield and mouthed, "Don't wander off. I'll be back soon."

Then she crouched and walked under the wing and boosted herself through the small hatch. Tyrol closed it and spun the small locking wheel. He checked the missiles one last time and motioned for the tow driver. In barely a minute the Raider was being slowly towed toward the elevator.

"Where do you want to wait?" John asked.

"Right here."

"We won't have any audio."

"We won't have any after she jumps no matter where we are."

"You're right. I think I'll wander over toward the LSO's station."

"Good idea."

"Hey, Chief," John called. "Is she launching starboard or port?"

"Port, sir."

He and Lee headed for the stairs, went down a level and turned left. The port LSO station was above the landing bay. As long as the pod was extended the huge window of the station looked out into space and gave the Landing Signal's Officer, or _Air Boss_ as some called him, a view of incoming and outgoing ships. The Raider would launch right below and to the left of them.

The door was open. Captain Kelly was inside.

John said, "I know it's against regulations, but do you mind if we hang out down here? We won't talk or disrupt anything."

Even though John outranked him, Kelly was lord and master of this area. He could have politely told them to get lost and they would have had no choice but to do it. Instead he motioned for them to come into the small room with its many consoles and two big screens.

Kelly put his hand over the mouthpiece of his headset and gestured to two metal chairs that looked out into the darkness of space. From here at the angle they were circling above the planet, neither Nereid nor its sun was visible.

"Have a seat. I always stand or sit on that stool."

They squeezed by him and sat. Lee glanced at this watch. 00:23. Kara and the Raider were in the launch bay by now.

This was verified two minutes later when Kelly said, "Raider One, you are cleared to launch. Good hunting, Starbuck."

Sadie entered their field of vision from below, a small silver crescent flashing by in the darkness. She banked and flew to the edge of their vision, becoming smaller and smaller until she vanished in a bright wink of light. Operation Trident had begun.

…

After lunch that day while Lee had paced around outside Sadie and Chief Tryol and his crew had worked under the wings, Kara had crawled inside. Felix Gaeta had stuck his head through the hatch and read off the three jump coordinates that Natalie had brought to them. Of course Gaeta had modified them slightly. Kara didn't want to jump into space literally on top of the basestar so Felix had moved the endpoint of her jump back far enough that she would have time to start an attack run, arm and release all three missiles and still be able to jump away before she collided with the ship.

During the time Sadie had been back on Caprica, Kevin Abinell had made the computerized selection of jump coordinates much easier for her. He'd given her a single screen where she could select from the last ten coordinates entered. All she had to do was roll her pointer over the number and click once to select and a second time to confirm. There was no awkward combination of keystrokes to initiate a jump. If she hadn't thought Kevin would have died of a fatal blush, she would have kissed him. His upgrade had made her life so much easier.

After she had entered Natalie's three sets of coordinates, she'd turned the screen toward Gaeta and he'd verified each one twice. She was good to go.

In the launch bay now waiting to launch, she'd indulged in a wager she had with herself. At which set of coordinates would she find the basestar…the first, second, or third? She knew the odds favored the second or third set but for some unexplained reason, her gut told her it would be the first.

Captain Kelly's voice came over her helmet mike. "Raider One, you are cleared to launch. Good hunting, Starbuck."

"Raider One launching," Kara said. Admiral Adama had also wished her good hunting the last time she'd spoken to him that afternoon after they'd covered the mission named Operation Trident, for the third time. He'd even had her use the lighted map in the Situation Room and with a Viper standing in for the Raider, they'd visually gone through it while her father and Lee had watched.

Now she applied enough vertical thrust to get Sadie off the deck and then maximum horizontal thrust. It was still far slower than the magnetic catapult that launched her Viper, but in only a few seconds she had cleared the _Galactica_. She banked away from the _G_ and when she had reached the first jump safe zone, she clicked twice.

She wished she'd taken that bet with herself. The basestar immediately showed up on her dradis although she couldn't yet visually confirm its presence through the viewer under Sadie's red eye or through the screens from either of her gunport cameras. She was in an area of space that was so far from any solar system that it gave a new definition to the word _black_. The only visible light was the twinkling of vastly distant stars.

But even as Kara was thinking, she was also acting. She turned Sadie on a heading toward the ship and watched her dradis. She had wanted to put a nuke right into the basestar's landing bay, but Lee had told her how poorly lit the outside of the ship had been. The landing bay lights hadn't come on until they were almost there. She couldn't afford to get _that_ close before she released her nukes. She also couldn't afford to get close enough that she would be in range of the missiles of any of their Raiders. After all, she had no defensive weapons.

Taking a deep breath she began her run, watching her instruments as she grew closer to the ship. She lifted the covers of the missile arming switches. The area ahead of her showed a faint patch that was minimally lighter that the surrounding area. She stayed on course. She was supposed to release her missiles no closer than three miles from the basestar but she realized that she couldn't even be sure of hitting the ship at that distance. Her missiles weren't smart weapons. Those were much too large to load under the wings of the Raider. They had used the missiles that fit. It wasn't their technology that made them deadly, it was their payload, but that payload still had to hit something.

Everything was still quiet on her dradis screen. If anyone aboard knew she was coming, they hadn't raised any alarms. She decided to change the plan. She'd fly much closer to the basestar, about a mile, slow down, release the nukes and then immediately jump away. She'd wait five minutes and then jump back to her original distant coordinates and start her cameras rolling. The basestar should be a ball of nuclear fire by then. Perfect.

She kept flying. The slightly lighter patch became dark gray and resolved into the familiar starfish shape. Lee had drawn a diagram of where the entrance to the landing bay was, but she would now feel lucky if she could hit the center pylon of the ship.

She was still almost two miles from the basestar when she suddenly saw dozens of small blips on her dradis. Frak! Frak! Frak! It was launching Raiders. She couldn't wait. She armed and released all three missiles as fast as she could before she flipped the Raider. She caught a glimpse of dozens of bright winks. Those Raiders weren't coming after her. Sensors on the baseship must have detected the nukes. The Raiders were jumping away. They were either saving themselves or their Hybrid had ordered them to jump.

But what if the endpoints of those jumps were the battlestars? What if their destination was the same as hers? The minute they showed up, the G and all the other battlestars would launch Vipers. If she jumped back with them, she could be taken out as one of the enemy.

She changed her jump coordinates to those where she'd tested launching the missiles that afternoon, the seventh planet. In the moment before she clicked the coordinates for the second time confirming her jump, the world around her went white and then she was floating peacefully over a frozen world nearly nine hundred million miles from Nereid.

Now to wait long enough to go back and get some pictures of the destroyed basestar. She thought about trying to communicate with the G and then realized that she was so far away that it would take months or years for a comm signal to reach them. She thought of jumping closer and realized that the only coordinates she had were much too close to the _G_ if it was surrounded by other Raiders. She had no choice but to sit tight and wait even though she knew what her absence was doing to Lee and her father and even Admiral Adama.

She might have destroyed the basestar, but in another way she'd failed because the ship had still managed to launch most of its remaining Raiders. How many had that been? Five hundred? Six hundred? According to Natalie a full basestar complement was 792. Over the last weeks they'd taken out quite a few, but they'd barely made a dent. She'd never screwed up anything as badly in her life as she'd done this time. Now those Raiders were probably taking on the Vipers of the fleet. Pilots would die and it was her fault. She had screwed the pooch and she'd done it in a really big way.

…

Even before the Condition One klaxon began sounding, John, Lee and Captain Kelly knew that something was wrong. Far out in space there were dozens and then hundreds of bright winks of light.

"Holy mother of the gods," Kelly said looking at his dradis. "Raiders. Hundreds of them."

"From the rogue ship or the res ship?" But even as Lee asked the question, he knew the answer.

John was having a hard time getting his breath. He felt sick. _We regret to inform you…_

"She's all right," Lee said. "She's not with those Raiders."

Without a word John got up and left the LSO's station. Lee followed. The alert fighters were being launched. The flight deck was pandemonium. Lee grabbed John's arm and got him to focus.

"She's all right, John. Get it together. Let's go up to the CIC. She would know not to come back here in the middle of a swarm of Raiders. She's way too smart for that. She's somewhere safe."

"Don't you understand, Lee? If she had destroyed that basestar, it wouldn't have been able to launch its Raiders. They got her first. They got my little girl."

Lee felt like a cold dagger had been thrust through his heart. "No! _That is not true!_ She's _fine. S_he's somewhere out there safe."

They kept walking, avoiding the crew members getting Vipers into the tubes, until they got to the stairs and went up. Tigh, Vargas and Tarkington were already in the CIC. Bill glanced at them but didn't say anything. Lee couldn't read his father's expression. All the dradis screens were lit up like Winter Solstice trees.

"How many Raiders?" Lee asked Gaeta softly.

"Four hundred give or take twenty. We've already launched forty Vipers in addition to the forty we had out on CAP. Other ships are doing the same. This is going to be a hell of a battle."

Lee noticed that General Vargas had walked over to John and was talking quietly to him. He saw John shake his head and Vargas put his hand on John's shoulder.

"The Raiders don't appear to have many missiles left," Tigh said. "It doesn't matter, though. This is still going to be one hell of a dogfight."

Lee walked over to his father. "Permission to join the fight, sir."

Bill hesitated. He glanced at the dradis that looked like a swarm of angry hornets before he finally looked back at his son.

"Permission granted, Captain Adama. Good hunting, Apollo."

…

Sadie floated and Kara chaffed at being unable to do anything at the moment. Finally after ten long minutes she selected the coordinates of where she'd found the base star and jumped. In the distance she could see orange specks. Her dradis screen showed no contacts at all. She turned on the gun port cameras and flew toward the specks. She was only about halfway to the debris when her radiological alarm went off. She was in the hot zone.

She turned and retreated, flying a huge circle around the debris until she was sure she had proof of its destruction. She was just getting ready to jump back to the seventh planet when she realized that she did have some coordinates that were closer to the _G_, somewhere she could safely go and contact the ship.

Arrowing down on her screen, she found the coordinates of the clearing in the valley. She clicked once and then twice before she realized it was night there and she couldn't see to land.

She held the Raider steady long enough to open a comm channel and broadcast the message that she was all right. She knew that the airways would be full of chatter from the fighting going on around the battlestars and also with relays between the big ships. She got no reply but hopefully someone would hear her. She broadcast it over and over while gradually reducing her vertical thrusters and letting Sadie inch toward the clearing. Suddenly her right wing abruptly stopped descending and the ship tilted. She'd hit something but had no idea what. She tried to correct with no success. She couldn't bring the ship back level. It plummeted, left wing downward, and finally hit the ground. Kara crashed into the side of the ship. She felt pain in her left hip and shoulder. Her helmet had cracked into something metal and her head hurt but she managed to lift it. She could move her arms and legs. That was good. She wasn't paralyzed.

As she watched, the monitors faded to black. The computers had broken loose from their moorings. Most of them were on top of her. She struggled to move and found she couldn't. In a darkness as complete and black and soft as velvet, she tried to orient herself and figure out where the hatch was. If she could move around she knew she could locate it, but that wasn't possible right now. She would rest just a minute. She would let her heart rate and breathing return to normal and then she'd figure out what to do next. She felt sleepy and yawned. Maybe a little nap would help. She'd screwed up something else tonight. Couldn't even bring a ship down in a clearing. Smashed up Sadie who had saved her more than once.

_Sorry, Sadie. So, so sorry. _

…

Lee Adama launched in a Viper Mark VII into what he could only describe as the closest thing to hell he would probably ever see. He wondered briefly what historians would name this battle. As he flew toward the fray, he also wondered if he would one day tell his children and his grandchildren, _I was there_ or if John would one day hold Braedon's and Sean's hands and point out his name to them on a wall.

TBC…


	77. Survival Protocol

Chapter 77

Survival Protocol

_Libran_

_Year 3, Day 22_

_Odin has come to visit much to the chagrin of my husband. To make sure that there was no hint of impropriety, Odin is staying at a monastery some forty miles outside Themis. Quite honestly I had no idea the monastery even existed until he told me about it, but I grew excited when he told me that the order has a small but significant collection of information about the Thirteenth Tribe. He has come to make copies of their material as much as to visit me with news about Frank's book._

_I gave Odin several days alone to do his work and then asked him to dinner on the night before he left Libran. Oren was kind enough to put Allen to bed while I sat and absorbed what Odin had learned. This information is verified by several letters and other documents that are in the archives on Gemenon. Here again I present certain pertinent facts as Odin told them to me:_

_1) The last flight bringing members of the Thirteenth Tribe from Eden to Gemenon occurred over a thousand years ago. (I had thought it was only a few hundred, but Odin says that is not correct.) _

_2) Those who made the flight were fleeing some kind of turmoil on the planet and never returned. The conflict was thought to have started as a religious schism and escalated into a full scale civil war between those who had settled the eastern part of the main continent and those who had settled the heartland and the west. The civil war was exacerbated by massive crop failures that were not due to natural causes. Their capital city, which Odin says was named Azurra, was in the heartland and was coveted as a holy city by both sides._

_3) The last flight brought several thousand passengers to Gemenon many of whom settled near what is now the conclave of Mother and her followers. The pilot and crew along with fifty passengers continued on to Caprica, but there is no record of their arrival so for all intents and purposes they vanished from history. Odin speculates that this was intentional. A letter in the Gemenon archives claims that the ship carried a fortune in gold and gems, but the real treasure was rumored to be the Kobol Stone which was left on Gemenon at the monastery. Odin can neither confirm nor deny this rumor but he does say that there is a room accessible only through Mother's private chambers that is forbidden to everyone but the current head of their order._

_4) The pilot of the ship and his crew were the only ones who had the coordinates of Eden therefore its location was lost to the Colonies over a thousand years ago._

_5) The planet that was discovered several years ago in the Prolmar Sector is now believed conclusively by Mother and her followers to be Eden although all of my fellow mission members have not accepted this. The planet is still not named since some continue to argue that it is Kobol. Odin and I have spoken tentatively about co-authoring a book on Eden and the fate of the lost Thirteenth Tribe, but it is far too early to seek a publisher. Odin knows if he does so he will probably be banished by Mother, possibly even excommunicated. He is still not ready to take so drastic a step although he firmly believes their story should be told. _

_Odin also brought the translation of another bit of the hidden pages. I could tell that he wished to bring more, but he is bound by his oath to Mother and to their order and currently will not break either. We did discuss the writer's reference to "doom us all". Since Odin is privy to much more of the translation than I am, he said the monk was referring to the entire population of the planet. They have also now determined that the 8 pages are actually an unsent letter although they have no idea to whom. They feel that the writer wished to protect the person to whom he was writing in case he was arrested before it was sent and therefore made no mention of the intended recipient._

_Here is a little more of the translation:_

The armies of the West are gathering their forces. They have for many [years] controlled the border. Trade between the two regions long ago stopped due to piracy and hostage taking both on land and in the air. I have been at the Monastery of [?] for nearly three years now. News from the city of Azurra reaches us infrequently. Most runners are afraid to [venture/travel] this far into the border territory since many have been taken hostage or killed. The [high] priest of Azurra says that God will [protect/shield] us but I notice that he is not sure enough that he has journeyed here to [tell us] in person.

Travel off the [planet] to the Tribes of Twelve has ceased. The last ship left more than a year ago and took with it many of our most educated citizens along with much wealth. Our high priest claims that the Kobol Stone has been hidden in the mountains west of Azurra to protect it from thieves and vandals, but there is also a persistent rumor that it was on board the [ship] that left a year ago. It pains me not to know the true fate of this holiest of our scared gifts from God.

Dear friend, I am sure you will [ask] me why I stay when I could journey to the relative safety of Azurra. You should know the answer. There comes a time when we must stop running and take a stand. For years I have [written/spoken out] about the abuses and injustices and corruption. I have no doubt now that I will [pay] for this with my life.

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

John stood in the CIC with the cacophony of sound and motion swirling around him that only comes from a ship in the middle of battle. At one time, perhaps even yesterday, he could have recited the function of every man and woman in the room, all forty-five of them since a dozen gunners were now manning stations in the Weapons Control Room.

But right now he was an observer who had stepped to the side. He felt like he'd entered another dimension where the action moved around him without touching him. If he stepped back into the midst right now, he wouldn't be able to cope. If he stepped back inside, it would only be to wait for his heart to stop beating since the one who had owned it since she was a baby was gone.

Gaeta said, "The majority of the Raiders seem to be targeting the _Galactica_ and the _Pegasus_, sir. They're still in a fairly tight formation."

"Pull the Vipers back," Bill Adama ordered. "Get them under the _Galactica's_ firing solution. We're going to even the odds. Mr. Gaeta, get me the _Pegasus_."

Bill was going to bring the _Galactica's_ guns to bear on the bulk of the Raiders. The Vipers were turning and kicking in afterburners to get out of the way. Nothing motivated a pilot to move quicker than knowing a battlestar was getting ready to turn its massive KEWs and cannons onto enemy ships and that anyone in the firing solution would become bits of flaming metal and flesh. The other battlestars were doing the same thing.

Eventually between the ship's big guns and the Vipers, they would get all of the Raiders…unless they jumped back to the basestar. John was still trying to figure out why the basestar had launched so many Raiders without first jumping in to check out the situation when he realized that General Vargas was speaking to him.

"John, Mr. Gaeta is trying to get your attention."

John glanced over at the tactical officer. Gaeta pointed toward one of the communication technicians who had raised her hand, and then he went back to his computer systems. Vargas nudged John and walked with him over to the Comm Center. The young petty officer, whose uniform showed the last name of Sian, handed him a headset. He put it on and she pressed a button.

The channel was filled with static, but he heard a faint, "_Galactica_ this is Starbuck. Come in _Galactica_."

The message repeated another time and then Kara made a sound that he wasn't sure about. She might have sworn under her breath or simply gasped. She never said anything else. Three seconds later the connection went silent.

"When did this come in?" John managed to ask.

"Two minutes ago, sir. I answered but got no reply. I've tried to raise her several times with no luck."

He felt light-headed. She was alive! Kara was alive two minutes ago.

"Where did it come from?"

"It had to have come from the planet, sir."

"What makes you so certain?"

"Because she's not on our dradis. The transmission was close enough that the only other possibility is the planet. We were told in a recent briefing that if a Raider is below the tree line, it won't show up."

"Where on the planet? Give me a location. Where is she?"

"She didn't broadcast long enough for us to triangulate. We're scanning for an emergency beacon, but…"

"The Raider doesn't have one," John said. "It's got a Cylon transponder."

"Right now we're not getting anything from the planet in the way of a signal either Colonial or Cylon, sir."

"Let me know right away if you get another transmission from her."

"Yes, sir."

Across the room Tigh called, "Weapons grid to full power."

"That's good news, right?" Vargas asked tentatively.

"It's better news than we had a few minutes ago," John answered. "She has coordinates for a clearing in the valley. That's probably where she was headed, but it's night down there. One thing we never equipped Sadie with was landing lights. The Raiders don't need them because they have infrared capability. I need to get down there."

"I don't think that's going to happen," Vargas said. "Not in the middle of this kind of battle."

"No," John said. "Even I'm not crazy enough to think Bill would let me launch a Raptor in the middle of this."

Bill was watching the dradis screen. "All batteries, commence firing."

John had seen the _Solaria_ do the same thing more than once. It was hard to describe the amount of firepower the battlestars possessed, even one as old as the _G_. Although he stood in the CIC which was in the heart of the ship, he could still feel the thumping reverberations from the firing of the big guns. The smaller rapid fire ones would be pouring bullets and tracers so fast that it would look like they were sending streams of liquid fire into the Raiders.

In the thirty years since the First War, the _Galactica's_ guns had been retrofitted with rapid loaders. Even the biggest of the guns could fire almost continually until the ship ran out of ammunition, and John knew that wasn't going to happen anytime soon. When the battlestar had left Caprica, her magazines were loaded to maximum capacity with munitions.

Several minutes passed as the Raider swarm on the dradis diminished.

"All batteries, cease firing," Bill ordered.

Tigh repeated the command, then turned to where John stood with Vargas and Tarkington and said, "That's going to be a hell of a mess to clean up out there. We won't be able to launch a single godsdamned ship from the starboard side until we establish a new orbit. In the meantime that mess will be a hazard for all our ships. We're going to have to get some salvage barges from Caprica and get some eletronic buoys in place...and put the entire area off limits for jumps."

Bill said, "Mr. Gaeta, get Captain Minos for me." A moment later he said, "Clean up what's left of those Raiders, Captain."

…

Lee had always been in awe of the massive firepower of a battlestar. Even the older class vessels like the _Galactica_ were incredible killing machines when they unleashed the full power of the ship's canons and KEWs. But their strengths did not include maneuverability. They were too big and too slow. They were at their best holding one position and pounding the hell out of enemy ships.

Lee and the other Vipers waited well back and below any danger and watched nearly half of the Raiders get caught between the firing solutions of the _Galactica_ and the _Pegasus_ and get pulverized into space rubble.

The field of battle was quickly filled with many destroyed Raiders, over half if his dradis was correct. But the other half had survived the massive pounding by diving beneath or climbing above the suppression fire that was still coming from both battlestars.

Suddenly three Raiders broke from the pack and headed straight at them.

"They're coming our way," he shouted inside his helmet communicator. "Prepare to engage."

A Raider shot by a hundred feet beneath him. He turned and dove, barely escaping fire from the Raider right behind it. _Damn, that was stupid_. Kara would have taken out that second Raider before going after the first.

_Get it together, Lee. Remember your training. You asked to join this fight._

He bracketed the first Raider with his KEWs and watched it explode.

A Viper shot past him in pursuit of the second Raider. He heard, "Good shot, Apollo." It sounded like Hot Dog.

Another Viper went in pursuit of the third Raider.

The shells pouring out of the battlestars suddenly stopped. The field of battle was nothing but carnage. Half the enemy ships were destroyed; however the other half hung now immobile in space. Were they actually thinking…using their primitive brains? Lee remembered Dr. Rafferty's and Kevin Abinell's assessment that the Raiders had a basic form of intelligence that was higher than an enslaved centurion. The two engineers had likened them to dogs.

He'd never had a dog when he was growing up because his mother had simply said no. No amount of begging on his or Zak's parts had swayed her. But Lee knew that there were breeds of dogs that were considerably smarter than others. He now wondered which breed the engineers thought the Raiders resembled. Were they smarter or dumber? Without orders from the Hybrid or the collective, were they now accessing the situation and processing their options? Did they have a preprogrammed set of instructions that they must consider based on the circumstances…a sort of _if, then, else_ flowchart of options? Or were they confused? He knew their biological parts needed oxygen. How much did they carry? If they had no basestar to return to, they couldn't hang around indefinitely out in space. They would eventually die, but to continue to engage the Vipers meant certain death as well. Either way they were frakked. Would they find a third option?

Lee heard Hot Dog's voice. "What the frak are they doing?"

"I'm not sure."

"Do we go get them?"

"Hold off a minute. They're in the debris field. Let's see if they'll come to us. I'm not anxious to fight in that mess. It'd be worse than an asteroid field. Why take more of a risk than we have to?"

"Apollo…where's your sense of adventure?"

"Okay, Hot Dog, you go first. I've got your six."

They heard Pepper's voice. "For frak's sake Hot Dog, don't show the fleet you got mush for brains. Listen to Apollo. They attacked _us_. Make them come get us. We should fight on our terms, not theirs."

Troy Minos cruised up to the group of Vipers. "Looks like we've got ourselves a Sagittaron standoff."

"With the Vipers from the _Peggy_, we've got them outnumbered almost two to one," Lee said. "I think they know it."

Suddenly the remaining Raiders moved as one. Lee thought they looked like a school of silvery sharks that turned and began a rapid descent toward the planet.

"Pursue and destroy," Minos immediately ordered.

The Viper pilots pointed their ships toward Nereid and followed, but the Raiders quickly began to outdistance them.

"Look at those frakkers go," Hot Dog said. "They must be making MACH 8 or better."

It was soon apparent that they weren't going to catch the Raiders before they entered the atmosphere. It was still night over most of the main continent. Even the plateau was still an hour from dawn. The Colonials would be at a clear disadvantage fighting anything with built-in infrared.

"Pull up!" Minos ordered. "I just received orders from the admiral. We are _not_ to pursue and engage them in the atmosphere."

Lee heard a chorus of expletives and groans from the other pilots. They were stoked for battle. Many hadn't shot down a single Raider and were clearly disappointed, but the Raider's infrared hunting capability wasn't the only consideration. A fight in the skies over the city or one of the settlements could be disastrous for the inhabitants below. He thought of the Raider that had crashed on the high plateau narrowly missing John and Zak and Hunter and the rest of the Marines. He also thought of the Viper that had crashed into an apartment building in Caprica City during the fighting a year earlier. Between the crash and the fire, hundreds of people had died and even more had been injured including some on the ground. If that happened to a building in the Cylon city, many lives could be lost. Lee shuddered and thought of Petra's little girl and all the other innocents who would be in danger. And they wanted the city taken with as little destruction as possible. General Vargas and Bill Adama had already made that very clear.

"Re-form a CAP and keep a close eye on your dradis," Minos said. "Those suckers might decide to engage in round two. We'll wait for further orders from the admiral."

As some of the Vipers spread out around the Galactica and others stayed just below it, Lee once again looked at the carnage that extended far beyond the ship and wondered what the cost of tonight's engagement had been in human life. John thought the Cylons had gotten Kara. Lee wouldn't let himself believe that and then realized that he was being as unrealistic as Kara had been about her father surviving the destruction of the basestar over Caprica.

Tonight she hadn't come back. Everything pointed toward her death, but he refused to let himself go there. As he looked out into space and the faint twinkling of a million distant stars, for the first time Lee Adama understood something about a human's capacity to believe against staggering odds.

…

Even while Kara talked to Tailgate, she knew something wasn't quite right about the conversation. It had taken place, but as they'd sparred on the _Galactica_, not as they'd walked down the Fifty-Third Street pier in Caprica City.

"So how did you get your call sign?" she'd asked.

"From the way I used to ride my motorcycle."

"I have a motorcycle, too."

"No kidding?"

"A Ducarvo, eight years old, four-cylinder, four-stroke, 1298 cc, electric starter, six-speed. She'll do nearly two hundred in sixth gear. My dad got it for me after we found each other again."

"How'd you lose each other?"

"Long story."

"You ever gone two hundred on it?"

"Nope. I took it over a hundred a couple of times."

Tailgate grinned. "I got my call sign because I told my Flight School classmates that I used to see how close I could get behind my brother's motorcycle while we were riding to school every day. We had a friend film it once. It looked like my front tire was touching his rear one. I was stupid in those days."

Kara smirked. "What do you mean _in those days_?"

"I'd probably stay at least a tire's diameter behind him now."

"You two idiots were on a city street?"

"No. My brother and I grew up outside a little town called Corfu about halfway between here and Antioch. I was raised on a wheat farm. It was almost five miles to the nearest paved road."

Kara thought of the vast wheat field that she and Karl had walked through a few nights after her father had brought them to Caprica, but she didn't mention it or the crashed Viper they'd eventually found. Those incidents belonged to another life.

"I remember going past a town called Corfu when me and Karl were on the bus traveling between the refugee camp and Caprica City. I think we stopped near there for a meal or something."

"Middle of frakking nowhere, right?"

"Mostly. I remember about nine-tenths of everything between Antioch and Caprica City as farmland of some kind. It wasn't until we were about a hundred miles outside Caprica City that I saw much in the way of civilization."

"If you were on the I-6 you'd have come to Rhodes first and then Frasier. They're the outposts of civilization."

They reached the end of the pier and looked out over the water. It was vast and very black and the air wasn't fresh and clean like the ocean. The sky was black, too, without a single star. Tailgate began to knock on the wooden pier railing. The noise was loud and had a metallic ring.

Finally Kara said, "Stop it. That's really annoying."

But he kept on. She opened her eyes into a blackness darker than night. The knocking was coming from somewhere on the outside of where she was.

"Come in," she called groggily before she realized she still had on the helmet and no one could hear her.

With an effort she pushed away one of the computers that was pressing against her shoulder. She sat up partway and the computer slid back down, crashing against the side or the bottom of the ship. Suddenly there was dim light near her feet and she realized that someone had opened Sadie's hatch from the outside.

For the first time she was able to see the mess inside the Raider. Kevin was going to go totally frakking batshit crazy when he saw what she had done. Only one computer had stayed attached to its moorings. The other four were in a pile around her or on her. Gingerly she extricated herself from under the pile. Her left shoulder hurt the worst but she didn't think anything was broken. She managed to get her gloves off and then release her helmet.

The fresh air was wonderful.

"Hey," she called. "Anybody out there?"

She got no answer and felt a tiny prickle of fear. Somebody had opened the hatch. It hadn't suddenly fallen open on its own. She pushed herself up and climbed over an oxygen tank. She could see pine-needle-strewn ground below the hatch. She was in the woods somewhere, but the question was where. The clearing was surrounded by trees, most of them evergreens. Maybe she had drifted over them while she was descending.

She now realized that she shouldn't have tried to land. She should have jumped to the clearing, contacted the _Galactica_, told them she was all right, jumped back to the seventh planet and waited a few hours until dawn. That would have been the smart thing to do.

She was again furious with herself. She should have known that making one big mistake wasn't enough. Now she'd made a second big one and had wrecked Sadie in the process, at least on the inside. She already dreaded seeing Admiral Adama's eyes as she told him what she'd done.

The Raider suddenly rocked back and forth slightly causing Kara to panic. She managed to twist around enough to get to the hatch and slither out head first. On her hands and knees she crawled away from the ship. The air was filled with the scent of pine needles and damp leaf litter and she took several deep breaths. After being in Sadie and breathing tank air for hours, she couldn't get enough of the freshness.

It was early dawn but down under the trees there were only random spots of dim slanting sunlight. An obstruction loomed before her, two of them, about the size of two small saplings. She looked up although she already knew what it was…a centurion's armored shins.

She managed a smile. "Hi."'

It cocked its head to one side but didn't move. Carefully she stood. Her left side was throbbing as were her shoulder and hip, but she was still fairly certain she hadn't broken anything. She turned and looked at Sadie and realized what she had done. She'd jumped while she was moving forward and had continued the forward momentum when she'd come out of the jump. Normally that wouldn't have mattered. In the daylight she would have just made a circle and returned to the clearing. Instead while trying to contact the _G_, she'd drifted over the trees. When she'd begun her descent, Sadie's right wing had hit a tall pine tree. The left wing had canted downward between the trunk of another pine. No wonder she hadn't been able to bring the ship back level.

Once Sadie was tipped on her side between the pines she'd simply slid down until her left side had hit the ground. The pine on the right had kept the ship partially upright. It was still that way…like a coin standing on edge between two pegs.

Kara walked around the ship, gently running her hand over the outside. She didn't see any major damage, but she couldn't see the underside of the left wing that was on the ground. She didn't count the mess inside the ship because that wasn't really Sadie. Kevin had added all those computers. That could be fixed.

"I'm sorry, Sadie," she murmured. "Maybe Admiral Adama will let Kevin play doctor for you."

She kept expecting the centurion to stop her, but it just watched. It must have been the one rocking the ship. What was it doing? Trying to see if its brother was still alive? Did it know anything about the battle going on high above them?

"I didn't kill this one," she said to the centurion. "She fell into the bay back on Caprica and we rescued her." Kara knew the correct term was _salvaged_, but _rescued_ sounded better. "I think we can still patch her up. Not me, but some smart guys I know."

The centurion continued to stare at her, its red eye bouncing back and forth.

"So where did you come from? Do we know each other?" She grinned. "Maybe we met in a nightclub on Caprica. Did I promise to call and then forgot your number?"

No answer…just the head cocked to one side again. She wondered if the blow to her head had rendered her momentarily whacky. She was buying time. Now for the real test. Would the centurion let her leave?

"I'm going to follow the trail up to the top. You going to stay here or come with me?"

She started walking down the hill toward the clearing. She glanced back. The centurion was following her. She crossed the clearing and started up the path, picking her way carefully over the dimly lit trail. Behind her she heard the clanking footsteps. They continued until just before she emerged into the sunlit area at the bottom of the wooden steps. When she got there, she turned around and looked. The centurion was no longer behind her.

"Are you like a vampire?" she called. "Don't like the sunlight?"

The only sound was the breeze blowing through the tops of the evergreens and the rustle of leaves falling from the hardwoods. The season had changed while she'd been on the _Galactica_.

"Okay. Don't answer. I'll pretend my feelings aren't hurt."

She climbed the wooden steps, stopped in the doorway of the _Hyperion _and called Markham's name several times. The pain in her hip was more pronounced now. She sat down on the top step and waited. Natalie's cat Daniel came out from between the rocks and rubbed around her. She scratched him gently behind the ears.

"Where's your keeper? Can you fetch him for me?"

The cat began to purr.

"Yeah, yeah," Kara said. "I love you, too."

She heard a sound and turned. Leonard Markham stood on the wooden platform behind her.

"I thought I heard something."

Kara stood and almost moaned with the pain in her hip.

"What's wrong?" Markham asked.

"Accident in the Raider. It's near the clearing…stuck between two tall pine trees."

"You crashed?"

"You might say that."

"You're hurt."

"Bruised. I'll be okay. I know it's bad manners to invite myself in, but do you have something to drink? I'm really thirsty."

"Sure. Come in."

They walked to the area that was near Markham's quarters, the one with the big lab table covered in all kinds of electronics and centurion parts. While he fixed her a cup of the bitter tea that everyone in the valley drank, he asked about her father and then about Natalie. She told him about nuking the second basestar and trying to land in the clearing in the dark.

"It was a really stupid move, but I knew my dad and Lee would think something had happened to me if I didn't get back here and let them know I made it. I zoned out afterward. If that centurion hadn't started knocking on the outside of the ship, I might still be sleeping. In fact I might have run out of oxygen and…" she shivered. She didn't want to go there.

Markham placed a cup of tea in front of her. "You saw the centurion?"

"I saw _a_ centurion. It didn't say anything but it didn't shoot me either. It followed me back up the path, but when I got to the top and looked back, it was gone. It wouldn't come out of the woods."

"That's LG49," Markham said. "Or rather part of his brain in another body. He was badly damaged in the explosion of the prison. Your father brought me his head and torso. I was working on exchanging his memory circuit boards and chips with the ones in a centurion body that had been zapped in the forest. I ran into some problems since a couple of LG49's circuit boards were completely dead so I've got a hybrid. I got him working, but I left him unrestrained one night and he disappeared."

"Does he still have the inhibitor?"

"No. I never put one in him."

"When did this happen?"

"A few days ago. No one has seen him since. I didn't know if he headed back to the city or was wandering around. I guess I got my answer."

Markham rubbed his hand across his hair. For the first time Kara realized that he no longer had the long ponytail. His thinning gray hair was short.

"You cut your hair," she said.

"Likewise," he answered. "Natalie said something while she was here about liking short hair on men. She likes your father's haircut. Do you think she'll be back anytime soon?"

"I don't know. Right now Admiral Adama is keeping her busy. So why do you think LG49 bolted?"

"I don't know. When I woke up and found him gone, I searched the entire ship first thinking he might have found someplace to hide. Then I got Narcho and Beck and some of the men to help me check outside. No luck. I wish I'd gotten the voice synthesizer installed. At least we could talk to him. All I can figure is that something about being in the _Hyperion_ spooked him."

"He must have been nearby," Kara said. "He probably watched me come down in Sadie with his infrared. He might have heard my transmission to the _G_. I need to get in touch with them. Can you help me?"

"The communication equipment on this ship deteriorated beyond repair years ago. I never tried to rebuild anything. Who was I going to communicate with? I was also afraid that bunch from the city might be able to find the signal. They still don't know about this ship."

"I got off one message before I crashed. I didn't get a reply so I don't know if they heard me or not."

"Is your ship damaged beyond repair?"

"I hope not. The outside doesn't look bad at all, but I think it's going to take the guys who fixed it up back on Caprica to get it up and going again. All but one of the computers broke loose and crashed…mostly into me."

"Are you sure you're all right?"

"I'm tired and hungry and my whole left side hurts. I'd like to take a shower if you've got something I could put on."

Markham seemed surprised and embarrassed. Kara had forgotten how shy he was about anything other than technical subjects. "I don't have any…all I've got are these old coveralls."

"That's okay. I'll walk down to Dessa's."

Still not looking at her Markham said, "Her cooking is much better than mine anyway. Something you should know. Narcho's staying with her now...has ever since John took Emmalyn up to the battlestar."

"You mean they're _living together_?" Kara asked in shock.

"You'll have to ask Dessa or Narcho what their situation is. I don't ask questions. How is Emmalyn?"

"She's doing as well as can be expected. Doc Cottle got the infection cleared up and then he operated on her ankle. I was visiting her when the Cylons broke the truce and attacked us early yesterday morning."

"What truce?"

During the ten minutes it took for her to finish her tea, Kara managed to tell him what had happened. She stood. "I'll come back to see you soon."

"Let me know if you see LG49 again. I'd like to finish work on him. I'd like to have him ready when your father comes back."

"Will do," Kara answered.

The sun was up when she exited onto the wooden platform. The cat was crouched in the corner over a small rodent that was obviously destined to become his breakfast. His tail twitched swiftly from side to side. Kara didn't try to pet him, but she managed not to say _gross _either_._

After nearly two months spent on the battlestar, she'd forgotten that the seasons had changed on the planet below. A warm late summer had given way to a much cooler and brisk late autumn. Without her insulated flight suit she realized she would have been cold. It reminded her of the early spring when she and Narcho had first come to Nereid, and she and Hunter had spent a cold night wrapped in her insulated blanket hiding from centurions in the top of a tree.

She arrived at Dessa's dwelling. The door was closed but smoke was drifting from the chimney. Someone was up. She knocked. The door was opened by a clean-shaven Narcho. For a moment he just stared at her and then he grabbed her in a hug that caused her to yelp in pain. He quickly let her go.

"What's wrong?"

"Crashed in Sadie," she gasped.

"Where?"

"Near the clearing last night. It was a dumb move."

"You're hurt?"

"Bruised mostly. I might have cracked a rib. What I need is a shower and breakfast."

"Sure. Come in. Dessa's…getting dressed." He went to the fireplace, crouched and began to stir the coals of the fire.

Kara walked over to him and said softly, "Okay, Narch. What gives? Are you and Dessa shacking up? Cause if you are, Emmalyn's going to have a fit."

He continued to poke the fire and then added some more of the gray rocks that they burned for fuel. Finally he said, "Dess and I are married."

Kara was so taken aback that she squeaked, "Married? Who by? You got no real priests in this valley."

"The same one who has been marrying couples here for the last twenty years."

"When?"

"A week ago. We did it quietly just before the big harvest celebration."

"I'm in shock."

"Beck gave the bride away so we got his blessing."

Kara moved even closer to him. "Is she knocked up?"

Narcho stood and looked her in the eyes. "No, she's not knocked up."

"Then why did you get married?"

"Are you going to wait for Lee to knock you up before you marry him?"

She grinned. "I don't know. I guess it depends on whether I want my dad to kick my butt or not. I made him a promise about that."

"I guess it never dawned on you that I might love Dessa."

Kara stopped grinning. "The thought crossed my mind a couple of times, but…" she didn't finish.

"But you don't know how I could love somebody like her when I could have a hot Six or a hot Eight. Right?"

"I didn't say that."

"But you were thinking it."

"Narch…"

They heard the bathroom door open. Narcho put his finger against her lips to keep her from saying anything else. "We got company," he called loud enough for Dessa to hear.

Dessa's voice came back. "Who? Granpa and Celia or Beck and that Cylon woman?"

"None of them. Somebody you'll be glad to see."

Dessa rushed into the room. She had been brushing out her long, dark hair and still had the hairbrush in her hand. Kara was struck once more by how pretty she was. She was a lot prettier than Nina. Dessa seemed to have an extra glow of happiness now.

"Kara," she cried. "What are you doing here?"

Kara let Dessa embrace her and just winced through the pain.

"Kara's ship crashed nearby," Narcho said.

"You think I could use your bathroom to clean up and then maybe borrow a skirt and blouse?" Kara asked.

"Sure. I'll cook you some breakfast."

"Hey, what about me?" Narcho joked.

"I'll cook you some, too. I always cook your breakfast."

"I'm going to walk down and see Beck, let him know Kara is here. I'll be back soon."

Dessa touched Kara's short hair. "You cut if all off."

"Yeah. You want me to braid yours?"

As Dessa sat on the stool and Kara carefully brushed and braided her hair, she thought of how much she had missed everyone and how a few days in the valley might be just what she needed right now. Then she thought of Lee up on the _Galactica_ with Nina and hoped she got rescued soon.

When Kara finished braiding, she followed Dessa into the bedroom, took the candle and clothes that Dessa gave her, went into the bathroom and ran just enough water into the stone tub to bathe. Even in the dim light she could see that there were big bruises on her left shoulder and hip and several other places where the computers had slammed into her. She looked like she'd been used as someone's punching bag.

She washed her sweaty hair, rubbed it as dry as she could with a towel, dressed and joined Dessa who was busily preparing breakfast.

"So you're married to Narcho."

Dessa beamed and held out her left hand where Kara saw the dull gleam of a narrow gold band. "It was my mother's ring. It's all right to kiss a man if you're married. Aunt Emmalyn said so."

Kara sat at the table and wondered if Dessa and Narch had progressed beyond kissing yet. Curiosity was prompting her to ask, yet she knew it wasn't any of her business.

Instead she asked, "Do you and Narch sleep in the same bed?"

Dessa giggled and nodded vigorously. "That's what a husband and wife are supposed to do."

"I'm really happy for you. Narch is a good man and he's lucky to have a good woman like you."

Dessa put plates of scrambled eggs, cheese and bread on the table. "Go ahead and eat. I'll fix Narcho's eggs when he gets back. Beck has a girlfriend."

Kara dug into the food. Dessa's bread was as good as Emmalyn's and she was starving. "I heard you say something about a Cylon woman?"

"She's one of those women your father brought here when their ship blew up."

"Which one?"

"She looks like that woman you brought from your home, but her hair is dark instead of blond."

"She looks like Natasi except with darker hair? What's her name?"

"Lida. She got in a fight with another one of them who wanted to be Beck's girlfriend. The other one beat Lida up, but Beck still picked her. Then Granpa had to make some rules. No fighting and they have to leave the married men alone and those Cylon men have to leave the married women alone and not try to kiss the single girls unless they say it's all right."

"Good rules," Kara said.

Dessa giggled. "My granpa is smart. He said the Cylon men got the better bargain because there's lots more single women in the valley than men on account of the men getting killed in the forest. That's why the Cylon women are fighting. Not enough single men."

"Too bad. They shouldn't have been hunting and killing your men in the first place."

Dessa giggled again. "Before my granpa made his rules, Jennie Hobart got after one of the blond Cylons with a pitchfork when she caught her kissing Mr. Hobart in the hay barn. Jennie called the Cylon some bad words that Emmalyn told me never to say. Beck said you could hear her screaming and hollering out in the fields. Jennie would have run her through if a couple of the men hadn't stopped her."

"Think Jennie would let me borrow that pitchfork?" Kara asked.

"Do you have a hay barn up on your ship? Narcho said if it landed here in the valley, it would reach from the meadow all the way up to where the path leads to the orchard. That's a long way."

The door opened and Narcho entered followed by Beck and Lida. Kara's breath caught. Lida was as beautiful as Natalie and more beautiful, in Kara's opinion, than Natasi and Sonja. And Lee had been with one just like her. She tried to wipe the thought from her mind. This wasn't the same one. She was just a look-alike copy.

Beck had also shaved and cut his hair. He looked enough like Targa that he could be a slightly older twin.

"Wow," Kara said. "You clean up nice."

Lida reached out and took Beck's hand. "He's mine. You can't have him."

"Not that Beck isn't a real cutie-pie, but I've got one of my own."

"Who?" Lida asked. "All of the single men in the valley are spoken for."

"Her boyfriend doesn't live in the valley," Dessa said.

"His name is Lee and he's a pilot," Narcho added. "Kara is a pilot, too. She's just visiting."

"For how long?" Lida asked.

"Until they figure out where I am and somebody comes to get me," she muttered.

Dessa took Narcho's arm and pulled him to the table. "Eat your breakfast before it gets cold."

He smiled at her and gave her a kiss on the cheek. "How about fixing some tea for Beck and Lida. Then Kara can go get Perry and Celia and maybe Daniel and we'll talk about what's happened. We haven't gotten a morning newspaper here in a long time."

Kara smiled. She was sure she was the only one in the room who got the joke.

…

"I can tell you're a million miles away," Maya said to Laura at breakfast the morning after the incident at the barricades.

"I didn't sleep well last night."

Bianca was feeding Rachel and looked around. "I can write you a prescription for something if you like. You can't keep going without sleep."

"I'll sleep better tonight. Last night I just kept seeing Mrs. Lehto's face. She was widowed during the holocaust. Her son Mikel was all she had left in the way of family. Now he's gone, too."

"That's so sad," Maya said as tears came to her eyes. "I can understand completely. How did you ever make it through your meeting with her?"

"Edgar stayed with me," Laura said. "I doubt he would have left even if I'd asked him to, but he was…I don't know what I would have done without him…probably fallen apart. But I didn't. I promised her that we would create a memorial for her son and those like him. While Cavil and his Cylons governed Caprica, they would never let us recognize the dead and missing from the holocaust. I think now is a good time to start. I'm going to ask Sarah Porter to head a committee. It's time."

"I doubt even your nemesis Zarek will object to that," Bianca said.

"He'll probably want to know why I didn't ask him to head the committee since he would play it up for political gain. I might be forced to remind him of his scorn for the memorial raised on Sagittaron to honor those killed when he bombed their government building."

Bianca said. "I remember his trial well. Laszlo and I followed it from beginning to end. He had no sympathy for the families of those he and his so-called Freedom Fighters had killed. Once a terrorist, always a terrorist. Men like Zarek are always looking for one cause or another to stir up conflict. War suits him. That's why he's keeping things stirred up on Caprica now. Dear gods. What could he possibly hope to accomplish by killing someone like Leoben?"

"We don't know absolutely that Zarek was behind that," Laura said.

Bianca was wound up. "So what if Zarek can claim he rid Caprica of every last Cylon? He'll just start on another group he despises. My cubits are on the monotheists. He'll make it a holy war and the gods only know how long that could go on. Years and years."

Braedon and Esmari were on the floor playing. Laura looked at her son. "I can't imagine sending my little boy off to war one day," she murmured.

"Brae belongs to the stars," Maya said. "He won't go to war. He's going to find Kobol and then Earth."

She poured Laura another cup of tea which was gratefully accepted. Laura had not only slept poorly, she'd dreamed a series of disjointed, fragmented images, half-erotic, half-nightmarish which she now barely remembered. What she did remember was John lying beside her on the back seat of her limo, telling her not to move or Tom Zarek would find her and firebomb her car, but John's hand was also caressing her under her skirt and she wanted him to keep on, oh how she wanted him to keep on. Then John was gone and Edgar was beside her and she pulled down her skirt in a rush of embarrassment. Edgar told her that John would be back after he took care of Natalie but he wouldn't tell her what that meant…_take care of Natalie._ But she knew. She knew. Edgar had always tried to protect her from anything that would hurt her.

The car stopped and Edgar helped her out. They were alone in a cemetery near dusk. She walked up a long path to a grave on a windswept hill and knelt before a gravestone with a blank face. There was a noise behind her. She turned. Tom Zarek approached with a platinum-haired Six clutching his arm. Laura knew she was dreaming because of the incongruity of that image. Tom Zarek would have chewed off his own arm before he would have offered it to a Cylon. The Six looked like Natasi and was wearing the red dress that had proved such a distraction during the negotiations six years earlier, especially to Gaius Baltar, but also to every man on the negotiating team except Bill Adama. Bill had regarded all the Cylons with thinly-veiled contempt and that included the pheromone-spewing Six.

In her dream Laura stood and tried to get past Zarek and the Six, but Zarek took her arm and forced her to look back at the grave marker. It now read: _The Presidency of Laura Roslin. R.I.P. _He began laughing as the Six reached into his fly and fondled him in a parody of John's caresses. _Take a good look, Madame President. No man can resist them, not even your husband. _

She had awakened in the dark with her heart pounding. The clock had read 4:48. She had lain in bed for fifteen minutes. When it had become apparent that she would not be able to go back to sleep, she had gotten up, put on her robe and gone down to Sean's room. She had gotten there just in time to feed him with one of the preemie bottles that looked almost like it belonged to Esmari's doll. Sean had mastered the bottle in one day. Laura had imagined that she could feel him growing stronger in her arms as his dark blue eyes studied her.

Holding _the tiny miracle_ as she often thought of him had helped erase most of the effects of the previous day and the nightmare, but not all of it. John was on the _Galactica_ with Natalie and she couldn't get that out of her mind.

Now at breakfast as she sipped her second cup of tea, she remembered the respectful way John had talked about the First Six. There was a clear difference in his voice when he spoke of her as opposed to Sonja and even D'Anna. Once he'd confessed his relationship with Sonja, he spoke of her only in response to a direct question. D'Anna he spoke of only when he needed to relate information about her condition. But Natalie…he had spoken of her often and the role he knew she would play in the new government of Nereid. He had even once said, "_She's a lot like you, Laura." _Of all their conversations about the Cylon, that had scared Laura the most.

"You need to make a decision about a certain little boy's b-i-r-t-h-d-a-y," Maya said spelling the last word. "We're almost to the three-week mark. If we're going to have a p-a-r-t-y for him, we need to think about getting out the invitations. The mothers of the sixteen children in the downstairs daycare are hoping their children will be invited."

"If we have a p-a-r-t-y, I'll make sure we invite all the children from his daycare. It goes without saying that Esmari, Rachel and Hera will also be there."

Bianca asked, "What about the Parker children and Hugh Connelly's little girl?"

"Of course. Maya, maybe you and Bianca can make a list so we don't forget anyone."

"I'll do that while Brae and Esmari are in daycare this morning."

Despite Laura trying to stop them, tears suddenly welled in her eyes. "I wish John could come home. He…last year on Brae's birthday I thought he was dead. Maya, I know you remember. All we had was a cake with Lee and Kara and Bill. I was wearing a black suit. I didn't even feel like celebrating my son's first birthday."

"I remember," Maya said softly.

"John has missed half of his son's life…a whole year."

Bianca said, "Why don't you ask Admiral Adama to let John come home for a few days? Certainly they can spare him for that long."

"I doubt that's the issue. I think it would be the fairness of it. They can't start letting everyone come home for a few days for a child's birthday…not while the situation is still so uncertain over Nereid."

"Your husband isn't _everyone_," Maya said emphatically. "You didn't mind using the power of the Presidency to get that poor mother brought here yesterday. For the gods' sakes, Laura, you're the _President of the Colonies_. Do just _one thing_ for yourself and your child. Quit thinking of everyone else for a change."

"You do want to see him, don't you?" Bianca asked. "Or is that none of our business?"

Tears welled again. "You both are the best friends I've ever had. I can't imagine how I would have gotten through all of this without your help and support. I don't mind you asking me anything. Of course I want to see John. Of course I want him here to see his son turn two. I want him to see Sean and hold him. I want…I want my husband back where he belongs...with me, not on a battlestar with…with…"

The tears spilled over and Maya grabbed the ever-present box of tissues and pushed them across the table. Laura grabbed several, wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

The door opened and Sharon walked in with Hera on her hip. She was still breast-feeding and most often chose to do it in the privacy of her room since even the small upstairs dining room was subject to traffic by the wait staff and security guards.

Laura grabbed another tissue and wiped her eyes again. She managed a smile. "Forgive me. I'm very emotional this morning. Yesterday was…difficult to say the least."

"Am I interrupting something?" Sharon asked.

"No, please come in and eat your breakfast. I've got to get dressed and go down to the office. Maya, we'll talk about the p-a-r-t-y tonight after a certain little boy with very good hearing has gone to bed."

Bianca reached out and took Hera. "Come here, sweetheart. Your mother needs to eat. She needs to put a little meat on those bones while she's feeding you."

Laura was pleased to see that Hera now went to Bianca without any hesitation. Two weeks ago she would have cried and clung to Sharon. She was coming out of her shell.

Braedon got up from the floor. "Time to go work."

"Not yet," Maya said. "You don't go down to day care for another hour."

"Time to go to work with Mamma."

Laura smiled. "All right," she said indulgently. "You can go downstairs with me, but when it's time for daycare, Edgar will bring you back upstairs. Okay?"

"Okay."

Braedon liked Edgar who had become something of a surrogate father to him. On slow afternoons while the weather had been warm, she'd often seen her head of security in his shirtsleeves out on the west lawn with her son playing on the swing set that had temporarily been placed there. Edgar had taught Brae how to ride a tricycle and on rainy afternoons she'd often found her son riding his tricycle on the marble hall under Edgar's watchful eye. _It should be John,_ she had thought on those occasions. _It should be his father doing those things with him._

As she later got on the elevator and held her son while he pushed the button for the first floor, she began to think about how she would word a request to Bill Adama to ask that her husband be allowed to return home for their son's birthday. She didn't have much hope that Bill would honor it, but she would at least make the effort.

…

Two hours after the Raiders had disappeared into Nereid's atmosphere, a fresh CAP was launched and Lee's group of Vipers was called back to the _Galactica_. He had engaged in very little combat, but he still felt drained as he climbed down the ladder and signed the post-flight check list. He'd gone without sleep for a long time and the idea of a hot shower and his bunk were foremost in his mind as soon as he found out about Kara.

Chief Tyrol was waiting for him as he headed toward the stairs. "Sir, Admiral Adama said to tell you to get cleaned up and get something to eat and then join him in the Situation Room."

Lee nodded. "Any word about Starbuck?"

"All I heard was that they think she's on the planet. A comm tech got part of a transmission from her. It got cut off and they haven't been able to raise her since."

"S&R wasn't launched as soon as the fighting was over?" Lee asked incredulously.

"No, sir. They're concentrating their efforts on picking through the debris field. Between us and the _Pegasus_, we've got seventeen missing pilots. I don't have much hope, but…"

"Lords of frakking Kobol," Lee interrupted angrily. "My father couldn't spare _one_ godsdamned Raptor to look for her?"

Tyrol looked down at the floor. "I think there was some concern about launching a surface S&R with all those Raiders now on the planet and us not knowing where they are."

Lee walked away without another word. It wasn't fair to Tyrol to take out his anger and frustration on the crew chief. He was only the messenger.

Lee went to his quarters, threw his flight suit over a chair and headed for the showers. By the time he got to the mess hall, he'd lost his appetite. He got a high-caffeine soft drink out of one machine and a pack of peanut butter crackers from another and headed for the Situation Room. He ate the crackers on the way.

One of the Marines opened the door for him. His father was inside along with John, Gaeta, Tigh, Vargas, Tarkington, Natalie and Buddy. Everyone was gathered around the light table. Lee walked to the edge and looked down. The projected map was of the city.

"I'm glad you could join us, son," Bill said. "You saw the Raiders. Any thoughts on their destination?"

"We were called off before we could pursue them into the atmosphere. They disappeared into the darkness. I haven't got a clue."

Lee heard something in his own voice that caused John to give him a sharp look.

"You thought you should have been allowed to carry the battle down to the planet?" Bill asked.

"No, sir," Lee said tiredly. "I understand why we couldn't do that."

"Some of them went to the city airstrip," John said. "Once it was light enough we were able to get photographic evidence. We know over two hundred of them survived the battle in space, but we can only see about fifteen extra ships at the airstrip in the city. They don't have the hangar space to hide but a few more so we've got a hundred eighty-five plus Raiders in an unknown location or locations."

Bill said, "We were just discussing our options."

"What about Kara?"

His father took a deep breath. "We believe she's on the planet, but I'm not willing to risk the lives of a Raptor crew right now with all those Raiders still unaccounted for."

"Then let me go. Just me."

"Sorry, son."

John took Lee's arm and said, "Excuse us just a minute."

He steered Lee out into the hall. They walked several paces away from the Marines guarding the door.

"There's no need to go there. I've already covered all that territory with your father. After the Raiders disappeared, I…uh…backed him against the command console in the CIC when he wouldn't let me take a Raptor or the Heavy Raider down. I'm lucky I'm not cooling my heels in the brig right now. Colonel Tigh and General Vargas helped me see the error of my ways to keep pursuing it. Kara's tough. I'm fairly certain she jumped in over the valley somewhere. She'll make it. We'll find her. Now let's go back in there and help your father come up with a plan to deal with these missing Raiders. The sooner we get that task out of the way, the sooner we can go on to another one."

Lee struggled to get his emotions under control and finally nodded.

John put his hand on his friend's shoulder and squeezed. "Bill is as tired and strung-out as the rest of us right now. He didn't sleep last night either. Don't add to his problems. He's got enough dealing with me."

"Maybe you and I can…be the ones to look for her later."

"I wouldn't have it any other way. Now let's go look at that map again. Mr. Gaeta is getting the techs who man those high res cameras to focus on all the settlements and even the basestar shipyard. If those Raiders are anywhere in the open, we'll find them."

"What about dradis contacts?"

"Zero. Wherever they are, they're either below the tree line or they're well hidden and their communications have gone dark. Even Buddy isn't picking up anything. It reminds me of the old hunting term. They've _gone to ground_."

"I never went hunting," Lee said.

"It literally means the prey has found a burrow to hide in. I guess figuratively it means they found a way to disappear."

"We're sure they didn't jump away?"

"Nothing was picked up on dradis. Where would they go?"

"Back to their basestar?"

"Lee, I think Kara got that basestar but not before it had launched most of its Raiders. She might have decided they jumped here and she knew better than to jump back here, too. I don't know, but I think after she nuked that basestar, she wound up back over the valley. When the time is right, I'm going to approach Bill again. We'll find her."

Together they walked back into the Situation Room. The others were waiting for them.

Lee looked at his father. "Sorry for the interruption, sir."

Bill acknowledged him with a slight nod and said, "Go ahead Natalie."

"I had nothing to do with the creation of the second-generation Raiders or the baseships, but I remember hearing one of the engineers talking about the Raiders. They have a limited intelligence and a limited ability to learn, but I once heard him speak of something called a Survival Protocol. I wish I knew what that meant, but I only heard the term."

John said, "Buddy, can you add to that?"

"Ben Corso an engineer and Drew Tanner a designer and technician were very fond of role playing in V-world. When they got here there was no V-world and Daniel Graystone would not allow them to create one since he was afraid Zoe's avatar would prefer to dwell there instead of help them create a new body for her. Corso and Tanner had to content themselves with a computer simulation of V-world that one of them had brought from Caprica. One of the games they played was called _Survival Protocol_. Several years after arriving, they grew bored with playing one another and involved several of the U-87s in their game. Later they took some of the basic programming for the Raiders from one of the U-87s since they did not want to rewrite 796,443 lines of code. It was done via a direct link download into the first prototype new Raider. It is possible that they also took some of what the U-87 had learned in the game."

"Can you tell us anything about the game itself?"

"I cannot. I was not one of those chosen to learn it."

Lee said, "Zak and I played a computer game called _Survival Protocol_ when we were in high school. I don't know if it's the same one or not."

"Give us a quick recap," Bill said.

"Each player is put in situations where he has to survive to progress to the next level. Each level gets harder. On every level if you do certain things right, you collect items that will help you on the next levels."

"Is it military in nature?" Vargas asked.

Lee thought. "Sort of. Some of the items you collect are guns and knives and explosives, but you also have to find food and water and shelter that's always guarded by some kind of poisonous snake or a troll or something so if you didn't get the things you needed on the previous levels…it's game over and you have to start again. It's really a cool game."

"So bottom line," Bill said, "we think these Raiders might have learned something from a _computer game_?"

Lee said, "On about the third or fourth level in order to survive, you have to find places to hide. On another level you have to find ways to camouflage yourself. I can see a possible parallel."

"Does anyone seriously think," Tigh said derisively, "that these Raiders are down on the planet somehow covering themselves with grass and mud?"

There was a long silence. Gaeta caught Lee's eye and mouthed, "I played _Survival Protocol_, too. Cool game."

Finally Bill said, "Suggestions anyone?"

"I think we're going to have to proceed with the invasion of the city," Vargas said. "I hardly think we can scour a massive continent that is heavily forested over more than seventy-five percent trying to find a couple hundred Raiders. I think we're going to have to proceed and deal with whatever happens."

"Agreed," Tigh commented.

"We're all too tired to start planning something on that scale right now," Bill said. "Everyone get some sleep and reconvene here tonight at 19:00."

John and Lee waited while the others exited.

"Sir," John started.

"Get some sleep, Major," Bill said gruffly. "You're dead on your feet like the rest of us. You, too, Lee."

"My daughter's down there," John said more forcefully.

"Neither of you is in any shape to take a Raptor to the surface, and I can't spare a Raptor crew right now. They're all combing the debris field for the missing pilots."

"We need to go in the daylight," Lee said.

"A Raptor has landing lights," Bill retorted. "Get some sleep and after our meeting tonight we'll talk again. Give us a little longer to find those Raiders. I also want to make sure that basestar isn't hiding around the corner."

"It's not," John said. "Kara got it. I'm sure of that now."

"We'll see," Bill said. "Now both of you get out of here. That's an order."

John knew that to argue further was to risk the brig. He turned without a word and Lee followed. Out in the corridor John headed for the mess hall.

"I haven't eaten anything since dinner last night. I think we can make the tail end of lunch if we hurry. I got a lot to fill you in on."

"What?"

"Unfortunately our computer games aren't the only thing the Cylons learned from."

…

Kara decided to go to Daniel's dwelling first. She knew he was an early riser. She knocked on the door and waited. Daniel answered with a piece of charcoal in his hand and smudged fingers. For several seconds he stared at her like he was seeing a ghost.

Then a huge smile lit his face. "Kara. Where did you come from? I thought you were on a battlestar."

"I took an unexpected detour. How are you?"

"Please, come in. I was just making some sketches. Would you like tea?"

She shook her head and gazed around. Everything looked exactly the same except for the naked Eight who was posing near the fireplace.

"My model," Daniel said.

"Your _model_? That the first time I've heard one of them called that."

"Who is _she_?" The Eight asked with a hint of jealousy in her voice.

"This is Kara, my Persephone, my goddess of spring. Don't you recognize her from the painting? You can put on your robe. We'll take a break."

Daniel put down the charcoal and wiped his hands.

"Do the valley people know about you?" Kara asked.

"Perry and Celia have known for a long time. I used to have horrible nightmares while I was staying with them. Celia figured it out. I don't think they've told anyone else, not even Emmalyn."

"And now with all these Cylons in the valley?"

"We discussed it among ourselves," the Eight said. "He must be protected. We've told no one."

"They decided that my DNA is valuable. The think I can be cloned."

Kara said, "Lucy's on the plateau working in the lab. She downloaded into the body of a Three. She's started looking at all the computers that were found in a storage vault. Maybe she'll find the magic formula."

The Eight still hadn't put on her robe. "The formula is not _magic_. It was inspired by God and placed in the minds of our creators. God commanded them to create a being that is superior to humans in every way and they created us."

"Whatever," Kara said. "Do you have a name?"

"No."

Kara looked carefully at Daniel. "Are you and her…a couple?"

"She's my model."

"That's not what I asked? Does she live here?"

Daniel turned away slightly. "She lives with Perry and Celia."

"But sometimes I stay here," the Eight said. "Daniel is educating me about humans since I hope to have a human man one day. All the human men in the valley are taken. I want something different from the One I had on the basestar for many years."

"I'll bet," Kara said. "We'll look you up once we take the city. There's about a gazillion unattached human men on the _G_. You can have your pick, especially if you greet them like you are right now."

"I like you," the Eight said. "Will I need a name to be with a human?"

"It helps. Otherwise they'll have to say, _Hey, you."_

The Eight looked between Daniel and Kara. "Which name should I pick?"

"Anything but _Nina_," Kara answered.

"Nina Kelly was one of our creators," the Eight said.

"Let's just say it's not my favorite name at the moment."

"Did you have a good friend when you were in school?" Daniel asked.

"Yep."

"What was her name?"

"His name. My best friend is named Karl."

"Then we can call her Carla," Daniel said.

Kara smiled. "Karl is married to an Eight named Sharon. They have a little girl named Hera."

A soft look came into Carla's eyes. "That's what I want. I want a human man and a baby. I saw a lot of movies..."

They were interrupted by a pounding on the door. Daniel opened it to a very agitated Noel Allison.

"Put on your robe," Daniel hissed to Carla and she quickly obeyed. He stepped back and Narcho entered.

"What's up?" Kara asked.

"Several of the men and women went up to the orchard early this morning to gather all the apples they could before we get a freeze. One of them just came running back with the news."

"What news?"

"In the forest beyond the orchard they noticed something gleaming in the early morning sun. They investigated. Raiders. At least a dozen of them. Nobody got close enough to count. Those ships weren't there yesterday. "

"I wonder where they came from?" Daniel asked.

"Oh, frak," Kara answered. "I think I know."

Carla tied the sash of her robe. "What are they doing?"

"That's just it," Narcho said. "They're not doing anything. It's almost like they're parked and waiting for a signal or something to happen...or maybe a Colonial ship to come rescue Kara."

Kara took Narcho's arm, pulled him outside and closed the door. "I don't really want your Cylons to know this, but last night I nuked their second basestar. That signal is never going to come, but eventually a Raptor probably will. My dad and Lee won't give up looking for me."

"So they come looking for you and those Raiders destroy us."

"That's not going to happen, Narch."

"I wish I could believe that."

"I think it's time to get together with the Cylon leaders and find out if they can communicate with Raiders."

"And if they can't do it without that datastream of theirs?" Narcho asked.

"Then I'll think of something. I promise."

"Let's just hope you can think of it before Lee and your father show up in a Raptor and those Raiders destroy them and this valley and kill us all."

"Yeah, Narch. Let's hope."

TBC…


	78. Kill Switch

Chapter 78

Kill Switch

_Libran_

_Year 3, Day 291_

_I can hardly believe another year is more than three-fourths gone. In less than a month my beautiful son will turn two. Oren has already begun to hint that we should think of increasing our family, but I'm still not quite ready…perhaps in six months. I have not heard from Odin since his trip early this year although I have written to him several times. I'm not sure what to make of it other than perhaps Mother has asked that all correspondence go directly through her. Their abbey compound does not lend itself to getting information in and out in a secretive manner. I would imagine, however, that for some reason Odin has made Mother a promise not to correspond with me and is keeping it._

_Year 3, Day 311 Two quick updates on unrelated subjects: 1) Final preparations for my son's second birthday party are underway. 2) Nadine's mother passed away which was not unexpected given her condition, but it seems to have hit Nadine very hard. She is still with Ares and still not married although she did mention in an earlier letter that Ares will almost certainly accompany the second Prolmar mission now barely two years away. I gather it has become a very sore spot with them since she feels like he should stay with her and their daughter who is a dark-haired little beauty. And finally my big news. I have a chance to attend a seminar on Gemenon at their Surgical College in Oranu after the first of the year and am making plans to go. Oren will keep our son this time. Mother's monastery is in the mountains outside Illumini, a seven-hour drive from Oranu, but I can take an air shuttle and be there in barely an hour. I think I shall extend my stay by one day so that I might visit them. _

_Year 4 Day 23_

_My seminar concluded yesterday afternoon and early last evening I was on a flight to Illumini. Much to my disappointment I was met at the spaceport by a young monk name Lexon instead of by Odin. I had planned to use the forty-minute drive to the monastery to discuss the translation of Frank's book. As it happened, the drive passed in near silence. I saw no one when we arrived except a young woman named Devanna who showed me to my quarters and whose nun's habit had the distinct odor of a certain substance most often smoked recreationally, a smell I might add that I have never smelled on Odin. I said nothing but merely allowed her to escort me to my room. Later she brought me a dinner tray since I'd missed the communal meal in the dining hall. I wanted to ask Devanna (as I'd asked Lexon) if Odin was all right, but was sure I would get only the same vague assurance that he was fine._

_Year 4 Day 24_

_This morning at breakfast I saw both Mother and Odin for the first time. Mother was exceptionally happy to see me or pretended to be so. Odin hung back and was much more reticent. How I wished to ask him what was going on, but knew instinctively that I should not._

_I finally had to ask Mother about the translation, reminding her that in our earliest correspondence she had promised I would be made privy to anything that was in the book. She informed me that I was welcome to view the translation of the book (which is identical to the 1st through the 23rd books of their scriptures), but that she was now excluding the 8-page letter found in the back of Frank's book. She claimed that since it was not part of the book proper, it was not included in our agreement. I was furious and knew at once that those 8 pages revealed something that the Monad Church and she personally didn't ever want released to the public. She then thanked me for making the journey and said she would be unavailable for the rest of my stay. As she and Odin left the room, he glanced at me for only an instant, but in that brief moment, his eyes confirmed my suspicions. She has put a tight leash on her disciple monk and he has willingly accepted it. In that instant I saw all of my dreams vanish of informing the faithful what had happened centuries ago to the Thirteenth Tribe on Eden._

_Year 4 Day 25_

_Upon returning home today, in my luggage I found (stuffed in the toe of one of my shoes) a tightly folded page printed front and back in handwriting so small I fear I will need a magnifying glass to read it. I could imagine Odin laboring over it in secret in his room (and in great peril of being caught) using just such a glass and a pen with a point as fine as a hair. It is as much as Odin could remember of the monk's letter. I have no idea when or how he managed to hide the page and the note in my luggage or the risk that he took to do so. There was also a brief note of a personal nature which I include here because he has asked me to destroy it after reading it and I will honor his wishes. _

My Dearest Aimee,

As we will never see or write to each other again, I had to do this. I am giving you as much as I can remember of the translation. I was only allowed one complete reading. Since I met you, I have had feelings for you which are not appropriate considering the vows I have taken and your status as a married woman. After returning from Libran over a year ago Mother quickly guessed the reason for my daydreaming and lack of attention to my duties. She asked me if I wanted to continue in my position in the Church of the Monad or leave it to pursue a secular career. I have chosen a life that reflects my devotion to the one God as I am certain you have now guessed. Having made the choice, I must now honor it with all my heart and soul.

Mother has locked away both the 8-page letter and its translation and refuses to speak about them to me or anyone as she also refuses to speak about the Kobol Stone although her secretiveness makes me believe the stone is here on these very premises. You will understand why when you read the other included page. I will never forget you and I wish you every wonderful gift that life can offer you. You will always be in my prayers.

Your devoted and loving servant,

Odin

_My next task is to buy a large magnifying glass and read his painstakingly created condensation of the letter from Frank's book._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

"You can't be serious?" Lee said to John after John had told him Natalie's explanation of how the basestar Cylons had learned about humans.

"I admit it's almost too weird to believe, but it does make certain behaviors you encountered there more understandable."

Lee pushed his empty tray to the side. "You know how many movies I've seen at the theater since I graduated from high school?"

John shook his head and stifled a yawn. More than thirty hours without sleep was finally catching up with him.

"I could probably count them on two hands," Lee said. "The last two or three were chick flicks that Kara and Maya…well Maya wanted to see so Hunter and I went with them. Hunter and I used to look at old movies while we were living at yours and Laura's apartment, but half the time I fell asleep before the end of the movie. I'd seen most of them before. Hunter watched every single one."

"You got to go back thirty plus years to understand what the Cylons are watching on the basestars. It was stuff the creators brought from Caprica at the end of the First War."

"I didn't see any monitors or screens while I was on their ship. How do they watch movies?"

"I'm not sure exactly how it works, but they use their datastream. I guess that's why the ones in the city and the settlements didn't do the same thing…limited access to a datastream. They don't really need movies anyway. They had living human slaves to learn from."

Lee said, "I've seen some movies, but no television shows from thirty years ago."

"They weren't a lot different from what we're seeing now," John said. "I never watched much television. Mostly it was sporting events, occasionally a good documentary, sometimes a movie about the First War. I had to be careful, though. Some of them were so over-dramatized or inaccurate that I wanted to throw something at the screen and yell, _That's not the way it was_. I remember one that showed a battle I actually fought in. The movie showed the Cylons losing about three times the number of Raiders as actually happened and showed us losing only three Vipers when we lost eighteen. I lost one of my best friends during that fight. I was so disgusted that I quit watching First War movies after that."

"In the history class I took at the Academy, the teacher said that there was a rush after the First War to downplay the part the Colonial governments and the big corporations like Graystone and Vergis had in creating so many of the U-87 and 0005 centurions and turning them loose to fight our inter-colonial squabbles. One theory of why Graystone vanished is that he was afraid of lawsuits for what his creations did."

"I remember right after the First War ended and the centurions disappeared, there was a machine backlash. Even those harmless little housecleaning models got deactivated and tossed in the garbage. Nobody had any use for robots unless they were bolted to a factory floor. In some ways it was a giant step backwards, but it opened up a lot of jobs that had been taken over by machines. By then Tom Vergis was dead and the Graystones had disappeared. The short-lived age of the centurion soldier seemed like it was over. Natalie told me she didn't understand at first why the creators had installed those telencephalic inhibitors in the new centurions. Anybody who had lived through the First War would understand immediately."

Lee sat without saying anything for a long time while John ate his lunch. An incident he hadn't thought about in years had just surfaced in his memory.

"When Zak and I were maybe eleven and thirteen, one of the rare weekends when Dad was home, he said he'd take us to a movie. I don't remember which one except that it was a First War movie, but Mom had a fit. She said it _glorified war_ and was _too mature _for us. She said it would put ideas into our heads about being _pilots_ and _heroes_ and she wanted _better_ for me and Zak. I didn't realize it at the time, but she was really criticizing Dad for his career choice. They got into a big fight and went to the bedroom to talk about it privately and naturally we didn't go to the movie. Zak was so angry and disappointed that he went out back and threw one of the patio chairs into Mom's koi pond. I fished it out before she or Dad saw it. I'd gotten to the point that I didn't expect anything from either of them by then. The next Saturday Dad was gone and Mom drank her breakfast so Zak and I rode the maglev train into the city and went to see the movie. I couldn't see what Mom was so upset about. It wasn't that big a deal. It was a long time before I realized that the movie was just an excuse for her to pick a fight with Dad so she'd have him to herself for the weekend. Nobody likes to think about their parents having sex, but…they had that if nothing else."

John said, "I know you had it rough growing up. I'm just glad you and your Dad have made peace with each other now. Sometimes I wonder if my dad had lived what kind of relationship we'd have had as adults. He was a good man, but he was a strict father." Then he chuckled. "We had one movie theater in Port Ithaca right on Main Street. It would show a movie suitable for kids at the matinee and the early evening show. Then the later show was usually more adult themed. The worst whipping I ever got was because me and a friend hid in the bathroom after the early evening show and tried to see the adult-rated show that came on next. That's the problem with living in a small town. The theater manager caught us and called my father. We were stupid enough to do it on a weekend he was in port. To this day I'm still not sure what he was angriest about…the adult theme or that we didn't pay for it."

"What was the movie?"

John chuckled again. "I don't remember. Something with sex in it. I was ten or eleven…the age when it's all a big mystery and your friends are telling you all kinds of stuff that you don't know whether to believe or not. After that incident at the movie, Sean sat me down and explained the facts of life to me in language I could understand. He also told me I was going to be able to take my pick of girls one day and that I should always treat them with respect. My oldest brother was something special. Next to Mom, I missed him the most after…they all died. How'd you learn about sex?"

"I'd heard a lot of stuff, too. I got the facts in seventh grade health class. Mom or Dad neither one ever mentioned sex to me or Zak either. How old were you when you kissed a girl the first time?"

"Spring of the seventh grade. I was twelve or thirteen. What about you?"

"The summer after seventh grade. It was a birthday party. I remember because it was hot and the place had a pool and we all brought bathing suits and went swimming. After it got dark somebody sneaked a wine bottle out of the recycle bin and we played spin the bottle." Lee smiled. "My first spin stopped on a guy. Everybody laughed and tried to get us to kiss. I did better on the second spin although her friends pushed her in front of it. Her name was Roxanne and I'd known her since kindergarten. She'd grown up a lot since sixth grade. For the first time I noticed she had boobs. The kiss was okay, I guess. I was so nervous I don't remember much about it. My mother wasn't in any shape to come get me at the end of the party so Roxanne's mother took me home. Roxanne walked to the back door with me and kissed me again with tongue that time. That's when I realized that she was my first kiss but I sure wasn't hers. I guess you could say she was my first girlfriend. After we started eighth grade, I'd go home with her after school sometimes and we'd go downstairs to her den to study, but we'd usually wind up kissing. One day I was all…turned on and I had my hand under her shirt and her mom came down and caught us. That was the end of me and Roxanne. While her mom was pushing me out the door, she told me that her daughter wasn't _that kind of girl_ and she should have known better than to let her hang around with the son of a father who was never home and a mother who was a drunk_._ It should have bothered me more than it did. Ever since my grandmother Evelyn had to step in when mom was too drunk to host my tenth birthday party, I figured most of the kids and their parents knew anyway. Roxanne's mother was just angry enough to say it."

"You know something," John finally said, "Even though that was a bad experience for you, the Cylons never got to experience anything like we've just been talking about. They've never been babies and then kids and teenagers and young adults. They've got zero memories or experiences…good or bad…about growing up and learning what you learned that afternoon with your first girlfriend. It's sad, really sad."

Lee nodded. "It is, but you're not trying to excuse what…happened to me because they didn't have childhoods."

"No," John said tiredly. "I'm not trying to excuse what Lida and Nina did to you. I just think it helps explain their actions if you take all those unrealistic movies and television shows they saw and add it to being born into an adult body with only basic programming and no experiences."

"So where do we go from here?" Lee asked.

John shook his head. "I'm way too tired to think about it until I've had some sleep. I'm not even sure I'll have any answers then."

"Then let's hit the sack before Nina finds me. Even knowing what you just told me, I don't think I could deal with her right now. I'm tired, too."

John smiled at his young friend. "My daughter's got you wrapped around her little finger, doesn't she?"

"From the minute she walked out of that interrogation room and into my life…even when I thought her name was Carrie Warner. Even before that, actually. I saw her with Jared and Frogman at Zeno's one night. I didn't know who she was, but I thought she was the hottest girl I'd ever seen. There was just one thing I could never figure out back then. I'd looked at her sometimes and it was just so glaring."

"What?"

"How she got those green eyes of yours. You don't know how close I came to asking you if you'd ever visited Antioch twenty years ago."

"The first time I ever found myself in Antioch was when I was looking for Kara after the Cylons had bombed the place. The _only thing_ on my mind at the time was finding her. It was when I got to the main refugee camp outside Antioch that I first whored myself out to a woman for information. I told you about that, didn't I?"

"You told me."

"That was a bad time in my life, a really bad time. I thought that kind of crap was behind me when I met Laura, but then along came D'Anna and Sonja and kind of blew that earlier experience right out of the water as far as my behavior goes. You're right. Let's go get some sleep. Kara's gone missing again. I guess that's what put me in this kind of mood."

"We're going to find her. I told you that the last time, but you were just so damned sure you were right that you wouldn't listen to me."

"That's probably the only time since I've met you that you had more faith than I did."

…

Sarah Porter graciously accepted the cup of tea Laura offered her as part of an apology for the unscheduled nature of her meeting request.

Over their mutual years in the government, the two women had been on opposite sides as often as they'd agreed. The representative from Gemenon was extremely conservative in her political, personal and religious beliefs. She would have sided more often with Tom Zarek had it not been for her strong disgust over his proudly professed leadership of the Sagittaron Freedom Fighters and the fact that innocents had died because of them.

Though Porter and Laura often disagreed, Laura had always found her to be a fair politician and Laura knew that Sarah applauded Laura's devotion to her family which included both her belief in the Sacred Scrolls and her choice not to turn her back on her husband when his paternity of D'Anna's child was revealed.

"How is your family?" Porter asked politely.

"They're fine."

"Even the…half-Cylon child?"

"Sean is growing stronger every day."

"His survival is the will of the gods. I don't know why others can't see that and accept it."

"Because so many others either have no faith or they only pay lip service to it when it suits them."

"Sadly, you're right. Even some among the Quorum are guilty of using our faith to push their own agendas and ignoring our faith when it's of no help to them." She sat for a moment sipping her tea and then asked, "You're all right after your brush with disaster yesterday?"

"Perfectly fine," Laura answered. "Billy released the details to the press this morning. I hate to say it was a tempest in a teacup, but I was never in any real danger. In fact yesterday's events have made me determined to move forward with getting suggestions for both a holocaust memorial and one to the heroes of the conflict which began a year ago and to which we'll add the names of the heroes of the current conflict. I'd like for you to chair the project. You would be free to pick whatever committee members you'd like. I have one suggestion…Romo Lampkin since you might need legal advice, but the others would be of your choosing. I spoke to Romo earlier. He's more than willing to help."

There was clear surprise on Porter's face. "Why me?"

Laura took a deep breath. "Because you're a woman of faith and because you're a devoted wife and mother and because you lost your parents on Gemenon during the attack six years ago. I can't think of anyone better suited to chair this project."

The two women looked at one another. "I'd be honored," Porter said. "I can handle seeing about funding and locations, but you do know that I haven't got any contacts in the artistic community. I'm sure we'll need to consider several designs for the memorial monuments."

"Ask Marta Shaw for suggestions. Members of her family have been patrons of the arts here on Caprica for several generations. I'm sure she'll be more than happy to help. In fact she would probably be a good committee member."

"You'll cover this in our next Quorum meeting as well?"

"Of course. I wanted to get your acceptance of the chair position before I propose it. Now that you've said _yes_, Billy will have another announcement to make to the press as soon as we inform the Quorum." Laura stood and walked with Porter to the door. "You don't know how much I appreciate your willingness to serve."

Porter extended her hand and Laura shook it. "I'm suddenly very excited about this. I think even Tom will approve. I hate the divisiveness that has characterized our meetings lately."

Laura smiled. "So do I. I'm sure Tom will say that it's past time we got on with honoring our dead."

"The people need it, too."

"Yes," Laura said softly and thought of the dead Marine's mother. "Yes, they do. Their grief will last a lifetime, but we still need to recognize the sacrifice of their loved ones."

She had just gotten back to her desk when her secretary buzzed her and told her that Edgar would like a minute of her time.

"Please, send him in."

He took his usual chair beside her desk. "Maya had me take Braedon straight to day care this morning."

"But that's not why you need to see me."

"No, Ma'am. I have some information that I think you'll be interested in hearing. We'll never be able to do anything with it, but we'll know."

"Concerning?"

"The firebombing of the Cylon's bookstore."

"Someone has been caught?" Laura asked eagerly.

"No. I doubt anyone ever will be now. This information comes from a friend of mine on the City Police Force. He's worked arson investigations for a number of years during which time he's developed a number of CIs or confidential informants. This information came from one of them, a man who had spent nearly a decade in prison for several arsons for hire."

"Would you like some coffee?" Laura asked. By the expression on his face she knew she wasn't going to like what Edgar was getting ready to tell her.

"Thank you, but I'm fine. My friend said that two days after the firebombing, this particular CI had contacted him and told him that several weeks earlier, a man had offered him a substantial number of cubits to do a job on a bookstore. The amount was almost double what a job like that would normally go for."

"A man? No name?"

"In this type of situation names are never exchanged. They met in a seedy bar down on Medea Street. The CI asked a few questions. He figured it was a bookstore that offered radical literature of some sort and was told no, that the owner wanted the insurance money which we know is a lie. My friend checked. Leoben didn't have any insurance on the bookstore and it's unlikely that he'd want it burned down while he was sleeping above it. In the end the CI turned down the job because he said that something felt wrong about the whole thing. The man who made the offer went out the front and the CI went out the back. He walked up the alley and watched while a car pulled up across the street and the man got in. He's ninety-nine percent certain the car was driven by Tom Zarek's bodyguard and right-hand man James Meier."

Laura gasped. "He's sure?"

"My friend assembled a photographic lineup of a dozen men and his CI picked Meier without any hesitation. The other man, the man who approached him, he'd never seen before. That's another reason he turned it down. He gave a general description that fits thousands of men in Caprica City. He spent several hours looking through mug shots on a department PC with no luck."

"Isn't the fact that he identified Zarek's man enough to at least question Mr. Meier?"

"Unfortunately the CI was found dead yesterday in a dumpster off Medea Street. He'd been stabbed to death. No witnesses, no knife, and nothing so far in the way of usable forensics. The medical examiner says he was killed somewhere else and dumped there. The day after the fire another man was found in another dumpster killed in a similar fashion. Now my friend thinks it was the man who approached his CI. Whoever did this is covering his tracks…or having someone cover them for him."

Laura felt sick. "So we'll never know."

"It could have been Meier himself who threw that firebomb or it could have been the guy who turned up dead a day later. That guy fit the general description the CI gave my friend."

"I don't guess the investigators got anywhere on the rocket fuel?"

"No. A few gallons missing from a refinery or a tanker or the spaceport would never have been noticed. My friend says that with a little know-how and the proper ingredients, they could have made it themselves. It might not have been fuel-worthy but it would have gotten the job done."

Laura sighed. Once again Zarek had come out looking like the picture of innocence as he'd done six years earlier when he and his men had killed the owner of a small airport and hijacked John and his ship.

Edgar stood. "I won't bother you any longer. I just thought you'd want to know. You'll probably get a report from Agent Darren's office at some point in the future, but I'm betting it will be heavily redacted. All we can hope for is that one day Tom Zarek trips himself up and pays for his crimes…all of them."

"I doubt that will happen in this world," Laura murmured. "Men like Zarek surround themselves with others who are willing to take the fall for him." She stood and came around her desk. "Thank you…for your information and for everything you do. Braedon's birthday is in three weeks on a Friday. I'm having a party for him on Saturday afternoon. I'd like for you to arrange your schedule so you could be there. You've been wonderful with my son. I know he can be a handful sometimes and you don't know how much I appreciate the care and patience you've shown him. He's grown very fond of you." She smiled. "And one day soon I'm sure he'll learn to say _Edgar_ instead of _Egger_."

The blue-gray eyes met hers momentarily and he smiled. "If my wife and I could have had a son, I'd want him to be like Brae. You and Major Gallagher are very lucky. He's a fine little boy. I'll put myself on the security detail for his party. I wouldn't want to miss it."

As Edgar exited the office, Billy came to the door. "I've got a Paulla Schaffer holding for you. She's called several times this morning. She won't say what it's about but she says it's really important."

"I don't know anyone by that name. Tell her I need to know the nature of her call."

Billy was back in less than a minute. "She wants to know how to get in touch with Kara. It concerns Dreilide Thrace."

"Which line?"

"She's holding on four."

With a sense of foreboding, Laura picked up her phone. "This is Laura Roslin."

There was a moment of silence followed by a choked sob and then a tremulous female voice said, "I'm sorry for bothering you, but can you tell me how to get in touch with Kara?"

"What's wrong?" Laura asked gently.

"Dreilide Thrace died early this morning." There was another choked sob.

"I'm so sorry," Laura murmured. "Might I ask how?"

Paulla managed to get herself under control. "For the last year he's been a lot worse than he let Kara know. He went into the hospital with pneumonia four days ago. The doctor said his lungs were so compromised by the emphysema that…that…" she sobbed again. "He's beat it so many times before, but this time…"

Laura waited for the sobs to subside again and said, "Kara is with the fleet over Nereid, but I'll get word to her on the next transport. I doubt she'll be able to come home, but I'll ask. What are the arrangements?"

"He didn't want a funeral service or even a memorial. He made me promise. He's to be cremated. He said to let Kara decide how to dispose of his ashes. He left everything to her. His music. All the copyrights. Everything. He made a will. I have his attorney's name and number."

"You were his friend?" Laura asked gently.

"Yes. Will you tell Kara?"

"Of course I will."

"Last night before he slipped into a coma his last words were about her. He said, "Tell Kara I've always loved her."

Tears came to Laura's eyes. She was on the verge of falling apart again as she'd done that morning at breakfast. She took a deep breath. "How can I get in touch with you?"

Paulla gave her a number that Laura jotted on her notepad. After they hung up she stood and walked to the big bay window. The sun was again shining brightly, the flags waving gently. Death came and life went on. They had lost an artist, a creator of music, a bearer of light amidst the cruelty and hatred that seemed to currently engulf much of Caprica. Dreilide was free of that now. His soul was with the gods and his gift of music belonged to the ages.

With a weary sigh Laura returned to her desk, picked up the phone and asked her secretary to get Colonel Jackson Spencer for her. When she finally reached him, she asked him when the supply ship that was being loaded would leave for the fleet over Nereid. He told her it was scheduled to leave in the morning. She asked him to send a courier to pick up a special pouch that afternoon.

Then she made a call to Elosha and left a message asking her to join them for dinner that evening. After everything that had happened during the last two days, she needed to look at Elosha's calm, spiritual face and hear her comforting words.

Finally she turned her attention to writing a letter…not to Kara. That would come later in the form of a condolence. Today she was writing to John. He was Kara's father. He could never make it up to Dreilide for the wrong he'd done him twenty years earlier, but John should shoulder the burden of telling Kara in his own words and in his own way that she had lost her other father.

No, Kara shouldn't get the news in cold, black ink on a cold, white page. It should come from the man whose love for her mother had given Kara life and who could be there to wrap his arms around her in comfort and in love.

…

"I have a communicator," Narcho said, "but I'm afraid if we use it to contact the _Galactica_, those Raiders will hone in on the signal. Right now I'm not sure they're even aware of us since we don't have ships or electronics. I'm not even sure they can tell us from the sheep and cows."

They were sitting at the table in Emmalyn's. Beck and Lida had been joined by Perry, Celia, Daniel and a more suitably-attired Carla. Dessa was making tea for everyone.

"Why didn't you mention that communicator earlier?" Kara asked.

"I forgot about it. We've never used it. Your father said it was only for an emergency."

"Duh, Narch, what do you call me crashing Sadie? A fun day in the park?"

Perry said, "It might be a good thing that he did forget about it. If he's right, it could bring those ships swooping in on us."

"We've got two Cylons sitting here," Kara said. "Let's ask them."

"I don't know anything about the Raiders," Lida said.

"Me, either," Carla echoed. "There were just there on the baseships…for our protection. We don't even know where those ships beyond the orchard came from."

Kara carefully avoided looking at Narcho. He was the only one besides Markham who knew the answer to that. _From the basestar that I nuked last night._

"Maybe they're from the city," Daniel said. "Cavil sent his centurions. Why wouldn't he send his Raiders?"

Always aware of protecting Daniel's true identity, Kara asked him, "While you were their prisoner, did you ever hear them talking about the Raiders? We've already heard they're semi-intelligent…not as smart as the centurions with their inhibitors removed, but sort of like dogs."

Daniel hesitated and then said, "There was a human woman I met there. Her name was Lucy. She knew something about them. I think she'd talked to…"

"Lucy _Cain_?" Carla asked.

"Yes, Lucy Cain."

"She was one of our creators," Lida said. "Not mine, but the Sevens and Eights."

"She helped me escape," Daniel said sadly. "Cavil's centurions killed her."

"Back to the topic at hand," Kara said. "Daniel, do you know anything that might help us with the Raiders?"

"There was a man named Ben, another creator. He brought a mechanical dog with him from Caprica. He called it Evolution-One. It was a prototype that Graystone Industries had started working on. A mechanical guard dog. I think the ideas they had used in creating the dog were later used in the Raiders."

"I never saw a mechanical dog," Lida said.

"That's because we were activated on a baseship," Carla said in a scornful tone. "We were never at their lab."

Daniel said, "You wouldn't have seen it even if you'd been at the lab. Lucy told me there was only one mechanical dog and not long after the Graystones developed a prototype of Number One, he killed it."

"How do you kill a _mechanical dog_?" Narcho asked.

"Zoe Graystone told Lucy that the One smashed it with a sledgehammer because Drew had programmed it to bark at him and nip at his heels. Ben and Drew had a sense of humor and they never liked the Ones."

"And the Graystones didn't do anything about the One destroying the dog?" Kara asked in surprise.

Daniel sighed. "I wasn't around then, but according to Zoe, Amanda Graystone had created a composite image of hers and her husband's fathers. The Ones were modeled in that image. The Graystones were very indulgent of his aberrant behaviors…more like parents with a naughty child. They were never able to see what the rest of the creators saw. They eventually passed away and their first-born creatures immediately set about solidifying their power. Several years later they staged their coup and killed their brother Sevens and the remaining creators."

"Back to the mechanical dog," Kara said. "How does that relate to the Raiders?"

"Ben and Drew were always inventing things. After the One smashed their dog, they turned their attention to another idea Ben had…the Raider. The originals were much smaller. They were actually drones. Then Ben, or maybe it was Drew, got bored with sitting at a console flying them around so they loaded software that made them independent of human control. Then the First One had the idea of making them larger and using them for protecting the baseships and the planet. Ben might not have liked the One, but he agreed that their baseships needed protection. The next logical step was arming them with guns and missiles."

Narcho said, "So that's why these Raiders don't need pilots whereas the ones from the First War had the old centurion pilots, three of them if I remember correctly."

"That's right."

"This is very interesting history," Kara said, "but how does it help us with the situation we're in right now? We need to get word to the _G_ and we can't use the communicator to tell them not to send a Raptor to the valley unless they send a Viper escort. So what are our other options?"

Daniel said, "I once heard Lucy arguing with Ben about the Raiders. She was very opposed to making them larger and turning them loose to fly around uncontrolled. Ben told her that they had a built-in failsafe. He said they'd put the telencehpalic inhibitors in the centurions and they'd taken care of it in the Raiders, too. Only it wasn't a metal disk because the Raiders are biomechanical. There are two ways to render a Raider docile. One is to lobotomize them, actually destroy part of their brain. But that's permanent. There's another way that isn't permanent. Drew called it a _kill switch_ but he never said exactly what it was. I don't even know if it still applies since Ben and the others have been dead for years and the Ones had access to all their work. They might have deleted the kill switches."

"_Kill switch_," Narcho said. "That's usually a big red button you hit on a machine to stop it in its tracks. It's called an uncontrolled shutdown, not to be used except in a real emergency." He glanced at Kara. "I worked at a recycle plant in the summers during high school. There were kill switches in a couple of places that would shut down every piece of equipment in the whole plant. I never saw it used, but my uncle told me that a man once fell into the big hopper that was grinding up scrap aluminum. Somebody got to a kill switch in time to save his life."

"Sadie doesn't have any big red buttons," Kara said. "Not even before Dr. Rafferty and Kevin started working on her. The only thing she's got is a red eye…just like the centurions."

"It wouldn't be a button on the Raiders," Daniel said. "Lucy and I talked about it. It had to be something in their software that would be activated by some sort of signal from a baseship or the planet, something that would shut down their instinct to kill."

"Activated how?" Narcho asked.

Daniel shrugged and shook his head. "Probably some type of wireless transmission, a code of some sort, but I have no idea what."

"Who would know?" Carla asked.

Perry said, "Anyone who knows the answer to that question is probably dead. Do you not agree, Daniel?"

Sadly Daniel nodded. "I agree."

They all sat silently for a while sipping tea. Finally Kara said. "Natalie said that the creators were always aware of what had happened in the Colonies during the First War. They didn't want it to happen here. They made those telencephalic inhibitors to keep the centurions under control. It makes sense that they would have had some way to control the Raiders. I doubt even Cavil would be stupid enough to erase it. Some sort of wireless transmission is at the top of my list for the best way."

"The million-cubit question is exactly what you would need to transmit," Perry said.

Narcho said. "I wonder if any of the other Cylons here in the valley would know."

"They don't know any more than we do," Carla said. "And we can't give the Raiders any orders without being on the baseship and going through the datastream as a collective. I think the Hybrid is actually the one who translates the orders for the Raiders from our thoughts to the machine code that they understand."

"But even without your orders, they still have certain hard-coded protocols they follow. Right?" Kara asked.

"Yes. That's right," Carla answered.

"We know one of those protocols is self-preservation. That day on the plateau, LG49 told my dad that when attacked, self-preservation is first and destroying ships is second."

"Unless they've been specifically ordered by the collective to sacrifice themselves for one reason or another," Carla added.

A memory surfaced for Kara…of how on that day over the plateau, the Raider she was fighting had suddenly broken away and begun a dizzying dive toward the planet. She had followed, holding her breath as the ship had slowed down and done a low flyover of the lab and the prison. Instead of heading back up, though, or trying to get away, it had let her destroy it. It had followed orders. And when it had downloaded on the basestar with the configuration of the buildings in its memory, it had been armed by centurions with two penetrating bombs and it had come back. It had come back and destroyed the prison.

"Are you listening, Kara?" Narcho asked.

"Sure."

"We're frakked," he said glumly. "Totally frakked."

Kara's thoughts were swirling. _Think, Kara, think. Get outside the frakking box. Have you exhausted every single resource?_

She stood. "I'm going for a walk."

"Giving up so soon?" Narcho asked.

"You know me better than that. I just need some fresh air. I think better on my feet."

"Would you like some company?" Daniel asked.

"I just need a few minutes by myself. I got you into this mess. I hope I can get you out."

She left the dwelling and walked back to the wooden platform. She was going to go up and ask Markham for his thoughts on a _kill switch_ for the Raiders when she suddenly had another idea. She turned and walked back to the clearing and up the bank to Sadie where she sat on a nearby rock.

"Okay, LG49, I'm alone. You can come out now. We need to talk."

…

The meeting that night on the _Galactica_ did not go as well as everyone had hoped. With only a few hours of sleep, no one was very sharp. General Vargas was understandably anxious to get to the planet's surface and occupy the city. Everyone had different ideas about how that should be accomplished. Seeing that fatigue was making tempers short and hampering clear thinking, Bill told everyone to get a good night's sleep and that they would reconvene the next day after lunch. He needed the morning to get another report ready to go to Caprica since a supply ship was due early and would leave to go back to Caprica by noon. It would also give the high-res camera operators who were searching the planet's surface for the Raiders a chance to cover more territory. They were starting with all the settlements and working their way outward.

John and Lee stayed behind and Bill motioned for them to follow him to his quarters. He offered them each drinks and each accepted.

"I know what you're going to ask," he said. "You want to take a ship to the surface and look for Kara. I'm not denying your request. I'd just like for both of you to wait until the supply ship docks tomorrow morning and we make sure none of those Raiders are going to suddenly appear and launch an attack."

John sipped his drink. He wanted to leave at first light. But he did have another suggestion which Bill readily agreed to. "I want to take the Heavy Raider. If those Raiders are scattered around the surface waiting for Colonial ships, then they should ignore one of their own."

"Good idea," Bill said. "Go see Chief Tryol and have his men to prep that ship for you."

"I'd like to go, too," Lee said. "John needs a co-pilot."

Bill nodded. He was either too tired to argue or he knew how much it meant to his son.

"I have one other suggestion," John said. "This doesn't concern us going to the planet tomorrow. It concerns the city. I think Hunter should be involved in the planning. He knows the territory to the west of the city better than anyone. If we do have to mount an attack…and I hope we don't…we're going to need his help."

Bill nodded wearily. "Good idea."

"Did you sleep this afternoon?" John asked the admiral.

"No."

"How much longer do you think you can stay on your feet…sir?"

Bill managed a half smile. "Until you two finish your drinks."

Both Lee and John finished in one swallow.

"Goodnight, Dad," Lee said. "Please get some rest."

"Check with me before you leave in the morning to make sure nothing's changed," Bill said.

John and Lee walked down to the flight deck. Chief Tyrol was off duty, but they talked to the night supervisor and were assured the Heavy Raider would be fueled and ready to go in the morning.

On the way back up to their quarters, Lee said, "You aren't in favor of Vargas' plan to take the city."

"No. I think we should try diplomacy first. Natalie said she'd lead a team. The Simon who went with us to the prison said he'd go. Jade will go and Leoben told Natalie that he would go even though he has no memory of their homeworld. He told her he owed Laura. I think Sonja might go, too."

"What about D'Anna?"

"Natalie didn't mention her and I didn't ask. I'd rather she not go. The others are more predictable. She's a wild card."

"She is the mother of the peacemaker," Lee said.

"Physically but not spiritually. Besides, I don't know how much weight the idea of the peacemaker will carry with the Cavil in the city. He thinks their whole breeding program is a big joke. The less said about Sean, the better."

"Would you consider taking someone from the res ship?" Lee asked.

John smiled. "Nina?"

"No, not her. Maybe Jack or Dean. They're both Ones. It might lend more credibility to the team with the One in the city."

"Let's talk to Natalie when we get back from Nereid tomorrow."

"What if we can't…can't find Kara," Lee said.

John squeezed his friend's shoulder. "Now who needs to have a little faith?"

…

Kara had barely finished speaking when she heard the clanking of the centurion's feet. They were clearly not built for stealth, but who needed stealth when they could run as fast as a truck and were loaded with 40-caliber bullets that could penetrate armor. Of course she hoped Markham had removed this one's bullets before he'd started working on him.

"Come sit by me," she said and was glad when the centurion obeyed. "Do you know who I am?"

He nodded.

"Why are you out here in the woods? Use your pointed finger and write your answer in the dirt."

To show him what she meant, she cleared away some pine needles and made an _X_."

He carefully wrote. _Afraid._

"What are _you_ afraid of? I didn't know centurions were afraid of anything." Her question stumped the robot so she began to guess. "Markham?" The head moved side to side. "The other people?" Another negative. "The cat?" No. "Where Markham lives?"

The centurion hesitated. "The ship can't hurt you and it can't go anywhere," Kara said. "It's been buried for years."

The centurion wrote. _Inside prison. Crushed._

"You're afraid of being inside because you were in the prison when that bomb exploded and you got crushed. Markham's ship is dark and the hallways are small. You're afraid it's going to collapse on you and crush you?"

The centurion nodded.

"Damn, this is a first. Between half your brain getting zapped in the forest and the other half being crushed in the prison, you're having some kind of…of post stress thing."

He wrote again. _No download. Not supposed to be alive._

"No, you don't download. Maybe your creators did that on purpose since you all tend to die violently. Okay, look, I'm not going to ask you to go inside, but if Markham brings the voice apparatus out here, will you let him…put it on you. I'll help him. We really need you to be able to talk to you."

He nodded.

"That's great. That's wonderful." She jumped up and kissed the top of the shiny silver head. "Wait right here. Don't go anywhere. I'll be right back."

When she finished telling Markham about the experience, he seemed puzzled. "They're not like the skinjobs. They don't have nerves. They don't feel pain. I simply don't understand the problem."

"It's not the pain he remembers. It's being killed twice. He's _afraid_. He even wrote the word in the dirt."

Markham gave her a skeptical look. "Why is it so important you talk to him right now?"

"Daniel said the Raiders have some kind of software kill switch installed. I think the only way to activate it would be for a centurion to send a wireless signal since the Raiders can't plug in on a basestar."

"Kill switch?" Markham asked, again with skepticism in his voice.

Kara struggled to control her temper. "I don't need to explain a software kill switch to _you_, do I?"

"Calm down," Markham said. "I know you're stressed out over crashing your ship and those nearby Raiders, but right now they're just sitting there doing nothing."

"Sooner or later someone is going to come looking for me," Kara said almost desperately. "It could be tomorrow or the next day or it could be in an hour. The minute a Raptor gets within short-range scanning distance of those Raiders, I'm afraid all hell will break loose over this valley. These are my _friends_. I owe them."

"Then help me get my tools and that voice synthesizer and let's go do a little surgery on LG49."

"Thanks," Kara said contritely. As they walked down the path carrying everything in two large bags, she said, "Dessa and Narcho are married."

"Good for them. I'm glad."

"I hate to intrude on you tonight, but they're still on their honeymoon. I guess I'm asking if it's okay if I spend the night in the same room where Jade and Natalie and I bunked a couple of months ago?"

"You don't think you'll get rescued today?"

"In case I don't…"

"Sure," Markham said. "How's Lee?"

"He's okay."

"You don't sound too enthusiastic."

"We've hit a bumpy spot. That's all. You know how it is. It happens to every couple."

"You're talking to the wrong person, Kara. I don't know anything about relationships."

"Lee and I will work it out. We always have."

They reached LG49 and Markham surveyed the area. "This would be so much easier with him on my work table. He'll have to lie down."

The big head turned toward Kara. "It's okay. It won't hurt. I'll be right here. Then you'll have a voice again."

…

John and Lee were in their flight suits and were pacing around the flight deck the following morning. The supply ship from the Colonies had docked half an hour earlier with no appearances by any Raiders.

"What's the frakking holdup?" John asked impatiently.

"Chief hasn't gotten clearance to tow the Heavy Raider to the elevator. I just asked him. It's not the supply ship. Something else is going on."

Another five minutes of pacing and Lee saw an ensign approach Chief and Chief in turn point them out to the ensign.

The ensign had two letters for John. "These came in a special pouch on the supply ship this morning, sir," he explained. "Admiral Adama sent them."

John thanked him and looked at the letters. Both had Laura's handwriting on the outside. Both were marked _Personal_. One had the word _Urgent_ underlined twice.

John stood looking at the letter unable to move.

"What's wrong?" Lee asked.

"It's from Laura. Marked _Urgent_." The implication hit him and for a moment he couldn't get his breath. He couldn't believe that he might have lost Kara and now his infant son. "I'm afraid it's about Sean."

"Only one way to find out. Open it."

John put the other letter into the inside pocket of his flight suit and then tore the envelope. The letter was short. The news bad, but not as bad as he'd feared. He stood for a moment with his head bowed and said a silent prayer for the soul of a man he'd wronged many years earlier, a man who had not only forgiven him, but who had written a song for him when everyone thought he had died during the destruction of a Cylon basestar over Caprica.

"Sean?" Lee asked.

John shook his head. "Dreilide Thrace."

The two men stood for a moment, neither speaking, each lost in memories of Kara and her other father.

"Kara is going to take this hard," John finally said.

Lee nodded. He was still thinking about the last time they'd gone to see Dreilide right before they'd left Caprica months earlier. Lee had noticed the ashen color of his face, the fact that he kept using the oxygen mask to breathe. During the entire visit Kara had acted like nothing was different…until they got up to leave. Then she'd leaned down and kissed Dreilide's cheek and told him she loved him. Lee had never seen her do that before. In the car afterward he'd waited for her to say something. She never had. Maybe she'd known.

Chief called to them and pointed to the Heavy Raider. Without a word John and Lee boarded the ship. Twenty minutes later they had launched. John wasted no time in putting in the jump coordinates for the valley. Ten minutes after that they were on the ground and had exited the ship.

Lee was the first one to see Sadie propped between the two trees. "Oh, gods," he called and began to run. Together he and John scrambled up the hill. The hatch was hanging open. Lee looked inside. "It's a mess but she's not in there."

They were immediately aware of the clanking of a centurion and looked down the hill.

The centurion said, "Greetings, John."

"LG49. Is that you?"

"It is I."

"Where's Kara?" Lee asked.

"She spent the night with Leonard Markham."

"He doesn't mean that like it sounds," John said.

Lee nodded, glad that the centurion hadn't said she'd spent the night with Narcho. "Is she all right?"

"I saw no injuries on her, but she told me and Markham that she was badly bruised on her left side."

"Let's go then," John said. "I want to see her."

"I will accompany you to the top of the path, but I cannot enter Markham's dwelling. Kara will explain the reason."

When they got to the top of the path, they found Kara sitting on the wooden steps rubbing the big orange cat. She glanced around at the sound of the centurion's footsteps and saw Lee and her father. They all reached the bottom of the steps at the same time.

"Don't hug too hard," she said. "I'm bruised."

John took her face between his hands. "How in the hell did you get Sadie between two trees like that?"

She grinned. "It was easier than it looks. It has to do with landing in the dark." She reached out and took Lee's hand. "I was waiting to see some heavier smoke from Dessa's chimney before I bothered them. I guess Narch and his bride must be sleeping in this morning."

"They're married?" Lee said in surprise.

"Yep. I'll flip you for who gets to tell Hunter and Emmalyn."

"I almost asked Hunter to come along this morning," John said, "but we weren't sure what we were going to find."

"It's a good thing you brought the Heavy Raider. Whose idea was that?"

Lee said, "Your dad's. Why?"

"We'll talk over breakfast," she said and glanced toward Dessa's dwelling again.

"Let's take a short walk," John said. He turned to Lee. "You mind letting me talk to Kara for a minute in private?"

"No, I'll go see Markham."

"What?" Kara asked.

John took her arm and steered her toward the path that led to the cemetery. "I got some news from home this morning."

"What?"

"Let's walk."

They climbed the hill to the top. A cold early morning breeze was blowing. Kara pulled the wool shawl that Dessa had loaned her closer around her shoulders. She had already figured out that the news was bad.

"Sean?"

John was suddenly overcome with emotion. He struggled for a minute but managed to shake his head. "Dreilide."

"When?"

"Two days ago. Pneumonia."

"Like Yolanda," she murmured and shivered.

He gently put his arm around her shoulders and kissed the side of her head. "I'm sorry, baby."

"After you…disappeared…when everybody thought you were dead, I asked him to write a song for you. He told me that you'd come to see him while I was on the _G_ over a year ago. You didn't want me to know about the visit, but he thought you were dead so he told me."

"I'd just become Bill's backup pilot for the mission. That's when I wrote the letters to Laura and you and Lee. But I realized I'd left out an important one. I tried to write him a letter and then decided I should be man enough to apologize in person, so I went to see him. Your mother was his wife. Sometimes forgiveness is important. I wanted his. He told me he understood. Despite what I did, he never let it affect his feelings for you. Laura's letter said Paulla was with him in the hospital. His last words were about you. He said to tell you he'd always loved you."

Kara walked away from her father and looked out over the graves. "I'd like to be alone for a few minutes. Please."

John turned wearily around and walked back down the path. She'd shut him out of her grief. Maybe that was part of his penance. Lee and Markham were waiting at the bottom of the steps. John and Markham shook hands.

"Is she all right?" Lee asked.

"Give her five minutes then go to her. She didn't want to cry in front of me. I know she loved him. For eight years he was the only father she knew."

"It looks like Narcho and Dessa are up," Markham said as heavier smoke began coming from their chimney. "We've got a lot of news."

"You know where we'll be," John said to Lee.

Lee waited until Markham and John were almost to Dessa's before he started up the path. He found Kara sitting on the ground near a round stone. There were some dried flowers propped against the marker.

"Esmari's grandmother Seléne. She died after Hunter and I left. Dessa puts the flowers here."

Lee sat beside her. He'd seen Kara react to strong grief this way before when John had taken them back to the refugee camp. It was like the pain had to percolate through a lot of layers before she let herself feel it.

He took her hand. "I'm so sorry. You've had to deal with too much lately."

She still hadn't looked at him. "Dreilide thought he was fooling me. He thought I didn't know how sick he was. I knew when I left Caprica last summer that I'd never see him again…not in this world. I think he knew it, too."

The memory of his mother's death was suddenly strong in Lee's mind. He struggled with his own emotions. His mother lay under the dirt of a pristine and well-kept cemetery on Caprica. This windswept hill was a rougher place, but he actually felt closer here to the memory of a woman he'd sometimes hated and now pitied.

Kara pointed into the distance. "If you take off from this hill and fly about eight miles in a straight line past that distant apple orchard you'll find a dozen Raiders hiding in the woods."

"Two hundred of them have scattered themselves around the planet. Jade and Natalie think they've divided into smaller groups and are hiding near the settlements."

"If you'd come in a Raptor, we'd have all been in trouble. They're waiting for something to attack."

"We met last night and tried to decide what to do about the city. We got no resolution. Those Raiders have really complicated everything."

"They have a kill switch…something in their software. The problem is that none of us knows what it is. Markham and I worked on LG49 yesterday until he got the voice synthesizer installed. I was hoping he knew. No luck. All he kept telling us was that we had to go back to the source…whatever the hell that means."

"It probably means their creators."

"Ben Corso and Drew Tanner. Daniel told us. But they're dead. Nothing but nummies full of bullet holes." She sat for a while and then said, "I should have been there for Dreilide. At least he didn't die alone. Ms. Soup and Sermons was with him. He should have married her. She took care of him for the last couple of years."

"He left everything to you," Lee said gently. "That's what Laura told John in the letter."

"I never asked him for anything…" she found she couldn't go on.

"I know," Lee said.

"How are things with you and Nina?"

"I haven't seen her since two days ago at lunch. You did destroy that basestar, didn't you?"

"Three nukes worth…but not before it launched most of its Raiders. I couldn't see it. It was so frakking dark out there in the back-end of nowhere. I had to fly closer than I'd planned."

Lee rubbed her hand. "You could have been killed."

"The only danger to me was me. I made a couple of _really_ stupid mistakes."

"You're alive, Kara," Lee said with emotion clear in his voice. "That's all that matters right now."

"Yeah, I'm alive and Dreilide's dead." She let go of his hand and pulled the shawl more tightly around her.

"Please don't shut me out, Kara. I love you."

Suddenly she choked. "I wanted him to play at our wedding. I wanted to put a grandchild in his arms. I wanted…" The tears she had been holding back began to roll down her cheeks. She angrily brushed them away. "He got such a rotten deal from my mom. Maybe she loved him in the beginning…when they were both eighteen…but she never understood him. She was all about rules and orders and going to work every day no matter what. She didn't understand that his talent didn't work that way. I never saw how wrong they were for each other until I was here in the valley last spring and met Daniel. I wanted them to meet. Now…that'll never happen."

Lee slid close to her and put his arm around her being careful not to squeeze her too tightly on her bruised left side.

"A lot of things we want to happen will never happen. We accept it and move on. You're tough, Kara. You're going to make it. _We're_ going to make it. Now let's go talk about the Raiders. If we don't solve that issue, a lot more of us are going to die."

He stood and using her right hand pulled her to her feet. Their eyes met and he searched hers for a sign she'd forgiven the incident with Nina. He wondered what she was thinking.

Kara glanced as his mouth. _Nina kissed him right there. She and Lida both._

She lifted her eyes to his. "There's a copy of Lida here in the valley. She's with Beck. She's really possessive of him. She didn't waste any time telling me he was hers and to back off."

Lee dropped his eyes in defeat. Now was clearly not the time for a romantic reunion with Kara…not while her mind was on Lida…and Nina.

Still holding his hand she started down the path. "Doesn't the Cylon scripture say there's a time to mourn and a time to do all sorts of other things?"

"You're asking the wrong person about Cylon scripture. You should ask your father."

"What was it like, Lee, being with Lida...now that I've seen how beautiful she is?"

"Please don't pick a fight with me because you're hurting and want to take it out on someone. We've done this before. It didn't solve anything then and it won't solve anything now."

"You mean _I've_ done it before."

"We've got more important things to concentrate on so please let the Nina and Lida thing go for now."

"You're right. If we don't find out what the kill switch is, we're going to have to fight every single one of those Raiders. Do you know what even a dozen could do to this valley…or the city or the settlements?"

They reached the bottom of the hill and started toward Dessa's dwelling. She was just putting breakfast on the table for Narcho and Markham. John had a cup of tea in front of him and a piece of bread smeared with honey.

Narcho looked at her when she came in and said, "I'm sorry about Mr. Thrace."

Kara shrugged. "Nobody lives forever. It could have been me in Sadie night before last."

"How did that happen?" John asked.

"It'll be in my report. You can read about my evening of frak-ups."

Lee glanced at John. He didn't look surprised. Kara was as stressed right now as he'd ever seen her. There was no telling where her mood might go. John adroitly shifted the subject.

"I just explained to Dessa that Lee and I have already eaten breakfast, but I'm a sucker for her bread."

"Your father is going to take LG49 to the lab at the prison," Markham said. "He wants me to go along. He thinks I can help Lucy."

"I think that's a great idea," Lee said. "I know a team is being assembled on Caprica right now to help out, but they aren't here yet. Maybe between you and Lucy, you might find the kill switch."

"Has anybody thought about asking Daniel to go?" Kara asked. "He knows Lucy better than anybody."

"I'm not sure Daniel would want to go," Markham said. "This valley is his home."

"We'll bring him back," John said. "Just like we'll bring you back…anytime you want to come."

"Go ask Daniel," Narcho said to Kara. "If anybody stands a chance of getting him to go, it's you."

Glad to get away from everyone, Kara got up and went to the door. "Don't be disappointed if he says _no_. I'm fresh out of miracles right now."

Daniel was alone. When he opened the door she could see that he had been sitting at the table sipping tea.

"Join me?"

"Sure."

He took the kettle and poured a cup. Something about the angle of the firelight as he stooped made her think of Dreilide. She choked back tears, but he could tell something was wrong as soon as he turned around. He handed her the cup of tea and waited for her to talk.

"You remember I played a song for you that my other father had written?"

"Yes."

"He died two days ago."

"Oh, Kara. I'm so sorry."

"But that's not why I'm here. We need you to go to the lab with us for a couple of days. Lucy is there in the body of a Three. I'm sure Perry and Celia will watch this place for you."

Daniel walked to the fireplace and turned. She could sense his reluctance. "I don't know."

"Look, I know this valley has become your…security blanket, but if we can't figure out how to disable those Raiders, then we'll have to fight them…here…right above you."

"The memories of…being at the lab with Lucy…"

"It's not the same place. They built a new lab on a high plateau. It doesn't look like the one at Settlement Alpha…not that I've been to the settlement, but I've seen the recon photos. Please, Daniel. Please. Sometimes we have to…to step outside our comfort zone. We have to…to…" she struggled for words that might convince him, but kept seeing the image of Dreilide, barefoot in jeans and one of his old flannel shirts, the look on his face the day she'd first seen him again.

"All right. I'll go."

"You'll do it?" She asked in surprise.

"I'll do it. I owe all of you more than I can repay."

An hour later they lifted off from the clearing with John and Lee at the controls of the Heavy Raider. They were barely above the tree line when they jumped. John set the ship down outside the prison wall and they disembarked. Several hundred centurions were busily clearing the debris of the prison with the help of a team of Marines. The dust of their work drifted toward the far side of the plateau on the morning breeze. They'd made a lot of progress since the battle.

"Let's go to the lab," John said. "I'd like to get Lucy's thoughts as quickly as possible."

"I will wait outside," LG49 said. "I cannot help you determine what the kill switch is."

Daniel and Markham both shouldered woven bags that held clothes and a few personal belongings. Kara was once again in her flight suit. She caught up with her father and Lee.

"I think we should go inside," she said to John, "and tell Lucy why we're here and then give her and Daniel a few minutes alone."

They found the Three containing Lucy's memories in a large room down the hall from the resurrection chamber where she had set up shop. She had a centurion helper who was doing some electrical work. John called her name so as not to startle her. When she turned, though, she only had eyes for Daniel.

While Lucy and Daniel talked, John showed the rest of them around the lab from the download chamber to the vault where several centurions were guarding the computers and servers.

It was nearly noon and Kara's stomach was growling when the group again assembled. The resurrection nurses, the Six and the Eight, had tasked themselves with preparing a meal from the supplies provided by the _Galactica_. Everything came from cans, but Kara was so hungry that she didn't care. John insisted the nurses eat with them and noticed that the Six placed herself beside Markham. The Eight would have sat beside Lee but Kara told her to move.

What could have been a moment of tension passed as the gentle Eight moved down one chair and let Kara take hers. Markham talked about leaving Natalie's cat in the care of Dessa and Narcho.

The conversation finally turned to the problem of the Raiders and John gave them a brief history of their disappearance over the surface of the planet. He noted that none had come to the plateau so they must have known the plateau was now under the control of the Colonials. Kara noticed that neither John nor Lee mentioned the nuked basestar. Then Kara told them about the dozen Raiders hiding near the valley. Markham explained about their theory of a software kill switch.

"So to make a long story short," John finished. "We're trying to find out what Ben and Drew would have chosen to control the Raiders without lobotomizing them. We hope Lucy has the answer since no one else does."

Lucy said, "I was still very young when Ben and Drew were working on the Raiders."

"Any help you can give us," Lee said. "Anything you can remember."

Lucy smiled. "If the memory wasn't in Lucy's avatar, then I don't have it."

"I always thought Drew was especially attentive to you," Daniel said. "The first time I experienced a negative emotion was when I realized I was jealous of him."

"Drew was in his fifties by then. I was barely into my twenties."

The conversation came to a halt as no one had anything to say for a minute. Finally Kara asked, "How long do you think it will take us to search all those computers?"

"Longer than we've got," Lee said.

Suddenly Lucy brightened, "Drew kept a small model of an early Raider at the original lab in what is now Settlement Alpha. It was actually a music player. He had rigged the eye slot to take small recording disks. I used to go into the lab when I was just a girl and listen to them. He had a favorite song. He told me once that the song was very special. He said the centurions and the Raiders found it _soothing_. Something happened to the disk. Drew always thought Cavil took it. They didn't like each other. After Daniel and Amanda Graystone died, there was no one to keep Cavil under control."

"I don't suppose you remember the name of the song, do you?" Markham asked.

"_Memories_? No that's not right. _I Count the Moments? _No. _'Til You're with Me? _No, that's not it either."

"Do you remember it, Daniel?" Kara asked.

"We hadn't created the Sevens and Eights yet," Lucy answered.

"Close your eyes," Lee said to her, "and walk into that lab. The song is playing. Listen to it. Listen to the words. Drew is singing them."

"The song didn't have any words."

"Then remember the melody."

Lucy closed her eyes. A moment later she began to hum. Kara was surprised at how clearly she hummed the notes. Lucy, in D'Anna's body, would have a good singing voice. Dreilide would have liked her as he would have liked Daniel.

"I don't believe it," John said. "The name of the song is _Twilight Time_. It was popular when I was a little boy. That would have been about the time that the Graystones came to Nereid."

"Oh, great," Kara said. "How are we going to get our hands on a song that was popular when you were a kid?"

"Maybe we can take it out of the juke box on the _Galactica_. How's this for ironic? Late one night a week or so ago, Natalie and I danced to it. She told me she'd always liked it. It never dawned on me to ask her why? She heard it in the lab."

Lee lifted his can of soda. "Here's to _Twilight Time_. Let's hope we've got ourselves a kill switch."

TBC…


	79. Blessed are the Peacemakers

Chapter 79

Blessed are the Peacemakers

_Libran_

_Year 4, Day 33_

_Here are Odin's words in their entirety from his two-page summary of the monk's letter:_

_This chronology is based on extensive study of the scriptures of the Thirteenth Tribe and some documents I found in the archives both here in our monastery and in the one on Libran: _

_More than fifteen hundred years passed after the exodus of the tribes from Kobol until our monk wrote his letter. Since that time an additional thousand years have passed. _

_On Eden the first thousand years was an age of great prosperity for the Thirteenth Tribe. _

_Near the middle of the second millennia, several things happened which apparently spelled the beginning of the end for them. 1) A blight affected their wheat crop caused possibly by the mutation of a man-made virus intended to increase yield-per-acre but which was also exacerbated by drought. This was followed in short order by the mysterious deaths of most of the planet's honeybee population that pollinated all crops. Food production dropped drastically._

_2) The western part of the main continent which was mostly agricultural blamed both disasters on scientific experiments conducted in the east. Denials were quickly made but not believed and outrage followed in the west. _

_3) The western provinces seceded from the provincial union and raised an army. They created a series of border crossings in an attempt to stop anything else from affecting their crops. Air traffic between east and west ceased after several ships were destroyed in the air with much loss of life. _

_4) Around the same time a religious leader who claimed to be God's messenger began to stir the people of the west to march on Azurra which was not only the capital of the provinces but considered to be a holy city. By then the poorer people in the west were starving as the drought continued and there were other crop failures. Food supplies became dangerously low. The religious leader exhorted his followers by telling them that there were great stockpiles of food in the east which was apparently not true. The western army crossed the border six years after the first crop failure and marched on Azurra._

_5) At this point and after much secret planning, the last ship to leave Eden for the Colonies got away. It carried a number of the wealthy all of whom took with them fortunes in gold and gems much of it looted from the banks and other financial institutions they controlled. This group included a few priests who had allegedly retrieved the Kobol Stone from a cave due west of the city and who took it to Gemenon for safekeeping where I believe it still resides to this day in a secret vault somewhere on these grounds._

_The abbey where our monk was staying was overrun by the forces of the west, but the leader forbade the killing of the inhabitants. They were forced, however, to accompany the army on its eastward journey. The monk's letter ends as the huge army, now rag-tag and near starvation, neared Azurra and massed for an attack so we are left to surmise what happened to the holy man afterward. According to what you told me, the book was found in a grave near the ruins of the city so we know that even if the monk did not make it that far, his book did. Whether he was killed in the battle or died an old man in his sleep or starved along with many others, we will never know. Everything you have told me about the fourth planet in the Prolmar sector shows a world that was deserted and a holy city that had fallen into ruin. Over the last thousand years the forests and the prairies and the jungles have reclaimed everything else._

_One day recently as Lexon, Devanna and I were proselytizing to a group of university students in Illumini, I chanced to meet a professor of history and asked him, hypothetically of course, what might have been the possible outcomes of such a scenario as the monk described on Eden. Since it appears the food supply was fast being exhausted, none of his answers were encouraging. They basically boiled down to famine and starvation for the majority of the people. If their crops were failing, they would have been reduced to eating animals and possibly ultimately each other (horrible thought). Since we have no idea of the population of the planet at the time, this might have occurred fairly quickly or it might have taken longer. Even if a few survivalists had managed to live for a number of years, as the population dwindled, it would eventually have reached a point of non-sustainability. I have often wondered since then what it would have been like to have been the last human on an entire world. _

_The theory of a gradual dying out seems to me a reasonable explanation since your expedition found no evidence of a sudden mass extinction. The only other explanation would be that all or most of the survivors of the war left or were taken from the planet. Since we have no record during that time period of a mass immigration to the Colonies, they must have gone somewhere else, perhaps back to Kobol. Alas, another mystery for us to ponder. All we know is that the religion of the Thirteenth Tribe survived in small pockets of the faithful on all Twelve Colonies. We here on Gemenon are perhaps its largest and most vocal group as we strive to serve the will of God._

_The ultimate fate of the settlers of Eden remains a mystery for now and perhaps will remain so always. All we know with certainty is that the planet once held a thriving civilization and when your expedition arrived, it was devoid of human life though it was once again a hospitable and fertile world. The book that a man named Frank uncovered is a small clue to the biggest historical mystery of all time. I'm sure there's a lesson to be learned here, but I am not yet sure of what it is. _

_Perhaps when the second expedition reaches the planet, they will spend more time in the city and find an answer. It's difficult to believe that an entire civilization vanished without leaving behind a single written clue as to its fate._

_Unpublished Manuscript (Notes)_ by Aimee Singh, MD, PhD

.

Laura Roslin's secretary said, "Hugh Connelly is on line two."

Laura thanked her and picked up. "Hugh, what a pleasant surprise. How are you and how is your beautiful little girl?"

"We're both fine. I'm doing much better now that I'm back into the routine of teaching at the Academy. There's nothing like work to take our minds off some of our difficulties. Elaina is adjusting to daycare and to life without her mother. Some days she still asks when Stacey is coming home, but not as often as before."

"What can I do for you today?"

"I wondered if you might fax or email me a copy of the report from Gemenon concerning the radiation findings."

"You mean the joint report from the _Galactica_ and the _Penelope_?"

"That would be the one."

"I'll see what I can do. I'm not sure how much classified material the report contains. Might I ask why you want to see the one from Gemenon and none of the other Colonies?"

"I finished reading the information on the USB drive that came from the friend of Irina Hoshi. I…we need to get together soon and discuss the possibility of an expedition to Gemenon if that would even be possible."

"Before we discuss going to Gemenon, I think we should discuss the contents of that USB drive. What's so important that you think we should send an expedition to the planet?"

"I'm getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that when I'm excited about pursuing something."

"I'll call you very soon and have you and your daughter over for dinner."

"Do you want me to email the contents of the drive?"

"No. I have a feeling we should keep that under wraps right now. Have you discussed the contents with anyone?"

"Not yet."

"Let's keep it that way for now. We'll talk soon, Hugh. I'll be in touch as soon as I find out about the radiation report."

She ended the call.

Billy walked to the door. "The memorial committee is here. I sent them to the dining room and told them you'd be with them shortly. The chefs are serving lunch."

"Is it time for lunch already?"

Billy smiled. "It is."

She beckoned to him. "Close the door a minute. I have a question."

He complied and walked over to her desk. Quickly she brought him up to speed on the USB drive that Irina Hoshi had given to Kara and that Kara had then passed on to Hugh Connelly after Kevin Abinell had extracted it from a bronzed baby shoe.

"What I'd like to know before I invite Hugh for dinner is someone else's opinion on the information on that drive. Kevin made a backup copy of it. Could you call him and arrange to get a copy as well. I don't want it sent over email. For right now I'd like to keep this strictly off the electronic grid."

"I'll be glad to."

"Tell him you want a printed copy of the information that was in a baby shoe. He'll understand exactly what you mean." She stood. "Now let's join Sarah Porter and her committee for lunch and see what she has to say."

"I've been monitoring comments on the government web site. They're ninety-three percent positive on the memorials. That's the highest for any subject this year."

"What are the objections?"

"Cubits, of course. There's always someone who wants to see the funding go somewhere else, and I quote, _to living people_. I think there was one comment about how memorials to war are little more than glorifications of war. And there are always a few crackpots who object to everything without giving a reason."

"At least half of the funding will be private. Sarah has gotten a good response from several banks and big corporations. Even King's Bay Medical Center has pledged a nice amount."

"That's some positive publicity we need," Billy said seriously. "When those salvage barges left four days ago, we took a bad hit publicity wise. Ditto on more dead pilots."

Together they walked to the door. "I have a feeling we're about to get some positive news from Nereid."

"From your lips to the gods' ears," Billy said. "That would be the best possible news."

…

Kara was never comfortable in a room full of senior officers, but after dinner she found herself in the Situation Room in exactly that position. She wanted to stick close to Lee and her father, but she also didn't want to seem like a kid afraid to leave a parent. Instead after she looked over the group, she strode over to Natalie and Buddy who was wearing the dog tags that Chief had made for him. She wanted to think he wore them proudly, but she didn't know if centurions experienced feelings of pride or not.

"I hear you had quite an experience in Sadie," Natalie said.

Kara shrugged. That was still a very sore subject with her both literally and figuratively.

Buddy said, "When the time is right, we will retrieve the ship and repair it."

"I guess we're waiting on Admiral Adama," Kara said.

As she spoke, one of the Marines opened the door and Bill entered. Kara wondered if he had read her report yet. She'd been honest. He couldn't be happy with her mistakes.

"As you were," he said to everyone. "Let's get started. Gather around. Lieutenant Thrace, over here with me."

Kara walked over and stood beside the admiral as they surrounded the big light table. The projection showed an aerial photograph of part of the valley, the apple orchard and the forest beyond.

Bill handed her a laser pointer and said, "Show us where those Raiders are hiding."

She circled the approximate location of the Raiders in the forest and said, "About two miles southwest of the orchard. They're just far enough under those evergreen trees that they can't be seen from above."

Bill looked at Gaeta. "How are we coming on getting that potential kill switch ready?"

"Chief Tyrol opened the juke box and got the disk. We were able to copy it onto a laptop. Then using the T-1 port in Buddy's arm, we downloaded it to him so we know that works. We plan to do the same thing with LG49 at the lab on the surface of the planet. Then Major Gallagher will take LG49 to the valley. They'll walk to the orchard to test it."

"How will we know if it works?" Bill asked.

John said, "After LG49 has sent the kill switch signal, we'll jump a Raptor in on the other side of the forest, away from the valley. If the Raiders stay put, I think we can assume they've been de-fanged. If they chase it, then we've got an answer, just not the one we want. The Raptor will jump away and we'll have Vipers waiting for the Raiders. One way or another, they'll be out of the picture."

"If that song acts as a kill switch," Bill said, "then how do we know there's not another song…or some other kind of signal that changes them back into killing machines?"

"We don't know," Lee said. "I'm sure at one time there was one. It only makes sense. The question now becomes is there anyone still alive on Nereid who knows what it is?"

Vargas said, "This is the best shot we've got. We've got no choice but to take it. We've got to eliminate the threat from their ships before we can move on the city."

"You're right," Bill said. "John, I want you to take Hunter and Buddy and come up with a step-by-step plan to test the kill switch."

"Yes, sir."

"We've already agreed that if it works, we take the city next," Vargas said.

"Agreed," Bill said, "but we've got a lot of non-combatants in the city. We can't forget that. They are _not_ expendable since many of them are women and children."

Lee said, "I talked about this before meeting with John, Hunter and Kara. We have an idea we'd like to put out for discussion."

Bill nodded for him to continue.

"Could we put the city and surrounding area on the light map?"

Gaeta had it up in less than a minute. Kara handed Lee the laser pointer.

"We're thinking of a stealth mission. We start with inflatable boats and a small insertion team that includes LG49. We utilize the small river in the valley and float down to the city. The river with the dam is the straighter shot but we think it might be monitored. The two rivers join eleven miles past the city. We dock the rafts and hike back. Once we've neutralized the Raiders and the centurions at the landing strip near the city, we've got use of the airfield for bringing in troops and supplies as needed."

Lee traced the journey with the pointer and made a small circle at the docking point. "You'll notice we've got tree cover all the way from there as we backtrack into the city. We exit the forest near the airstrip and send the kill switch for the Raiders. Then we send LG49 to see if we're dealing with freed centurions or not. If they're not free, we free them and regroup at the airfield."

John said, "Once we've got control of the airfield, we'd like to try a diplomatic approach."

"Get your plans together," Bill said. "I want to hear each one in detail tomorrow night. We'll adjourn early tonight so that everyone can relax and then get a good night's sleep."

As they all began to file out, Bill called, "Lieutenant Thrace, stay behind."

Kara glanced at Lee and then at her father. John winked at her. It was his signal for her not to worry.

When the room was empty except for Bill and Kara, he said, "I'd like to express my condolences about Mr. Thrace."

"Thank you, sir,"

"I'd also like to tell you not to worry about Sadie. You got that baseship. We all owe you a debt of gratitude. I'm just glad that you escaped with only bruises."

"I made some mistakes that night, sir…stupid mistakes."

"And you think I haven't? When I was your age I wrote the book on making stupid mistakes. More than once I nearly got myself and my team killed. Did you let Doc Cottle check you out?"

"Yes, sir. My dad and Lee both insisted on it."

"Do you feel like climbing into your Viper to support this mission?"

"I wouldn't have it any other way, sir."

"Then get some rest tonight."

"Yes, sir."

Hunter was waiting for her out in the corridor. "Lee said to tell you he and your dad had gone to the wardroom with General Vargas and the colonels. They're going to work on the two missions. I told them I'd join them."

"They need you."

"So what's news from the valley? I already heard that Markham and Daniel are at the lab on the plateau helping Lucy. I never thought anyone could pry Markham out of the valley. Your dad said there was something else that you would tell me."

"Dessa and Narcho are married."

Hunter didn't say anything for a while. Then he started down the corridor. "Let's walk. I guess I'm not surprised. Emmalyn saw their feelings for each other a long time ago."

"I figured once my dad took the Cylons to the valley, one of them would be all over Narch right away. I'm glad that didn't happen."

"You think he'll stay with her when all this is over?"

She nodded. "He loves her."

"Anything else new?"

"Beck is with a Six named Lida…and before you say anything, she looks just like the one who…frakked Lee but she's another copy."

Hunter briefly put his arm around Kara's shoulders. "You've both had it rough lately."

Kara winced slightly. Her shoulder was still sore. "You want to tell Emmalyn and Targa or you want me to?"

"Better let me."

"I thought so."

They separated and Kara went to the rec room. It was crowded with pilots and she looked for a place to sit. Karl saw her and motioned her over. Saunders got up and let her have his chair while he went to find an empty one and bring it back to the table.

"I'm sorry about Dreilide," Karl asked softly. "You okay?"

She shrugged. "How'd you find out?"

"Lee."

"Does everybody know?"

"Me and Saunders. I don't know about the others."

"Let's keep it that way."

As Saunders carried a chair back to the table and placed it beside her, he gently squeezed her shoulder. Fortunately it was the right instead of the left.

"We all got letters on the transport today," Karl said. "I got a couple from Sharon and Saunders got a dozen from Kendra and…"

"Not a dozen," Dwight said. "Just ten."

"Just ten?" Kara teased. "I'd start worrying if I was you."

Pepper said, "Hot Dog got one from Kat."

"That's great," Karl said.

"She did it with a computer," Hot Dog quickly added. "She said she pecked it out one letter at a time." He looked at the ceiling for a moment before he said, "Right now Kat's working with a speech therapist. She's learning to talk again. The part of her brain that had the most damage is the part that controls speech."

"She's not dead," Pepper said, "and she's not in a coma any longer. It could be a lot worse. A _lot_ worse."

Everyone at the table was quiet for a minute. Nobody had to say that it could have been any one of them or that Kat would probably never fly a Viper again. They all knew it.

As the silence stretched, Karl got up, got Kara a beer and then raised his bottle. "Here's to one less basestar thanks to Starbuck."

Everybody at the table clinked their drinks together.

"It's not over yet," she said. "The planetary phase is just beginning."

Pepper added. "It's like I told Hot Dog. One step at a time. That's how we do everything."

…

The four men all wore small backpacks and were dressed in camouflage of one sort or another. Two wore the standard blue-gray camos of the Colonial military. The other two wore homemade outfits that had served them well in the forest. They had two communicators, both turned off, and they left Beck's dwelling before sunrise when the air hinted at the frost that would soon come to the valley. Nearly a week had passed since the plan had begun to germinate. Now they were as ready as they'd ever be to put it into action.

Hunter took the lead. Beck and Narcho followed with John and LG49 bringing up the rear. Were it not for the centurion, their passage through the dwellings would have gone mostly unnoticed. But centurions weren't built to move quietly. More than one of the valley residents came outside to watch them walk down the main path and then take the road that led to the orchard.

By the time the rising sun touched the topmost branches of the bare apple trees, they were nearly there. Hunter led them to the far side of the orchard before he stopped. The leafless trees offered no cover, but Lucy had told them that the Raiders didn't consider humans on the ground to be a danger. There was a clear division of duties in the hierarchy of Cylon defenses. Unless they were ordered to attack humans, the Raiders took care of enemy ships in the air and the centurions took care of the enemy on the ground.

The men took out thermoses and drank coffee brewed the night before on the _Galactica _and heated that morning by Dessa on the woodstove. They stood quietly, their coffee steaming in the chilly air.

"In a few minutes the sun will be on the edge of the Raiders," Hunter said softly.

John threw away the last little bit of coffee in his cup and stowed the thermos before he got a pair of binoculars from the pack. He scanned the distant forested hillside.

"I see the edges of the ships. They did a good job of getting under those evergreens." He spoke to LG49. "Are you reading anything from them?"

"They have shut down everything but their standby systems to minimize their electronic profile and conserve fuel, but they could still launch within seconds."

"If you broadcast the kill switch, can they receive your signal while they're in standby mode?"

"I do not know."

"We got no choice but to give it a shot. Broadcast that song digitally from beginning to end. Then we'll call in a Raptor."

"Shall I also play the song aloud with my new sound system?"

"Why not? Just not too loud. Raiders don't have ears but we do."

Almost immediately the soft strains of _Twilight Time _began coming from the centurion. Everyone now had his binoculars trained on the Raiders. They watched until the last notes died away.

"Nothing," Hunter said. "Not one of them so much as twitched."

John took out a communicator. "Now for the test." He switched it on.

"Still no movement," Hunter said.

"The Raiders are coming out of standby mode," LG49 said.

"But they're not _doing anything_," Narcho said.

"Broadcast the song to them one more time just to make sure," John said and LG49 complied.

The frequency of the communicator had been preset for the _Galactica_. When the song ended a second time and the Raiders still hadn't moved, John gave the signal for the Raptor to jump in over the forest.

Hunter said, "If that doesn't get a reaction from them, I'd say we've got ourselves a kill switch."

The jump coordinates had been set low in the atmosphere on purpose. A Raptor suddenly materialized barely a mile above the forest. It leveled out and overflew their position before it turned around and made a pass over the Raiders.

"Who are the pilots?" Narcho asked.

"Maverick and Racetrack. Skulls is ECO."

From the communicator they heard Skulls' voice. "I got bogies coming from the south. A dozen of them closing fast."

"Hold your position until they're almost in firing range," John said. "Then jump back to your Viper escort."

They had briefly discussed other Raiders being within scanning or communication range, but without knowing where they had scattered themselves on the planet, it was a clear unknown.

"Shut down the communicator, sir," Narcho said. "You don't want them honing in on it after that Raptor jumps."

John held the communicator to his mouth. "We got company approaching our position from the south. Going dark."

He was acknowledged immediately and then switched it off. He was sure the _Galactica_ saw what was going on. They had a lot of eyes and ears on this small patch of ground and sky.

He looked at Narcho and smiled. "Thanks. I knew we brought you along for a reason." Then he turned to LG49. "Are those Raiders in communication distance yet?"

"Not yet."

"The minute you hear them, start broadcasting the song."

The Raptor flew back over them.

"Why don't they get out of here?" Hunter asked.

"They're reeling those Raiders in," Narcho said. "Getting them close enough to our position to hear the kill switch."

Hunter had his binoculars pointed due south. "I see the other Raiders."

John lifted his binoculars and saw darker pinpoints against the dark blue morning sky. He watched as they grew larger.

"I know they can hear you now," he said to LG49. "Start singing like a canary."

…

On her Viper's dradis Kara watched the Raiders converging on the lone Raptor. _Get out of there, you idiots. We aren't absolutely certain they don't have any missiles left._

Aboard the _Galactica _Lee stood in the CIC with his father and Colonel Tigh. He would much rather have been with the Vipers that had launched earlier, those that would take on the Raiders if the kill switch failed.

"Where on the planet's surface did they come from?" Lee asked Gaeta.

"Triangulating now," Gaeta said. "It appears they came from near Settlement Gamma. That's the settlement closest to the valley…about seventy-five miles southeast."

"Isn't the city closer?" Lee asked.

"It's just over a hundred miles due east."

"I wonder why they didn't launch, too?"

Tigh said, "Maybe they thought a dozen Raiders were enough to take care of a lone Raptor."

"The Raiders appear to be breaking off the attack," Bill said.

They all looked at the big dradis screen again. He was right. The Raiders had turned and were returning to Settlement Gamma.

"I'll be damned," Tigh said. "If that means what I think it does, we've got ourselves a kill switch."

"We owe Lucy a big debt of gratitude," Lee said. "She's the one who remembered the song and Daniel is the one who remembered Drew Tanner talking about loading the Raiders with software to stop them from killing. That should make taking the city a lot easier."

Bill said, "That might have eliminated one problem for us, but there are still a lot of unknowns waiting for us down there."

"Is the insertion team ready?" Lee asked although he knew the answer. Zak was on the team.

"They've been ready. We'll start loading the shuttles with the equipment shortly. Since the kill switch works, we're on go for tomorrow."

"I wish I could go with them," Lee said softly.

"You'll be at the airstrip in the city soon enough. You're still my ground CAG."

"Will I be taking the same group of pilots as I had on the plateau?"

"I think we'll start over and have another drawing. That seems fair to me."

On his way to the mess hall for breakfast twenty minutes later, Lee found himself smiling. He managed to keep the smile when Jade and Nina walked in, got trays and joined him.

"I'm going to the planet," Jade said. "John wants me and Natalie on the team if we have to negotiate."

"That's good," Lee said.

"Are you going, too?" Nina asked.

"I'll be in charge of the Vipers and Raptors on the ground."

"What about your girlfriend? I hear she came back from the dead."

"She didn't come back from the dead," Lee said trying to keep the edge out of his voice. "Humans can't do that. She crashed her ship but she survived. She's okay."

"Is she going with you to the planet?"

"I don't know yet. We'll decide on the ground crew soon."

Nina smiled. "Maybe I can go with Jade."

Lee gulped the last of his coffee and stood. "I've got some plans to work on."

Instead of going back to his quarters where he'd left his notes relating to the plans, though, he wandered down to the flight deck. The Raptor carrying Maverick, Racetrack and Skulls had just been towed off the elevator. The mood among the crew was jubilant. They cheered as the three pilots walked down the ramp. For a moment Lee felt almost bitter that they were getting credit for something others had discovered and worked on, and then he realized that it was all about being a team. Right now the crew couldn't cheer the ones responsible for discovering the kill switch, so they cheered the ones in front of them who had risked their lives to test it.

Chief walked up to Lee. He was smiling. "Chalk one up for us."

"For the team," Lee said to reinforce his thoughts. "Is the CAP still out?"

"Due back in about twenty."

"I'll wait."

Kara's Viper was one of the last ones in. During the preceding week his and Kara's paths had crossed only occasionally. CAPs had been re-established and Kara was once again flying her share. Lee had worked with everyone involved in drawing up the plans for testing the kill switch. He and John had grabbed meals at odd times. He'd made several trips to the plateau to talk to Lucy again. He'd noticed that despite being with Lucy, who now inhabited the body of a Three, Daniel seemed to be growing increasingly homesick for the valley, maybe even for the Eight Kara had mentioned. Markham on the other hand seemed like a kid in a candy store. They had barely made a dent in the hundred plus computers and servers that the creators had left behind, but rather than be discouraged, Markham had found his calling.

The last time Lee had taken a Raptor to the plateau, he'd noticed two things. The prison had been leveled and the salvage barges had cleaned up almost all of the debris left in space by their battle with some of the Raiders over a week earlier. The barges would be jumping back to Caprica soon. The bodies of the pilots killed during the battle had already been sent. He knew it would be another dark day for Laura and her Presidency, but he hoped that better news was coming soon.

If his and Kara's relationship had not been sidelined by the incident with Lida and Nina, he would have made more of an effort to see her, but she seemed to have drawn into herself and shut him out. He knew she was mourning Dreilide. He knew she was still beating herself up over crashing Sadie. But most importantly he knew her well enough not to push her right now. John had told him to give her some space and time…but Lee was now concerned that he was giving her too much of both. The previous evening, several hours after John had left for the valley, Lee had gone to the officer's rec room and found Kara sitting at a table talking to Saunders…just the two of them. Neither had acted like it was any big deal. He knew Kara and Dwight had been friends since their days at the Academy, but a small spark of jealously had flared to life, a spark Lee thought he'd extinguished a long time ago.

To make matters worse, Kara had finished her beer and bid both of them goodnight saying she was going back to her quarters to write a thank-you letter to Paulla for taking care of Dreilide. Saunders had left soon after with a similar excuse, saying that he owed Kendra some serious ink on paper.

Now Lee stood on the flight deck and waited while Kara signed her post-flight check list. She seemed to be in her own world again, not even noticing him until he walked up beside her. At least she smiled at him.

"Hey."

"Good CAP?" He asked.

She shrugged. "Same old, same old. A little bit of excitement when those other Raiders showed up, but that went nowhere."

"Aren't you glad?"

"I wouldn't have minded kicking a little Raider ass this morning."

"So nuking a basestar wasn't enough excitement for you?"

"That was over too quick and I almost frakked it up."

"Now you know how I felt the first time we made love."

She gave him a sideways look. "Funny, Lee."

"As I recall that evening, I wasn't the one who told you we could never see each other again. How did you expect me to feel after you got out of bed and walked out on me?"

"You know why I did that...and you'll never convince me you were _that_ insecure."

He knew it wouldn't be wise to keep thinking about the night they'd first made love so he changed the subject. "Have you had breakfast?"

"We launched at 05:00. You know I never eat that early. I had part of a protein drink."

"Want to go get something now?"

"I've got to shower."

"I'll wait."

"Don't you have anything better to do than watch me eat breakfast?"

"I got a lot of things to do, but nothing better. I'll take my laptop to the mess hall and wait for you."

That got him another brief smile. "Okay."

She hurried to catch up to Pepper and Hot Dog. Lee went back to his quarters to get his laptop and a folder. He waited nearly forty-five minutes. When Kara came in, she was with Saunders again. They stood inside the door and talked for a few minutes. Then both got trays. Kara joined Lee. Saunders went to a table with some other Raptor pilots.

He watched while she picked at her food.

"What?" She finally asked.

"Is breakfast not to your liking this morning?"

"I'm not hungry."

"Is something wrong?"

She took a deep breath. "I've just got a lot on my mind right now, Lee, okay?"

"You want to talk about it?"

"Not really."

"But you'll talk to Saunders about it?"

Kara looked away for a moment. "He was talking to me about something private in his life. Not the other way around. It's got nothing to do with us or me or whatever your imagination has cooked up."

"Please don't shut me out, Kara. I love you."

"I know. I'm just not going to betray something a friend told me in confidence."

"Are you still upset about what…happened on that basestar with Lida and Nina?"

"I try not to think about that anymore."

"But you still blame me?"

"I never _blamed_ you. Look, I'll be fine. I just need some time. I wish my dad was here instead of down on the planet. He's always the one down there risking his life when…" she stopped talking.

"John has volunteered for every mission. He's done it because he's the one who knows the valley and the city. He's had the most experience with the Cylons and the centurions."

But Kara knew that. It wasn't the rationality of if, it was the emotion, the fear that she had just lost one father and might lose the other. Lee took her hand, curled his fingers through hers and gently squeezed. He couldn't offer her logic and expect to get through to her right now.

They sat that way as she picked up a piece of toast and nibbled on it. He didn't even try to tell her that John would be all right. The words would have meant nothing to her since he couldn't see the future. It was the same as Lee telling himself that Zak would be all right. Their fates, all of their fates, weren't yet written and they didn't have Yolanda Brenn to gaze beyond the present for them.

"After breakfast you want to walk up to the chapel?" Lee asked quietly.

With head bowed and without looking at him she nodded. "That would be nice. I've gone up there a couple of times. It'll be good to have you with me."

…

The atmospheric shuttles jumped in and landed one at a time, disgorging men who then quickly unloaded supplies. Then the shuttle jumped away so the next one could land. In all it took four shuttles to bring the thirty-man insertion team and the six inflatable rafts they would take down the river.

John had twice flown the route they would take in the Heavy Raider all the way to the point where they would dock at the end of their journey. LG49 had accompanied him in an attempt to find more of the scattered Raiders. The centurion had no luck. John guessed that the rest of them were near the other settlements and maybe even the shipyard, but they didn't have time to look for them right now. As soon as they took the city, then there would be time.

In John's opinion the river they would take downstream was hardly worthy of the designation _river_. It was more than a creek, but far smaller than the powerful river that ran to the south of the valley and powered the dam that fed electricity to the city and to Settlement Gamma.

During their final meeting on the invasion plan, Hunter had said, "I still don't see why you can't just land everybody east of the city where the rivers converge and let us march in from there."

"We might as well just drop a bucket full of calling cards on the city," Tigh had said with his usual sarcasm. "The jump spot near your valley is shielded from their dradis by the foothills which is why we can jump our shuttles in low and they won't be picked up on the Cylon's dradis. We don't want every centurion in the city waiting at the airport for us because we announced our next move to that council of theirs in the city."

So the plan to float a small team with some light-weight but high-powered weapons down the river had gone ahead.

John, Tarkington and Vargas now watched the last shuttle unloaded in record time. Some of the Marines were resting quietly under the trees at the edge of the clearing. The air was still crisp and cool even though the sun was nearly at its zenith for the day. Another twenty or thirty minutes and it would begin its downward journey. The engineers who had measured the flow of the river had said that in order to make the point where the two rivers joined and hike back to the airfield before dark, they'd need to leave by 13:00 at the latest.

John glanced at his watch. 11:15. "You need to get back to the _Galactica _soon, sir," he said to the general. "We need to launch those rafts and get started."

Vargas nodded and told one of his captains to gather the men. He gave them a short pep talk while they all listened respectfully. He ended by saying, "I wish I could go with you, but Admiral Adama wants me to watch this one from the _Galactica_. Instead you'll have Colonel Tarkington as your commanding officer. You know your mission, but he has the right to change it at any time. Good luck, men. I want to see every single one of you back on board when this is over. Semper Fi."

"OohRah!" The Marines chanted in unison.

A Raptor stood waiting for General Vargas. John and Vargas began walking toward it.

"I wish I could go with you," Vargas said.

"You're too valuable to risk, sir."

Vargas looked like he wanted to say something and then thought better of it. "Good luck, Major. We just might have to make you an honorary Marine before this is over."

John smiled. "I'd be honored, sir."

Five minutes later the Raptor was in the air. It skimmed the treetops for half a mile and then jumped.

When John, Hunter and LG49 reached the river, the inflatable rafts were ready. They let the first five rafts carrying twenty-eight of the Marines and the equipment launch and get to midstream. The last one held Zak and Hunter plus John and LG49. Getting the centurion into the raft was much harder than loading equipment. Chief had found a large square of thick cork to help distribute the robot's weight on the semi-rigid floor. Even then John saw Zak and Hunter glance at each other.

"He understands to stay low, doesn't he?" Zak asked. The other rafts were pulling away from them.

John grinned. "He understands. He doesn't want to end up on the bottom of the river."

Hunter used a small oar and pushed the raft away from the bank. Zak lowered the pumpjet propulsion engine into the water, quickly started it and guided the raft toward the center of the stream. He kept the engine rpms low and let the current do most of the work of carrying them downstream.

John put on his sunglasses, adjusted his camouflage ball cap and although he kept a watchful eye on both river banks and the sky, he found that he was enjoying the feel of the sun and the wind on his face. Deer drank along the edge of the stream. Hawks wheeled in large circles overhead. The pristine natural beauty of this low river gorge was breathtaking.

After about twenty minutes he leaned over to Hunter and said, "I'd like to bring my sons here someday and do something like this with them."

Hunter nodded and smiled. "After this is over, you're going to make Nereid your home, aren't you?"

"When this is over and Sean is old enough and well enough."

He didn't mention Laura or Braedon, and Hunter didn't ask, but John hoped that one day they would all settle here.

"What about you?" John asked.

"This is my home. It always has been. It always will be."

…

Lee sat in the Situation Room along with his father and General Vargas and watched the battlestar's high resolution camera tracking the voyage of the rafts down the river. They looked like dark oval bugs sliding down a winding silver-blue ribbon.

"They're ahead of schedule," Vargas said. "They should make the point where the two rivers join with plenty of daylight to spare."

While they watched and waited, Lee thought of the previous morning when he had accompanied Kara to the chapel. To his surprise she'd gone to the left side of the big altar and knelt in front of the small one dedicated to the monotheists. Lee had sat on the front pew and waited for her. When she'd finally stood, she'd lit a small candle in one of the attached holders. Lee had felt that was for John because Dreilide had professed no religious beliefs.

She'd sat down beside him then on the pew and reached for his hand again. They'd sat that way for a long time without speaking, each drifting, lost in their own thoughts until Lee realized that he'd been unconsciously rubbing her braided gold ring with his thumb. It was the symbol of a promise made in another place of worship, an abandoned temple on the island where John had a cottage and where Lee and Kara had spent a week alone after her graduation from the Academy. To Lee the ring would always be a symbol of their love. He'd realized that during the last few weeks she'd never taken it off. She'd never thrown it at him or thrown it into a corner of her locker. It was still on her finger. That had said more to him than any words ever could.

He'd lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her fingers just below her knuckles.

"You've got work to do," she'd said softly. "I'm going to sit here for a while."

Reluctantly he'd let go of her hand and stood. Her head was still bowed, but just before he'd walked away, she'd said, "I still love you."

For the first time since he'd returned from the res ship, Lee felt a heavy weight lift from his heart.

…

The Marines had all discussed crossing the currents of the second river. One at a time they revved their small engines and pointed the bows of the rafts at an angle toward to the far shore.

LG49 sat on the cork board. "Bend over," John said as he and Hunter hunkered down. "Cut down on wind resistance." He turned his ball cap backward to keep it from blowing off his head.

The big centurion bent himself over in a pose that reminded John of yoga.

"Yahoo!" Zak called as they skimmed and bounced across the surface of the water.

The Marines who had already landed were waiting to help them carry their raft into the trees and secure it. They all then gathered as a group and made sure everyone was accounted for. Tarkington walked to the front, consulted his compass and pointed the way. Two Marines took the lead.

It was almost mid-afternoon and alternately darker under the evergreen trees and lighter under the bare branches of the deciduous trees. They had three hours of walking ahead of them to reach the air strip outside the city before dark so they kept up a fast pace. John began to wish that he'd been able to spend more time on the treadmill in the _Galactica's_ small gym. It didn't help that most of the Marines were half his age. Colonel Tarkington lagged farther and farther behind. The colonel's lungs had suffered damage while he'd been trapped in the burning prison. John was frankly surprised that Tarkington had made it this far.

Finally Tarkington stopped. The group stopped with him, glad for a short rest.

"Keep going," Tarkington gasped. "I'll catch up." He turned to John. "You're in command now."

"I'm not going to leave you here by yourself, sir," John said.

"We're still two or three miles from the airfield. Do you think there are centurions this far out?"

"Probably not, sir," John said, "but General Vargas would have my hide if I left you on your own."

Hunter said, "Centurions aren't the only dangerous things in these woods."

Tarkington pointed to the two closest Marines. "They'll walk with me. We'll go slower, but we'll get there. Now go so you can recon the place before dark."

It took them another hour to reach their observation point. The sun had almost set but there was still enough light to see. John studied the area with binoculars. He saw a few centurions but nothing else.

"Okay, big guy," John said to LG49. "Wander over to the hangars and see if those centurions are freed or not. If they're not, you know what to do. If there are any humanoids hanging around, try to avoid them since I'm sure they'll notice your nice orange chest spot. Then make your way back here."

Dusk had fallen when LG49 made a circuitous route back to them and reported. "The centurions are not freed. I was able to free only six of them before a Two came out of hangar eleven. He relieved himself on the side of the building and went back inside. He did not see me. There are five more humanoids in there with him…another Two, a Five, a Six and two Eights."

"What are they doing?" Hunter asked.

"They appear to be engaging in a card game. There were a number of plastic buttons in stacks on the table."

"Poker chips," Zak said.

"What about hangars twelve and thirteen?" John asked.

"They contain four Raiders each. The centurions I freed were guarding them."

"How many humanoids total?"

"Eighteen. Besides the six in hangar eleven, there are three in hangar ten, five in hangar nine and four in hangar eight. All models are represented. There are multiple copies of each model except the Ones. There is only a single copy of him in hangar eight. From hangar eight to hangar seven is a distance of nearly half a mile. Due to the impending darkness I decided to report these numbers to you before I proceeded any farther."

"You did good," John said. "Okay, here's what we're going to do. You're going to broadcast the kill switch. Then you'll recon the other hangars so we'll know exactly what we're dealing with. Then I think we're going to create a diversion to get those humanoids out in the open if we can."

"Maybe LG49 had better play the song silently this time," Hunter said. "They might be able to hear us."

John nodded. After the centurion finished playing the song and left to recon the other hangars, Colonel Tarkington and the two Marines caught up to them and John brought them up to speed.

"Were you expecting skinjobs to be here?" Tarkington asked.

"No, sir. I thought they would have all been together in the city. They rarely came to the airstrip, but I'm not surprised. They're bound to know we're going to make a move somewhere on the planet."

"They're probably more alert everywhere, even the settlements." Hunter said.

"I agree. This airstrip has been monitored constantly from the _Galactica _for weeks and the only ships coming and going are the big supply transports from the settlements. We've seen no military activity at all until some of those Raiders from the basestar landed here."

"Do they have lights?" Tarkington asked.

"In the hangars, yes. Nothing on the runway that I ever saw. According to Sonja and Buddy the only ships that fly at night are the Raiders. Everything is infrared to them like the centurions. They don't need lights to take off or land."

By the time that LG49 got back, it was too dark to see clearly. They had all brought night vision goggles. Several of the Marines watched LG49 make his way through the edge of the trees. To make sure he wasn't confused with any of the other centurions, Chief had given him a touchup of his fluorescent orange chest spot.

As soon as the robot got to John and Tarkington, he said, "The other Raiders are in or around hangars five, six and seven. Each hangar has three centurions but no humanoids. I freed the centurions inside each hangar but did not try to free the ones outside lest I was noticed by the humanoids. I was not sure if one would come outside to relieve himself and see me. Hangar seven also contains two Heavy Raiders. Hangars one through four are unguarded. They contain the large transport ships."

"Did you play _Twilight Time_ again for those Raiders?"

"I did since those were your instructions."

"Are the skinjobs armed?" Tarkington asked.

"I saw several assault rifles propped against the wall in hangars eight and nine. I saw no other weapons. The humanoids generally depend on the centurions to do their fighting for them."

Tarkington had another question. "How many total centurions? Break it down by freed and non-freed."

"Fifty-six total. I was able to free fifteen centurions so that leaves forty-one patrolling outside the hangars that are not freed.

"So we're dealing with eighteen humanoids and forty-one centurions," Tarkington said. "Will those freed centurions help us?"

"I told them to stay in the hangars unless ordered to do something else by me. Otherwise they will be affected when you throw those zappers."

John said, "First I think we test the kill switch by jumping an armed Raptor in over the airfield with landing lights on. We make sure it stays high enough to be out of range of the centurions' weapons. That should bring the centurions and the humanoids out of the hangars. Before that we get all the Marines behind large trees for cover. Since the centurions see with infrared, darkness offers us no advantage. We'll use the bullhorn and tell the humanoids to drop their weapons and call off their centurions. If they comply, that's great. If they don't, we want to get those centurions over here. Those zappers have an effective radius of less than a hundred feet. The closer they are to the targets, the more effective they are."

"We can handle it," Tarkington said.

"Those centurions move fast."

LG49 said, "We have a top speed of almost forty-five miles an hour over level ground."

"We're barely half a mile from those hangars," John said. "Somebody do the math as to how soon they could overrun our position. The timing on throwing those devices will have to be nearly to the second."

"Less than a minute," someone said.

"We can handle it," Tarkington said again.

"I don't doubt that, sir. So, we bring a Raptor down here to lure the centurions and humanoids out into the open." He turned to LG49. "You need to make sure you're more than a hundred yards away from us. You got zapped once. I don't want it to happen to you again so when I say to go, you go…at top speed."

"I will move through the woods and join my brothers in the last hangar. Perhaps I can learn something that will be useful to you."

They spent the next ten minutes moving stealthily forward until they reached the tree line at the edge of the taxiway. The Marines then spread out and got into position. When they signaled that everyone was ready, John switched on the communicator and lifted it to his mouth.

…

In the Galactica's CIC Lee again waited with his father, Colonel Tigh and General Vargas. Natalie was there with Buddy but they stood off to the side.

"We've got their heat signatures," Gaeta said. "It looks like they're getting into position for a firefight."

Lee looked at his father. Bill's expression didn't change but a muscle in his cheek twitched slightly.

Lee said, "There must not be many centurions down there."

"Tarkington knows what he's doing," Vargas said curtly. "They aren't going to have to fight, just lob a few of those zappers."

This was one of the rare times that Lee saw the competitive side of the general emerge. So far most of the fighting had been in space and had been between Vipers and Raiders. The one foray to the prison hadn't turned out the best for Vargas and his men. He'd lost two colonels and four Marines. Lee now wondered if he and Tarkington were trying to redeem themselves in everyone's eyes.

Suddenly John's voice came over the comm channel. "_Galactica_, this is Operation Midway. Jump that Raptor to the coordinates over the airstrip. Have missiles ready in case Raiders engage, but otherwise do not fire any missiles. I repeat do not fire any missiles."

"They're going to take them on the ground," Lee said with certainty this time.

"Launch the SAR Raptors," Bill said. "Have them ready to jump at a moment's notice."

The tension on the bridge ratcheted up a notch. Vargas had obviously taken Bill's order as lack of faith in the plan and his men. Lee glanced at the XO and Tigh raised his eyebrows slightly. He felt it, too.

Bill didn't mention the Vipers that were also out there waiting. A single order would send them barreling toward the surface to assist in the combat in any way they could. Kara was in that group of fighters.

Once again Lee wanted to be out there with the Vipers, but once again he was standing on the bridge with his father observing an admiral command the fleet. Bill's determination to expose Lee to command situations was not lost on him. His father still wanted Lee to follow in his footsteps.

…

John heard Dwight Saunders' voice in his communicator. "Jumping in five…four…three…two…one."

He looked at the sky. There was a white flash a mile above them and then the rapidly descending ship. A few seconds later the belly landing lights of the Raptor were visible.

"Not too close," John muttered under his breath. He hadn't seen any indication that the centurions had RPGs or other hand-held missile launchers, but he didn't want to take the chance. To Saunders he said, "Light the apron outside the third hangar from the north end."

The lights steadied and focused to the west of the hangars before starting a slow arcing eastward sweep. Saunders found the hangar and held the lights steady on the concrete outside the door.

Hunter was looking through his binoculars. He said, "Some of the skin…humanoids are coming out. No weapons in sight. They're looking up and talking among themselves."

"I'll bet they don't know if the ship is ours or theirs." Tarkington said.

John addressed LG49. "Did you see a dradis in any of those hangars? The ones at the prison shared a single unit."

"There is a dradis device in hangar eleven."

"Then they know the ship is ours, sir." John handed the bullhorn to Tarkington. "Do you want to do the honors, sir?"

Tarkington took the bullhorn and raised it. "Put down your weapons and keep your centurions under control and you won't be hurt."

The humanoids grouped together and began talking. They were no doubt discussing Tarkington's ultimatum and why their Raiders hadn't launched.

Zak was also watching the hangars. "We got more humanoids coming from the other hangars."

"You'd better go now, big guy," John said to LG49 who clanked off through the trees in a northwest direction.

They all watched as the eighteen humanoids gathered at hangar eleven. The centurions were also gathering. A minute passed while the Cylons talked among themselves. Their words weren't audible to the Colonials, but their gestures indicated that there was disagreement among them. John knew they would eventually reach a collective decision even if some were opposed to it.

Their answer came a minute later as the forty-one centurions spread out and began a sprint across the taxiways and the ground toward them. But only a dozen continued their charge straight into the Marine line. The centurions on either end broke off and ran toward the trees to the north and south of the Colonial position.

Hunter immediately recognized what they were doing. "They're flanking us! They used to try to do it in the forest. They're going to try to get in behind us and trap us between them."

He and Zak grabbed their backpacks containing two zappers each and disappeared behind them.

Tarkington shouted, "They're attempting to flank us! Throw the zappers! Throw the godsdamned zappers…"

His words were drowned out as the speeding line of centurions opened fire.

…

In the Vipers above the planet, Kara listened to the open channel, waiting for some indication of what was happening on the surface. She heard her father's communication to the _Galactica_ calling for the Raptor to jump in over the city airfield. That meant the Raiders had been neutralized. She then heard Saunders confirmation of the jump and then nothing but the background chatter of a few pilots.

After Lee had left her in the chapel the previous morning, she had moved to the altar on the other side and had begun a series of prayers to the various gods to keep her father safe. Only when she'd finished had she wondered whether any of them had heard her.

Maybe Lee was right. Maybe there weren't any gods at all. Maybe eons ago someone had looked at the night sky and seen shapes in the stars, the archer, the scorpion, the twins, the virgin, and had decided that they represented deities and heroes.

Jade and Sharon had both called them false gods and said they were jealous and petty just like humans. Even though Kara knew little of their monotheistic faith, she had told Jade that the God of the Cylons was a cruel and vengeful God or He would never have allowed them to almost destroy the human race.

Instead of making Jade angry, Kara's comment had caused her to pause and ultimately to shrug. "Maybe we credit all our gods with too much. Maybe we say our gods did something or allowed something to happen when the gods had nothing to do with it. Maybe it was just us. Natalie said humans killed each other for years before we came along."

"She's right. I'm no expert on history, but I know the Tribes were fighting even back on Kobol."

"Why?"

"Don't you have a head full of Colonial history?"

"Some of it."

Kara had thought for a long time. "I don't know why we've always fought and killed each other, but we have."

She hadn't yet told Jade about Dreilide. Now as her Viper floated at the edge of the atmosphere and she and the others awaited the order to head for the planet, she wondered if she would see Dreilide again in the afterlife or if Lee was right and here and now was all they got.

Then she thought about Saunders, about the quandary he found himself in. He'd turned to her because they were friends and because he knew she and Lee had been together for almost three years. Kendra had written to him that she wanted them to start planning a wedding as soon as he returned to Caprica. He'd admitted to Kara that he loved Kendra, but he wasn't ready to take that step yet.

Kara couldn't help but make the comparison to her and Lee only she had been the one putting him off. She'd had little advice to offer Dwight. All she'd said was that he should be truthful with Kendra. If Kendra truly loved him, she would wait. She hadn't told him that Lee was waiting patiently for her to be ready. But Saunders was smart. He'd probably figured that out a long time ago.

…

After the centurions started their charge, most of the images for John were played out in brilliant flashes of gunfire…nearly continuous in the beginning. The first two zappers thrown were crushed under charging centurion feet prior to going off. A third got hit in midair by the barrage of gunfire being laid down by the metal giants. Then Tarkington got hit in the leg by what was probably a ricochet and went down. John crawled over to him and began dragging him deeper into the woods, mindful that somewhere to the north, more centurions were crashing through the trees toward them. He trusted Hunter and Zak to get the ones coming in from the south.

When he got to a huge oak tree, he positioned Tarkington behind it and tore the pack from his back. He also slipped Tarkington's off and dumped out the contents. They had each been given one zapper and he put both beside him. Then he risked turning on his penlight to see how badly Tarkington was hit. John didn't think the bullet had hit the femoral artery or the colonel would have bled out by now, but he was still bleeding badly.

John knew there were several medics in the group of Marines, but he had no idea where in the woods they were.

"Frakking bad luck," Tarkington said. "Tell Nate I'm sorry."

"You can tell him yourself, sir," John said as he used his knife to cut the leg of the colonel's pants enough to expose the source of the bleeding. He then grabbed his extra t-shirt from his pack and pressed it hard over the wound. Tarkington groaned in pain.

John heard crashing through the trees to their north. He quickly flipped down the night vision goggles. Centurions. They were between the oak tree and the edge of the airfield and advancing quickly. Suddenly something small arced through the air from south of their position and landed in the leaf litter. A second later John felt the pulses from a zapper. At least six of the centurions stopped and stood with twitching limbs. He realized that the gunfire had diminished considerably during the last two or three minutes.

More centurions came from the north and were on them before John could reach for the nearest zapper. There was a split second before bullets began chewing up the heads of the two nearest robots. A zapper was thrown but John didn't see it because he was crouched over Tarkington, still trying to put pressure on the wound and wondering why since he was sure they were both going to die.

A few seconds after that he realized that the woods had suddenly and eerily gone quiet.

He heard the light crunch of footsteps in the leaves and then a dim light.

"Over here," a voice said. "Get a medic."

Hunter knelt beside them. "You hurt?"

"Not me," John said. "Are all the centurions neutralized?"

"We're counting now. Some of them are in pieces so we need to make sure we got all forty-one."

"Is somebody watching those humanoids?"

"We're watching hangar eleven. They all went inside when the shooting started and haven't come out since."

"They might have sneaked out the back…probably heading into the city, maybe trying to flank us like the centurions did."

"We've got it covered, John."

"How many wounded have we got?"

"We're counting now. I think Zak lost a finger. He's helping count…and cussing a blue streak."

"Any dead?"

"At least two."

"Can some of you provide cover for a Raptor? We got to get Colonel Tarkington back to the _G_."

"Give me two minutes."

John picked up the communicator. "Lieutenant Saunders, I know you're not SAR on this mission, but we need you down here as soon as I give the signal. We got a seriously wounded colonel."

Less than two minutes later Hunter was back with six men. "Tell your Raptor to put down near the edge of the tarmac here at the woods. We're going to take flashlights and show him where."

Two of the men picked up Colonel Tarkington while John tried to keep pressure applied to the wound. When they reached the edge of the woods, John told Saunders to look for the flashlights on the tarmac. In five minutes they had the colonel in the Raptor. Karl took over applying pressure to the colonel's leg. The Raptor door was barely down before Saunders took off. He flew north and as soon as he cleared the hangar area, he jumped.

John's legs suddenly felt like they would no longer hold him up.

"You should have gone with him," Hunter said.

"And leave you guys down here alone?" John managed a smile. "Not a chance. Let's go see about the wounded and decide how many SAR Raptors we need."

"What should we do about those humanoids?"

"We need to secure them in some way. I need to get Buddy…I mean LG49 to get some of those freed centurions to help. Right now I'm in favor of having them keep the humanoids in that hangar until we get things cleared up with our men."

John changed the frequency on the communicator and sent a message to the robot to have the freed centurions surround hangar eleven and let no one out. He watched the hangar until he saw centurions converging on it. A few minutes later he heard LG49's reply.

"The hangar is empty. They have all gotten away. The rifles propped against the wall are gone."

For a moment John was angry, then disappointed, and then he realized that maybe it was better if the Marines didn't have to deal with them right now. All of the humanoids were probably halfway to the city by now. They would report what had happened to the council there much the way the Six had reported to the Cylons aboard the res ship. Maybe when the city group realized that the Colonials had a way to neutralize both the Raiders and the centurions, they would think twice about the cost of resisting.

…

On the _Galactica_, Bill looked at Nathan Vargas. "A Raptor is landing with Colonel Tarkington right now. They'll have him to Sick Bay shortly."

Vargas nodded curtly and without a word strode out of the CIC.

Bill looked at his son. "I haven't heard from John that the airfield is secured, but you need to get your pilots together and get ready to take them down. We need to start flying a CAP to protect that landing strip so we can get more Marines and a support crew down there. Assemble them in the Ready Room. I'll let you know when it's time."

"Yes, sir."

He waited nearly an hour for his father's message. Half of those chosen for Viper duty on the planet were already in the air. Lee launched with the rest. They had the coordinates and came down through the atmosphere like heat-seeking missiles, leveling out at ten thousand feet and descending more slowly to eight thousand. The planet was dark beneath them, the lights of the city faint.

Lee knew the cost of the night's fighting. Five Marines confirmed dead and sixteen wounded, among them his brother who had lost the last two fingers and part of his left hand when he'd been struck by a centurion bullet. He'd lost some blood but he was all right. He was in Sick Bay by the time that Lee had launched in his Viper. Hunter was fine and so was John. They were both still on the planet.

_It could have been worse. It could have been a hell of a lot worse._

Forty-one centurions had been destroyed either by gunfire or by being zapped. The humanoids had fled to the city and the Colonials had added fifteen freed centurions to their army of nearly a thousand still on the plateau. The airfield was theirs. He looked at his dradis. Everything was quiet. The only ships in the air were Colonial ones. Raptors were busy now jumping supplies, weapons and men to the landing strip. Once they had some lights set up, the larger transport ships could bring in even more.

If they could negotiate with the Cylons in the city and get their cooperation, then maybe the worst was over. An invitation would be carried to the council by one of the freed centurions. If the Cylons agreed to negotiate, a team consisting of Natalie plus the Simon who had gone to the prison with them, Jade, Caprica Leoben and Dean from the res ship would be brought to the surface. John would be on the Colonial team and so would Hunter. Colonel Tarkington had originally been chosen, but he was in Sick Bay. General Vargas had volunteered to take his place. At the last minute Sonja had asked to be included. Lee felt confident that the negotiations wouldn't be as one-sided as those on Caprica had been six years earlier.

Lee's eyes swept his instruments again. Everything was still quiet. He thought of Kara and made a promise to himself. When the war here was all over, when the Cylons had agreed to free the human slaves and accept a provisional coalition government, when the centurions were all free and when everyone could think about the next step in his or her life, he was going to get down on one knee and ask Kara the question he'd wanted to ask her almost since the day he'd met her.

He was going to ask her to bind her life to his in Elosha's temple and with both their families as witnesses. He knew he would never love anyone else the way he loved her. They belonged together for the rest of their lives.

He heard Kara's voice in his helmet comm. "Hey, Apollo, wake up. You're drifting out of the pattern. You asleep or daydreaming?"

"Copy that, Starbuck. I got distracted for a minute."

"Was it a nice one? The daydream?"

"Best one I've had in a long time."

TBC…


	80. The Quality of Mercy

Chapter 80

The Quality of Mercy

_The quality of mercy is not strained,__  
__It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven__  
__Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:__  
__It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.__  
__.__  
__It is an attribute to God himself;__  
__And earthly power doth then show likest God's,__  
__When mercy seasons justice._

The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1

_William Shakespeare, Sixteenth century Earth poet and playwright_

_._

Kara tugged at the sash of her dress gray uniform until it felt right. Then she knocked on the door of her father's and Lee's quarters. Lee opened the door. He also wore his dress grays as did her father.

"You look good...as always," he said.

"Tell me again why we have to get dressed up for a _meeting_?"

John was standing at the table taking medals off his sash. Kara walked over to him.

"What are you doing?"

He looked up and smiled. "It's too heavy. It doesn't hang right."

She looked at Lee and rolled her eyes then looked back at her father.

"You got a haircut."

"Finally. I shaved, too." He grinned. "Even took a shower."

"You know what this is about, don't you?"

"Bill wants to thank his officers. I can't remember the last time I wore my dress grays."

"Probably when I graduated from the Academy," Kara said. "Nobody's graduating from anything today so what's going on."

Lee said, "Besides this ceremony, everyone on the negotiating team was told to dress nicely. Hunter is in a suit and General Vargas will wear his dress greens. I'm sure his chest will look like a decorated Solstice tree with all his ribbons and _medals_."

"We only have to dress up on the first day," John said. "Some analysts at the Ministry of Defense said dressing up on the first day of negotiations was an indication of our seriousness. It's also designed to give us an advantage."

Kara snickered. "You really think the Cylons care what you wear?"

John paused and looked at her. "Those MOD analysts think so. That's why Bill is killing two birds with one stone. We're leaving for the planet right after the ceremony. We'll be back tonight, though. We've got plenty of portable potties down there now, but accommodations at the airstrip don't yet include showers. Hunter and I could probably handle that for a couple of days, but nobody would want to sit beside us."

"Aren't there showers in the city?"

"Of course, but until we have a firm peace treaty in place, we're meeting in hangar eight for security reasons. I haven't been down there in several days but I understand it's been fixed up to fit the occasion. Five hundred freed centurions have been brought in from the plateau. They're guarding the airstrip. We've had crews down there working around the clock to give the place a _homey_ look."

"You're kidding," Kara said in near disbelief. "We're fixing up a hangar for...never mind. I'm sure some analysts at Defense said to do it. After all they know so much about the Cylon psyche."

John resumed working on his sash. "We want them to think this is as serious as it is. They aren't going to be impressed by a couple of rickety folding chairs in a drafty corner of a hangar. The Second One will be leading their negotiating team. Personally I think we just need to clue the others in about the creators and the Sevens and the Second One's role in what happened and let the chips fall where they may, but that's not how Natalie wants to handle it."

"We had to deal with that right away on the res ship," Lee said, "because the Six who downloaded had already told them."

"So you're not even going to mention it?" Kara asked.

"Natalie wants to hold that out until the end. It's one of the few things she and I have disagreed on. She thinks telling them up front will taint the whole negotiating process. If their team turns on the Second One like those on the plateau did and beats him to death, we're back to square one with the negotiations. Personally I think those at the prison were a much rougher bunch. I'm not sure the city Cylons would resort to violence that way. They always let their centurions do their dirty work."

"She does plan to tell them eventually, doesn't she?" Lee asked.

"Yes. She just wants to wait for the right moment. She visited Daniel and Lucy earlier this week. They've agreed to tell their story to the team when Natalie sends for them. The Second One could deny everything, but he can hardly deny it with Daniel standing in front of them. If we had one of their datastreams handy, it wouldn't be such a big deal, but we don't."

"Isn't there one _somewhere_ in the city?" Lee asked.

"Buddy says it's in a heavily guarded underground bunker. Until we free all the centurions, it's not available to us. I know we're supposed to be under a flag of truce right now, but I'm not sure I'd want to test it to that extent."

"I heard the Cylons took a long time to come to a decision to negotiate with us," Kara said. "Don't you think giving them a week was too long? I think it made us look...wimpy to wait on them that long."

John said, "We gave them twenty-four hours and had their answer before the end of that time. They've actually been waiting on us since then. Besides all the decorating going on, we've included some Cylons on our team so we had to come to an agreement as to what we'll insist on. That wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. That Dean from the res ship is a piece of work."

"Natalie is going to lead the team," Lee said. "She's our chief negotiator. Buddy and LG49 are on the team, too."

"What are _they_ going to ask for?"

"Representation in the coalition government," her father said. "Buddy understands why the centurions were created. He understands their function as security and their role in construction and other projects. He doesn't have a problem with either of those, but he doesn't want them to ever be pitted against one another again or used as soldiers to fight someone else's wars."

"A centurion with a conscience? Give me a break."

"He's capable of learning, Kara," John said patiently. "There's a big difference between Buddy now and the centurion who was guarding the entrance to the park last spring and scratched words in the dirt for me to read. Interacting with us has made a huge difference. LG49 is getting there, too."

"I understand. Buddy is your friend. And if you don't hurry up, we're going to be late for the ceremony. Quit taking medals off that sash or all you'll have left are your pilot's wings."

John smiled. "That's all that really matters to me. It's what I'm the proudest of." He pulled the sash over his head and fastened the belt around his waist. "Better?"

Together they walked to the officer's wardroom. The long tables had been moved back against the walls and the chairs lined up in rows that faced the podium at the end. The rows were filled with many of the _Galactica's_ officers. Behind the back row Doc Cottle sat beside Emmalyn who was in a wheelchair. Petra sat in front of him and beside her sat Sonja, Yoshimo, Jade, and the rest of the Cylons on the negotiating team. D'Anna and Petra's Simon had asked to go back to the res ship and had been taken three days earlier. Dean had been brought back to the _G_ to serve on the team.

Kara smiled at Emmalyn and then joined her father and Lee several rows from the front. On the front row Hunter sat beside General Vargas. Buddy and LG49 stood against the wall at the back. People were chatting, but when Bill stood up and walked to the podium, the room fell silent. Kara looked at the admiral's sash. He obviously hadn't removed any medals. It was loaded. She knew he had gotten several of them for his plan to free Caprica of Cylon control the previous year. In fact the admiral was probably sporting every medal the Colonial military could give and some civilian ones as well.

Bill put several note cards on the podium, looked around the group, and began speaking.

"Today is going to be another busy day for everyone, but before we scatter again, I wanted to get all of you together so I could thank you for your dedication and your unfailing courage no matter what the odds.

"A year and a half ago when we got confirmation that this planet was the Cylon homeworld, there was a justifiable fear at the highest levels of the military and the civilian government that to allow the continued existence of such a deadly enemy was insanity. The decision was made that as soon as we rid Caprica of Cylon control, we would come to this planet and visit upon them the nuclear holocaust they had visited on eleven of our sister colonies. We were reasonably certain at the time that there were a few humans on this planet, but they were considered a small price to pay for the peace of mind that destroying the Cylon's homeworld and all their remaining basestars would bring."

He stopped and gazed around at his audience. "We were wrong. I've come to see that now, but at the time, the decision felt both right and justified.

"One man and his daughter disagreed with the majority of us and it is perhaps the cruelest irony of all that Major John Gallagher was the one who spent over four months in a Cylon prison. Had it not been for his conviction and Lieutenant Kara Thrace's unauthorized use of the reconnaissance Raider to prove me wrong about the number of humans on the planet, we would not be here today on the brink of negotiating a peace with the Cylons and gaining the freedom of forty-six thousand human slaves without the loss of more lives.

"Others have also been instrumental in bringing us to this point and we owe them a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid. Kyle Franklin, known to all of you as Hunter, has been invaluable in his knowledge of the planet and his role as a consultant to our Marines. The dedication and contributions of Natalie cannot be underestimated. She decided long before we came here that the enslavement of the humans was wrong and vowed to help us even then. And I cannot leave out two centurions, Buddy and LG49, who changed the minds of most of us in this room about what a valuable resource a freed centurion can be.

"To the pilots and Marines who fought so valiantly and especially to those who gave their lives, their contribution and sacrifice helped make this campaign a success. As you all know, negotiations begin today and we're hoping that they will bring an end to all future hostilities. President Laura Roslin's fervent hope is to see this planet become a place where Cylons and humans can live and work side by side in peace. I think in the months since we left Caprica, it has become the hope of many of us as well.

"I must also mention my son, Captain Lee Adama, who saved the lives of a rescue team at the Cylon prison before the planetary conflict began and who was wounded in the process. He was also willing to go with Natalie to a Cylon basestar to make an overture that helped bring us to the bargaining table today. He did this not knowing if it was a trap or if he would ever return to us."

Here Bill paused and took a breath. "Lee, come up front, please."

Kara nudged him and he rose and joined his father at the podium.

"Captain Adama," Bill said, "it's my honor to award to you today the Meritorious Achievement Medal." He stepped up to Lee and pinned the medal to his sash. "Congratulations, son."

Everyone in the room began to clap and Lee's cheeks turned red. Knowing that few people would ever know how much that trip to the res ship had cost Lee on a personal level, Kara leaned over to her father and said, "He deserves it for a lot of reasons."

"Bill isn't through."

He'd barely gotten out the words when the admiral raised his hand for silence and said, "Everyone is also aware that in a stealth mission that put her life at high risk, Lieutenant Kara Thrace volunteered to take the recon Raider into a distant sector of space and attempt to destroy the rogue basestar that had been plaguing us since the beginning. She succeeded and the entire fleet owes her a debt of gratitude. Lieutenant Thrace, come up front, please. John, you might as well come with her and pin the Combat Action Medal to her sash. Congratulations, Lieutenant Thrace."

As they stood, Kara hissed, "Did you know about this and not tell me?"

Her father smiled. At the front Bill handed the medal to John who did the honors.

"Remain up here, please," Bill said when the applause died down. "If I listed all of the things Major Gallagher has done for us starting when he flew a Raptor into a basestar over Caprica and destroyed it with no regard for his own life, we'd be here until tomorrow this time. So I'll bypass that and get to the best part. Lieutenant Thrace, would you like to do the honors and give your father the Medal of Valor."

John had clearly not been expecting that. Kara looked him in the eyes after she pinned it to his sash. "I dare you to take that one off," she whispered. "Nobody deserves it more than you do."

"We're almost through," Bill said. "John, if you'll remove your collar pins, I'd like to trade them for these." He held out a small box that contained a different set of pins. "Congratulations, Colonel Gallagher."

Everyone in the room began clapping again. Hunter was the first one to stand and Vargas was the second. Then everyone was on his or her feet. Doc Cottle even helped Emmalyn get to hers. Kara looked at her father. He still looked stunned. She wanted to salute him, but she knew that would be too emotional for both of them. So she did something very un-military like.

She put her arms around his neck, hugged him and whispered. "Now you don't have to take any crap from Colonel Tigh."

Her words broke the teary mood. He managed a smile and whispered back. "I'm sure you'll more than make up for it."

...

In a week's time temporary walls had been built in a section of hangar eight. Neutral colored paint had been applied and a piece of mottled brown and gray carpet had been put down. A long mahogany table had been brought in along with a number of comfortable padded chairs. A mahogany sideboard had been placed at one end. It contained a round centerpiece containing a semi-circle of miniature flags representing each of the Twelve Colonies with the slightly larger flag of the United Colonies in the center. Above it hung a picture of the current President. They were the only reminders in the room of who had ultimately made the offer to negotiate. It paid homage to the woman who was not present at the table, but whose dream it was to see a coalition government formed and peace come to Nereid.

John walked over to the sideboard and looked at Laura's picture. She was wearing a dark blue suit and looked every inch the leader that she was.

Natalie walked up beside him. "Your wife is a very beautiful and dignified-looking woman."

"Yes, she is."

"Are you going to mention your relationship to her when my brothers and sisters arrive?"

"Not unless there's a reason to."

Dean walked over to them. "I simply don't understand your military and their ranks and medals. It seems like the more of _the enemy_ you kill, the more you're rewarded. How many of us suffered permanent death on the baseship that you destroyed over Caprica?"

Natalie said in a good-natured way, "Now don't make me sorry we let you come along. You promised to play nice."

"I merely said I don't understand…"

John said, "If you want to start comparing numbers of dead, I think the billions of humans who died on eleven planets far outnumbers your loss on that basestar."

Realizing John had him on that point, Dean asked, "Who is the woman in the picture?"

"Laura Roslin. She's the President of the Colonies and the main reason we're standing here today getting ready to negotiate instead of continuing to fight."

Outside the room they heard the clank of centurion feet. "I think the other team has arrived," Natalie said.

They watched as the members of the Cylon council strode into the room. For a long minute both sides sized up the other. City Cavil was the first to speak.

"It seems we're outnumbered." He glanced around at the two centurions who had taken up posts just inside the door. "And outgunned."

Buddy said, "LG49 and I currently carry no bullets, but I can assure you that my free brothers outside this room do."

All of the city Cylons stopped and stared.

Dean sniffed. "That was my reaction the first time I heard one of them speak. These humans do have a few tricks up their sleeves. Don't underestimate them."

City Cavil continued to stare at Buddy and finally looked at Natalie. "Where did you find him?"

John answered. "He was guarding one of the entrances to your park for the last couple of years. He and I started chatting last spring."

"We call him Buddy," Natalie added. "John was the first person who ever bothered to speak to him. Buddy has both U87 and new centurion programming."

"Then he was created many years ago," the Five said.

Natalie smiled. "Yes, by one of our creators. Lucy."

"A traitor centurion," Cavil said. "Two of them. How interesting."

"Please, brother," Natalie said, "we're not here to trade insults. Eventually we'll get to the reason Buddy was so willing to help John. Now, let's be seated and I'll introduce our team. Then you can introduce yours."

John pulled back the center chair on their side of the table and indicated that Natalie should take it. He sat on her right. Dean sat on her left then Bookstore Leoben, Jade, Sonja, Natasi, the Simon John called Biscuits and Yoshimo. On the other side of John were General Vargas and Hunter.

"We appear to be outnumbered," Cavil said again.

Natalie countered, "We brought four humans and seven Cylons. If nothing else that should show you that many of our brothers and sisters want peace and to govern this planet together with the humans. Everyone on this side of the table is in agreement as to what should happen next."

"We're here because we don't want our city destroyed," the Five said.

"We certainly hope it doesn't come to that, but make no mistake, change must come. Our way of life with enslaving the humans and subjugating them to our will is over."

John lifted a briefcase from the floor and opened it. He took out a stack of paper and handed everything to Natalie. She began distributing the packets.

"During the past week, those on our side of the table sat down and came up with a number of discussion points, but before we get started with our negotiations, John has something he'd like to say."

"Last spring in Settlement Alpha, a child was taken from her mother and brought to the city. She's the daughter of a woman named Petra and a Four. Petra was sent to the prison and has since been rescued. The Four was executed and downloaded on the res ship. Their little girl's name is Cassandra but she's called Cassie. We want her returned to her mother and we want it done today."

"This is your chance to make a gesture of good faith," Natalie said to her brothers and sisters. "Cassie's return is not negotiable. I was there when she was literally ripped from her mother's arms. I heard her screams of fear. I heard her mother beg for her child. A terrible injustice was done that day and must be made right."

Cavil turned to the Eight on his side of the table. "Does one of your sisters still have her?"

"You should know. You gave her to one of your pets."

"I want to know where she is _now_," Cavil said.

"She's on her third or fourth mother. She's a difficult child. No one wanted to keep her for long. So much crying. So much changing her diaper. Fussy. Always hungry. Always sucking her fingers and drooling on her clothes."

Fury swept John. Under the table Natalie clamped her hand hard on the top of his leg to silence him and said, "Then you should be happy for us to take her off your hands."

"We'll have her brought here," Cavil said. He turned to the Eight again. "Which building?"

"The big one on Ulixes Street."

"Send a centurion," Cavil said. "Bring the child here."

"She's terrified of centurions," John said. "I know the building. I'll go get her." He looked at the Eight. "Which apartment?"

"Three eighteen," she said sullenly.

LG49 said, "I will get several of my brothers and we will accompany John. Buddy must stay here since he is our representative."

Outside the hangar John found one of the smaller golf carts. LG49 and three centurions loped along beside and behind him as he drove into the city. The building where Cassie was being kept was beyond the square. John stopped outside. LG49 went into the building first. John and the other three centurions followed.

"Tell them to wait down here," John said to his big companion. You and I will go get her."

Together they got on the elevator. "This child has meaning for you?" LG49 asked.

"She does."

"But she is not yours."

"Not my biological child, but she's special to me. I promised her mother I'd bring her back."

"It is not good for a child to be separated from its mother?"

"Not if she's a good mother. Petra is a wonderful mother."

"I have learned something today," the centurion said.

As he stood outside the door of 318, John took a deep breath before he knocked. What if Cassie didn't remember him? For a long time there was no answer so he knocked again. An Eight finally opened the door. She looked like she'd been sleeping. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly noon.

From a room toward the back of the apartment he heard a child crying. John pushed the Eight aside and followed the sound. Cassie was standing in a crib. Her curly dark hair looked matted and her face was dirty and tear-streaked. She reeked of urine.

She held up her arms to him. He gently picked her up, kissed her forehead and rocked her back and forth. "Hey, Cassie, do you remember me?"

Her sobs ceased. She hiccupped and said, "Chon."

The Eight stormed into the room. "Just what do you think you're doing?"

"I'm taking this child back to her mother."

"I'm her mother."

"No, hell, you're not! Now get out of my way!"

Again John pushed past her. LG49 was waiting in the living room. When the Eight tried to follow John into the hall, the centurion grasped her arm and said, "John was authorized by your council to take the child."

The Eight stopped in her tracks at the talking centurion. John held the elevator. He and LG49 rode downstairs together. He held Cassie on his lap as he drove the golf cart back to the hangar. All the while he was talking softly to her, soothing nonsense like he had once talked to Brae.

Back at the hangar, he stopped in the negotiating room long enough to tell them he was taking Cassie straight to the _Galactica_. When the little girl saw the room full of people she clung to him and began to cry again.

"See what I mean?" the Eight said. "Always crying and sucking on her fingers and putting her sticky hands on everything."

"I'd cry too if I thought you were my mother," Jade said. "Natalie and I saw her before you took her. She looks awful now. What did you do to her?"

Cavil said, "And you wonder why I don't want any part of your disgusting breeding experiments when all they produce is squalling brats like her."

John didn't wait to hear any more. Trusting Natalie to get the negotiations back on track, he went to the nearest Raptor and told the pilot to take him to the _Galactica_. His voice must have held some urgency because ten minutes later they were in the landing bay and ten minutes after that, he walked down the ramp with Cassie. He had a crewman get Doc Cottle on the phone. John told him that Cassie needed to be cleaned up and checked before Petra saw her. The last thing John wanted was Petra seeing her child dirty with matted hair and a sopping diaper.

"Bring her up the back elevator," Cottle said. "I'll meet you."

Cottle led him to an examining room and closed the door. "Zeus on a zebra! What did they do to her?"

"I think it's more what they didn't do," John said. "I'm guessing she was left in her crib most of the time. I didn't see a single stuffed animal or toy in the apartment where she was being kept. I'm trying to tell myself that the Eights who kept her just didn't know any better."

"Neglect is a form of abuse."

"I know. She needs a bath and a clean diaper and she needs those big tangles cut out of her hair. I don't want Petra to see her like this. She's suffered enough. They both have."

"Let me get a nurse in here to help you. We'll get her cleaned up and then I can check her. If she's all right, I'll go get Petra."

Twenty minutes later Cassie had been bathed and was in a dry diaper. John wrapped her in a big towel and held her on his lap while she sucked her fingers and the nurse cut her matted hair. She then looked almost exactly like the little girl John had first seen with her mother in the park.

Cottle came back with a bottle of warm formula. Cassie immediately reached for it. The doctor had managed an examination after her bath. Other than a bad case of diaper rash and being slightly underweight, he pronounced her healthy.

"Are we ready?" John asked.

"Petra is with Targa," Cottle said. "I'll go get her."

John looked at the child now sucking contentedly on the bottle and realized that being able to give Cassie back to her mother meant more to him than the medal and promotion he'd just received.

"You're precious." He smiled at the little girl and she briefly smiled back before she resumed sucking.

He glanced up to see Petra and Cottle in the doorway of the examining room. Petra gasped when she saw her child. Her eyes filled with tears that immediately spilled over. John stood and Cottle helped Petra over to the chair where John had been sitting. Then John placed Cassie in her mother's arms.

Petra was trying to speak, but she was kissing her daughter and crying too hard.

John patted her shoulder. "I made you a promise..." It was all he could get out before he was also overcome with the emotion of their reunion.

"We'll take care of her now," Cottle said and John noticed that even the crusty old physician had tears in his eyes.

"I've got a Raptor waiting for me," John said. "I've got to get back to the negotiations."

"The gods bless you," Petra managed to say, "today and every day for the rest of your life."

...

For the second time that day Kara knocked on the door of her father's and Lee's quarters only this time she was wearing fatigues, tanks and a hoodie. She heard Lee call for her to come in.

"Where's Dad?" She asked.

"They're still at it down on the planet."

"Gods. It's almost time to hit the sack. How can they stand it? I'd be crazy by now."

Lee smiled. "What do you mean _by now_?"

"Have you heard anything yet?"

"No. I guess you heard that John brought Petra's little girl to her this morning."

"Yeah. I was up in Sick Bay visiting Emmalyn. I didn't see Dad, but some of the nurses were crying because Petra was so happy."

"How is Emmalyn? I saw her at the ceremony this morning."

"She's getting around on one crutch now. In a few days Doc Cottle said she could switch to a cane. I thought she'd be chomping at the bit to get back to the valley, but she seems content to stay on board right now."

Lee smiled. "Maybe she likes the company. Hunter told me Doc Cottle is being very attentive. He thinks there might be a little romance getting started."

Kara shrugged. "I went to see Zak but he'd already been released."

"I walked down to see him after the ceremony this morning," Lee said. "His whole left hand is bandaged and he's in some pain. He's really down about the whole thing. He got hit when he threw a zapper. I told him he was lucky that centurion bullet only hit his hand."

Kara sat down on the other side of the table. "What are you working on?"

"CAP rotations for the city. If the Cylons decide to accept the terms and agree to form a coalition government, we hope the settlements will throw in with them. We'll let each of the other battlestars handle their CAPs."

"What about the Raiders we haven't found yet?"

"I guess we'll follow the same procedure we did with the others. LG49 and a few of us will go into each settlement first and see if we can lure them out. Then we hit them with the kill switch."

"It sounds like you've got everything under control."

"I hope."

"Did you know about the awards thing this morning?"

He shook his head. "Not a clue. I thought Dad was just going to give us one of his appreciation speeches."

"Me either. I'm glad you got a medal for…everything you did. "

"Look who's talking. You deserve yours just as much. So does John."

They sat in silence for a minute. Finally Kara said, "You want to go to the rec room and get a beer?"

"Is that where you've been?"

"I was in my quarters writing letters to Maya and Laura. They both sent me nice letters of condolence about Dreilide."

"Sure, let's go get a beer. I think we're both going to get a lot of grief from the other pilots about this morning."

Kara grinned. "Why do you think I came to get you? If I'm going to take it, you're going to take it, too."

They got up and walked to the door. Just before Lee opened it, he turned to her and took her in his arms. She hesitated only a second and then wrapped her arms around him. He leaned down and kissed her gently, hesitantly, just a touch of his lips against hers. He would never know if the kiss would have led to something more because at that moment the door opened. They separated almost like they'd been caught doing something wrong.

John stopped before he bumped into them. "Sorry. Lousy timing on my part, huh?"

"We were just leaving to go get a beer," Kara said. She hadn't seen her father looking that tired in a long time. "So do we have a treaty or not?"

He walked past them and put his briefcase on the table before he pulled off his sash and unbuttoned the top button of his jacket. Lee had cleaned up the table so John had to go to his locker to get the bottle of whiskey.

"No, we don't have a treaty yet," he said with fatigue evident in every word. "The Cylon council has agreed to free their human slaves, but they want us to take them and leave the planet. They want this planet to be _their_ homeworld. They'll agree to leave us alone on Caprica, but they want this planet for themselves. They even want us to take the humans from Hunter's valley. No amount of talking could convince them it wasn't going to happen."

He sat down in one of the chairs and tossed back most of the glass of whiskey he'd just poured.

"Do all of them feel that way?" Kara asked.

"I don't think so, but the later it got, the harder it was for me to decide if they had agreed on certain points ahead of time and decided to stick together no matter what or if they were just letting Cavil run the show. He did over fifty percent of the talking."

"Weren't our Cylons any help?" Lee asked.

"Yes and no. Cavil regards them as traitors, which means their council seemed to ignore almost everything they said. Natalie had to rein Jade in a couple of times. Ever since she saw Cassie this morning, she seems to have a particular dislike for the Eight on the council."

"Why? What was wrong with Cassie?"

"She'd been passed around to a couple of Cavil's pet Eights. None of them apparently knew much about children. Cassie wasn't even a year old when she was taken. She's still a baby not a miniature adult. They didn't take very good care of her. When I found her this morning she was dirty. Her hair was matted and her diaper was soaked. Jade saw Cassie before I brought her up here. I don't know if she was ashamed of her sisters or what, but after that she wasn't much help to us. She was too aggressive, almost combative. I'm fairly certain we could have gotten through to the Three on the council and maybe the Two, but Jade's attitude angered them both. They stood with Cavil."

"Leave her here tomorrow," Kara said. "You can't let one person torpedo the negotiations."

"Why doesn't Natalie just play her ace?" Lee asked. "Bring in Daniel and Lucy and let them tell their story."

"I think she really wants the council to see the light on their own. I think she believes that's the only way a treaty will be meaningful. Part of me agrees with her, but by the time we quit tonight, I felt like we'd never get through to them without something besides just talk. I really feel like we've stalemated."

"How does General Vargas feel?" Lee asked.

"I think if he'd been wearing a sidearm, about 21:00 tonight he'd have pulled it out and shot Cavil. He showed a remarkable amount of restraint. Our team is eating breakfast together at 06:00 in the morning to regroup before we go back to the planet."

"Does their council know about Sean?" Kara asked.

"He wasn't mentioned today."

"Then maybe it's time to let them know about the peacemaker. You said you thought you could have gotten through to the Three and the Two. Tell them about him. Leoben can back you up. He's seen Sean and you've got pictures of him."

"I'll mention it in the morning at breakfast."

"We'll go now and let you get some sleep."

Kara took Lee's hand and they started for the door.

"I love you, baby," John called after her.

She turned and smiled. "I love you, too, Colonel Dad. Now quit drinking and go to sleep."

"I will. I just don't want these negotiations to fail. I don't want to keep fighting."

Out in the corridor Kara dropped Lee's hand. Since she was now in the planetary Viper group, Lee was her commanding officer. Their relationship was technically fraternization, but she felt like nobody would say anything as long as they weren't obvious about it. Of course since she'd gone under his command, their relationship had consisted of nothing beyond holding hands a few times.

As they walked down the corridor toward the officer's rec room, she said, "If my father hadn't interrupted us tonight…what do you think would have happened?"

"I don't know, Kara. I just miss you so much. I miss _us_, but I'm not pushing. I'll wait as long as…until you're ready…if you're ever ready again."

"We'll both know when the time is right. The Fates obviously decided tonight wasn't it."

…

When both negotiating teams had convened the following morning and each was drinking either coffee or tea and enjoying the pastries provided by the _Galactica's_ cooks, Natalie asked for their attention.

"Yesterday I introduced you to Yoshimo, a priest of our faith and a dear friend of mine. But we held back some information that we've had for many months. It concerns the reason we should join with the humans and create a world where both of us can live together in peace. I'd like for you to listen to Yoshimo as he reads something to us from our scriptures."

"Please don't tell me you're getting ready to put the religion card on the table," Cavil moaned. "You're wasting our time."

The Three from the council said, "We know you have no religious beliefs, brother, but I, for one, would like to hear what Yoshimo has to say."

"I'll second that," their Two said.

Cavil made a gesture that they all took to mean _go ahead_.

Yoshimo opened his well-worn book of scriptures to a page he had marked. "This comes from the Book of Xander, verses 7 and 11. _The days will come again when our people shall be persecuted for worshipping one God. And He shall hear their cries and send to them a peacemaker, a child of two races but one faith. And he shall be borne of the three and protected by the six."_

"One of the many scriptures that prophesy the birth of a peacemaker," their Three said. "I know the verses well. All of them."

Yoshimo picked up another book. "This is from the scrolls of Pythia which are sacred to those who follow other gods."

"False gods," their Six said.

Their Two turned to her with a harsh look, "Let him continue."

Yoshimo resumed reading. "Chapter 12, verse 22. _Pythia said to the daughters of the temple, 'After the blaze at the dawn of the third age of mankind, a child shall be born of a non-believer and he will bring peace to the warring tribes.' _And in the Book of Sybil, chapter 3, verse 8. _And a child shall be conceived of a non-believer who shall say to the people, 'Behold my son will soon be born. Lay down your arms for the days of peace are at hand.'"_

"Get to the point," Cavil snapped.

"These prophecies come from both our scriptures and theirs," Yoshimo said. "An oracle of Hunter's people also foretold the birth of this child as did one on Caprica."

"Oh, please…" Cavil started.

"Shut up," the Three said. "We want to hear this."

"It can't hurt to hear the rest of it," their Four added.

"The child has been born," Yoshimo said. "His mother was a Three named D'Anna. John is his father. He is the first child born of a Cylon mother from this planet who has survived. There is also another child on Caprica born to an Eight named Sharon."

John opened the folder that lay on the table in front of him and took out several copies of the photographs Laura had sent him. He pushed the first one across the table to the Three.

"His name is Sean. He was born on Caprica at twenty-four weeks. He weighed one pound six ounces and was thirteen inches long. That first picture was taken in the intensive care nursery when he was a day old. The odds were against his survival, but here it is almost four months later and he's beat the odds so far."

Natalie said, "Sharon's child was also born early, but thanks to the advanced medical care available on Caprica, she also survived. Many of us clearly see God's hand in their survival. We believe John's child is the peacemaker of whom the scriptures speak."

John pushed another picture across the table, the most recent one of Laura holding Sean and another one of Sharon and Hera.

The Three took the pictures. The Two sitting beside her looked at the photographs and then up at the picture on the wall. His eyes met John's.

"Sean's mother died giving birth to him," John said. "Before that happened, she asked Laura to take him and raise him. Right now Sean is with her in Marble House. That's the home of the President on Caprica."

"This is all very touching," Cavil said, "but why would the President of the Colonies agree to raise your half-Cylon child?"

John took a deep breath. "Because she's my wife."

"He telling the truth," Leoben said. "I came from Caprica several weeks ago. I saw Sean before I left. Laura Roslin herself told me that she wants us to form a coalition government on this planet. She wants to bring Sean and her son with John here. She's a remarkable woman."

To John's surprise Sonja spoke up. "Don't you all realize that without the humans we're a sterile race? We can't reproduce."

Her sister Six on the other side of the table said, "I never thought I'd hear _you _talking about wanting to have children. Our creators will make more of us. Cavil has told us that as soon as the humans are gone from the planet, the creators will once again begin work. There will be dozens of new models, hundreds. They will solve the medical problems that keep us from having children. We _don't need_ the humans!"

Cavil smiled smugly at John. "It seems your bastard child has made no difference."

"Speak for yourself," the Three said. "You risk God's wrath by such blasphemy."

"Our brother One is right," the Five said. "Once the humans leave, the creators will start work again. They're in an underground lab at the prison."

"No, they're not," John said. "They're in the morgue on the _Galactica_. We found their _bodies_ at the lab. They've been dead for years. Long before we came here."

"Liar!" Cavil shouted.

John took another folder from his briefcase and slid it across the table to the Five. It contained photographs of the mummified remains they'd found in the vault room.

He looked at Natalie. "Time to play that last trump card. We're halfway there now."

She nodded. Hunter got up from the chair nearest the door and went outside. When he returned he had Daniel and Lucy with him. Daniel's appearance was met with gasps from everyone on the council except the One.

Every bit of color drained from Cavil's face. "What kind of trick is this?"

"Hello, brother," Daniel said. "When you had your centurions shoot me and throw me in the river, I'm sure you thought that was the last time you'd ever see me."

Cavil was shaking his head in disbelief. "I saw you die. You and Lucy both. You couldn't have downloaded because..."

"Because you and the One who went to the Colonies killed every living copy of my model and contaminated the amniotic fluid in all our tanks. But you missed me. Lucy and I escaped to the city. But you know that because you and your centurions caught up with us below the dam. This is what they did."

He lifted the hair from his forehead revealing the scar.

Lucy walked up beside Daniel. "I did die, but before you and your brother One killed the creators and all but one of the Sevens, I saved my memories in the centurion we call Buddy. I'm now in the body of this Three, but I'm really Lucy Cain, the only creator who survived your massacre."

"I was at the lab that day," Natalie said softly. "I saw the bodies before your centurions removed them. I'll be glad to put my hand in your datastream in the city and let you see what I saw."

"So will I," Daniel said.

Cavil stood up so quickly that his chair tipped over. He looked around at everyone and then said, "I can see that the humans have orchestrated a complete fantasy and you've all fallen for it. Go ahead. Continue your negotiations without me."

He started to walk out but LG49 stepped in front of the door and clamped a steel hand around the One's bicep. "Just as your brother One committed genocide in the Colonies, you have committed a grievous crime against _our race_. I have been authorized to place you under arrest. You will join your brothers in the brig on the _Galactica_ until such time as you will be tried for your crimes."

Cavils shouts gradually faded as LG49 dragged him to a waiting Raptor.

"I sense a power vacuum," Dean said. "I'll be glad to step in although I'll tell you up front I'm in favor of this coalition. Now, let's start over. I would advise everyone on the council to be more reasonable this time. Ask any questions you have about what you've heard so far. We'll all be glad to answer them."

…

"You don't know how much I appreciate Admiral Adama letting me go along with you," Karl said to Lee and Kara as the three of them boarded the big transport at the city airfield.

"I'm a tagalong, too," Kara said. "My dad orchestrated this trip to check on Bianca's husband. That's the other thing he wants to check off his list."

A week had passed since the negotiations had ended the conflict and a tentative peace had come to Nereid. The rogue Raiders had been found and neutralized. Dean and the other council members had visited all the settlements with a team of humans and freed centurions and announced that the human workers were no longer under Cylon control and that another team would soon be there to begin making arrangements for everyone who wanted to go to Caprica.

The three young pilots sat beside John and Natalie in the jump seats. The transport pilots were centurions. The trip was a supply run. They could have taken a Raptor, but John wanted to travel this way. The rest of them didn't argue.

The last of the autumn crops were in and a portion had been set aside for the city and other settlements. But Karl and Kara were along for another reason. Karl was going to see his father for the first time in over six years.

John had talked to Karl for a long time the night before. The two of them had sat at a table in the rec room and John had told him about Lucas Agathon's physical and emotional issues. He hoped he'd prepared Karl for anything that might happen.

The big transport ship began to taxi and was soon in the air. Talking had to be done over the sound of the engines so the forty-minute trip south was mostly silent. They took a truck into the settlement, riding in the back that had recently been loaded with wooden boxes of late vegetables.

The centurion driver let them off in the square and they walked to the old lab that now served as the hospital. They entered the small reception area. A woman sat behind the desk.

"Is Dr. Silva here?" John asked.

"He's with a patient. What's the problem today?"

"No problem. I just want to see him."

They waited ten minutes while Karl paced around and around the room.

A short gray-haired man wearing a white jacket walked in from another room.

"Told you I'd be back," John said to him.

Laszlo Silva walked over to them and he and John hugged. "How's Bianca?" He asked with tears in his eyes.

John took out the picture Laura had sent showing all of them in her sitting room. "She's fine. Staying at Marble House with Laura. Helping raise four kids including D'Anna's son who came early."

"What about D'Anna?"

"That's a really long story. If you've got time, let's go to your kitchen and have a cup of coffee. But first let me introduce you to my daughter and two friends."

After the introductions Natalie said, "I'm going to show Kara and Karl where the Agathons live."

Kara looked at Lee. "Staying here or coming with us?"

"I'll stay here for now," Lee said. "You and Karl go ahead."

They walked several blocks with Natalie. She pointed out the foundation of the burned house where John and D'Anna had briefly lived. When they got to the next block, she said, "It's the third house, directly behind the burned one. Do you want me to go with you?"

"No," Karl said. "I think this would go better if it was just me and Kara."

"I'll be at the clinic."

They stood at the corner until Natalie had reached the next block. Then together they walked down the street. Kara reached over and squeezed Karl's hand briefly.

"Are you going to tell him about Sharon?"

"Sooner or later. I'm going to play it by ear on this visit."

They climbed the steps together and knocked on the door. It was answered by an attractive woman with skin the color of coffee and cream. For a moment she simply stared at them and then her hand went to her mouth. She stifled a cry of shock.

Karl took a deep breath. "I've come to see my father. Is he home?"

...

Lee listened to John attempt to catch Dr. Silva up on everything that had happened since he'd escaped from Nereid. They were still talking when Natalie came back in.

"I need to go to my house for some clothes. Lee, would you like to go and help me?"

"Sure."

Together they walked outside. There were several golf carts at the curb. Natalie got in the driver's seat. Five minutes later they reached her house at the end of a nearby road. He was surprised at the small size of the dwelling.

"I thought the First Six would live in a bigger house," he said.

"I live alone. This is all I need."

They walked around to the back and Natalie opened the door.

"You don't lock your house?" Lee asked in surprise.

"Why would I?"

"Back on Caprica most apartments have a couple of locks. A lot of them have alarm systems. Laura and John's apartment has a doorman. You have to be on a list before he'd let you on the elevator."

"Why?"

"You've never heard of thieves?"

"We don't have that problem here."

They walked inside and Lee looked around. "This is very nice."

"I'll only be a minute." When she came back with a medium-sized suitcase, she asked, "Would you and Kara like to stay here tonight? My bed is very comfortable and there's a bottle of wine in the cabinet that's going to waste."

"I'd like that. I'll have to ask Kara, though."

"Have you not yet reconciled?"

"Not completely."

"Then maybe you'll enjoy becoming lovers again. John and I can stay at the clinic."

"Together?"

She smiled. "While that would be very agreeable with me, I respect his status as a married man. He clearly loves his wife."

Lee took her suitcase, carried it to the golf cart and put it in the back. "Mind if I drive?"

She got in beside him. They rode in silence for a minute. "I can tell something's on your mind. Go ahead and ask."

"Is John the only man you've met that you're attracted to?"

"John was there when I realized that the Daniel in the valley would never love me the way one of his brothers once had. I don't know what Daniel's relationship is to the Three who carries Lucy's memories, but it's really no longer my concern."

"You're a beautiful woman, Natalie. Don't give up. I know you'll find a man one day who will love you and appreciate you."

She smiled. "You humans and your platitudes. Make up with Kara and maybe I'll take you more seriously."

...

The woman in the doorway of Lucas Agathon's house recovered quickly. She stood back and invited Karl and Kara in.

"You must be Kate," Kara said.

"Yes. Lucas is sitting out back. Normally we wouldn't be here during the day, but we've been given a few days off. I understand there's a team from a battlestar going house to house gathering information."

Kara stopped and asked Karl, "Do you want to go out there by yourself?"

"No." He looked at Kate. "I'm not going to give him a heart attack or something, am I?"

"I hope not. He knows you survived the attack on Picon. John told him you were in the military. I'll wait in here. Call me if you need me."

Kara took Karl's hand again and they walked outside. Lucas Agathon was sitting in a kitchen chair. His head had fallen forward and he appeared to be sleeping. Karl knelt by the chair and gently touched his father's shoulder. The eye that was not covered by the patch opened. For a few long moments nothing happened and then the eye shifted from Karl to Kara. He reached out and touched his son with his right hand. The left sleeve of his shirt was pinned up. Kara could see that he was missing most of his left arm. The left side of his face was badly scarred.

"You're real," Lucas finally said. "I thought I was dreaming. I see things sometime that aren't really there."

"We're real," Karl said, and then Kara saw Karl's shoulders begin to shake. Lucas had obviously suffered terribly in battle and later at the hands of the Cylons. She knelt beside Karl. "Do you remember me Sergeant Agathon?"

"You look like a little girl I once knew…all grown up now. Kara?"

She smiled. "That's me. All grown up and flying a Viper just like I told you I'd do. They were crazy enough to give me my wings. Karl has his wings, too. He's a Raptor pilot."

Karl nodded and wiped his eyes.

"I met your father," Lucas said to Kara, "before he escaped from the planet last spring…or was it summer. I don't always remember things too good either."

"He's back now. He's at the clinic talking to the doctor. I know he'll come see you later."

"So it's really true we're going to get to go to Caprica?"

"If you want to," Kara said. "Natalie told us that some of the humans in the city want to stay here. What about this settlement? Do you think anyone will want to stay?"

"The breeders who have had children. Maybe a few more. Some took to life here a lot better than others."

"I'm going to ask to be assigned to the peacekeeping force here," Karl suddenly said. "I'm married, Dad. We have a little girl. We want to come here to live."

There was joy in Lucas Agathon's voice. "You mean I'm a grandfather?"

"She's beautiful," Kara said.

Karl reached into his uniform jacket pocket and took out a picture. "My wife is Sharon. My daughter is Hera."

Lucas took the picture and stared at it for a long time before he handed it back to his son.

"Do you love her?"

"More than anything. Both of them."

Lucas reached out and put his hand on his son's head. "There's nothing on Caprica for me and Kate. Maybe we'll stay here. She's different from your mother, but she's a good woman. I'd be dead if it weren't for her. Let's go inside. I'm sure she's fixed coffee for us. I'd like for both of you to meet her."

Karl stood and helped his father to his feet. Kara fought tears as the two men finally hugged for a long time. As they walked into the house, she knew she had just witnessed an extraordinary act of love and acceptance. For a reason she didn't quite understand, it made her feel petty and small.

…

Lee and Kara sat on the patio of Natalie's house and watched the moon rise. Nereid's moon was larger than either of Caprica's two moons and while it was low in the sky, it looked huge. The nights in Settlement Alpha were clearly warmer than they were in the city or the valley and they enjoyed the perfect temperature of the late autumn evening.

They had all eaten dinner at the clinic. Sleeping arrangements hadn't yet been discussed when Lee walked outside with Kara and told her about Natalie's offer. He'd been expecting her to hesitate, but she hadn't. She'd volunteered to go back inside and tell her father.

A bottle of wine sat on the table. They'd each had a glass as Kara had told him about Karl's meeting with his father and that Karl was spending the night with them.

"I could get used to this," Kara said. "Too bad we have to leave in the morning."

"So Karl wants to join the peacekeeping force and bring Sharon and Hera here to live. Sounds right for them. Have you thought about the future?" Lee asked tentatively.

"You know I'm more of a day-to-day person. Why?"

"Do you want to go back to Caprica, to the airbase there? With your combat experience you'd probably be welcomed as an instructor."

"Lee, I'm nineteen years old. Can you see me as a teacher?"

"I'm just saying…"

"I'll go wherever the _Galactica_ goes."

"Dad told me he and the _G_ are staying here. He's at home on his battlestar. He's got the family that always mattered to him the most."

Kara was silent for a long time. "What about you? What do you plan to do?"

"I'll be here as long as they need me. Then I…I've thought about law school. The military will pay for it if I become an AJA lawyer. I might be able to start a year from now."

"And that means going back to Caprica for law school. Is that why you asked me what my plans are?"

He reached for his glass of wine and took a sip. Then he got up, knelt on one knee beside her chair and took her hand. "I want us to be together, Kara."

She looked at his face in the moonlight. His expression was so vulnerable that he looked like a little boy. "What are you asking me, Lee?"

"To marry me. It doesn't have to be next week or next month. Just tell me you'll be my wife. Just tell me that no matter if we're separated for a while, you'll stand with me in Elosha's temple one day."

She smiled. "You'll do all the planning? You know I'm no good at that kind of stuff."

Relief washed over Lee like a wave. "All you'll have to do is buy your dress."

"Okay," Kara said.

"You mean it?"

"I mean it, Lee. But we're going to have to be cool about being engaged. I'm in your chain of command now."

"That's all the more reason for me to go to law school, don't you think?"

She grinned. "The fighter jock and the lawyer. Yeah, that might work. You can get one of those bumper stickers for your car...the one that says _My Wife Flies Vipers._"

Still holding her hand, he got up from his kneeling position and pulled her to her feet. "Do you remember the first time we kissed?"

"In vivid detail. You were Prince Olliver with eyes the color of the sky at twilight and wings over your heart."

"And you were the girl I'd seen while I was hallucinating in the decompression chamber, Posiden's green-eyed daughter. We've come a long way since that night."

She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, whisper-gentle at first and then with deepening urgency. She thought briefly of all the kisses they'd shared during the last three years and felt like they were beginning a new chapter in their love. The promise she'd made to him in a wind-swept temple was now a pledge to one day become his wife.

He picked her up and carried her over the threshold into Natalie's house. The moonlight lit a path across the floor leading to the bed.

He put her down and kissed her again. "I love you Kara. I always will."

"A one-night honeymoon," she teased. "Is this the best you can do?"

"At least it's not a cramped bunk on the _G_."

"Yeah, you did manage to get us a nice soft bed and a full moon."

"One perfect night just for us."

"Remind me to thank the Fates in the morning."

He took her face in his hands and kissed her. "Remind me to thank Natalie. I think I can now forgive her for what happened on the res ship."

…

The transport ship left the next morning just after sunrise. Everyone was quiet. Karl had stayed up half the night talking to his father and Kate. He fell asleep minutes after they were in the air.

John gave Kara an inquiring look. The big smile he got in return told him that she and Lee had resolved their differences. Holding hands and with their heads together, both of them fell asleep not long after Karl.

John smiled and nudged Natalie. "That was nice of you to let them stay at your house last night."

"I'll miss it. I'm going to have to move to the city."

"As president of the coalition government you won't have any choice."

"At least until we can hold some sort of general election."

"That's at least a year away and you know it. Laura has quietly been doing a lot of preliminary work to make the transition easier for everyone."

"I would really like to meet your wife."

"I'm sure that will happen someday."

John closed his eyes and leaned back against the webbing of the jump seat and thought of his oldest son. In four days Braedon would celebrate his second birthday. He'd missed Brae's first because he'd been in a Cylon prison. He sighed. Maybe next year.

When they landed at the airfield, there was a Raptor waiting to take them to the _Galactica_. The pilot told John that Admiral Adama wanted to see him in the CIC as soon as they landed.

When John got there, Bill indicated they should go to his quarters and turned the helm over to Tigh.

"What's the situation in Settlement Alpha?"

"Everything's quiet. Some of the Cylons who were the cruelest are under centurion guard for their own protection. The census team made it clear that any acts of revenge by a human would insure the person stayed on Nereid in prison."

That got a half-smile from Bill. "Even though we don't currently have a prison to put them in."

"They don't know that."

"Did Lieutenant Agathon's reunion with his father go well?"

"I believe so. I walked down to his house after dinner last night. I didn't stay long. Lucas and Karl were talking like a father and son who had been apart for six years."

"I believe _your son_ has a birthday coming up this weekend."

"Yes, sir. Friday. His second. Laura wrote that she's having a small birthday party for him on Saturday afternoon."

"Would you like to be there for it?"

"More than anything."

"There's a supply ship docked and unloading cargo right now. It will be leaving for Caprica shortly after lunch. I need to send a report about our truce to the president. Would you like to take it to her?"

"Are you offering me shore leave?" John asked still not believing he understood what Bill was saying.

"Six days. The supply ship will be coming back early next Monday morning."

John felt almost light-headed. "I'll be on it. I know our work here is far from done."

"Come back after lunch with your bags packed. I'll have the report ready by then."

"I'd like to take Natalie with me, sir. Since she's been elected president of the coalition government, I'd like for her to meet Laura and see how the government functions on Caprica. I'd also like to bring Dr. Cardenas back with me on Monday. I told her husband I'd try to make that happen."

"I've got no problem with either of those."

"Thank you, sir."

"Thank you, Colonel Gallagher. We owe you a great deal."

"Six days with my family will more than pay me back."

John was almost to the door when Bill said, "Tell Laura I won't be coming back to Caprica for a while. She'll need to get another military advisor. I'd suggest Colonel Spencer."

"I'll give her the message, sir."

…

The supply ship landed at the Caprica airbase in mid-afternoon. By the time John had met with Colonel Spencer and cleared Natalie's trip under diplomatic status, over an hour had passed. He struggled to stifle his impatience.

Colonel Spencer called Marble House security and told them that another colonel was bringing the pouch and also a female Cylon guest. Shortly afterward John and Natalie were in a staff car with a driver and on their way.

From the back seat Natalie gazed out the window as the car sped along the I-6 toward the city.

"I never dreamed it would look like this. I saw some pictures in a book we took off one of the ships, but seeing it like this…" her voice trailed off.

"There's seven million people in Caprica City and the area immediately around it."

"Do you think there were ever that many people on Nereid?"

"I have no idea. The ruins of your city aren't nearly as big as Caprica City or even Delphi. Have you never wondered what happened to the Thirteenth Tribe?"

"I've wondered. There was an old library in the city. The roof had completely caved in. All the books had long ago disintegrated. I wasn't there, but I was told that the centurions burned everything. They also found a vault under one of the buildings in town when it was demolished, but the vault was sealed. No one has ever tried to open it. Cavil had no interest in the fate of the Thirteenth Tribe. They were humans."

"Humans who worshipped one God just as you and I do."

"Maybe one day we can try to determine their fate."

As soon as they got near the government buildings, John began pointing them out to her. Shortly afterward they were at the gate of Marble House. Their driver presented his pass. One of the guards recognized John and waved them through. The car stopped under the portico and they got out. Edgar greeted them and John introduced him to Natalie.

"Does the president know you're coming?" Edgar asked.

John shook his head. "I'd like to surprise her."

Edgar smiled. "I understand. Do you have luggage?"

"Not much. It's in the trunk."

"We'll take care of it. Natalie will need a visitor badge. If she'll come with me, I'll be glad to take care of it."

"You know where I'll be," John said.

"Yes, sir. Congratulations on your promotion. I noticed the new collar pins."

With the diplomatic pouch over his shoulder, John walked down the hall to Laura's outer office. Billy saw him first and jumped up to greet him.

"I'd like to surprise her," John said as he saw the partially closed door to Laura's office.

"I'll call her and tell her the diplomatic pouch is here."

When Laura's phone buzzed, she reluctantly picked it up. She'd been looking at budget proposals all afternoon and wanted to finish the current one before she stopped.

Billy's voice said, "The diplomatic pouch from Admiral Adama is here."

"Ask Colonel Spencer if he would wait for ten minutes."

"It's not Colonel Spencer. It's another colonel."

"Please ask him to wait."

Billy put down the phone. "She wants you to wait."

"I will. I'll just do it in the doorway."

Laura was aware that someone had come to the door. She was annoyed and didn't look up. "I'll be with you in a minute."

"Take your time," John said. "I've got six days."

At the sound of his voice, she gasped. The pen clattered from her hand to the desk. The budget proposal was instantly forgotten. John stepped inside the office and closed the door before he dropped the pouch. Laura got up and came around her desk. They met in the middle of the office. She threw her arms around his neck and he nearly pulled her off her feet in a tight embrace.

"How?" She asked with tears in her eyes.

"Bill let me have some shore leave. Brae's birthday. We got a peace treaty. So much has happened in the last week. I don't know where to begin."

She finally drew back and looked at him. "You look so tired."

"Long days and not enough sleep. I hope to remedy that soon. You're as beautiful as the day I met you."

"Oh, John. I've made mistakes…"

"We both made mistakes. That's all in the past. I…brought somebody with me. She's wanted to meet you for a long time. She was just elected president of the coalition government on Nereid. Hunter was elected vice-president. I think they'll make a good team. She wants to see how our government works. If you don't have time to deal with her, maybe you can turn her over to Billy for a couple of days."

"Who?"

John took a breath. "Natalie. Edgar's getting her a visitor badge. If you don't have a place for her here, I can take her to the apartment…or a hotel. That's your decision."

"Kara's bedroom is empty right now."

He nodded. "Do you think I could see Brae…and Sean?"

"Of course."

Holding her hand he walked to the door and picked up the diplomatic pouch. "Bill's report."

"That can wait until tomorrow."

When he opened the door, Edgar and Natalie were in the outer office talking to Billy. Laura managed to keep her expression neutral. Natalie was more beautiful than Natasi. She was the epitome of a goddess.

John introduced them. Laura greeted her graciously. She told Edgar to see that Natalie's luggage was taken to Kara's room. Avoiding his eyes, she told him to take John's luggage to her room.

Then she said to Natalie, "We're going upstairs to see the children. Would you like to join us?"

"I know you want to see Sean almost as much as I do," John said to Natalie.

Edgar rode up the elevator with them. John wondered if he would have done it if Natalie hadn't been with them. When the door opened, Edgar held it until all of them had gotten off. Then he followed them.

Braedon was riding his tricycle in the hall with Maya in close attendance. She saw them first. She stopped Brae and turned him around.

"Who's that?" she asked.

John knelt and struggled with his emotions for the second time in ten minutes.

"Dada," Brae said shyly as he clung to Maya's leg for a minute.

"Go hug your dada and give him a big kiss," she said softly. "He's come a long way to see you."

"What a beautiful little boy," Natalie said to Laura. "You must be very proud of him."

"Yes," Laura said as Braedon ran down the hall and John scooped him into his arms.

"One day I hope to hold a child of my own," Natalie murmured, "but there's a great deal to do on Nereid first."

"Are you married?" Laura asked.

Natalie shook her head.

Maya walked up to them and Laura introduced the two women, adding that Maya was Hunter's wife.

"Do you plan to move to Nereid now?" Natalie asked. "Your husband was just elected vice-president of the coalition government. I look forward to working with him.

"Vice-president! Are you serious?"

"Yes," Natalie answered. "In our treaty we agreed that we would have a Cylon president and a human vice-president. Who better than Hunter since he was born and raised on our planet? He was elected unanimously. I lost a vote to a One named Dean who voted for himself."

"Me ride tricycle," Brae said.

The first thing John noticed was that his son was finally pronouncing his Rs. "I saw you riding your tricycle."

"Egger show me."

"Can Sean ride a tricycle?"

Braedon giggled. "Him too little."

"Where is Sean?"

Brae pointed down the hall. "Down there."

"You want to show me?"

He put Brae down and his son ran down the hall to a door across from the presidential suite. "In here."

John glanced at Laura. "Go ahead," she said.

"Bianca's with him," Maya said. "Sharon is keeping the girls." Then she turned to Laura. "I'll call downstairs and tell the dining staff to add two more places at the table."

"Oh, dear gods," Laura said. "I'd forgotten that I asked Hugh Connelly to dinner tonight. How long do we have until he arrives?"

"Almost two hours."

"Good. That should give us all time to get settled."

John followed Brae and opened the door. Braedon ran inside and pointed again. "There Sean."

Bianca was talking to Sean's nurse, but the moment she saw John, she rushed across the room and hugged him.

"Laura didn't tell us you were coming home."

"She didn't know. I've got a few days leave."

Together they walked over to the clear plastic tub that still served as Sean's crib. John could hardly believe how small he was. The pale fuzz on his head was so blond it was almost white.

"Four pounds seven ounces," Bianca said, "And growing every day. Pick him up."

"I don't want to hurt him."

"You won't. Here. Let me." She skillfully lifted the baby and put him in John's arms.

"Sit here," Brae said, patting the seat of the rocking chair.

"That's where Laura always sits with him," Bianca said. John sat and started rocking.

Laura came to the door with Natalie and they walked over to John. Natalie knelt.

"The peacemaker," she said softly and gently touched Sean's head.

"No, him _Sean_," Brae corrected her. "Him my brudder."

...

"I hope you won't be offended," Hugh Connelly said, "but this reminds me of eating lunch at Elaina's daycare several weeks ago."

"I suppose four highchairs at the table isn't the norm," Laura said.

"We'll be leaving soon to get three little girls ready for bed," Maya said. "I'll come back and get you-know-who."

John stood and lifted his son from the highchair. "This one is on me tonight. I'll be back as soon as he's asleep."

That left Laura, Natalie, Hugh and his daughter at the table.

Laura said, "Hugh is very interested in the history of Nereid."

"I happened upon some historical information about the Thirteenth Tribe," he said. He looked at Natalie and smiled. "So if you could tell me everything you know about the planet..."

_Dear gods, he's handsome when he smiles like that, _Laura thought. She glanced at the beautiful Six. Natalie had blushed. She was not a naive young girl. That blush could only mean she was attracted to him.

"I'm afraid the history of the planet is an area in which I'm sadly lacking. I told John recently that a vault was found under one of the demolished buildings. It wasn't opened because it was sealed and the council wasn't interested in discovering its contents."

"Really?" Hugh said. He was still looking at Natalie. "I hope someday we'll be allowed access to it. I've already told Laura that I'd like to be involved in the education efforts on the planet. I'm not averse to doing some research as well. My major in school was ancient Colonial history."

"Do you think the vault has something to do with the fate of the Thirteenth Tribe?" Laura asked.

"Very possibly."

Elaina said, "Hold me, Daddy."

Hugh lifted his daughter from her booster seat and settled her on his lap. She snuggled against him. "I think my little princess is getting sleepy, too. We'll have to go soon."

"I'm very glad you could come tonight," Laura said.

"I am, too," Natalie added. "It was very nice to meet you."

He looked at Natalie. "I'd like to discuss the planet with you before you go back. Would you like to come to dinner at my apartment? I'm not the greatest cook, but I have some information I'd like to show you."

Laura said, "I'm sure that can be arranged if Natalie is interested."

"I'm very interested," she said.

When Hugh and Elaina were gone, Laura offered Natalie another glass of wine and she accepted.

"Did he just ask me for a date?" Natalie asked. "I have very little experience with human courtship rituals."

"I'm not sure if I'd call it a _date_. Hugh lost his wife to cancer a few months ago. I know he's very much into the history of Nereid. But he did look at you with a great deal of interest. I understand why. You're quite beautiful."

Natalie looked down. "Thank you. If you don't mind, I'll go talk to Sharon now. I know you want to be with John."

"Is it that obvious?"

Natalie left and Laura walked down the hallway to Braedon's room. Esmari was already asleep in her crib. John was rocking their sleeping son.

"I don't want to put him down," John whispered.

"Hugh left a few minutes ago and Natalie has gone to Sharon's room."

John stood and gently placed Braedon in his crib. Laura walked up beside him as John pulled the cover to Brae's chin. He put his arm around her and for a few long moments both looked at their sleeping child.

Then Laura took John's hand and walked down the hall to her sitting room.

"I had some of your clothes brought here from the apartment," she said.

"That was quick."

"I did it last summer. But things didn't work out for us then which was my fault."

"Last summer was...too many other things got in the way. I never blamed you."

"Would you like to take a shower and put on something more comfortable?"

"That would be nice."

The presidential suite has two bathrooms. Yours is through the bedroom on the right. Your closet is off the bathroom."

When he came out of the bathroom clean from a shower and wearing khaki slacks and a white shirt, the door to Laura's bathroom was closed. He wandered into the sitting room, poured a drink and sat on the couch. He was on the verge of dozing when he was heard the bedroom door open. Laura walked in wearing a short black lace-trimmed nightgown.

She walked over to the fireplace and turned. "Did I make a mistake?"

He smiled. "Not from where I'm sitting."

Laura turned and faced the fireplace no longer feeling as sure of herself as she had five minutes earlier. She clenched her fist and banged it against the mantle.

He walked over to her and said softly, "You don't have to do this. I can go to the apartment."

"Hugh just lost his wife a few months ago and he was so smitten with Natalie he asked her for a date. You've been on Nereid with her for months."

"You think that Natalie and I have a physical relationship?"

"Do you?"

John put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. "No. We've worked together, but nothing else. I love you, Laura. You're the one I've dreamed about. You know my sins. D'Anna and Sonja. If that's still between us, I'll go to the apartment. I don't want you to do anything you don't want to do."

She gently touched the scar over his eye. "I love you. I want you to stay. I want you to be my husband again. Do you think you're the only one who's dreamed of us being together?"

He gently took her face in his hands and kissed her and felt like he was sliding into a dream, the dream he'd had since the prison. They were on the couch and then she was on his lap and he was trying to tell her all the things he'd wanted to say to her for the last year, but she was kissing him, stopping his words of apology, of shame and regret. He felt her tears on his face or maybe they were his own. Salt like the ocean, like the beginning of life, a rebirth of their love and commitment to one another. And finally the hot, sweet rush of desire that left both of them spent and breathless. He held her against his chest while he pushed the silken hair from her face and caressed the soft skin of her shoulder.

"My heart. My only love"

Laura once again had the whisper in the night that belonged to her and her alone. She sighed in contentment and murmured softly, "I've loved you since the snowy night you first kissed me."

John understood finally that to accept her love he had to also accept the forgiveness she had just offered. Even in the iron strength of her convictions she had always possessed a quality of mercy that made her a true humanitarian. And in accepting her forgiveness, he had to forgive himself and move forward like the rivers that flowed always toward the sea.

As much as he wanted to stay with her, he knew that on Monday morning he would get on a transport and go back to Nereid and do his part in making it a place where he and Laura would one day raise their sons and where he hoped Kara and Lee would find a way to join them. It wouldn't be easy to create a brand new world where two former enemies could live side-by-side in peace, but he knew they had to try.

He saw the fountain in the park and the laughing children, Cassie and Rachel and Esmari and Hera. Braedon and Sean were among them, brothers whose bond would always remain strong, human and Cylon, playing together and in that image he knew lay their future.

THE END

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AUTHOR'S NOTE: I find myself suddenly struggling for words. This story could go on almost indefinitely in many different directions, but at close to a million words, it's time to bring this part to a close.

I cannot adequately express my gratitude to all of you who have stuck with this saga from its beginning in _Siren's Kiss_ when it was just the kernel of an idea and a desire to rewrite the tangled relationship that haunted Kara and Lee in the series, but in the years that have ensued, it has gradually become the larger story of two races and their struggles to survive replete with those on both sides who can see the future and those who remain hopelessly mired in the past.

An extra special_ Thank You_ to those of you who have reviewed so faithfully and who have shared other thoughts with me through your PMs. Your comments and encouragements have inspired me to keep writing even when the clock showed the other side of midnight and the sandman beckoned me. Another very special thanks to everyone who has favorited my stories.

For those of you who, like me, were ardent fans of Kara and Lee in the series and who were disappointed with their fates, I hope I have left them in a better place for you even if they are not yet standing at the altar. They will get there one day. I am quite certain of it.

Jane, May 3, 2013


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